365 Jobs: The Mojo of Concrete

Like most beginning carpenters, I thought I would cut boards and whack nails into them.  I might even use a hand plane to shave a smooth curl from a plank.  Those are the symbols of carpentry: the hammer, the saw, the plane.
 
What a load of crap.  As a beginning carpenter on a small construction crew, I spent most of my time digging holes, mixing concrete, stapling insulation, hanging drywall, cleaning up garbage.  If I touched lumber, it was to carry toxic rasty pressure-treated two-by-twelves from one pile to another, load by muscle-weary load.  As for hand planes, entire houses got built without the use of one.

On a small crew, you do everything.  You learn to like it, or at least to tolerate.  Except insulation.  Does anybody enjoy handling fiberglass batts?  I accept digging holes or gathering garbage as part of the job.  Drywall can be pleasant in a mindless, big-muscle way, and you get immediate, large results.

One surprise, though, was my changing relationship to concrete.  Slowly over the years concrete is something I've learned to respect.  Perhaps even love.
 
In my novel Clear Heart I wrote about my education through the character of Abe, a high school graduate who takes a job as a beginner on a construction crew to earn some money — and, his mother hopes, to learn some discipline — before starting college at Princeton in the Fall.  Abe is me.  (Actually, most of the carpenters in that novel are some aspect of me at different ages and stages of my career.)  (Though I never went to Princeton.)  (But then, Abe isn't too sure he wants to go to Princeton, either.)

Here is Abe's first task on a construction site, guided by an old carpenter named Steamboat:

“You need to know,” Steamboat said. “What looks simple, ain’t.”
And what could look simpler than building a rectangle out of two-by-sixes, then filling it with concrete? Abe noted the care Steamboat gave to all the details: He shoveled the ground flat, a little deeper around the perimeter, and then tamped it firm with his flat-soled boots. He made sure the form was square and exactly the right distance from the edge of the deck, measuring not once but twice. He leveled the boards with his fingers by pushing dirt under one corner, scooping some away from another, eye to the earth, butt to the air.

A little later, after pouring the concrete:

Steamboat showed Abe how to strike off the top with a screed board, which was just a regular old two-by-four, pulling it back and forth along the top of the form in a sawing motion, cutting off the high spots, backing and filling the low spots. With a running commentary all the while, Steamboat seemed quite happy to be slopping concrete in dirt, practicing a skill that until this moment Abe had never given a thought, much less any respect.

Steamboat showed Abe how to swing a wooden floater in circles, working all the stone into the mix so they dropped below the surface, holding the leading edge of the tool up slightly to keep it from plowing. The wet concrete had an odd quality under Abe’s hands, feeling both solid in its mass and grudgingly liquid on its surface, sort of bouncy, as the tool swept over. There was magic the way the pebbles disappeared, as if the floater was sucking smoothness from the mix.

That's right: magic.  I was surprised when I first wrote that word, but I knew instantly that it was right.  You can feel the mojo when you run a floater over concrete.  At least, if you have a certain personality.  Which I seem to have.

Steamboat nodded toward the landing. “Lookin’ good,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Abe liked saying sir. He knew he didn’t have to, it was a joke, but he didn’t want to stop. He liked the ache in his muscles that would grow into strength. He liked the smell of wet concrete. He liked this work—so solid, so basic, so real.

On another day, Abe is involved in a larger pour of an entire raised foundation:

Abe lugged rebar. Without asking questions, he listened and absorbed the meaning and use of a doughboy, waler, pier cage, stirrup. He discovered—with stunning tension in his shoulders, fingers, and back—the difference in weight and stiffness between grade 40 #4 rebar and grade 60 #5. He saw the meticulous and muscle-straining preparation for what would become invisible, unbeautiful, mostly buried, and taken for granted. As Steamboat had said—and he seemed to mean it as an essential Law of Life and Human Development—Don’t fork up the foundation.

One of the forms breaks, and for a few minutes Abe is nearly Hoffaed, as they call it — drowned under concrete.  He washes himself off with a hose and then is told he can go home for the rest of the day, but instead he returns to help the crew:

All the while, amidst the hard work and the pain and shock of nearly being buried alive, with heightened senses Abe was keenly aware of the smell of curing concrete. It was a wet and yet oddly dusty odor. It was a scent of possibility, of something you could briefly shape with tools, of impending permanence. Abe loved that smell: a magic force, so solid and quiet and strong. Concrete, he realized, has dignity. Maybe Abe had a law, his first, his very own: Honor concrete. Honor it, at least, until you come at it with a demo hammer.

There, I used that word again: magic.  Maybe I'm alone in this.  Or maybe you've felt it, too.  Maybe you've run a floater over concrete; maybe you, too, have sensed the mojo under your fingertips as the fragrance of cement — wet and yet oddly dusty — embeds in your memory like the bouquet of a fine wine.

Or maybe I'm weird.



Note:  I borrowed the picture from a useful web site called concretenetwork.com. 

I'm embarrassed

I'm horribly embarrassed.  Due to a software glitch, two of my ebooks have displayed wild changes in type size and fonts, often several sizes on a single page. 


It's fixed now.  If you downloaded Famous Potatoes or Clear Heart from Smashwords, you can re-download them now and get a non-glitch version.  The words are the same, but the viewability is much better.

You should be able to re-download for free, if you've already downloaded them before.  If you have problems, send me an email and I'll solve it.

Gone podcasting...

