Sometime in the early nineties, I hired on with one of the country's major oil companies to design site enhancement for the grand opening of a new property development project they were building on the east coast. Site enhancement is an industry term which translates to something more akin to "industrial decorating". It includes things like staging, lighting, plantings, special events - and in this case building an outdoor ice skating rink in a part of the country that isn't known for cold weather. The project had nothing to do with oil and everything to do with property development. They were building a little town - complete with office towers, a hotel, a theater, and many retail stores laid out on a street grid that resembled (what else?) a nifty little town. There was a central plaza (actually, it's still there - the place is called Reston Town Center and it's just outside of Washington DC.) You can google it to see what it's like today.

The experience lasted 2 years and was something few artists get to experience. The project was very high profile and very important to my employers. I'm happy to say that I performed well as designer & production manager for my assigned tasks and the results of my work were roundly acclaimed. While the design work and the grand opening ceremonies and events were exciting enough, the year of planning was even more interesting because I was part of the overall development program so I attended many long meetings in the special conference room in one of the office towers, where there was always lots of heavy breathing.

I won't bore you with the details, but I'll just say that having a glimpse of things inside this kind of economic power structure was really eye-opening. Not so eye-opening in terms of the scale of the project or the amount of money being spent. (that's kind of a given, under the circumstances). More eye-opening in terms of the sociology and psychology and the interaction of the various players involved in the project. Suffice to say, the people watching was spectacular. This part was so interesting to me - an artist/contractor who was flown up to the project site from my home in Florida on a weekly basis so I could attend the planning sessions, that years later I decided to write a novel using my experiences as a background for a story. I should say right here, that no specifics from real life were transferred to the book - and in fact, the story I ended up with is quite far from anything remotely comparable. Still, the high pressure fumes of those days linger in this writing - which turned out to be an outrageous and hilarious corporate adventure in which the city of Minneapolis becomes home to the nation's first illegal toxic waste dump disguised as an underground amusement park with a nuclear meltdown theme. If you want some good laughs and plenty of Midwest humor, pick this book up at Amazon.com It is entitled, "Behind The Sausage Curtain".

Now here's the deal. This is my third book and my first novel. It is 346 pages long and I spent roughly 3 years writing it. After I got over my initial fears of making a complete ass of myself - I mean, hey, I'm a papa Hemingway fan - the process was super fun. I discovered almost right away that this being a story of the mind (fiction), my best bet at ever actually finishing the book was to let my imagination run free, write the chapters and then reign them in with the realities and language of the characters. Unlike the two non fiction books previously discussed, this thing had a life of its own. Sometimes I just hung on for the ride and sometimes I slogged along trying to remember why I ever started the journey at all.

When the manuscript was finished, I gave copies to six different readers and waited impatiently for their reactions. I also began the long process of manuscript submission to literary agents and publishers. This is a real "pain in the ass" process because first, one must find the contact information necessary to, well, contact these places. I don't know how writers found publishers and agents before the internet wasinvented. Maybe things were simpler then. Maybe a writer scrounged up a list of publlishers out of the library. Perhaps a writer would have a list of a dozen publishers to send his/her manuscript to and when these dozen publishers turned the work down, the writer just went back to his/her day job. Simple. Now, with access to the internet, the problem is reversed. There are hundreds - even thousands of publishers and agents listed on the web. You can spend weeks and months mulling through all these names to find the 50 or 100 publishers or agents who just might be receptive to your new book. I did that. Then I sent a well prepared query letter, a small resume and three chapters of the book to 100 or so addresses. In some cases I sent the entire manuscript. Expensive and time consuming. Weeks and months later, I received back, something like 50 form printed rejection slips and not one little note about why my book wasn't chosen. "Screw this," I said. "I'll publish it myself.

More notes on the "Sausage Curtain" saga, to come - alongwith some "art talk." Comments and chat are invited.