I’m probably the last guy to ask for advice. I don’t see the glass as half empty or half full. I see it as breakable.

Basic Observation #1: Because of a huge cultural shift and the misguided belief that if education was good, over-education is better, we are now awash in an abundance of poets, playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, painters, et al. Each one has the same shot at self-sufficiency at his or her craft as the ghetto kid playing pick up basketball does of reaching the NBA.

I have always pursued artistic ventures existentially, probably in lieu of a god. I think religion is mass manipulation and personal delusion. But you’ve got to have something to keep from going crazy, so I am an artist. But I do not categorized myself. I am not a writer or a painter. I create product. The last few years my product has been books.

While I am baffled by writers who are writers first and storytellers second, I can understand the need to give yourself a personal identity that seems more important than “an insignificant spec on a pebble for the blink of an eye”.

Basic Observation #2: The next Big Thing will be unrealized until it is too late to get into it.

In publishing, I think the tipping point will be when there is one more writer than there are readers.

The book I am working on might actually be good, but the writing is inspired more by the personal need to bring it to fruition than fantasies about commercial success. I’m not sure I will even bother sending out query letters this time.

If I were younger, I think I would probably spend my computer time editing video. I think video is a medium that has the most outlets and markets. Whatever the next Big Thing is, it will probably involve images and sound. But I’m not a turncoat to old media. I’ve read Homer in Greek.

On the other hand, in a generally sucky world, writing is keeping me sane and happy.

And we end the “Fargo” analogy there.

For books, the stakes of digital distribution are about to change. Authors have been excited by the prospect of e-books — they can distribute their works quickly, set prices very low, and reach broad audiences with measurable results.

But all these lovely notions of the digital age are about to be shifted dramatically by a shovel upside the head.

Or shall I say, an iPad upside the head.

Reading is a different kind of activity. It benefits from concentration and isolation. The Kindle is a single-use device that fits with how people read novels and literary fiction.

But the Kindle is about to meet the iPad, and it will lose.

The emergence of the iPad means some victories for authors — competition has forced Amazon and others to make pricing concessions, and a sensible model of working with authors is taking over — but the iPad will also force authors to compete with music, the Web, movies, games, email, and applications on the same device.

The question is — Does your book compete?

Does your book cast enough of a spell to ward off the temptations of the latest Tarantino extravaganza? Can it tantalize readers away from a YouTube clip of LOL cats? Will it withstand the onslaught of email reminders chiming through the reading experience? Will it defeat the charms of that “Guilty Pleasures” playlist sitting oh so close to the books app? Can it even beat a worthy Solitaire application’s simple vices?

Your novel will have to compete differently in the coming competitive reading era.

The continuing consolidation of computing functions into devices like the iPhone and iPad means that books could lose their special place in our readers’ lives. No longer separated by covers, no longer protected by the steps of isolation that accompany a retreat into reading, the book will be just a click away.

And so will everything else.

So, be prepared to think differently about your e-books. Over the next few months and years, your books will no longer be sanctuaries unto themselves, protected from the distractions of modern life.

They will be check-by-jowl with games, movies, browsers, applications, and music.

How will they do?

Write like you’ve never written before. It’s the only chance we have!

It’s a huge challenge for a short story writer to move into being a novelist. My first novel, “The Brightest Moon of the Century,” started as a short story collection, but shortly after starting it, I realized how to turn it into a novel with a through-line. I started seeing it as a whole rather than a bunch of separate stories. Thanks to passion, obsession, and luck, it worked.

With Lorrie Moore’s new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” I see a lot of the reviews on Amazon are feeling that Moore isn’t as tight in her novel as she is in her short fiction. The featured review by Robert Holland says the plot is tenuous and, “There were long (they seemed long anyway) stretches in the novel where I wanted to say ‘OK, I get the point! These people are callow and self-absorbed.’”

I’ve just started Moore’s novel, so I can’t comment on it yet. However, Moore is one of my absolute favorite authors. Some of her sentences, with their sardonic observations, have me laugh out loud, highlighting away. Another Amazon reader in defending Moore’s novel says, “This narrator, eccentric 20-year-old Tassie, is not a person who shares her emotions. She deals with things by trying to maintain an emotional distance with humor.”

My point in bringing up Moore’s novel is that it’s a huge challenge to write a novel, and it’s an extra challenge for people who mostly write short stories. Thus, one of my own obsessions with my novel-in-progress is that the story line be tight. I don’t see novels as a long short story but, rather, a more complex story that is compact, even if it’s hundreds of pages long.