I've interrupted my posting of 365 Jobs.  I'll get back to it in a few weeks.  Every once in a while - I'm sorry - but I have to do a podcast.  I just have to.  I've started recording a new one, and it will take a few weeks.  It's an obsessive, all-consuming project.  There's no time for anything else.

I became interested in podcasting about 5 years ago, when it was a relatively new frontier.  I'd just finished writing my novel Clear Heart and was looking for what every writer needs, the two "pubs": publicity and publication.

I ended up self-publishing Clear Heart and self-publicizing it by recording it as an audiobook to be distributed as a podcast.  I hoped that people would hear the podcast (for free) and then want to buy a copy of the book (for money). 


The podcast was and still is a popular success, but it didn't convert into book sales.  And why should it?   People listen, then they're done with the story - why read it again?

In the process, I came to love podcasting.  I love making audiobooks.  It's like a street performance with my hat out on the sidewalk seeded with a few dollar bills.  There's very little money to be made - a few people leave "tips" for the podcaster, but most people simply listen and then move on.  And that's okay. 

Five years after I started, the podcasting of audiobooks remains a relatively obscure subculture.  With the worldwide reach of the web, podcasting has the potential to reach billions of people.  One could at least dream of reaching millions.

In reality, I've reached about 60,000 people.  I'm still reaching a couple of thousand new people every month.  As a radio show, those numbers would mean I'm a dismal failure.  As a podcaster, I'm not ashamed.

For the new podcast, I'll be recording Danny Ain't.  By now I have realistic expectations.  There's no recognition by any other media.  It won't help sales of print or ebook versions.

I do it for love.  I love giving voice to what I've written, and I get satisfaction from having people hear it.  I love literature as an oral tradition, and I love being part of that tradition. 

I want to thank Evo Terra and all the folks at podiobooks.com for hosting my podcasts and for their technical help.

If you're interested, you can download my podcasts from the iTunes "store."  They're free.  Simply go to the iTunes store and search for "Joe Cottonwood."  The most popular title is Babcock, followed by Clear Heart and then Boone Barnaby.  Clear Heart is strictly for adults.  Babcock and Boone Barnaby are for all ages.

And of course, I'll let you know when Danny Ain't becomes available for downloading as a podcast.


If you don't care about podcasts, my apologies.  I'll get back to blogging (which I love as much as podcasting) in a week or two.  Or three.  It's summer.  Let's have fun.

365 Jobs: Crucifixion by Ladder

(After posting 288 true* stories to the blog, this one is fiction.  It's from the first chapter of my novel Clear Heart.  I'm including it here because it fits with the ladder theme and because if you've read the previous four ladder entries plus an earlier entry called Impaled — all of which truly happened to me — you will know the origins of this fictional event as well.)

. . .

Somehow, each new day, year after year, the plywood seemed heavier while the quality seemed crappier—just like my body, Wally was thinking. 

Awkwardly balanced on the ladder, Wally pushed a raggedy four-by-eight-foot panel up toward the roof. Sweat trickled along the hairs of Wally’s armpits and dripped to the second-story subfloor fourteen feet below. He supported the plywood with the top of his belly, a splinter digging into his flesh, as he shifted his grip.

Standing above Wally, straddling two roof trusses, Juke was ready. While Juke took hold of the top of the panel and lifted from above, Wally pushed the plywood from below.

Laying the plywood over the trusses, squinting a practiced eye, Juke lined up the edge and set to work with the nailgun. Phap phap phap.

Wally slid the next sheet of 19/32 CDX ply up the ladder. 

With a final phap phap from the nailgun, Juke leaned down and grasped the top of the next sheet of plywood with his fingers.  He lifted.

And at that moment on that hillside where the frame of a house was rising among live oaks and wild oats with a red-tailed hawk soaring above, the world stirred. On this calm day, with neither Juke nor Wally noticing, clouds had formed. The oak branches bent. The oats flattened. The hawk shot out of sight.

Juke was just turning sideways when the wind hit. Suddenly, from out of nowhere a bolt of air was pulling the plywood—and Juke along with it—like a big, stiff kite.

Down below, meanwhile, Wally still had a hand on the plywood in addition to supporting it with his belly and, for one brief moment, no grip on the ladder. The updraft whipped the plywood out of his fingers and knocked his body off balance. Instinctively, Wally shifted his weight.

The ladder shifted, reacting to Wally’s sudden move.

Up above, Juke realized that if he didn’t let go he would be lifted to hang-glide into the sky under a four-by-eight panel of plywood. So he let go. The rough edge of the sheet ripped the tips of his fingers and sailed away. Juke fell back against the nailgun, which started to slide down the slope of the roof decking. Juke, with raw, bleeding fingertips, reached for the nailgun and at the same time saw that Wally had lost his balance on the ladder just below.

Their eyes locked.

Wally was fourteen feet up a ladder that was moving to the right while his body was twisting to the left. Juke lunged for Wally’s hand just as Wally, whose body had now spiraled a hundred and eighty degrees, was desperately reaching over and behind his head to grab the king post of the truss. Juke had the nailer in his grip. All three—nailgun, Wally’s hand, king post—met at the same moment.

Phap.

