I’m jumping on the Tony-Pierce-should-be-the-L.A.-Times-blogger bandwagon. The LAT couldn’t do better than Pierce for this assignment.

My friend Larry Edward’s has a piece in the U-T slamming reality TV shows.

As a fan of Survivor, I thought I should respond.

Edward’s writes:

Yes, such shows are considered harmless, if not mindless, entertainment. Yet, they mock the memories of true survivors – survivors who didn’t have any behind-the-scenes overseers on hand to rescue them from any genuine threat to their otherwise comfy lives.

Larry admits he’s never watched Survivor, so I offer him this challenge — come down from your ivory tower, Larry and starting with the next season (it won’t work to enter mid season), watch an entire season of Survivor.

The reason I offer the challenge is that without ever having watched the show, his own challenge to the producers lacks credibility. Survivor makes no pretense to being anything other than a game show. It is all about surviving the game and winning $1 million. It is not about surviving in a Donor-pass type real life struggle. There is no comparison. To say Survivor mocks real-life tragedies, then you must level the same criticism at “Robinson Caruso,” or “The Swiss Family Robinson,” or even “Lord of the Flies,” because off those “entertainments” offered alternative realities. Each of these works of literature are a form of escapism that exploit the misadventures of real people.

I didn’t watch the first season of Survivor because I thought it beneath my dignity, but my boss convinced me to give the second season a try, and I was hooked. The show is full of strategy and intrigue, and though it is a game, offers a revealing glimpse of how real people, real personalties, make deals, lie, aim for nobility and dignity and deal with adversity in some fairly strenuous conditions. Yes, there is a certain bit of unreality when you know that CBS always has a safety net nearby, but that safety net seems to be rarely used. Only once, when a contestant was badly burned, have the producers stepped in an altered the course of the show. Other wise, cuts and bug bites and the inability to easily secure water or fire or (especially) food are left up to the tribe and the individuals to deal with as best they can. The game looks neither easy to play (I challenge Larry to give it a try himself), nor entirely put on. Yes, it’s not like being stranded for real on some snow-capped mountain, but it is not totally devoid of real survival issues either.

My wife is also now as equally hooked on Survivor for many of the same reasons. So, Larry, you see, the show really does appeal to some pretty smart people.

There’s a very rough bar in El Cajon that I’ve been to once, just to say I did it. It’s called Dumont’s.

It is notorious, to say the least.

So I’m not surprised to read that there was recently a stabbing and a shooting there. What’s another murder at Dumont’s?

There are two interesting things about this Union-Tribune story, however.

First, I found this sentence odd: “The bar is known to be frequented by members of a motorcycle gang, KFMB-TV reported.”

Why is the U-T citing another news organization on this? Is KFMB suddenly an expert on biker bars in San Diego? This is lazy reporting. Besides, the sentence could credibly be recast to read: “The bar is known as a biker hang out.” This sentence is 100 percent factual, doesn’t accuse anybody of engaging in criminal activity (which is why, I presume, the U-T felt it necessary to attribute the “gang” accusation), and it gives the savvy reader all the information he needs about what kind of place Dumont’s is.

The second element of the story worth noting is this:

El Cajon police first became aware of the violence when officers saw a speeding vehicle being driven without lights near Melody Lane and Main Street at about 12:45 a.m. yesterday, said El Cajon police Lt. Fred Morrison.

The motorist, who refused to stop, drove to a vacant building that had once been a hospital in the 1600 block of East Main Street, Morrison said. He told officers he was taking a friend to the hospital.

In the vehicle was a wounded man who was later pronounced dead by paramedics, Morrison said.

Hell, I think this should have been the lede. A man drives his friend to the hospital that is nothing but a vacant building, and has been vacant for a number of years, and that isn’t the lede? That’s human tragedy. Especially when any local reader is going to know that the former El Cajon Valley Hospital is further way (at least five miles east of Dumont’s), and slower to get to on surface streets, than Grossmont Hospital to the West, which is a straight freeway shot of about two miles. And Grossmont has also always had state of the art emergency facilities.

I can only presume this late breaking story was handed off to an intern.

Last night we drove down to the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles to see Hot Club of Cowtown.

If you’re not familiar with the music of Hot Club, think Django Reinhardt meets Bob Wills. Hot Club is a trio of amazing musicians, but guitarist Whit Smith is a particularly stellar guitarist. It’s all very western and very jazzy.

Here’s an article I did for InsideVC.com in advance of the show.

