Google is a fine tool. I use it frequently, and it provides helpful answers to questions such as “What was the name of the actor who played H.R. Pufnstuf?” (Roberto Gamonet, pictured out of costume at right) and “What was the #1 song of 1968, the year I was born?” (“Hey Jude”). Just today I used it to find out whether or not there was a DVD release of the short-lived television show Glory Days. (There is, but sadly not in the U.S.)

But googling your own name is just asking for trouble. All sorts of things can come up that you just don’t want to see. Regrettable pictures. Your ex’s blog. Outstanding warrants.

Which is exactly why I shouldn’t have googled Jane Bites Back. But I did. I never said I was smart.

Truthfully, I google the book from time to time to see if anyone is talking about it. And they are. Mostly it’s in a good way, but every so often I run into someone who’s determined to hate the book before it’s even out. These are my favorite comments. It’s always fun when someone forms an opinion about you and your work without actually having read any of it.

Today my googling brought me to the following comment on a Jane Austen blog. It was credited, as many such comments are, to Anonymous. I present it here exactly as it appeared.

HOW DARE YOU ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR SENSE TO WRITE THIS NOVEL MR MT FORD.
FIRST WE GET ZOMIES IN PRIDE AND PRJUDICE AND SEA MONSTERS IN S&S MAY BE YOU SHOULD WRITE NOVELS FOR BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER IF YOU LIKE TO WRITE ABOUT THEM.
WHAT HAS POOR MISS JANE AUSTEN DONE FOR YOU TO TURN HER IN TO A VAMPIRE NOTHING.
BY NOW YOU WOULD HAD GUESS I WILL NOT BE GOING OUT TO BUY THIS BOOK OR ANY LIKE IT.
YOUR EVER A VERY DISPLEASED MISS JANE AUSTEN FAN

I’m tempted to say that judging by the tone and content of this post it’s unlikely Anonymous has read very many books at all. Or is six. But that wouldn’t be fair. I don’t know Anonymous any more than Anonymous knows me. Unless, of course, it’s just one of my friends being horrid, which is entirely possible given the crowd I run with.

Here’s the thing–this is not the only post like this. There aren’t a lot of them out there, fewer than half a dozen, but they all resonate with the same indignant tone. How dare I write about Jane Austen as a vampire?

Here’s a thought: Unless you are Jane Austen, maybe you shouldn’t be huffing and puffing about what she would or would not approve of. Because I have news. She’s not your friend. No matter how much you love her books, you’re not going to be calling her up and saying, “Can you believe what Michael Thomas Ford did to you in that awful book? How dare he?”

Besides, I already showed the book to her and she thinks it’s most agreeable.

My point is this: If you read it and you hate it, fine. But if you haven’t read it, sit in the corner and let the grown ups talk.

And while we’re at it, what’s wrong with being a vampire, Anonymous? You just don’t like anything, do you? Well, I know people like you, and I’ll tell you something–they all come to bad ends. Mark my words. If I were you I’d watch out for falling anvils, and bear traps, and poisoned lozenges.

In nicer news, my googling also revealed that Jane Bites Back is now on sale at Walmart. This is thrilling indeed as, no matter what you think of them, those stores move books. Obviously you can’t walk in and get a copy–the book isn’t out until December 29–but you can preorder it on their website if you’re so inclined.

You can preorder it lots of other places as well, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Indiebound, and your local independent bookstore. But I love, love, love that I’m going to be on sale at Walmart as well. For one thing, my relatives may actually see it. Oh yeah, Teri and Nancy, I went there.

You know, some really big musical acts–Garth Brooks, Journey, AC/DC, KISS–have started selling their new music only at Walmart. I know this because in October I had to drive forty-five minutes to the nearest Walmart to get the latest KISS album, Sonic Boom. It was sort of annoying, but it also made it kind of an event. In this age of being able to download things with the click of a mouse, having to actually go somewhere to get a new album or a new book feels very old school. You know, like when we used to camp outside the Ticketmaster outlet all night to get good seats for Ozzy or Heart.

