It's In the Cards

One thing I've sorely missed the last few months is a good card game. I've asked around and no one has invited me to a local game, so I guess I'm not speaking to the right people. California and various local laws concerning card rooms and poker are difficult to figure out, but I'm learning.

The closest public card rooms are in Marina, just up the coast from Monterey. Mortimer's Card Room and the Marina Club are across the street from each other, though I can't personally prove it since I've never been there. According to PokerWiki, the rooms were there six months ago. Mortimer's is the largest of the two rooms and seems to cater to a higher stakes game.

If I want a larger room at a casino I'll have to drive to San Jose. The Garden City Casino and Bay 101 Casino have large poker rooms spreading numerous games and have enough tables to keep things moving along. It may be worth the extra drive to play in a larger room.

I suppose I'll have to visit all four locations and report on my experiences. There is no way to know where the best games are. Keeping in mind I'm near the ocean, I'm looking for juicy fish.

I'm sitting at the Starbucks in the Del Monte Center watching a steady stream of latte drinkers basking in the glow of all the goodies in the display counter. This particular Starbucks is among the busiest I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of Starbucks locations around the Southwest (see the sidebar at left). Whenever I have visited this location it's always been busy.

It's easy to get a glimpse of the people of Monterey County at the Del Monte Center, particularly here at the Starbucks. In line I see military personnel (probably from the post-graduate naval academy), young children hanging on young moms out for a day of shopping, elderly women with books in hand (mystery novels seem to be popular with them), Asians, Mexicans, mostly Caucasions, and very few Blacks. Three young men in blue jeans are busy typing away at laptop computers at various tables around the room (me, too, but I'm no longer young). Tourists are in town today. You can spot them right away by the new cameras hanging around their necks. By my calculation, today's most popular customer at Starbucks is a young woman, perhaps between 20 and 40 years old. At the risk of sounding sexists, my guess is most men are at work. Thus the only men I see are elderly, working on Suduko or Crossword puzzles, and a few young ones working online.

Outisde the window I see the many tables and chairs available for patio-dwellers. This area of the Del Monte Center has restaurants and fast food places, though you will not see a McDonald's or Burger King. Chipolte's and Chinese Express are directly across from the Starbucks, and a Subway Sandwich and pizza joint are nearby. Most of the lunching crowd sits outside. Monterey has one of the best year-round climates in the country.

The locals refer to this place as a mall, and I suppose it is. It's really an outdoor mall, since entrances to the retail stores and eateries are all outside. Since many indoor malls around the country are closing due to the economic crisis, maybe outdoor malls will survive. I would think an outdoor mall saves a fortune in utility costs, air conditioning and heating provided by Nature.

While I know California needs the rain, I was nonetheless a happy clam to see the sun break through the clouds this morning as I drove to Monterey. January was entirely dry, so it's a good February has been a very wet month. But enough is enough already.

After visiting the Monterey Public Library, I had lunch at the Del Monte Center. I noticed three military soldier-types, still in fatigues, enjoying a meal outdoors. I often see sailors and other military personnel in town. The major military presence here comes from the Defense Language Institute, Naval PostGraduate School, and Coast Guard.

The beach at Carmel was growing more crowded by the minute as locals discovered the sun was out. An elderly couple walking three dogs, one man walking a grid pattern from the ocean edge to the cliffs with a metal detector, swiping the detector left and right like a drunk Samarai with a broken sword. Two women brought their sack lunches and sat beneath a Cypress to eat sandwiches and watch a few surfers take advantage of the nice waves. I walked along the path along the beach and listened to Gordon Lightfoot on my iPod.

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I'm nursing a sore thumb. How I strained it I can't tell. Unfortunately the ligament strain is at the base of my right thumb. Since I'm righthanded, it's been a problem. I never realized how a sore thumb can make your day a little bit uneasy. Try taking notice of how often you use your thumb. When I think about the guy who had a big toe transplanted on this hand to take place of a severed thumb, I now understand it. I'll trade a big toe for a thumb if it ever comes to that. My feet stink, anyway. One less appendage might not be so bad.

I drove to Carmel Sunday afternoon and attended the “Author to Author” lecture series hosted by the Carmel Public Library Foundation. The CPLF schedules these events throughout the year. This presentation involved three published authors and the topic was “Fiction: Writing the Novel and Getting It Published.”

The three authors presenting the program were Alex A .Vardamis, Cornelia Read, and Robert Irvine. They were seated near a huge fireplace in the Barnet Segal Reading Room, located just to the right of the entrance to the Harrison Memorial Library. Tom Parks moderated the discussion and asked questions. Somehow, about 75 people squeezed into the large room, with some of them sitting in chairs beyond the rail along an upper floor balcony. I was surprised to see that many come out on such a rainy day.