My friend Dana Crowell wrote me recently on this subject without my mentioning it. She said, “I have been so disappointed by ‘established writers’ who receive excellent reviews yet their novels lack story.” She goes on to criticize Moore’s novel as well as Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Lacuna. Crowell said, “A novel is story with narrative drive, tension, and structure where arc is crucial to success. One cannot just go on a comic rant for pages on end. Kingsolver has reached a point where I fear she has nothing to say. Thus, she falls back on history and non-fiction to carry her books which now read like didactic history lessons without art or purpose. Her book is a potpourri of styles, a failed epistolary novel, that lacks voice, characterization, structure, and more.”

I happen to be writing a mystery. I’m doing so because a) I ran out of personal experiences to exploit and b) I’m fascinated that the form requires a tight structure. I figure what I learn in writing a mystery will help me in all my future novels, no matter the genre. I love the challenge, too.

Some of America’s greatest writers, such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and more modern writers such as Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, T.C Boyle, and others can write tight short fiction as well as stunning novels. I want to do both, too. I’m not giving up short fiction.

The good news for a manly man like me is that the book has enough value-added depth to make it eminently readable. In fact, within the first hundred pages, the book was promoted from an “on the bus” read to an “at home” read.

While Stay includes the original wrecking crew from The Proviso, the baton has been passed to a new generation. The Karate chopping, high-financing, power-brokering sextet of Book One are much more like Olympians this time around, looking down on the mere mortals slugging it out on the Trojan plane with the occasional god-like poke or wink to give assistance to favored combatants. The central characters are two spiritual orphans, adopted by the ubiquitous Knox Hilliard who despite his fire-breathing reputation, acts much more like a mentor or Dutch Uncle.

This is a perfect Book Two of a series. The pyrotechnics of the first book have been replaced with a more intimate conflict. While the personalities are still heroic, they are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs, because they each are slugging it out harder with their own selves than any outside enemy.

The domestic shift of this book is made clear when the patron saint of Book One, Ayn Rand, is replaced with Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is an elegant move. The internal personal debates and struggles become more powerful than the battles waging around them. Yet ultimately, despite the noise, the political, media and familial wars, this book is about healing.

The even better news is that seven pages out, I did not know how it would end and could not wait to find out.

Neither an English major nor a reader of Joyce Carol Oates and not having spent a day at a writers’ workshop in Iowa, would someone please explain to me why the modest adverb is anathema to the educated class.

I ask this humbly.

NP: How does self-publishing differ from traditional publishing?

BK: At its most elemental level there’s no difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing: Either way, the writer’s job is the same: Write a book. Beyond this essential there’s a whole heap of difference – the biggest being time. How much time does it take to get your work published? In traditional publishing, excluding the rare exception, the answer is, years, decades, even lifetimes. (Henry Miller’s first novel didn’t get published until he was 44 years old; Raymond Chandler’s first short story didn’t get published until he was 45 years old; Emily Dickinson’s poems didn’t get published until after her death.) In self-publishing, the answer is that your book can be published within months. When you move beyond the printed page into ebooks and digital, you can be published in minutes. Time is a tremendous factor in a writer’s decision about which route to take, traditional or alternative. I personally found it to be a complex and difficult decision.

NP: How do you respond to the following statement? “Self-publishing is not a serious way to get one’s work into print now and never will be.”

BK: Well, it’s just a silly statement. The fact is that writers are self-publishing, and they are getting their books reviewed, distributed, and into the hands of readers. I belong to a collective of eight very serious writers, called Backword Books. Our work has been reviewed by highly-respected literary critics and reviewers, and we have each achieved recognition in our varying genres. So, to put it another way: There’s nothing “unserious” about self-publishing.

NP: Has the golden age of self-publishing already passed or is it yet to come?

BK: The golden age of self-publishing has yet to come. It’s still in its infancy. It has rattled, and radically altered traditional book publishing, and it will continue to do so. It’s hard to predict what the book publishing industry will look like once the dust settles. It’s also hard to predict when that might happen. Until then, self-publishing continues an upward trajectory. It has a cache of advantages over traditional publishing; technological innovation and infinite opportunity; unbridled creativity; and the excitement and energy of serious and committed individuals who have a love of books – be they reader, reviewer, marketer, or publisher. When you add to that mix the willingness of professional writers to take control of their own destinies, well, it’s not hard to understand why self-publishing has so successfully breathed new life into an industry that had become both dull and stagnant.

NP: What about the challenges posed to the self-published writer by having to promote and edit his or her own book?

BK: It’s a tremendous challenge, no question. In order to be successful, the self-published writer will have to wear many different hats – some which may not fit so well. The writer has to become editor, proofreader, copywriter, blogger, marketer, maybe even distributor. It’s a fulltime job. On the other hand, the road to traditional publishing poses challenges no less daunting. The writer has to become, primarily, a salesperson. The writer has to shop the work around in hopes of finding an agent – which, even if one is secured, is no assurance that the work will be published. The writer has to become, secondarily, a professional “waiter” – waiting for a response to an inquiry, waiting for acceptance or rejection, waiting for an agent to return a phone call. Given all of this, it’s reasonable that a writer would choose to take on the challenges of self-publishing because the end result is not dependent on the judgments of agents and editors and publishers. The end result is guaranteed: The writer will be published.