You probably don’t remember those days, do you? Well, you missed out. It was a lot of fun.

Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if in the not-so-distant future some authors made a deal with Walmart to publish their books and be the sole distributor. Then we’ll see ads for Stephen King’s The Thing in the Hamper: Only at Walmart! Buy two and get Michael Thomas Ford’s latest for only $1.99!

Anonymous would love that.

That’s right, I said famed clown. And there’s more–I adore clowns. Especially clowns from the Eastern European clowning tradition, which is about as different from American clowning as borscht is from Jello. American clowning is all “Ha ha! That’s so cute!” European clowning is all “Ha ha! That’s so true!”

Stevo Capko is a clown’s clown. He studied at the Prague Art Academy and interned with Switzerland ’s Scuola Teatro Dimitri and the Centre National des arts du Cirque in France. Yes, they have actual schools for clowning. That’s one more thing that makes Europe better than the United States. That and the fact that they allow dogs in restaurants, which in my book is the hallmark of a great society.

“Brick Circk” is 60 minutes of clown perfection. Using only his body and a small number of props, Capko brings to life a character whose sole goal in life is to get a single gold brick balanced atop a 10-foot-long pole. On the surface it’s a lighthearted comedy routine, but beneath that is the palpable frustration his clown builder feels at being unable to complete his task.

This is what great clowning is. It takes a universal struggle and presents it to the audience as something we can all laugh at and sympathize with. Forget the clowns of the water-shooting daisy and overstuffed little car. Those buffoons are caricatures of what the clown was originally meant to be, a messenger sent to tell us that hey, life is hard sometimes but it’s okay too.

I’m a huge fan of clown shows. Not that there are a lot of them. In recent years Patrick and I have been fortunate to see three wonderful ones: Slava’s Snowshow by Russian clown Slava Polunin, Aga-Boom by Dimitri Bogatirev, and Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo. Unfortunately, only Corteo (which is a fantasy on the last dream of a dying clown) is available on Blu-Ray and DVD. You should totally watch it. And the other two shows are still touring, so you might be able to catch them at some point.

But you probably won’t. Hating clowns is a popular pastime. There’s even a term for it: coulrophobia. Numerous sites exist bemoaning the horror of clowns. My favorite is probably The No Clown Zone, which is the creation of one Rodney Blackwell, whose hatred of clowns stems from his traumatic seventh birthday party. Check out his brilliant “34 Reasons Why You Should Hate Clowns Too.”

Strangely, there’s no equivalent term for people who like clowns. The natural antonym to coulrophobia should be coulrophilia, but that term is used to describe someone with an erotic or sexual fixation on clowns. So is the term clownophile. And apparently there are a number of people who indeed do find clowns . . . stimulating. Here in San Francisco we have our very own Ouchy the Clown, who brings his unique brand of S&M-flavored clowning to street fairs and community events.

This is all well and good, but what about those of us who just love clowns? You know, in a pure and wholesome way. Why are we (apparently) doomed to be perceived as perverts of some sort? At what point did embracing the whitefaced tellers of truth become crossing over to the dark side of the tent?

Frankly, I think those of you who hate clowns are the ones with the problem. That’s right. I said it. You’re sick and wrong. And why? Because you’re afraid. You know that behind the greasepaint and red nose there’s someone who sees the world more clearly than you do, and that given half a chance he’ll show you what he sees. So you’d rather cast clowns as demons instead of the truth-tellers they are.

Well guess who’s going to have the last laugh? Clowns, that’s who. Unless they eat you first. Better check under the bed before you turn out the lights.

Anyway. In the episode I saw, Jonathan has been contacted by real-life filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (who likes his first novel) to re-write a screenplay about the life of poet Frank O’Hara. Jonathan manages to lose the script when he hooks up with a girl, goes back to her place, then discovers that she’s in high school. When her father comes in, Jonathan runs away, leaving the script behind.