In the news business, you develop some special relationships with people that you serve in the trenches with. I don’t know how it is in other businesses, but the emotional intensity that comes from journalism encourages bonding among co-workers. I’ve made some incredible friends over the years. One of them is Vince Kern, who was my managing editor for a time at The Daily Californian in El Cajon, Calif. We lost contact for a number of years, but I recently tracked him down in Detroit.

He had never heard of a blog before I showed him mine. Now he has his own. He’s a smart, caring guy, so we can expect good things from his blog. Check it out.

I’ve got TIVO. Man, what a great device. Never again will I miss ABC’s “This Week,” the only Sunday morning gab fest I’ve ever really bothered with. Plus, now I can watch “The Sopranos,” “Survivor” and “Enterprise” pretty much on my schedule instead of the networks’ (I really don’t watch any other shows on a regular basis, preferring movies for entertainment if I’m going to let the boob-tube suck up my time — that and sports, which TIVO is also great for … pause live action, reply, skip commericials). As part of the upgrade, they moved my old DirecTV box into my office, so now I can have the news on while I blog — sound off, music on, something I call “BarVision.”

I’ve known fellow Ventura County blogger Arnold Williams for a while now, but I just noticed today that he isn’t on my blog roll. He should be, so he is now. Go check him out — many fine posts up now.

The new inmate sauntered into his cell, only to be queried by his new cellmate.

“What you in for?”

“Murder.”

“Who’d you kill?”

“Mr. Wiggles.”

This past summer, didn’t you get sick of the endless stream of stories about white, blonde teen-age girls being kidnapped? It wasn’t like these were unusual events, or anything new — it was just that the media was bored with the war on Islamofascism and looking for some new high.

Knowing the media’s addiction to pack journalism, it’s craving for ratings and scintillating stories, it’s tempting to dismiss the growing coverage of the “sniper” as just more of the same.

But this story is different. It is real news.

Yes, the coverage is sometimes ridiculous — speculating on his psych profile, debating his skill, wondering about his background, grasping at straws (such as the so-called French marksman who disappeared in the U.S. more than a year ago — but all of that doesn’t necessarily undermine the assertion that this is a major story that cries out for major attention from news reporters and the public.

Where the kidnapping, rape and murder of some young girl might be sensational and sad, it is not unusual. Tragically, it happens a couple hundred times a year in the U.S. Nothing happened this summer that warranted increased coverage of these issues other than the media decided to play them up. And while serial killers are rare, they are not unusual.

What is unusual is that this killer seems to have designed his scheme to play to the media, to terrorize and draw attention through fear. What is more scary than realizing that as you walk down the street, or pump gas, or walk outside a Wal-Mart, you could be shot by a man 150 yards away for no reason at all?

This is a crime spree that has all the marketings of being designed to attract media coverage. Most serial killers prefer to remain in the shadows and they get their thrills from seeing the terror in their victims’ faces. The sniper gets his thrill from making headlines.

So the argument might go — why give in to him? Why give him the coverage he craves?

Here’s why: Giving him what he wants only emboldens him. Not covering him won’t necessarily stop him (he killed at a faster clip when this story got little media coverage than he has since it made CNN). While it would be criminal to encourage him to fire again, it would be worse to have him killing anyway with no media coverage.

Does the coverage jeopardize the investigation. I don’t think so and I’ve seen some ex-detectives on TV say they don’t believe it does either. Not in this case. The sniper is going to strike regardless of what the media says, and leaks and misinformation only feed his growing sense of invincibility. It is that sense of invincibility that will fuel his eventual demise.

Ego is one of the worst enemies of any man. Just ask Othello or Hamlet. Ego leads more men into hell than any other human failing. The sniper is a classic narcissist. He is seeking attention through criminality. He believes he should be recognized as a media star (if not God), and he is using a gun to create his star power. His own narcissism will prove his undoing. It will lead him into making mistakes. One of those mistakes will lead to his capture.

Yes, there are more important things going on in the world — what to do about Iraq and North Korea, the November elections and the state of the economy — but when you have a killer on the lose who strikes with such anonymity and equanimity, we realize how vulnerable we all are in this modern society. The public is justifiably concerned and the media is responding to that concern. This is more than just the media creating a story — this is a story. But the media is also fulfilling a valuable role that will eventually help lead to this killer’s capture — it is feeding his ego.