NP: Why is it that a self-published author has yet to emerge into national recognition as a self-published author? (As opposed to being given a mainstream publishing contract after a self-published book attracts attention.)

BK: That’s an easy question: Writers want to write. They don’t want to edit, proofread, market, distribute. So, if a mainstream publisher came along and said, “You write, we’ll do the rest,” well, it would be an opportunity that most writers would find very hard to pass up.

NP: Has the experience of self-publishing changed the way you write? (If you have self-published.)

BK: No.

Bonnie Kozek’s highly-acclaimed noir thriller, Threshold, is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Powell’s Books and other online sites.  Her second thriller, Just Before the Dawn, will be published in 2010.  Website: www.bonniekozek.com

When I was dying in a Greek Lyric Poetry class, I liked and maybe understood a quatrain by Sappho, but then those four lines became embroiled in an academic fight and they might not be by Sappho after all. Despite that disappointment,  I liked them any way.

Surprisingly, being a failed student and not even understanding what I was reading or why, once Aphrodite bounced me on my head a few years ago, I kind of got the poetry bug.

My initial love poems were a little strange. One of the early ones, My Love is like a Carcinoma ran into difficulties with a forced rhyme. Like metastasize is so easy to rhyme with.

I had an inspiration recently, but it’s not auto-bio, just a bug bite. Yet I think it might be a poem after all.

Complication

Wedded-bliss

Distressed

Mistress

Undressed

Witnessed

Confessed

Redress

Big mess.

A very smart computer programmer tries to write the formula for love, in my first book, Do the Math: a novel of the inevitable. He’s working on an ancient piece of IBM iron in the basement of a freezing college campus building. Yet despite the many yards of green bar paper that the machine spews out, he never quite succeeds in codifying the romance novel, which is so clearly formulaic.

While I was working on the book, I got curious and wrote a bit of the program for fun. Here it is:

case of

      :($currentPageNumber=46)
              if ($thinker=”male”)
                    vtThought:=”Rude girl!”
              else ($thinker=”female”)
                    vtThought:=”Such arrogance!”
              end if

      :($currentPageNumber=92)
              if ($thinker=”male”)
                    vtThought:=”But is there a fire burning inside the glacier?”
              else ($thinker=”female”)
                    vtThought:=”A generous act — from HIM?”
              end if

     :($currentPageNumber=138)
              if ($thinker=”male”)
                    vtThought:=”She makes me so mad!!!”
              else ($thinker=”female”)
                    vtThought:=”He makes me so mad!!!”
              end if

    :($currentPageNumber=182)
              if ($thinker=”male”)
                    vtThought:=”So soft.”
              else ($thinker=”female”)
                    vtThought:=”So firm.”
              end if

end case

First, Wendy Runyon, the Literary Feline at Musings of a Bookish Kitty, selected the novel as one of ten best of 2009. In her review, she says that, “Christopher Meeks is well on his way to becoming one of my favorite authors…. What I got most out of this wonderful novel is a sense of hope. Life is full of bumps in the road, and those bumps make us stronger.” You can see her full list by clicking here

Second, Sam Sattler at the website Book Chase also placed The Brightest Moon of the Century in his top ten books, which also includes books by Pete Dexter and Jon Krakauer. Sattler says, “Meeks’s characters, and his slightly off-centered view of life, continue to remind me of John Irving’s early work, definitely a good thing.” You can read more by clicking here.

Third, The Brightest Moon of the Century won a Noble (not Nobel) Award in MyShelf.com’s seventh annual end-of-the-year awards, created by Carolyn Howard-Johnson in her “Back to Literature” column. In listing the award, Howard-Johnson says, “If the world is just, Christopher Meeks is destined to be widely read.” To read more about the Noble Awards, click here. 

Over two dozen critics gave positive reviews for the novel in 2009. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote, “Meeks has managed to put together a thoughtful, fresh-feeling portrait of how we become who we are.”

Grady Harp, a top-ten reviewer at Amazon.com, says the novel “reaches out to the reader in a way that offers an honest invitation to relive our own growing years… Along the way in Edward’s journey, the author takes time to pause and offer poignant philosophy.”

“This is a quiet yet powerful piece of literature,” says Heather Figearo in the website Raging Bibliomania. “[Edward’s] joy becomes your own, and his calamities compel you. This is a tremendous feat for an author.”

BookGeeks in England says, “Unpretentious and deeply human, the normalcy and everyman nature of the novel give it its power.”