I spent the weekend at the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. I pitched my two books and have five agents at least willing to take a look at them. So I should have come away ecstatic.

But it was bittersweet. Writers and agents are finally admitting out loud that the publishing industry as we know it is in its death throes. We will soon have little need for bookmarks or for flashlights to read under the covers. We will have to find something else in which to press our flowers.

Non-fiction is very comfortable with the electronic world. Google a subject, you’ll find the book. Fiction doesn’t fit the mold quite so readily in terms of being found, but with enough folding, stapling and mutilation, we can reshape it.

It will be wonderful for niche books or for any fiction that follows a different drummer. Let’s face it. What is still published in paper is primarily fantasy/sf, thriller, romance, young adult. Not bad … but not as diverse as devoted readers would like. Also it is the era of escapism – don’t count on many realistic endings any time soon.

And so we change direction, some of us as slowly as a battleship in the harbor. I will give it six months. If one of these agents does not think she can sell my stories, I will investigate self-publication. This was once a dirty word … this weekend, I heard two agents recommend it in their workshops.

What it means is that writers will have to be marketers. We’ll twitter and blog whether we want to or not. We’ll publish excerpts and sell online. We’ll hope to build up enough of an audience so that a real publisher will see that our efforts are worthy of their notice.

If I were younger (or at least less employed than now), I would start a new website. It would be a bookstore for ‘traditionally unpublished’ manuscripts and it would be funded/managed by a writers association. This site would have standards; it wouldn’t just be Uncle Eugene’s scrapbook online. It would employ editors … there are plenty looking for work.

The reader would be able to download a paper copy or an efile. She would know that the books were worthy contenders. Yes, there would be a percent cost for the writer … but the book would reward the investment in the long run. Because a minimum quantity would not be important, there would still be room for the oddball or non-mainstream fiction so many of us love.

It’s already being done with erotica, and maybe other categories, too. Amazon seems just a click away. Somebody way smarter than me will have to deal with the whole issue of pirating. That will be cause for another snit one day on the back nine.

But for now, I’m going to go curl up with a good computer.

This would be the aforementioned “rough break” if you failed to watch carefully.

The moon vacations on Bear Tooth Pass between Red Lodge, MT and Yellowstone. This pass is nearly 11,000 feet. Beware of mountain sickness.

Red Lodge is in a beautiful setting, but you may have to show a little courage about entering an eatery. And maybe dress like a dance hall girl. As it happens, this place had wonderful steaks. But we missed the pig races because they didn’t begin until seven.

The Gray Lady broke down in Three Forks. Of the eight businesses there, one was Ron’s Deisel Repair which had a sense of humor and a few extra minutes to rescue a couple more gray ladies of the two-legged variety. The chamber of commerce bills Three Forks as “Montana’s favorite small town.” They may be right.

Some working conditions are harder than others. At one point on the Going to the Sun road, one crane was holding another as it dangled over the side.

The construction crews in the national parks know how to choose flagpersons who can really stop traffic.

It’s worth the wait if you get views like this. Thanks for sharing my summer vacation here on the back nine.

First, domestic beasts on menus:

And now for something just a bit more tasteful:

A baby tastes his first peanut. No, I did not feed an animal on national park land. Not me, no way.

This baby marmot did not know you should always run and hide from humans. To my great joy.

Bison are easy to photo because they can stay fairly still for long periods of time.

And finally, in all my trips to national parks, Alaska and Canada, I’ve never seen a grizzly. Until now. This young mom, fresh from hibernation with her two cubs, has a very short summer to grow strong. Hope they all make it. A peaceful Fourth of July from the back nine.

Last week, I decided it was time to ‘cowgirl up’ so I began weaning myself off the pills. Two days ago I stopped the drug altogether.

That sets the scene for today, okay? Hold that thought.

Sis and I are driving through Glacier National Park. This place is so filled with ghosts for us both that it wraps around us in a shroud of memory. We started camping in Glacier with Mom and Dad and family and friends in the fifties. We grew up year after year in Avalanche campground fishing in the creek, pestering bears, hiking the Garden Wall, riding a series of ill tempered old trail plugs. Even, for the love of God, singing around the ol’ campfire.

