Category Archives: work

The End

I started this blog in April 2007, on Blogger, titled “A Writer Reads.” Over the last five years, among a lot of extraneous posts, I’ve written some 50K words about several hundred books, mainly fiction, approaching each as a writer—what is the book about? Why is it interesting, craft-wise? Where does it fit in the literary tradition?

But now the blog’s purpose has come to an end, both this blog for me as a writer and the blog in general as a cultural technology. I appreciate the readers who have stopped by over the years, and invite anyone who likes to keep in touch with me via email: jonsealy [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Blogging as social media

Things happen fast online. In 2007, Web 2.0 was a new phenomenon. Blogs were on the rise at an exponential rate. Social media existed (Facebook’s NewsFeed was launched in 2006), but connecting online was still novel. Blogs served a kind of social media function.

Jumping on the bandwagon, a number of graduate school friends and I created our blogs and posted our thoughts and commented on each other’s pages. It was a network, and we were linked by the  “blogroll.”

Since then, several things have happened. Twitter (launched in 2006) became mainstream; Facebook granted more control over your wall so that your Facebook page could serve the same function as blogs had in 2007; and a number of other social media sites emerged, including Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Each of these forums offers a better way to connect, socially, than a blogroll or an RSS feed.

Perhaps most importantly, mainstream media got on board the bandwagon. Sites such as Forbes and The Atlantic have great blog content, to say nothing of all-online forums like The Millions and The Rumpus. Online content has exploded to the point where we need filters. The role of mainstream media is to filter out us masses. Individual blogs, now, are like sparks firing in a wide and lonesome universe.

‘A Writer Reads’

Back on Blogger, I titled this blog “A Writer Reads.” I was in graduate school, in my apprenticeship years, and all the best writers I talked to said the same thing, that the secret to being a good writer was to read a lot and write a lot. In those years, I’d set a regimen to read 100 pages and write 1,000 words each day, at least five days a week.

Having a blog to report to was a way to keep me on task, and over the years I’ve thought of it as being my version of Henry James’s Notebooks. Now I’ve got a library of books in my living room, and since starting this blog, I’ve completed three novels, one novella, and a book’s worth of short stories. Some of the stories have been published, and I’m shopping around one of the novels.

In short, reading and writing have become habit for me, and I think I’ve graduated from my apprenticeship years, at least as much as any writer ever does. If you follow blogs regularly, you know that unless the focus is current events, blog-writers eventually run out of content. I could keep writing about books I’m reading, but it would be more of the same, and I feel my time is better spent elsewhere.

Contact

One reason I moved from Blogger to this website is because an editor once left me a comment saying she liked one of my stories she’d read elsewhere. I stumbled on that comment by chance many months later and sent her a story and an apology for not responding sooner.

Her magazine took my story, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any other opportunities. I’m building my freelance business now, and I’m in still in what I’m calling the “look at me” phase. I’m marketing myself and trying to land clients. Right now I have some weeks of 75% work and 25% marketing, and other weeks of 25% work and 75% marketing. I suspect I’ll eventually be doing mostly work and occasional marketing.

So too as a fiction writer. I’m sending “look at me” letters to agents, trying to sell a book, but if all goes according to plan I’ll eventually be on the bookshelves rather than in my cyber-sandbox. But until then, my plan is to create a static home page for this site and archive the blog for the search engines until I have a book coming out.

Final comments

Check out this article in The Atlantic about Facebook making us lonely. The writer starts with an anecdote about a B movie star who died and wasn’t found for nearly a year. Her network had grown wide and shallow.

On Facebook, we accumulate friends from all the nooks and crannies of our lives, but with several hundred connections, I believe it’s impossible to sustain anything meaningful. My recent posts there mainly have been links to interesting articles elsewhere, and when I log in I mostly do so to find some interesting meme, such as Texts From Hillary. A wide network, shallow connections.

The internet is full of such trends, sparks that flare briefly and fade just as fast—a Tweet, an infograph, a blog post. Trying to create a more sustained fire might be anachronistic, but in response, I’d quote the epilogue to Blood Meridian, which seems to be about a Gnostic hero carrying the fire in the face of an indifferent world:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

My wife says I’m a pessimist about humanity’s future, though I might argue it’s an act of radical optimism to attempt to make lasting art in today’s culture. With that thought, I’m off to the desert to try to make fire.

Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

I think if I had read this book in college before John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, I would probably be trying to work my way up in some ad agency right now. Sullivan has written a humorous and instructive look at the life of an advertising copywriter (along with some helpful how-to advice). Reading it, I thought back to the ninth grade physical science class, where a group of us would sit in the back of the class, draw pictures of tanks, and write Beavis and Butthead scripts (I’m not kidding; if I still had that script, my first piece of real writing, I would be writing for Adult Swim right now). Sullivan makes life as an ad agency copywriter sound like the grown-up extension of that science class. Put your feet up, talk about movies, come up with some cool idea.

Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

What it is:

Crawford is a think-tank philosopher turned motorcycle mechanic (or a motorcycle mechanic who worked briefly in a think tank), and Shop Class as Soulcraft is an exploration of what it means to work a trade in today’s knowledge economy.  His thesis is that working with your hands to produce something fosters a sense of humility (because you’re in service of something outside the self), and it also creates a sense of responsibility. Crawford offers numerous personal examples from his own work history to explore what it means to be human, and what the risks are of abandoning our humanity to become cogs in a machine, disconnected from the product of our labors (cubicle life).  This book is really an answer to the cognitive scientist that says we are machines.  Crawford gives weight to experience – the way a chess master understands a chessboard, or the way a firefighter knows when to get out of a burning building, or the way a mechanic knows that certain colors on your spark plugs mean different things about your engine: these are things a computer cannot compute.