Still following me? Good, because I’m almost to the point of this entry. It turns out the girl’s father is a famous psychiatrist. In order to get his script back, Jonathan schedules an appointment with the shrink. To his surprise, the session is remarkably helpful. As he leaves the office (having retrieved the script) he thanks the doctor for his help and says that he thinks that because of the revelations he’s had during their session his life will change .

The shrink, in response, says, “Lives don’t change. We simply become more comfortable with our core misery, which is a form of happiness.”

I love this, mostly because it’s similar to something I said to my own shrink a few months ago. He asked me how things were going, to which I replied, “That depends. I’m not really sure what we’re going for here. Am I supposed to be wildly enthusiastic about getting up in the morning, or is it enough that I’m only kind of disappointed that I didn’t die in my sleep?”

He thought this was funny, which is probably why I like him as much as I do. But he didn’t answer the question. Shrinks never do. They just stare at you until you talk some more. The goal–I suspect–is to get you to answer it yourself, which I think is just mean. It’s like when you’re a kid and you ask your father how to spell a word and he says, “Look it up in the dictionary.” If I could look it up, I wouldn’t need to ask you how to . . .

And so on. But it’s a good question. The shrink one, not the spelling one. What are we going for when it comes to happiness? Is the most some of us can hope for just not feeling completely overwhelmed and doomed all the time? Or is there some gold standard, some definable state of being that everyone agrees is happiness?

I’ve long argued that the most hopeful people are those who are the most pessimistic. We’re pessimistic because we see what people–what life–could be if people didn’t insist on behaving stupidly almost all of the time. We’re not necessarily convinced that everything will go wrong, we’re just theorizing that based on past experience everything is likely to go wrong. If it doesn’t, we’re pleasantly surprised, which is a win-win situation all around. But usually it does (See: people behaving stupidly, above).

Today I am getting a bit of work done. Also, I have downloaded the new Tegan & Sara album, Sainthood, which I purchased with the iTunes gift card Patrick gave me for my birthday a few weeks ago. I am anticipating the arrival of a check, the copyedited manuscript for my next novel arrived and doesn’t need as much work as I expected, and tonight Patrick and I are going to a show I’m really looking forward to seeing. All things considered, I am . . . happy? Not unhappy? Content?

I don’t know how to answer that.

This morning I was telling a friend about the sale and she said, “Congratulations! You’re a photographer!”

Well, no, not really. I take photographs, and one of them is interesting enough that someone bought it and hung it in his home. But I’m not a photographer.

What I am is a writer. My income comes entirely from my writing. Selling this photograph added a little bit to the pot, but it’s the writing that pays the mortgage. Everything in my life is paid for with words.

Why the distinction? Well, this is the tricky part. I’m going to step on some toes here, hurt some feelings, maybe even make a few enemies. But the truth is, I’m tired of people calling themselves writers who aren’t really writers. They’re people who write.

What’s the difference? Well, I like riding horses. That doesn’t make me a cowboy. I like writing reviews of the films I get from Netflix. That doesn’t make me a film critic. I like taking pictures. That doesn’t make me a photographer.

There’s an attitude (and I think it may be peculiar to North America, maybe even to the United States) that anything “arty” is fair game. You like to paint? Call yourself a painter! You like to dance? Call yourself a dancer! You like to write?

You get the idea.

Last week I was reading the blog of a perfectly lovely woman whose post of the day happened to be about the writing life. She referred often to “we writers this” and “we writers that.” She talked about how the writer’s life is so difficult, but reminded us that the rewards of dedicating oneself to the occupation of writing more than make up for the hard times.

Except that she isn’t a writer. She’s an elementary school teacher. To be fair, she has written a novel. But it remains unpublished. She remains unpublished. In any form. As far as I’m concerned, she’s an elementary school teacher who likes to write. She is not a writer.

I can hear you from here. “You’re being mean!” “If she says she’s a writer then she’s a writer!” “Why do you care if she calls herself a writer?”