Got the picture? Heady memories mixed with two days off incubating drugs? I am suddenly an emotional wreck. I begin to weep at the park entrance. Sis presents her Golden Eagle Pass to the National Parks. The ranger looks at me ululating like a mourning Middle Easterner. He tells Sis to have a nice day (he knows I’ve already failed that hurdle).

But suddenly I am not weeping. I am giggling, then roaring with laughter until tears of joy cascade down my face. What could I possibly have done that would be a greater test of drug free living? Can I plan or what?

It is rumored that Glacier Park will have no more glaciers in a decade. And the north side of Lake MacDonald is scarred by forest fire. And a devastating beetle has killed many of the trees on the east side of the park. But grandeur still surrounds you. The road is still called Going to the Sun and no other highway compares. America the Beautiful.

That’s plenty worth crying about even without memory and mood on overload. With it, well it’s quite a trip here on the back nine.

Oh, and P.S. I seem to be having issues with anger management as well. So fuck you, gentle reader, if you choose to criticize.

The socks were for those of us who are squeamish about sticking our tootsies into sweat-soaked shoes that should have been jettisoned off the planet decades ago.

That’s right … bowling!

We were divided into four teams, and Project One was designing bowling shirts. My team didn’t know a Sharpie from Shinola so we had limited graphic ability but the team came up with Super Sizzlers.

I did not contribute to the name or the performance in that I have not been in a bowling alley since I was about six years old. That was the year my father hauled me home and sent me to my room for some giant infraction of the rules (it may have involved hard candies bouncing down the lanes but that is another story).

Anyway, my team should also have sent me to my room. I certainly held the team average in the low double digits (can you have a negative bowling score?). Megan, Mylinda and Keith, I beg forgiveness. You were far nicer about it to me than I would have been to you if the challenge had been, oh say, WRITE AN ESSAY IN TWO MINUTES FLAT.

On the other hand, I have a great chance to win the Most Improved award next year. Unless, of couse, next year’s team activity involves paintballs in which case I either start all over or aim directly at this new management and let it rip.

Anyone in the Dog Patch area willing to teach this old dog new tricks? If so, bowling instructors are being hired on the back nine.

So far, guesses include:
- We’re going to make puppets
- The host is concerned our feet will be cold in the air conditioning
- We’re going to dust the entire factory by sliding around the floor

Care to add your own guess to this list? There’ll be a prize for the winner. Well, maybe.

Ah, here’s a fascinating story on the front page about an attorney campaigning to be our county prosecutor. An inmate has accused him of sexual misconduct, claiming the candidate “masturbated in front of him in the attorney-client booth at the county jail and coerced him into showing his genitals.” Otherwise, the 26 year old inmate claimed, the attorney threatened to drop his case.

The attorney admitted to authorities to masturbating in the jail booth but said that the act was consensual. Therefore, he claimed, ” I never did anything wrong.”

The innate said to the reporter “Why would I make this (expletive) up?”

Due to discrepancies in the story, the Prosecuting Attorney’s office has dropped it, saying “its investigation could not substantiate the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.”

This story gives new meaning to client attorney privilege or to getting your client off.

And I hope you didn’t miss this big Memorial Day story of which we locals are particularly proud:

The county prosecutor has declined to further press charges against the father who branded his children with an SK (standing for Seamands’ Kids). The assault charge was dropped because the two teenage boys “testified they had wanted to be branded.” His daughter was also branded but “the dad wasn’t charged with assaulting her because she was old enough to give consent” when it happened.

So just in case you want to disfigure your children, and can frighten them into saying it’s okay, go right ahead. Or, hey, if you’re looking for something else to do this afternoon, go masturbate at the inmates in your local jail.

Who says this isn’t still the land of the free?

There was an agent attending that I had particularly wanted to meet in order to pitch my book. At this conference you got ten minutes to do that, which is a huge amount of time as these things go. The goal is not to sell the book. Or to have her agree to read the ms. The goal is to have her agree to look at a synopsis and maybe 10 pages. If she likes that, then you move to round two. By the way, she gets 200 queries per week. Jeesh.

Anyway, that’s a year of my time up against ten minutes of hers. In theory, she would be paid by me but let’s never forget where the balance of power really is here.

Driving across the mountains, I practice a pitch. I’m very good at presentations, have done a million of them. No worries. I figure maybe two minutes to get her to like me, three minutes for the actual pitch, and five minutes for her to heap adoration atop my justifiably proud noggin.