The Fall Classic is sports’ greatest event.
It should be treated as the classy lady it is.
So why are Joe Buck and Tim McCarver the broadcasters on these games? Nothing against Buck. He’s pretty decent as broadcasters go, but McCarver is a stiff. His “color” is cliché-ridden, facile and too often wrong to be trusted. It’s pretty sad when the play-by-play guy (Buck), who never played the game, knows more about what’s going on on the field than the ex-player, McCarver.
The World Series doesn’t really need commentary, but good broadcasters can enhance the game.
If Bud Selig really cared about the game — and it’s doubtful that he does — he would impose a rule on whatever Network has the broadcast: Use only the best broadcasters. That means no McCarever, no Joe Morgan, no John Miller, etc. And only the likes of Vin Scully, Bob Costas, Al Michaels and for color, probably Dave Campbell and possibly Tony Gwynn (who is showing real promise as a color anaylsis). I realize the networks usually go with whomever they have under contract, and back in the days when NBC had a monopoly on the game, that was fine. It didn’t get much better than Curt Goudy, Tony Kubek and Joe Garagiola.
I’m just tied of putting up with, year after year, second rate talkers covering the world series. But these days, no network has a monopoly on the best sports broadcasters, so baseball should take control of who presents their best games (including the All-Star Game).

Yes, I think the Chargers are for real.

During my first year at Point Loma, I felt compelled one day to hit the local Crown Books and see what I might see. I don’t remember having any specific intention to buy a book, but being a book addict, I just felt like sniffing the glue in some bindings.

Before this particular trip, I had never paid much attention to the bargain racks on bookstores. Back then, I think only Crown stores offered a few shelves of remainder hardbacks at 25-percent of the original cover price. I always figured remainder books were overrun stock for a reason — people didn’t buy them because they weren’t very good. But on this trip I found a book by William Golding. Even though I had not been among the legions of high school students assigned “Lord of the Flies” by an English teacher (we read, instead, “Black Like Me.”), I knew who Golding was, even in these, his pre-Nobel days. I was surprised to find his book “Rites of Passage” on the bargain table.

Curious about the book, I bought it.

The next day, I skipped class. Why? I was too caught up reading this book. I plowed through it in about 24 hours. It was, in my estimation, among the best novels I ever read. The story was compelling — it’s about a ship-board death on a voyage from England to Australia — with beautifully drawn characters and prose that flowed like honey. How such a book wound up with a $3 price tag, I’ll never know, but I instantly became a Golding fan (though I would have preferred to see Anthony Burgess win the Nobel in 1983).

The book also made me a little more willing to buy books off the bargain table.

Today, of course, the concept of selling remainder books has expanded to where you now have whole bookstores comprised entirely of overstock. These warehouse stores pop up in strip malls from time to time and usually disappear within a few months, only to reappear again in another location. I’m guessing they are a low-margin business run by big distributors.

Recently, I read two novels I picked up in such a store, and while neither was as wonderful as anything by Golding, they both were charming in their own ways.

The first book was “Lost Highway” by Richard Currey. It is the story of Sapper Reeves, a hillbilly banjo player who took a shot and stardom and fell short, which also left him with some holes in his personal life, but the one record he made became a cult classic and redeemed his life to some extent. The writing is crisp and clean and the story moves along nicely, but I never really found myself rooting for Reeves like I should have. I think Reeves is a little underdeveloped as a character. Still, fans of bluegrass and good stories should enjoy this novel.

The second book was “Battle Creek” by Scott Lasser. I was drawn to “Battle Creek” because it’s a baseball book. It’s about an amature baseball team in Michigan that never quite wins the big game. The manager, the main protagonist, has decided this will be his final season — win or lose the national championship, he has had enough of baseball, or so he thinks. Through a couple of deaths (one of them pivotal), Gil rediscovers the game he loves. The story kept my interest from beginning to end, but at times I found the characters a little stilted, a little obvious.

Which brings me to another point — both of these writers, and another I will mention shortly, have MFAs (Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing). I come across more and more MFA writers and I find that their writing has a generic quality to it — there is a formula that is followed, and a predictability about how characters and plot or orchestrated. Unlike Golding or Burgess, for example (or Ken Layne, for that matter), among MFAs I find few unique voices.

I mention MFAs just to ask — am I alone in this observation?

And for the last MFA I’ll write about — Richard Ford. Not only is Ford an MFA, he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won for “Independence Day,” which is a sequel to “The Sports Writer.” A couple of friends recommended Ford, so I thought I would give him a try. And I thought I would start with “The Sports Writer.”