I’ll tell you why I care. Because being a writer is not the same thing as wanting to be a writer, or even the same as working toward being a writer. It is a profession. And if you are calling yourself a writer and it is not your profession, you’re insulting everyone whose profession it is.

Listen. I get it. I understand that very few artists actually make a living at their art. I understand that there are a lot of actors working as servers, a lot of dancers working as dog walkers, a lot of writers working as grocery clerks. I know that there are circumstances beyond our control that make it impossible for most of us to do our art exclusively, that force us to be part-time when we want to be full-time. I understand that we call part time artists actors and dancers and writers as a way of acknowledging that it isn’t necessarily their fault that they aren’t doing this full time.

That’s all very well and good, and I don’t want to quash anyone’s dreams. However.

There’s a Jehovah’s Witness woman who stops by my house every couple of months. Last time she came she had an older man with her. “This is Clark,” she said when I answered the door. “He’s a writer like you.”

What Clark is is an insurance salesman who has penned a picture book. He wrote it for his grandkids. They think it’s brilliant. Clark asked me how he could get an agent.

This happens all the time. When we were buying our house and I had to fill out a stack of forms a mile high, the woman at the title company looked at one of the documents and said, “Oh, you’re a writer. I’m a writer too.” I forced myself to ask what she wrote. “Poems,” she said enthusiastically. “I’ve done it since I was a little girl.”

Maybe her poems are brilliant. I don’t know. But I can guess. And yet, she’s a writer. Just like I am.

Are you starting to see why this is just the tiniest bit irritating? And believe me, I’m not the only writer who thinks so. All my writer friends do. They just don’t want to say so because they’re afraid it seems churlish.

Maybe it does. I don’t care. I’m tired of people thinking that writing is something anyone can do. I’m tired of everyone who’s ever penned a letter to the editor or written an article on rhododendrons for their garden club newsletter telling me they’re writers. I’m sick of hearing about some acquaintance’s “other writer friend” who turns out never to have published a thing.

Before you start, I realize that defining what does and does not constitute being a “real”
writer is impossible. Is it one published book? Is it five published short stories? Is it ten published poems?

Professional writing organizations have guidelines for membership that vary widely. The Romance Writers of America, for instance, is “open to all persons seriously pursuing a romance fiction writing career.” I don’t know what “seriously pursuing” means, but there you go.

The Mystery Writers of America are more demanding of their applicants. To be an Active Member one must meet the following requirements.

Active membership is open to professional writers in the crime/mystery/suspense field whose work has been published or produced in the U.S., who reside in the U.S., and who meet specific criteria set by the Board for this category. Currently, some of those criteria are:

1. The applicant is a professional creative writer of fiction, non-fiction, or drama (including TV, screenplays, radio, and staged drama).
2. The writer has received payment for his or her work in an amount determined by the Board of Directors of Mystery Writers of America. Proof of payment is required.
3. The work is neither self-published nor cooperatively published; no monies were required of the writer by the publisher.
4. The publisher is on MWA’s list of approved publishers or eligible to be added to that list; similar criteria are set for dramas, films, and video productions

The Horror Writers Association is even more exacting. Prospective members must have achieved publication credits of varying degrees depending on their genre (poetry, scripts, comics, etc.). For those who write books, the requirements are as follows:

The publication or sale of at least one book-length work, fiction, non-fiction, or translation, sold at professional rates and containing one or more elements of dark fantasy, horror, the occult, or fear. “Book-length” is defined as being in excess of 40,000 words. Professional rates are defined in this case as an advance of at least $2,000 against royalties of 5% or more, OR an advance of at least $5,000 against royalties of less than 5%. Flat-fee sales or royalty rates below 1% of the retail price of the volume do not constitute professional sales. For works not published as independent volumes, such as magazine serials, qualifying rates shall be defined as five cents (5¢) or more per word. “Publication or sale” is defined to mean either publication, or the receipt of payment for future publication; the signing of a contract shall not constitute sale until the first payment has been received.