For Wally, it was a moment of absolute clarity. He felt—and even smelled—the puff of compressed air, stale from a hundred feet of hose, that had driven the nail through his wrist. He felt Juke’s hand grabbing his own free left hand, the one that wasn’t nailed to the post. He heard the sliding of the ladder and then the clatter as it hit the floor below. He heard a mighty thud and a splintering of wood as the nailgun, dropped by Juke, struck the floor a moment later. He kicked his feet in a broad arc searching for support even though he knew that nothing was there.

“Jesus fuck!” Juke shouted from above.

And there was a woman. Where she had come from Wally had no idea. Already she was lifting the fallen ladder, but she wasn’t strong and the ladder was heavy.

Inside the nailed wrist, Wally felt two separate bones grinding against the nail. Or maybe the nail had shot right through one bone, splitting it in two. He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that inside his body, bone was in contact with steel, that the bone and nail and flesh were supporting the weight of his body, that the flesh was ripping as he wriggled, that the nail felt solid and unforgiving, that the bone felt as if it was bending and would be torn from its little sockets and pop like a broken spring out of his skin. 

Weird explosive shock waves were racing up the nerves of his arm to overload and confuse his brain. Even more urgent, rising into Wally’s awareness above the flood of pain: He couldn’t breathe. The weight of his body was stretching the muscles across his chest so that only with a supreme effort could he exhale, making quick ineffective puffs. With rapidly de-oxygenating air in his lungs, he was suffocating.

Juke, still holding Wally’s left hand in one of his own, lay down flat on the roof decking and placed his free hand under Wally’s armpit. When he had a solid grip he moved his other hand to Wally’s other armpit, supporting all of Wally’s weight.

With an explosion of fusty air Wally exhaled, coughing, and then sucked a deep gasp of breath.

Juke’s face was now pressed up against Wally’s, cheek to cheek, stubble to stubble, sweat to sweat.

Wally was panting, catching up on oxygen.

Meanwhile, down below, the woman couldn’t lift the ladder. Whoever she was, she’d never before dealt with the unwieldy heft of an OSHA Type A Louisville fiberglass extension ladder.

Juke called down to the woman: “You—uh—you—”

Wally could feel Juke’s jaw moving against his own.

“You gotta—” Juke was trying to tell the woman how to raise the ladder but he was handicapped by his speech impediment—an inability to open his mouth without cursing. Juke’s personal law of carpenter etiquette wouldn’t allow him to swear in the presence of a lady. He might be rough but he was gallant. Or if not gallant, at least fearful: Juke still had nightmares starring angry nuns.

“Walk it up,” Wally said in a voice that sounded strangely high-pitched to his own ears.

The woman, confused, raised her face toward Wally. “What?”

For an instant, Wally stared. Her eyes, even at this distance, the eyes of a puppy, luminous and brown.

Juke, meanwhile, stared as well. He could see right down the front of her jersey. Nice rack.

“Grab one end,” Wally squeaked, trying not to screech, to remain calm, to ignore the electric buzz that was running up his arm. “Place the tip against the wall, and then walk under the ladder, lifting it higher as you go, keeping one end against the wall. Can you do that, please?”

The "please" came out a little higher than Wally had intended. Screechy high.

The woman tried. She raised the ladder half way, sliding it up the studs. A moment of extended arms, trembling. As she tried to shift her grip, she lost it. The side of the ladder bounced against her shoulder and then rattled to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Briefly she laid a hand on her shoulder, wincing.

“You all right?” Wally said.

“My God. What a thing for you to ask right now.” Already she was trying again. This time she seemed to get a better angle on it, walking the ladder up the frame of two-by-fours without overextending her arms.

With something like a ballet move, Wally was able to arch his potbellied body and swing his legs sideways while the woman slid the ladder until his foot, and then two feet, once again supported his weight.

Juke could now let go of Wally. There were bloody fingerprints on Wally’s arm. Wally’s body was blocking Juke’s access to the ladder. Juke whispered, “Now what, Boss?”

Wally spoke to the woman below. “See that saw? No, behind you. The Milwaukee. There. Yes, that. Can you bring it up the ladder and give it to my partner here? Carry it by the handle so you don’t touch the trigger.” Always Mr. Safety. “Make sure it stays plugged in to the extension cord. Okay?”

Oops. His voice had squeaked again on the "okay."

Juke whispered, “No, Boss. I ain’t cuttin’ your hand off.”

“Cut the post,” Wally said.

And that’s exactly what Juke did.

Wally walked on his own two feet out of the house and straight to his truck, his hair powdered with fresh sawdust, his left hand cradling an eighteen-inch piece of two-by-four Douglas fir that was still nailed to his right wrist, trailing blood…  

 . . .

*True:  Based on fact.  I frequently change names or other details to protect people's identities and avoid lawsuits by billionaires.  Occasionally for ease-of-storytelling I'll combine two characters into one, or I'll compress a time line or use other implements of the trade.  I've been wearing a novelist's tool belt just as long as I've been wearing a carpenter's, so it comes naturally now to reach for the handiest chisel, or pliers, or plot device.  I'll smooth the rough spot out of a messy story just as I'll rub a little sandpaper over a piece of wood.

Clear Heart podcast had a glitch

A very kind listener notified me that the last 6 episodes of Clear Heart couldn't be downloaded from iTunes nor directly from podiobooks.  Meanwhile I noticed an obnoxious loud "pop" at the beginning of many episodes of the Babcock podcast.

The missing episodes are now available.  There was a problem with Libsyn, the host.  They've fixed it.

The "pops" remain.  We'll find a solution...