That was probably a mistake, because I doubt now that I will bother with “Independence Day.”

There is an element to Ford’s writing that is MFA-like, with its plain prose and it’s conventional plotting, but it is also very un-MFA like in its tempo. This is a very slow moving book. It is the story of one-man’s life over easter weekend. I quit reading the book at around page 200 and it was still Saturday. Maybe I’m just in too much of a mood for faster paced books (I’m reading “L.A. Confidential” now), but Ford’s long passages of interior dialog, the self-reflection of a rather insipid, uninspiring character just became too much too take. I also found some of the character’s actions improbable — such as his being a little too friendly with a bi-sexual man who obviously has the hots for him, even to the point of not being surprised when this man is in his house when he returns from Detroit a day early. That’s about where I put the book down.

So, that brings you up to date on my recent fiction reading.

As for writing, I’m going through the third draft of my story now, then I’ll probably have a couple of more people read it before “publishing” it here.

Here’s another example of how the lack of affordable housing in Ventura County is impacting my life.

On Saturday I took the train to San Diego. I planned to depart at 7 a.m.

On Friday, I went to the gym after work, as I usually do, with every intention of stopping off at the Von’s pharmacy before 9 p.m. to pick up my heart medicine. Per usual, I had waited until I’d taken my last pill before ordering a refill.

When I arrived at Von’s, the pharmacy was closed. “New Fall Hours” the sign read. Closed at 7 p.m.

My medication is not something to trifle with, according to what my doctor’s told me. Skipping dosages, especially more than one, can be fatal. So I was a tad upset to find out I couldn’t get a refill right when I expected it. It would have been OK if I could have gotten into Von’s after nine o’clock the next morning, but I planned to be on a train by 9 a.m.

Fortunately, the pharmacist at another chain was willing to give me a couple of pills to hold me over. That apparently isn’t legal, but it is the ethical thing to do and I know happens all the time in similar circumstances.

Today, I finally got a chance to speak with the pharmacist at Von’s and he apologized, but said the only reason they have started closing early is he hasn’t been able to find anybody to fill the evening shift. No pharmacist wants to move to Ventura County and contend with local housing prices.

Why are housing prices so high in Ventura. Well, first, it is a great place to live. And with current interest rates, demand for housing is strong. But the biggest thing driving housing prices up is a cadre of slow-growth laws and slow-growth politicians and activists who don’t want to see any housing built in this county. There is plenty of good land to build on, but there are too many laws, regulations and fees that prevent builders from doing what they need to do.

Ventura’s rental vacancy rate is 1.7 percent. It is estimated that you need to earn at least $21 per hour to afford a decent apartment in Ventura County. That’s a big reason many Oxnard-area apartments have two, three and four families sharing small units.

As for buying a house in Ventura County — forget it. You need at least $400,000.

In Ventura County we have something called SOAR. I didn’t vote for it. It’s a particularly draconian anti-growth measure. It is the bane of every working family’s existance in Ventura County. If you want to know why there is a 1.7 percent vacancy rate in Ventura, look no further than SOAR. People like County Supervisor Steve Bennett will tell you that housing is all about supply and demand, and that to blame high prices entirely on SOAR is unfair. There is a lot of demand because of low interest rates. That may be true, but the people of Ventura can’t do anything about low interest rates (the demand side), but we can do something about the supply side. That is entirely within our power. Increase the supply and you drive down prices. It’s simple economics. That’s why I favor the repeal of SOAR and pray that some day that glorious event will come to pass.

In the meantime, I’m supporting Measure A this November. Measure A will allow a group of land owners to develop the hillsides behind the city of Ventura. The planning measure would protect the ridge lines, including the important and beautiful Two Trees area. But it allows development. And that’s the key point. The measure probably won’t pass because most voters are already home owners and it’s in their best interest to prevent development (drives up housing prices). People tell me I shouldn’t support it because more development means more traffic. When compared to high housing prices, I don’t care about the traffic. They tell me the new housing allowed under the measure won’t bring down housing prices because they will be rich people’s homes and there won’t be enough of them. And this is true. But a vote for Measure A is still a big “screw you” message to the SOAR fanatics. I will vote for anything that chips away at SOAR.

There are vast tracks of prime real estate in the city of Ventura that are undeveloped. Under SOAR, this land will never be developed. This is criminal. It is immoral. It prevents hard working people from getting good housing at a fair price. It means that my pharmacy can’t stay open until 9 p.m. because no right-minded pharmacist will move into a city he can’t afford to live in. That just isn’t right. It’s time to dump SOAR back into the garbage heap it came from.