PEN American Center puts their membership requirements more succinctly:

The standard qualification to become a Member of PEN is publication of two or more books of a literary character or one book of exceptional distinction (i.e. winning a major national prize).

I believe at one time PEN also required letters of recommendation from two current members. I applied years ago, after publishing three or four nonfiction books for young adults. They turned me down, presumably because my books were not “of a literary character.”

“Ah ha!” you may be crying. “You know what it’s like to be shut out!”

Yes, I do. Which makes it even more annoying when people toss the word “writer” around as if it applies to anyone who has ever put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. I’ve worked very hard for the privilege of putting “writer” as my occupation on forms that ask for it. (By the way, there is no option for choosing writer on the tax preparation software I use, as if they decided that no one could possibly make a living at it.) It is what I do. It is what I am.

When you use a word indiscriminately it begins to lose its power. Take fuck. Used once in a while for effect, it’s startling. Used over and over, it’s tedious. In the same way, when everyone is a writer because they say so, encountering someone who really is a writer is not particularly interesting or, for the writer in question, even remotely pleasant.

Imagine for a moment that you are at a party, chatting to a friend. Someone with whom your friend is acquainted joins the conversation. Your friend says, about you, “This is my friend [insert your name here.] He/She is a writer.”

The acquaintance looks at you and says one of the following:

1. “A writer? Good for you. I hope you get published someday.”

2. “A writer? Have I read anything you’ve written?”

3. “A writer? What do you do for work?”

If imagining this scenario makes you grind your teeth to keep from punching your new friend in the face, go off in search of another drink, or triggers a facial tic, you’re probably a real writer. If, however, you can respond to those reactions with “Thank you,” “Oh, I don’t have anything out yet,” and “I’m in computers,” I’m afraid we have to consider your membership application more carefully.

Again, I’m not trying to be mean here. I wish everyone who wants to be a writer the best of luck. I want you to see your stories in magazines, your books face out on store shelves, your name on the cover of your poetry collection. I really do.

But I also want saying you’re a writer to mean something. Like a merit badge in scouting. If you haven’t managed to get a fire started using flint and dried twigs, don’t sew that patch to your sash. By all means announce that you’re working toward earning that badge. Let everyone know, so that we can be excited for you when you finally get it. But don’t go sewing it on ahead of time, because that’s cheating, and scouts don’t cheat.

When I told my friend this morning that I don’t consider myself a photographer, she asked what would make me consider myself one. I don’t know. I’ve been asked to do a solo show of my work at a gallery. For that I’ll have to produce 25 or 30 prints. Will I be a photographer then? Do I have to sell five of them to be considered a photographer? Ten? What if I don’t sell any? I still took them. They’re still photographs. But am I a photographer?

Maybe I’ll wait for someone else to decide. The one photo I’ve sold was bought by a real photographer, someone who does it for a living and has published four books of his work. Because he thinks my work is good, does that mean I’m a photographer too? Or will it take something else to make me claim that word? When a reviewer calls me a photographer, maybe, or when my income is comprised equally of money from writing and money from photography. I don’t honestly know.

But until I figure it out I’m going to tell people that I’m a writer who takes pictures.

Notice that there are 12 seats. Then notice that only six of them are filled. Then subtract the store’s author events manager, two of my friends, and two friends of a friend who were ordered to go.

Now we have how many attendees? Oh, right. One.

To be fair, two other people came in after I took this photo, which brings the grand total to eight, three of whom were there because they like my books. Also to be fair (to me) I signed around 30 additional books that had been ordered online by people who couldn’t attend but wanted autographed copies.

I think most writers dream about their first reading. The idea that people will buy your book and read it is one thing; thinking about them coming to see and hear you is something else altogether. It’s been said that all writers secretly long to be rock stars. If that’s true, then the reading is the equivalent of the big concert, replete with lights, crowds, and possibly even groupies and T-shirts.