365 Jobs, Day 99: Toy Chest

Cross-posted from my new blog, 365 Jobs:

Toy Chest
Monday, April 9, 1984

On this day in 1984 I'm building a toy chest for Will's second birthday.  In six days my son will be two years old.

I'm using 16-inch pine planks that I pried from Wagon Wheels just before the poor cottage was crushed.  Unlike my older two children, Will never lived at Wagon Wheels, but this toy chest will give him a piece of it.

Though not quite two years old, Will actually assists me in the construction at least to the extent of picking up sweet-smelling pine shavings and placing them in a pile.  His older brother Jesse, age seven, helps run the plane over the top.  Everybody loves to plane.  Then both Jesse and Will watch the quickening of color as I apply oil to the wood - no stain, no varnish, please.  

And oh how I love salvaged wood.  Here's a photo from 2007 which I've been advised never to show anybody because "there's something creepy about a man hugging a toy chest."  In the photo you can see the shape of the chest (an old Shaker design), the extraordinarily wide planks of the sides, the planed top.  You can also see that the chest is somewhat banged up from 23 years of use.  Eventually Will left it behind, not needing a toy chest at Dartmouth - so it remains where I can hug it again if ever I feel so inclined. 

Building that chest was such a pleasure - and such mental therapy - that I recreated the experience in a chapter of my novel Clear Heart.  If you're curious you can read all about it - Chapter 30 to be exact.  Or episode 14 of the Clear Heart podcast.

I'd quote the chapter here, but it's a bit too long for this setting.  But, hey, I tell you what.  For the rest of April readers of this blog can buy the ebook of Clear Heart for half price!  Such a deal!  Just follow this link to Smashwords, put Clear Heart in your shopping bag, and use this discount code at checkout: CJ48P.  You'll get 50% off the price of a book that already costs less than one beer at Sullivan's Pub.  Now it costs just half a beer!

Here are the words of some people I respect, craftspeople who could build a far finer toy chest than I:

" I LOVED Clear Heart. In fact, I couldn't put it down.  It's about a 55 year old ex-hippy carpenter named Wally—and the interaction between true craftsmen, their good-natured joking, routines and habits (like sometimes getting too friendly with female clients). It's male bonding at its finest, filled with endearing characters and fast-paced, nail-biting mishaps.  And it made me want to ask Wally: 'You hiring?'"—Kari Hultman, The Village Carpenter

" I just couldn’t put it down. It was a great read.  Now I have met many of the people in Joe’s novel, quirky sub contractors, stupid clients and the like. I found myself (I believe for the first time) actually rooting for fictional characters. The book is gripping. It is a love story and so much more.  I should also tell you that it is a book for adults.  I wouldn’t have my (prude) sister read the book."—Stephen Shepherd, Full Chisel Blog

365 Jobs, Day 86: Forkin' Fred

Cross-posted from my new blog, 365 Jobs:

Forkin' Fred
Monday, March 27, 2000

Fred the carpenter looks like a wild man as he tells me: "It's the fuckin' floor, man.  I gotta cut a fuckin' access but the fuckin' Skilsaw was fuckin' smokin', man.  The fuckin' blade hit a fuckin' nail.  Brand new fuckin' blade, man..."

We're in the hallway of an office building where Fred has been hired by the landlord to, apparently, cut an access hole in the fuckin' floor.

A well-dressed woman appears.  She asks Fred, "What are you doing?"

"It's ... uh ... I ..."

"What?"

"The ... uh ..."

The woman sighs.  She moves on.

Fred is fluent in the language of carpentry, but he has a speech impediment: he can't talk without a liberal sprinkling of swear words, one word in particular.  But Fred will not allow himself to swear in the presence of a lady.

To women, at least to that class of women who Fred would consider to be ladies, Fred appears to be an incoherent wild man.  It's true that he looks wild and unkempt.  In fact, he is wild and unkempt.  But also, Fred is a gentleman.  It takes a perceptive and patient lady to find that out.  


Note:  This is the one and only day I encountered Fred.  I spoke with him for less than half an hour, but I owe him a debt of gratitude.  If you've read my novel Clear Heart, you've met Juke, the character half-inspired by Fred.  I didn't want to write an entire book of cussing, so I made up an alternate form of swearing.  It's a forkin' fact, man...

An Interview

I was just interviewed by Liana Burnside for a research project at Brigham Young University.  The questions were interesting...

 1. What first prompted you to distribute some of your material for free online?
In March 2008 I read an article in the NY Times about podcasting novels, and I instantly loved the idea.  All literature has its roots in oral storytelling.  Somehow we have come to believe that only printed works are true literature, but they are merely an imitation - and sometimes a poor substitute - for oral storytelling.  My own writing has always been geared toward the sound of words, especially the extensive dialog.  I'd been writing podcast-ready novels for 40 years and hadn't known it.

Or is the question about doing it for free?  Well, initially I thought a free podcast of the novel might entice listeners to buy the printed book.  I was wrong.  Most of them are happy just to listen.  But the podcasting process turns out to be exactly what I like about literature, so I'll continue even without making any money from it, although - ahem - I appreciate the occasional donation from the occasional grateful listener.

2. When writing your novel Clear Heart, did you know you were going to turn it into a podiobook? If so, how did that affect the writing process?
I had completed Clear Heart just before I discovered podcasting, so the writing was intended for print.  Reading aloud, of course, is a great editing tool, so the writing became better as I prepared the podcast.