Why it’s interesting:

I can’t do this book justice here.  He elucidates things I’ve been thinking about since I was 17, and takes discussions I’ve had with friends over the years and complements those kinds of ideas with everyone from Anaxagoras to Heideggar.  Two things I find most interesting here: (1) Crawford essentially takes Marx’s argument that the proletariat have been stripped of their humanity, and he applies it to white-collar, middle-management cubicle culture.  We in cubicles are the new proletariat, cogs stripped of our humanity (because we have no agency, we have no tangible connection to our labors). (2) Crawford’s book is not an aesthetic treatise by any means, but you could apply his thinking to creative writing – this idea that through our hands we produce something, that it takes years of experience to get good at it and that you have to think of yourself as in service rather than in control.

I really want to just say to you: Stop what you’re doing and go read this book.  It’s probably the best book I’ve ever read concerning work.  If you’re strapped for time, you can read this essay.  I’ll leave you with an example from Crawford.  He notes that a new high-end Mercedes doesn’t have a dipstick.  On the one hand, you are alleviated from the responsibility of changing your oil; you just take your car in when the light comes on.  But on the other hand, you are stripped of agency, of self-reliance.  You don’t have a choice; when the light comes on, you have to take your car in.  Crawford says that’s bad.  (He notes that the light used to be called an “idiot light,” but now that would be inappropriate marketing.)  What’s worse, he says, is the mechanic who then reads the meter and does what the machine tells him: If the number is below this amount, change the part.  (The manual doesn’t tell you why, or what’s actually wrong.)  The mechanic is stripped of agency, and he’s stripped of experience.  An idiot could read a meter and replace the expensive part, whereas it takes a certain intelligence (derived from experience) to actually fix the car.  For Crawford, this shift in our working world is bad, and I’d agree.  I’m sure that’s one reason Circuit City went out of business.  They bankrupted their business model, fired people who knew how to sell, and hired people like me that didn’t know anything and who, because we didn’t have any sense of agency, didn’t care what happened to the company.

Further Reading:

To reconsider Crawford’s argument in light of aesthetics, I recommend Bret Lott’s Before We Get Started.  I haven’t read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  The reviews of Crawford that I’ve read say that is a very different book.  But, if you just want to read about motorcycles, there you go.  What else would pair well here?

Sealy Communications

Until the MacArthur Foundation or the Pulitzer committee gives me a call, my primary occupation is as a copywriter in the Prepress Design Services department at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. There, my tasks include proofreading advertisements, writing promotional features, and copy editing specialty sections.

Occasionally, I will do noncompetitive freelance work — writing brochures or proposals, editing Web copy, essentially anything where the hand of a wordsmith would prove useful. For an interesting essay on what “noncompetitive” means, check out what Malcolm Gladwell has to say. In my case, it would be inappropriate for me to accept work from a current or potential advertiser of The Times-Dispatch.

For more information about my editing services, feel free to contact me at jonsealy [at] yahoo [dot] com.

New Job


I’m the proud new copywriter in the advertising department for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Good pay, great hours, plenty of time for fiction. Maybe not so much time for blogging over the coming weeks. I’m learning the ropes now, and then I’m off for Key West next week, so look for January posts to be scarce. In the meantime, check out Donald Harington, who came up with what might be the best novel title ever (THE CHOIRING OF THE TREES) and Daniel Woodrell, whose novel WINTER’S BONE is fantastic.

Analog to Digital

Because of the switchover in February, I’m selling a lot of converter boxes at Circuit City, and it tends to be elderly folks who are buying them. I’m starting to seek out the older customers on the job; I think I bond better with them. Partly I think it’s that they are retired and have more time in their day to spend in the store. Or maybe it’s that they have more questions about electronics. Whatever the reason, since they don’t duck their heads and run when I ask if they need help with anything, I find I’m more charming when I’m around them. Don’t tell Circuit City, but I also think I’m about on their level when it comes to electronics. I’ve learned a lot in three weeks, but someone asks me my opinion on whether the Turion or Core Duo processor is better, they might as well ask me if I prefer brie or gouda (I hate cheese, always have). But someone from the Great Generation comes in, I know what to talk about–GM’s trouble, American manufacturing, gas prices. The other day, a spry old lady wrote a check, and I saw on her license that she was born in June of 1920. That was neat.

So I was thrown today when an old guy came in and started asking about an HDTV he’d bought last week and couldn’t get set up right. The cable company needed to put a box in his living room, but he didn’t want it. That’s easy enough to explain (you need it), but he’d read up way more than I ever had. He said, “I’ve read the lit-tre-ture on this thing. Now it’s got this QAM tuner here, so why do I need a box?” I went to Wikipedia before finally giving up and calling for someone else to help me out. While we were waiting, he started grumbling about the FCC, said he read up on their analog-to-digital conversion, said, “That thing was 26 pages. I know because I printed it. I’m an engineer, so I’m used to technical stuff, but damn.” In all its glory, I think this is what he was talking about.

Golf cart adventure


Someone parked a golf cart on the little strip of grass in front of the theater and came to a movie. We didn’t know who it was, but we didn’t like the golf cart in the way, so my good friend Michael and I went out there, took the emergency brake off, and pushed it to the far corner of the theater. The douchebag came out of the movie and said, “Who took my golf cart?!”

“We moved it.”

“Why’d you move it without asking me?”

“We didn’t know who owned it. You can’t park in the grass.”

The guy sputtered, then said, “You can’t touch other people’s stuff! Would you have touched it if it was someone’s car?”

“Actually, we would have had it towed.”

The guy sputtered again, then left. He had to walk across the lot in the rain to get to his cart. I feel accomplished.