There are certainly authors for whom this is true. Generally they are enormously popular or spectacularly attractive. (But seldom are they both, which is at least some comfort to the rest of us.) These authors easily pack the venues at which they read. Sometimes they even get away with selling tickets. They have handlers, and publicists, and shocking cocaine addictions. Okay, this is not entirely true. They don’t all have publicists.

Then there are the rest of us.

For us readings are hit or miss affairs. After 20 years of doing them, the only thing I can say with certainty is that you cannot possibly predict what will happen. All you can do is show up and deal with whatever you get. Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised; other times you wonder how you ever imagined writing a book was a good idea.

My first book tour–which I financed myself, by the way, and am still paying off 12 years later–was for my essay collection Alec Baldwin Doesn’t Love Me. It was my first book for an adult audience and my first book for a gay audience. Filled with optimism, I decided to visit as many bookstores as I could. I spent weeks setting up dates, figuring out flight routes, and blissfully imagining a storm of adulation. Even the bookstore owner who told me he wouldn’t have me unless I guaranteed him I would sell 40 copies of my book couldn’t discourage me.

I think I hit 20 stores on that tour. Of those appearances I would say that five went very well, ten went moderately well, and five were unmitigated disasters. At the three readings I did in Texas (in Houston, Dallas, and Austin) I had a combined audience of–one. But that was not the worst. That distinction belongs to Portland, Oregon, where I walked into the store, told the manager I was there for the reading, and he said, “Reading? We have a reading tonight? Nobody told me.” At least he was kind enough to make the staff sit and listen to me read to them.

As I said, these were the worst ones. The ten moderately good events saw audiences of 5-10, the really good ones 20-40. Curiously, the best-attended events took place not in cities such as West Hollywood and San Francisco, where I expected big crowds, but in Columbus and Minneapolis. The one I’m proudest of, however, is the New York event, where I’d cleverly managed to schedule my reading for the night of the Oscars. As I lived in New York for almost a decade, and because I have dirt on a lot of people, I knew I could count on a dozen or so, but I didn’t expect to see a single unfamiliar face in the crowd.

I did, though. I saw a lot of them. And that made up for Texas, and Portland, and Chicago (where I was caught in a downpour on the way to the bookstore and read, dripping on the carpet, to one friend).

When new authors ask me for advice about doing readings, I don’t know what to say. I know they’re excited. I know they envision rooms filled with people nodding, laughing, crying as they listen to The Work. I also know that they will probably be disappointed. But I don’t know whether I should try to prepare them for the likely reality or let them enjoy their excitement for as long as possible. After all, they’re not going to believe me anyway. But somehow I expect them to blame me if it all goes wrong. “You should have told me!” I hear them wail.

Usually I just tell them to do it if their publishers will pay for it or if they have a lot of frequent flier miles and friends with couches. Then I hope that their reading will be the exception to the rule, and that they will leave with their self-esteem filling them up like the helium in a Macy’s parade balloon.

I am enormously thankful for every single person who comes to one of my readings. And after all this time it’s no longer about numbers. Now it’s about connecting with people–whether it be one or five or 50–who find something meaningful in my work and want to hear me read or just say hello. I know they have a lot of other things they could be doing than sitting and listening to me read for half an hour, and the fact that they choose to come see me means a great deal.

I am also thankful for the bookstore owners and managers who, in an increasingly bleak book industry, continue to support authors by inviting us to read. People like Philip Rafshoon of Atlanta’s Outwrite, Stephen Quinones of San Francisco’s A Different Light, and Michael Lemon of the now-closed Baltimore branch of Lambda Rising. Thanks to them and many others like them my books–and the books of other writers–have gotten into the hands of readers they might never have reached. In a business that is increasingly conducted online, they provide a personal touch that no website, no matter how well designed, can offer.

As for those of you who promised to come to one of my readings and didn’t, don’t think I didn’t notice. And I’m keeping a list.