Currently I'm producing a podcast novel that is strongly influenced by my podcasting experience.  It affects the story in several ways - most obviously in my use of music which I incorporate into the plot.

3. How have you promoted your work? In addition, what sort of online networking have you participated in?
I suck at promotion.  It doesn't fit with my personality.  I have a blog and a website.  Sometimes I comment on other people's blogs.  I do a few internet radio interviews.  That's about it.  Eventually, the podcast itself is my best promotion.  Without any publicity, my downloads increase every month.  People find me through word-of-mouth recommendations.

4. You offer a few of your books in both audio and print versions. Do you feel like the different versions offer different experiences? Is one superior to the other?
I want both versions to be good, and I try hard to make it so.  And yes, of course the experiences are different.  Listening to a podcast is an incredibly intimate experience.  My voice is literally inside the listener's head - inserted through ear buds.  People won't allow that kind of intimacy for long unless they really like you - so I have to be as good as I can be.

5. What is your primary motivation for writing?
Creating characters and bringing them to life.  Creating my version of the world.  A kind of birth.

Thank you again for assisting me with my research.

Interesting questions, Liana.  A pleasure.

Ah, technology ...

So far, three of my books are available as ebooks on Smashwords.com. Right now I'm preparing to upload a fourth. So I thought I'd check the formatting of my previous books to see if I could conform to the same style. When I checked, here on the left is what one of them looked like.

Here on the right is what it used to look like.

What changed?

I dunno.

All I know is I'm working real hard to make my books available at incredibly cheap prices as ebooks, and then the technology gets "upgraded" and everything turns into garbage. Sheesh.

If anybody reading this blog has downloaded one of my ebooks and is having any problem viewing it, please contact me.

Smashwords converts my manuscript into all the various ebook formats including PDF. What I am displaying here are PDF pages that have somehow become unreadable. I can't check the EPUB and MOBI or any of those proprietary files because I don't have a Kindle or any of those nice reading devices. So if you have one, and if my books are unreadable, please let me know. Otherwise I'll never find out that Smashwords needs to fix them. And you'll never get to read them.

In this case, I think the problem is that one of Apple's routine system upgrades has changed the Preview program, which is how I view PDF documents. The same document still looks good when viewed with Adobe Reader. It used to look good in Preview, too, but now it doesn't.

I'm sure Kindle and all those other reading systems upgrade their systems periodically. What happens to people with old files?

Swallowing my pride

As of January 31, 2010, the Clear Heart podcast has been downloaded 123,235 times.

In non-English-speaking countries it has been downloaded by 4 people in Ethiopia, 7 in Russia, 9 in Portugal, 12 in Iran, 26 in Spain, 32 in Slovakia, 35 in Hong Kong, 46 in Japan, 67 in Germany, an inexplicable 1036 in Manila, and so on across the globe.

I've received email from listeners in France, Italy, Spain, China, Lesotho, Germany, New Zealand, a pub in Liverpool England and a sailboat in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.

I've had several dozen contractors tell me they know exactly who I based the character of Juke on, and that they employ him (in New York, Ohio, Florida, Oregon, Scotland...).

The Clear Heart podcast won the Podiobooks Founder's Choice Award as one of the 5 best book podcasts of 2008.

The novel Clear Heart is available as a printed book from Amazon (if interested, go here) or as an ebook from Smashwords (if interested, go here).

In these hard times, I'm glad I could provide something people can relate to and enjoy...

But I've never before seen such a disconnect between popularity and monetary reward.

Podiobooks.com, the host of my podcast, suggests that each listener make a voluntary donation of $9.99 to the artist if you enjoyed the podcast. I’ve made such donations myself for podcasts I’ve enjoyed.

Over the last two years I’ve received less than $100 in donations, which is less than I paid for the microphone ($128, a Samson USB mic).

One problem is that most people download using iTunes, so they never see the “Donate” button on the podiobooks website. I've just added a “Donate” button to this blog, though it hurts my pride. An alternate way to show appreciation would be to buy the ebook or the printed book.

Okay, I'll drop this embarrassing subject now. And whether you donate or not, I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Thanks for all the support and encouragement you’ve given me through your emails and reviews and comments. It means the world to me.

Babcock is now an ebook

I'm back from vacation and catching up. First of all, the ebook of Babcock is now available from Smashwords.com and can be downloaded at this link. Meanwhile, the podcast of Babcock continues. There are now 8 episodes available.

The ebooks of Clear Heart and Boone Barnaby are surprisingly popular with members of the US military serving in Iraq, Korea, Afghanistan, and Germany. I'm gratified. I hope they like Babcock, too. And if you should happen to be in the armed forces, by the way, I make these ebooks available at no cost to members of the military. Send me an email for details.

I'm on Smashwords

A nifty web site called Smashwords has made two of my books available for downloading onto iPhones, Sony e-readers, Palm e-readers, Kindle e-readers, regular cell phones, laptop computers, wristwatches, whatever platform you prefer. You can sample 50% of each book for free and then - gotcha! - you have to pay to read the second half. It's pretty inexpensive, though.

The future of publishing is e-reading, though the publishers are as clueless as the music industry about how to handle it. Smashwords seems to have the answer: easy, cheap, and user-friendly to the reader. Also, to be honest, Smashwords is generous in sharing its income with the authors (unlike, say, Amazon - or any print publisher).

You'll find my novel for adults, Clear Heart, here: Clear Heart on Smashwords.