Alan Trammell’s a nice guy who knows baseball and probably did well teaching young Padres the fundamentals of the games.
But when Davy Lopes was the Padres first place coach, the team seemed to play with more fire. Of course, we had Rickey Henderson then, and for a time the likes of Ken Caminiti and Steve Finley overlapped with Lopes’ tenure. But I always felt that Lopes brought a fire to the coaching staff that Bruce Bochy and Tim Flannery lacked.
So to me, it’s good news that Trammell is leaving (to become manager of the Tigers) and Flannery has been fired (though I loved Flannery as a player and was once convinced he was a good coach, I think his heart hasn’t been in it recently), and Lopes is probably returning to the Padres.

Newspaper industry magazine Presstime carries a profile of the Santa Barbara News-Press this month (story not online, as far as I can see).

Key graph from my perspective:

Most content on www.newspress.com is available on a pay-per-view basis … Fleet (the publisher) makes no apologies: “Local news is our franchise;” he sees no logic in giving it away. … This policy, explains Alcorn (CFO), has made “our Web product among the first in the newspaper industry to be profitable.”

It’s a minor trend for newspapers to go to paid subscriptions, and contrary to the myth, enough readers will pay for content to make such a move profitable. But paid subscriptions are not the only way for a newspaper to make money online, and, in the long run, is probably curtailing potentially larger profits available to a free-content site.

It is also a myth that online news sites are not making money. Many, many sites are making money. In fact, it has become so easy to make money online for a newspaper site, that the only news sites not making money are only doing so because of poor management, not because putting local news online is a bad business model. There is no reason to resort to paid subscriptions to make money.

So my problem with the statements from the News-Press are two fold. First, contrary to Mr. Fleet’s statement, there is no logic in charging for content; and second, it is a bit of an overstatement for the News-Press to crow about being among the first to be profitable. Being profitable is old news late.

While it is possible to turn a profit charging for access, you greatly restrict the size of your audience, and there are bigger profits to be made from money-making applications that rely on aggregated eyeballs. There are numerous ways to repackage and upsell classified ads and featured ads, there are online auctions, and many local newspapers have found great success in banner advertising and building custom Web sites. When you restrict your audience size through paid subscriptions, you take all of those options off the table.

So, in short, I don’t agree with the way the SB newspaper is running their online operations.

UPDATE: Very smart media analyst Vin Crosby also finds fault with the growing trend
toward paid subscriptions. It’s a quick fix that only digs publishers in a
deeper hole.

This season was going to be different. This season, we were going to win at least half our games.
This is my second year as coach of the Ventura County Star’s softball team. Last year, we went 1-11, which made me the second winningest coach in the team’s history. Going into this season we were 5-47 (or something like that) over five seasons. There’s no telling how many of those 47 loses were by 15 runs or more, which is the demarcation of “mercy” after five innings.
Dave Montero, who coached the team in the last fall league, is out this season with a broken collar bone. He broke early in the summer league while diving for a ball. I had positioned him in right field, not a position he has played much and now vows never to play again. Injured, and inspired by our ineptness, Montero decided to film a documentary about our team — the worst softball team in the world. Since he couldn’t play, why not film?
I asked him before the season started, “What if we’re a better team?”
“I’m not worried about that,” he said with a wry grin.
I made some adjustments from the summer league to the fall league. The main thing was, we weren’t going to play every guy who showed up — only a 10-man line up every game so our best hitters could get more at bats every game. We recruited a new shortstop — Jeremy — who is a natural athlete, and I anchored some key guys in regular positions.
Coming into the season, I felt good about our chances.
Our team name this season is “The Fred Mertz Experience.” We change team names every season, picking the odd names of obscure rock bands. We’ve been the “Swinging Udders” and the “Rats of Unusual Size”. We are, after all, a team made up primarily of journalists, so words are important to us. Our esthetic sense would never let us be the “Outlawz” or the “Beer Bellies.” We want a team name that no other team in its right mind would pick.
In our first game, “The Fred Mertz Experience” took on a team that shall remain nameless, to protect the innocent. And for the first time in team history, we mercied the other guys.
Dave Montero was seriously bummed. How can you do a documentary about the worst softball team ever and show that team winning its first game of the season?
But Montero did not give up hope.
He showed up to the second game with camera in hand. This time, our foes was Possas.
We played them well. We played them tight. We hit, we caught the ball, we made good throws. We were never more than four runs down and at one point, we held a one-run lead. But walks killed us. We walked 10 hitters and lost 16-13.
Such a tight game convinced Dave that we were no longer the worst team in history. We were playing well, so he stopped showing up.
Too bad. In our third game, we failed to catch the ball, our throws were weak and off line and our hitting was abysmal. I won’t even go into our base running. In other words, we reverted to form. We were mercied by VACCO by more than 20 runs.
Tonight, we returned to the field of battle to take on Possas again. We felt good about our chances — cut down on the walks, we thought, and we win. We had the same pitcher going, but he’s proven before he can throw strikes, so I wasn’t too worried. And tonight, he threw strikes and only walked two batters. Unfortunately, tonight Possas decided to hit the ball. Really smack it. Add to that some horrible fielding blunders and anemic bats and you wind up with a lopsided score of 18-5.
We were supposed to be better this season. We’ve got eight more games to go. Let’s hope we get good again real soon. Next week, we go against the first place team (VACCO) again. We’ve just got to play better.