I didn't learn much. Unfortunately, Mr. Parks failed to take full advantage of the hour. It takes a special talent to interview a panel such as this. It's not as simple as just writing down a few questions. I realize Mr. Parks had a remarkable career as a writer and dialogue coach in Hollywood. Nonetheless, the panel's presentation was a little flat. Perhaps having one author, not three, would have been better. That way, we might have been able to dig deeper into the life of a professional published writer and gained some insight into how they deal with publishers, agents, and editors in a changing industry.

Mr. Parks touched on the Kindle 2 controversy from Amazon, but it was clear he didn't fully understand the issues involved. Mr. Vardamis probably summed up the whole discussion by saying that “the Kindle is probably the wave of the future...it's how things will be done since printing costs are so high.”

The one thing that really stuck out in my mind after hearing the discussion? Writing is an individual and lonely pursuit. Every writer is unique, and each has their own opinions on the process and practice of being a writer. Writing is as unique to the individual as fingerprints. When a writer puts words to paper he is fingerprinting an idea, saying a thing that no one else will say in exactly the same way.

Finding one's voice as a writer, then, should be easy. All we must do is write what we will. How we choose to write it is our business, and others be damned.

Carmel Valley, CA

Spring is coming. I love this time of year. I feel like a black bear that's emerging from a few months of hibernation. I'm ready for some warm weather, sunny days, and lots of outdoor action.

I suppose Springtime is God's way of saying, "Okay, enough's enough. Time to bring you back to life." Although Winter is leaving, I'm not sure it's actually ever arrived here. One of the perks of living on the Monterey Peninsula is the year-round climate. Winters are more about rain than anything else here. And since California is suffering the worst drought in its history, the rain is welcome.

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This afternoon I'm attending a novel-writing seminar hosted by the Carmel Public Library. Local authors will be speaking about writing novels and the publishing industry. While the economy is hurting most sectors, including the book market, books and the publishing industry or still strong.

I'm a regular reader of the blog "The Rejector", written by an assistant in a literary agency. He (or she, probably she) recently wrote:

"Despite the corporate doom-and-gloom, publishing is actually a fairly stable industry in that people always want/need books...not all publishing companies are doing badly. Yes, I don't know an editor who isn't under a little extra stress (or a lot of extra stress because half her department was cut and merged with another imprint), but most companies are in the black or near the black, and the ones doing well are being tight-lipped about it, hoping no one will figure out their secret. (Hint! It's probably cheating the authors with low advances and bottom-level royalties!)"

I really don't think the economy is as bad as the press makes it out to be. People are still spending money. Yes, there are layoffs and the job-market is flooded with people looking for work. But why? Is it the recent real estate crisis? The world-wide recession? The depressed markets? When it's all said and done, it comes down to consumer confidence. If we keep hearing how bad things are, then a self-fulfilling prophecy takes hold and confidence drops.

Yes, the economic climate is bad. But I have confidence that it will rebound and we'll move ahead. I tend to see us going through a market correction. The real estate market was living on borrowed time, and it had to come to end.

I was a real estate broker in the late 1990s and we were saying at that time that banks were nuts for lending money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. I attended a meeting in 2000 that warned us about this disaster. We were told it was coming, a banking collapse brought on my bad loans, probably by 2010. Sure enough, here we are. But as a real estate broker making lots of money at the time I joined my colleagues and ignored the gloomy forecasts. "We'll worry about the mess when it comes" was the prevailing attitude.

So I'm not surprised by the recent collapse. That's why my confidence is higher than ever that we'll be okay.

Wild Goose Cafe
Carmel Valley, CA

Okay, let me see if I can get this straight. Roy Blount, Jr., current president of the Author's Guild, is lambasting Amazon's Kindle 2 release because it converts the text of a book into computer-speak.

Says, Mr. Blount:
"The Kindle 2 is a portable, wireless, paperback-size device onto which people can download a virtual library of digitalized titles. Amazon sells these downloads, and where the books are under copyright, it pays royalties to the authors and publishers.

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there’s another thing about Kindle 2 — its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights."

He wants to stop Amazon in its tracks before, God-forbid, the entire audiobook market is destroyed by some high-tech gadget. There are certainly writers who believe he's nuts and wasting his time. Audiobooks are read by ACTORs who are actual HUMANs, and therefore add something to the bookreading experience. A computer voice just doesn't get there.

Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Wil Wheaton have posted comments about the issue, which I've just read. They seem to be on the right side of the fence on this one.

I doubt Amazon has any worries. Just another day at the office for a company that sells zillions of books and audiobooks. Any time a new tech-toy emerges there are those who go bonzo over the prospect of losing something, either real or perceived. For Mr. Blount, Jr., he needs to find another issue on which to spend time and money.