And my novel for children and adults, Boone Barnaby, is here: Boone Barnaby on Smashwords.

So if you've been itching to read them on your cell phones - or on your laptops - now you can.

Babcock: The podcast

It looks like the web host has resolved its problems, so I'll begin uploading my podcast of Babcock today. After a few days of grinding through the technical sausage-maker, the podcast should be available for downloading. I'll post a notice when it's "live."

Meanwhile, here's a preview: Babcock Promo. It's an mp3 file, and it's two minutes long.

While the web host was under reconstruction, I couldn't check my download statistics, but now they're back and I see that for example, in one day -- yesterday -- there were 178 downloads of the Clear Heart podcast and 75 downloads of the Boone Barnaby podcast.

It's amazing to me. Instead of tapering off, the downloads of both podcasts keep accelerating. It's totally viral. I haven't publicized either podcast for a long, long time.

(The cover image of Babcock is the original bookjacket, which was painted by Shane Evans.)

"It's funny, very tender, and enormously, tremendously human."

One of the best book review blogs out there is called Bookslut. As you can tell by the name, it has a female, somewhat irreverent point of view. In their August issue, Colleen Mondor wrote this review of Clear Heart:

Clear Heart is a realistic, if somewhat turbulent, look at the lives of hard working men in the California construction business. Anchored by two characters, Wally the contractor and Abe, the teenager he employs and befriends, it includes numerous secondary characters all of whom revolve around a plot based on building houses in a business climate that does not always reward honesty. When Wally finds himself teetering on the edge of bankruptcy after a client turns out to be a liar and a cheat (and an appallingly bad businessman), it is only through the good will he has engendered over the years with the people who work with him that he has a shot at saving everything he loves. Abe, swinging a hammer for the first time in his life, becomes a student of male behavior in the midst of all this drama, the new kid who is at first the victim of harmless pranks but soon graduates to dedicated apprentice and valued crewmember. Abe sees the kind of decent man Wally is and finds a great deal of value in his life and the lives of those who are part of his world. In the end, author Joe Cottonwood succeeds on multiple levels with the novel, from exploring the nature of responsible relationships, both romantic and friendly, to revealing the high value and reward of an honest day's work. There is also, at a very critical juncture, a road trip.

The road trip is the kind of frenzied last minute rescue that brings the book to its soaring conclusion and wraps up multiple relationships. Abe and "FrogGirl," a second apprentice (the name is quirky at first but becomes very significant), set off in a temperamental vehicle to transport a large bell from the east coast to the west. Nothing works out the way it should and Abe ends up questioning love. It's funny, very tender, and enormously, tremendously human. In fact, Clear Heart just might be one of the most human books I've read in a long time.

Life is good today.

Update (a day later): Apparently there was supposed to be a third paragraph in the review - a caution to teen readers about "sex of a real and raw nature" - which has now been restored on the Bookslut web site. Here it is:

Clear Heart was written for adults but Abe and FrogGirl are key to the story and both of them are transformed in significant ways. There is no mystery here, just a dozen small moments of hard work and deep thoughts and why both are important. There’s some sex of the real and raw nature (as in actually doing it as opposed to just talking about it) so older teens only on this one but for the right kid -- for the one who wants to know what to do with their life but isn’t sure how to work that out -- this book could very well be transformative. And if the kid likes to build things, well then, it’s perfect.

Though I wrote Clear Heart for adult readers, my books always have appealed strongly to teens as well, so the caution is appropriate. Is "sex of the real and raw nature" going to keep people from reading the book? You have been warned...

Brag

Colleen Mondor of the blog Chasing Ray reviewed Clear Heart back in May while I was on my book tour, and I just found out about it. I'm proud because she's one of the most insightful reviewers out there, and she loved the book. You can read the entire review here. The conclusion is:

By the time I closed the final page I thought wow - this is the book every 17 year old boy needs to read. It's about men and women (and how to treat each other); it's about choosing your friends wisely, and it's about work which is something we are all supposed to plan to do but no one ever seems to teach us how to do it well. I simply thought it was wonderful. Highly recommended for discerning teens and anyone interested in a good read about some good people.

Colleen reviews YA titles, so that's the slant of her review. Funny how every time I write a book for and about adults, it ends up appealing to teens, too.

There will always be laundry

Laundry of Shanghai...
So what's this got to do with construction - or writing - or anything?
Well,
I've never seen an architect's rendering of a proposed building that included laundry hanging out to dry.
But laundry happens. I have a passage in Clear Heart that goes:

“If I lived here,” Abe said, “I’d erect a telescope here. Great platform for stargazing.”
“And daytime,” Juke said, “you could check the downhill neighbors. Some lady of leisure. Watch ‘em sunbathe nude and rub up with coconut oil.”
“They do that?”
“I know for a fact. All them rich ladies.”
“If you say so,” Abe said, shrugging. “They’re also mothers, you know. They have children and laundry and stuff.”

Somehow we never include laundry in our sex dreams. Or our fancy plans. Do you think the Chinese architects and builders who drew up scale models and spiffy drawings of those high rises in the background included laundry hanging from the balconies?

There will always be laundry. Including bright red jammies.

Great Review of Clear Heart

Last night I returned from Italy feeling sleepy and idiotic after eleven hours cooped up in an airplane. My muscles needed exercise while my brain needed sleep. Now I've had both, and when I check out the Internet after a three week absence, first thing I see is this great review of my book Clear Heart. The reviewer is Kari Hesse of The Village Carpenter. Here's part of what she said:

Well I didn't like his book....I LOVED his book. In fact, I couldn't put it down and sped through it faster than it takes me to read a magazine.