Gene Autry is in Cowboy Heaven singing a happy song.
The California Angels did the improbable. They beat the New York Yankees in four games to advance to the ACLS.
Why? I say it’s the uniforms, but more important is the gritty determination of the Angel players. They’re the kind of team you’ve got to admire. They aren’t intimidated by anybody. They play hard. They hussle. They do the little things that win games, such as managing the strike zone and advancing runners. The Angels hit nearly .380 in this series, which is a new baseball post season record. Amazing.
It was in the Angels favor that the Yankees probably approached the series with a little too much arrogance. It also helps that the Yankees pitching staff is aging rapidly. In fact, if the Yankees have a weakness going into 2003 and beyond, it is their starting pitching. They don’t seem to be developing any young arms and with guys like Jeter and Giambi and Williams sucking up a huge portion of the payroll, along with a bigger luxury tax in coming years, it’s not going to be easy for the Yankees to fix their pitching. The idea of an ongoing Yankee dominance is a lot less believable than it was even just yesterday. Sure, the Yankees are always going to be competitive, but at least for the next four years (the length of the current collective bargaining agreement), they may find it harder to reach the post season.
Congratulations to ultimate Angels fan Matt Welch. I happy for all Angels fans really. I know what it’s like to wait a long time for your team to win a big post season series. I may very well even root for the Angels over the A’s if the A’s make it to the ACLS. We’ll see where I’m at emotionally on the question at the time of the first pitch of that possible series. If it’s the Twins and the Angels, then there’s no doubt I’ll be 100 percent behind the Angels.
As for the NLCS, my money is on a series between the Giants and the Cardinals, with the Giants taking the NCLS in 5. Of course, part of that is just kind of disliking the Braves. I really don’t want to see the Braves advance. They don’t deserve it. They’ve blown too many previous chances.

Hurray! The Diamondbacks lost. Now we just need the Giants to knock off the Braves and all the evil teams of post seasons past will be gone.

Here’s an interesting fiction site. It’s called FictionLine. It’s a fairly democratic way to publish short stories. Each hopeful writer submits a story and pays a $2.36 fee. After 500 stories have been submitted, one story is selected as the “winner” and is published on the Web site. The winner is paid $1,000, which isn’t a bad pay day for a short story when many literary journals may nothing and few writers who are not established can get published in the better paying markets. Now, the normal rule of thumb is writers should never pay reading fees, but do the math: $2.36 x 500 = $1,180. Subtract from that the credit card processing fees and you have your $1,000 prize. The site is entirely non-profit.

I’ve finished “The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett.

It’s a fast-moving, compelling, well-plotted book. The story pulls you from chapter to chapter and the twist and turns hold your interest. As I have read from various critics, Hammett does do a better job of plotting than Raymond Chandler (at least based on what I’ve read so far of the two authors), but I still prefer Chandler’s prose style. He is more poetic, more descriptive — his scenes come alive in a way Hammett never quite achieves. Neither writer really develops three-dimensional characters, but Chandler’s are less cardboard than Hammett’s, I think.

As for my own writing, I’m more than half-way through the second draft of my current story. Though, with a computer it seems silly to refer to anything as a second or third draft. It’s not like the old typer days when you would retype every word of every draft. Now it’s read and make changes as you go.

So far, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve written. I’ll get through this “second draft” and then give it a third read through and then have my wife play fiction editor.