So for the first two minutes, I pack along my hand puppets, tonette and Uncle Eldon’s best joke.

Second, I work out what I will bleat out at her in the next three minutes. I begin:

TITLE is my 90,000 word psychological thriller.

Ah, good opening. Terse, meaty. She knows how long it is, that it’s fiction, and that it’s a category where a new writer could still muscle her way in. I go on:

It is the struggle between a psychologist and the psychopath who is brutalizing her clients. When she discovers him working against her behind the scenes, she uses every ethical means to fight back.

Okay, okay, hey now. We have tension, we have a very bad guy, we have an upright heroine and we have BRUTAL. Eighty miles into my journey, and I am really rolling now. I continue:

In the process, her lover is endangered and her best friend is murdered.

Hold on to your hat! We knew about that brutal stuff so murder is not really news. But lover? That means sex, right? Hot fucking damn! I build toward the big finish:

Finally, she realizes she must use the psychopath’s own cold-blooded methods to save her son.

Holy mother of god! A threatened child? The good girl goes bad??????? That’s character arc all over the place. And wait for it, wait for it:

She triumphs … or does she let the real danger get away?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! Even a surprise ending? I will own this agent. She doesn’t stand a chance. All I have to do is ask for the order.

Pitch day comes. I — good at presentations as those of you who are paying attention may remember — forget almost everything. I babble. I narrowly avoid drooling. I imagine she wonders why I am clutching a puppet.

Finally, in mercy, she asks me enough questions that I manage to regurgitate a few key words. She gets the idea I am thinking about writing this project. Not that I’ve completed the goddamn thing. Seriously. That’s how piss poor a job I did.

Happy-ish ending. Once she finally gets the quivering mound of humanity seated before her to confess that the fucking thing actually exists, she says she would be happy to read the first thirty pages. She is a goddess on earth. I consider going gay for this woman if it would please her (somehow, I doubt that it would).

So the pitch succeeds, no thanks to me. And now I look forward to the next conference to try with yet another agent. There the pitch is only two minutes long.

My heart is already pounding here on the back nine.

Mary was unsure how to fit so large a nipple into so tiny a mouth, and laughed when the rubber tip touched his nose and the infant drew his lips open wide as a carp …
Hunger. Food. Sustenance. Simple and perfect, and perfectly simple to recognize while holding the warm bottle to the infant’s gulping lips. Water to flora. Sun to earth. Breath to lungs. …when (had) food lost its divinely simple purpose, for her or for anyone like her, including the blonde anorexic in the row beside. At what point had food ceased to nourish and sought to torture?

The novel has a lot to do with weight. Not plump, not fluffy. Fat. Lard-assedness.

My mother got me my first prescription for amphetamines when I was twelve. I don’t blame her … none of us knew what they were back then. She raised us on what was perceived to be healthy. Lots of meat, lots of potatoes. Patterns were established.

People who are chronically ‘weight challenged’ try to fly under the radar. Fat people don’t like to eat in front of others to avoid the, “time to belly back from the bar, babe” syndrome. We all think nobody is assessing anything but our dinner plates. We have been known to even envy nicotine addicts or alcoholics who don’t wear their insecurities quite so obviously for everyone to see.

In my life, I have lost at least three adult people, each of them a chunky monkey in her own right. I never know when serious weight loss will begin … can’t peg it to any particular emotional ionization. I know it ends each time the earth quakes under my pudgy feet… I’ve put on forty pounds since the Mister died. I truly believe the best lifesaver in most situations is a French fry. I’d shoot the St. Bernard that showed up with brandy.

I’ve NutriSystemed, Weight Watched, South Beached and more. They all work for a time. And believe me, I know about nutrition. I know about exercise. I know about risks. I know about being comfortable with who you are. I don’t need pep talks. It’s all good.

But the sad fact of the matter? For me, the best diet is to never have that delicious feeling of contented fullness. If I am hungry, I am losing. If I am not, I am gaining. That’s the lifestyle that I know works. There’s no mid ground. The end is never in sight … there is no such thing as a goal weight, not if your idea of a celebration is to have a nice meal out.

Nonetheless, I’m going to put on my flappy feet and strap on my honky horn and clown around once again. Here goes nothing. Please don’t pass the gravy on the Back Nine any time soon.