It's about a 55 year old ex-hippy carpenter named Wally—his bond with his workmen, love for his work, respect for wood, relationship with a "perky Presbyterian" and her kids, Job-like patience, and determination to build the perfect house, despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

But more than that—it's about the connection and interaction between men who are true craftsmen, their good-natured joking, routines and habits (like sometimes getting too friendly with female clients), temperaments, and respect for one another's capabilities. It's male bonding at its finest.

And it's filled with endearing characters like Juke, FrogGirl, Abe, Opal (okay, Opal kinda drove me crazy--that chick needs a chill pill!), and fast-paced, nail-biting mishaps.

It's about second chances, belief in the things that truly matter, mentoring, teaching, and friendship.

And it made me want to ask Wally: "You hiring?"

As for Italy, I have a lot to say. Not about tourism, but about craft, something the Italians know best. Instead of taking snapshots of statues and art like all the other tourists, I would be walking through some ancient village saying things like "Look at the size of the gluelam they used as a header over that garage door!" This is why my wife sometimes has to pretend she doesn't know me.

Let me sort through my 350 photos of Italian bricks, doorknobs, windows - and let me get a little more sleep - and I'll try to make sense of it all.

Jody and me

At the end of yesterday's post, I said that Jody Procter and I "treat parallel subjects with slightly different perspectives."

Here's what I mean.

On the subject of personality traits in the various building trades:

Actually, plumbers tend to be the most twisted people in the trades, just as the roofers are the wildest, the drunkenest, and have the highest number of tattoos per square inch of exposed skin. Electricians are the cleanest, although, oddly, the drivers of the concrete trucks tend to be meticulous about their clothes and boots.
--Jody Procter, Toil: Building Yourself, page 39.

Abe was coming to the opinion that cabinet makers had authority issues, electricians were obsessive by-the-book rule geeks, plumbers were smarter than people gave credit, painters were flat-out nuts, and drywallers were all Jesus freaks...
--Joe Cottonwood, Clear Heart, page 256-257

Then there's the matter of measuring hairs:

Anything closer than one-sixteenth of an inch is inevitably a cunt hair and the smallest of cunt hairs is always a red cunt hair.
--Jody Procter, Toil: Building Yourself, page 39.

“I’m learning new units of measurement. I always knew that a hair was a unit of measure - like, ‘That board is too long by a hair’ - but did you know that a pussy hair is a smaller unit? And a red pussy hair is the smallest unit of all?”
--Joe Cottonwood, Clear Heart, page 91

Also, there's catching the rhythm. And work as a form of prayer:

On a day like this, in quiet, in peace, with no rain, with the boards lining up easily and falling into place, the nails plunking home, one after another, ...I am in a state of perfect flow, of harmony, of almost mindless happiness. The work, itself, becomes a prayer.
--Jody Procter, Toil: Building Yourself, page 154.

Abe kneeled, carried, held in place, lifted, watched, learned. The flow of work, the hot breath of the power saw and the whine of the blade, the heft of the wood in his hands, scratches on Abe’s elbow where he collided with a four-by-four, drops of blood sprinkling in powdery sawdust, the sharp fresh-cut scent of fir, the nails whacking true, the prickling heat of the sun, the outline of the gazebo forming and then filling, board after board, joist to beam to rafter, the skillful and yet spiritual rhythm of it all was like a song. Or a prayer. The frame came out tight as a drum.
--Joe Cottonwood, Clear Heart, page 63-64

My Top Ten (or Five, actually, or maybe Six...) Jody Procter

Jody Procter went to a fine university, migrated to San Francisco in a VW bus, became a hippie, spent his entire life writing while pursuing other work for money, and ended up as a carpenter. A lot like me. Toil: Building Yourself is Jody's meditative diary of one of the last jobs of his career, one rainy winter working as a carpenter building a McMansion in the Pacific Northwest.

As the newest hire on the crew, Jody was low man in the pecking order. He provides a detailed, graphic account of construction as viewed from the bottom. A bit too detailed at times. What I like best is when he steps slightly outside the job and considers the larger implications of what he's doing:

"Someday this house will be done, and we and all our voices and our inane chatter and our grim faces will be the ghosts of the workmen who built it, and whoever lives in it will know us only by the strange, unsettled sensations of movement and thought they pick up sometimes... We will have moved on somewhere else with our yearning laughter, our muddy boots, our hammers with their odd nicknames, our ladders, our wet nail-belts and tired feet, our fear of fuck-ups and death. And the house will be like our mountain and it will remain."

I like it when he tells us not what he's doing so much as how he feels about it: "When I'm at work, I like to work, to get into the rhythm of it, the perfection of it, the uninterrupted flow of it - on a really good day, the mystical, mantra-sounding, deep spirituality of it." This is a guy who recites his mantra while he's nailing studs.

We begin in November, 1994 with an empty lot, the first scrapings of the bulldozer blade "curling up rich, brown chunks of river-bottom dirt," and follow the work through the bickering and joking, the competition and the camaraderie. We meet Vern, the nearly unflappable contractor with a laconic Gary Cooper personality attached to a Don Knotts body. We meet Brian, the brash 19-year-old whose energy outpaces his skill set, who has a motor mouth, who thinks Rush Limbaugh is God and who, naturally, irritates the crap out of old hippie Jody. We meet Bud, whose one-year-old daughter is on chemotherapy and whose life is on the edge. We care about this crew, we watch them practice their craft, we understand how working on a construction site can be like immersing yourself in a nearly dysfunctional family.

Most of all we come to know - and worry about - Jody Procter, a man who, as the subtitle says, is building himself. Despite the humorous image on the cover, this man is haunted by some dark ghosts. First there are the aches and pains of a 51-year-old carpenter, such as on this occasion after spending a day on the roof in the pouring rain, a day of wondering whether it would be better, on sliding off the slick roof, to land dead on his head or to land on his back and be a paraplegic:

"About 8:00, I'm lying there on the couch, Kathleen has gone in to take a bath, and suddenly both my legs seize up in violent cramps, cramps in both upper thighs that turn my legs into these wicked, painful knots of constricted muscle.... The pain is almost unendurable, and I call out for Kathleen, who emerges naked and dripping wet from the bathroom to find me thrashing around on the floor, my legs out straight, eyes closed, jaw clenched; she pounds on my legs, tries to loosen them." The cure, it turns out, is a warm glass of salt water. "When I drink this, the cramps go away almost immediately. The floor of the living room is a chaos of plates, books, and magazines from where I have been thrashing around between the coffee table and the couch. Everything is wet from where Kathleen, ministering to me, has left water tracks from her interrupted bath. But I am all better. I stand up. I laugh. We both laugh about it.... I am in bed and asleep by 9:30."

But as a reader, I was less troubled by Jody's physical problems - which, as a 61-year-old carpenter, I am fairly acquainted with - and more concerned with his mental well-being. Jody grew up with wealth and privilege: "My father was a Republican businessman, a Harvard-club man, and a golfer ... whose only tools were the weeder and the trowel for the garden.... The work, such as it was, that was done to our house, was done by rough-looking working men, plumbers and carpenters and electricians who came to the house in their old trucks, and seemed to me as alien as if they had just arrived from Outer Mongolia. Now I had become one of them." And later he says, "I wonder, out of my graduating class, if I am now working at the most menial job. Would there be some sort of reverse accomplishment in lowliness?"

I hate that attitude. Having spent my own life in the construction trades, I've never seen myself as a failure. Yes, I was a National Merit Scholar. Yes, I went to a fine university. But no, it is not failure to spend your life working with your hands - hands that are attached to an active and engaged mind. It is the work of my hands that has sharpened my mind and kept it in focus, reality-based, unlike the weird and useless abstractions of some writers who spend their lives in the academic world sucking on - and simultaneously hating - the university teat.

Most of the carpenters I know take pride in their work and in their livelihood. Only in literature, it seems, do we see ourselves as troubled, exploited, miserable laboring wretches. There's a strain of that attitude in the poems of Mark Turpin and Joseph Millar, too, and I suppose we can all be forgiven a bit of self-pitying. We have all been through some form of 12-step - it seems to be a job requirement. With Turpin and Millar, fortunately, there are equal expressions of pleasure, of taking joy in the work itself.

I'm not sure whether Jody Procter ever reconciled with himself. The story ends on a fairly positive note as he moves on to carpentry jobs that seem to give him more satisfaction. Then he died of lung cancer 3 years after the diary was completed. In an afterword, Catherine Silbert writes:

"If that God of his meant for him to learn humility or kindness or compassion, Jody learned it. The toil of manual work, the toil of creativity, the toil of living, and finally the daunting toil of dying was in the end done with a monk's perseverance and devotion, with stunning humor, and with love."

You'll come away from this book with a sense of that humility, kindness, compassion. You'll remember the humor and the love. And you may have a renewed appreciation of the depth of the word: Toil.

A sidenote: The book was unavailable for a long time. I originally read a library copy. When I recently purchased my own, it was hard to find a used copy and I had to pay a premium. Now, suddenly, it has reappeared on Amazon and is easy to buy. Compared to my own Clear Heart, we treat parallel subjects with slightly different perspectives. We even, I was stunned to discover, discuss such minutia as the use of hair - various colors and locations of hair - as units of measurement with a red pussy hair being the finest unit. Sorry, folks, but the language of carpenters, it seems, is fairly standardized and totally sexist, at least on the West Coast.

Pesky Paparazzi

Now that sales of Clear Heart are up in the hundreds and the name Joe Cottonwood is recognized by at least two bartenders around the world, those pesky paparazzi follow me everywhere. Of course, they showed up for last week's reading at Sullivan's Pub.

Before the photos can hit the tabloids, I managed to obtain a few and - in an exclusive scoop - will post them here. First there's the attentive crowd:

And then we have some of the local writers who had the courage to stand in front of a rowdy group that was armed with Newcastle Ale and steaming hamburgers. David LeCount, who is never without a writing implement:

Diane Moomey:

Thomas Krempetz:
David Rock:

Tom Lichtenberg:

The crowd sang along with Tom Devine, who had put a William Blake poem to music:
Also reading, though missed by the paparazzi, were Terry Adams and Lynnette Vega.

Next extravaganza will take place on April Fool's Day. I'll be reading a passage from my upcoming podcast with a very talented young lady, Caroline Graham, who can do an uncanny imitation of a spirited and willful 13-year-old girl. Come join us at Sullivan's. We will applaud you.