Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

My book, in Korean

I arrived home to find a package from my publisher -- 6 copies of my book, in Korean!  It's pretty awesome.  There's a website, obviously I have no idea what it says, but those yellow and black images are from the cover art.  Actually, here's a scan of the whole cover.  Really cool.  If you live in Korea, makes a great gift!  And if you read Korean, tell me what that website says!

Google Books

Not sure how long this has been around, but I just noticed it -- you can read about 10 pages of my Anonymous Lawyer book for free on Google Reader.  Seems pretty cool -- I may poke around and see what other books are up there.  There's something more appealing about getting to read actual sample pages instead of the web-formatted first chapters they sometimes have on the NYT or Washington Post sites.

Favorite Quotes

The New York Times is asking for people's favorite quotes from recent books.

Just saying, you know?

Waterstone's Bookclub

Waterstone's, the biggest UK bookstore chain (according to Wikipedia) is featuring my book in their monthly book club.  Very cool.  Check it out.

I've spent much of the day sleeping or trying to sleep.  Eyes are pretty sore.  Feeling better since taking Tylenol and waking up from a nap at 9:00.  Psych, on the USA Network, is a pretty consistently entertaining show.  Haven't watched Monk in a couple of years, but I like Psych better than I liked Monk when I watched Monk, I think.  Also meant to post about this but didn't -- Friday Night Lights continues to be an awesome show.  Wednesday's episode was really good.  And this cool article about ABC's Brothers and Sisters was a good read, and actually pretty much the only thing I read today.

UK Edition Available

For any readers in the UK: Amazon UK has my paperback in stock for 3.99 pounds, 50% off list price.  Here's the link.  I just got 15 of them in the mail yesterday from my agent (I think that's what my contract said I'm supposed to get for free) and they look pretty cool.  Supposed to be interviewed on BBC Radio 4's "Today" show sometime this week, but I'm still waiting for details.  Exciting to have the book out in a new country....

Anonymous Lawyer Blog / Law Firm Salary Bump

Just a pointer to Tuesday's Anonymous Lawyer entry, about the salary increases at some of the big firms.  I'm a little worried Anonymous Lawyer is making too much sense tonight.  :)  No, I'm not wishing I took the law firm job, but, gosh, that's a lot of money, and there's probably something very liberating -- if you can bring yourself to do it -- about giving up on what you really want to do and settling for "just a job," albeit a lucrative and secure and prestigious and probably sometimes interesting and challenging one.  I know, I know, I know I'm too-often guilty of ignoring the fact that there are people who can genuinely have it both ways -- who find the law firm work interesting and are passionate about it and it's really what they want to be doing.  And, I mean, great for them, because they get to have it both ways.  They get the security of a law firm job, and it also happens to be the thing they love to do.   Now, I certainly can't complain about a single thing that's happened on my career road so far, I've been extraordinarily fortunate, and it's also the case that success doing what I want to be doing would bring me comparable security.   It's not like I want to be a poet or a painter.   But there are certainly moments when I think about how much *easier* it would be to not be striving for anything at all, and just to be able to suck it up and deal with a job I didn't love that would pay the bills and I could get fulfillment from everything else in my life.  But easier doesn't mean more fulfilling or satisfying, and I don't *actually* wish I was wired that way, and I wouldn't make that tradeoff.  The highs are higher when you care about something, even if the lows are lower.  And the burden of worrying about your future, and of trying to push and push to make things happen... I think or at least I hope that it ends up worth it in the end, and gets you to a more rewarding place than if you just give up and don't strive, and settle.  I don't know.  I don't know if anyone really ends up making conscious decisions about this kind of stuff.  I think we're all just wired in one way or another and if we're the kind of person who's going to strive for something, and worry about finding meaning and satisfaction and fulfillment in our work, then we're stuck, and that's who we are, and if you're the kind of person who doesn't feel that push, then you just don't.  I'm just rambling.  It's been a very unproductive day, punctuated by reminders that I need to keep pushing if I want to end up where I want to end up, and that the scariest thing about this kind of stuff is that it's all on you, you don't have a boss, you're not accountable to anyone but yourself, and there's really no one to blame but yourself if you don't end up executing the best you can.  I think I'm just disappointed that I thought this TV stuff was more of a slam dunk than it's turning out to be, and I got too much of a teaser for my own good, too spoiled seeing what it could be like, and now I'm frustrated that I don't know exactly what the path is to get back there.  I mean, it's all good, and I have nothing to complain about, but it'll still be disappointing if it doesn't happen, as much as I realize I've been way too fortunate and really don't have the right to be disappointed.

Best E-mail Ever

From a friend: "Saw a guy reading Anonymous Lawyer on the subway this morning."

That's pretty cool.  My mom got a kick out of that when I told her.  If I see someone reading it on the subway, I'm going to regret I don't have a camera phone.

Also, I was Googling myself to see if I'd missed anything recently, and I noticed they put up a podcast interview I did months ago.  I'm not sure when they posted it, but I'd stopped checking after a while.  Here it is.  Press the play button and it'll open your windows media player and play it.  It's a deceptive icon, because it looks like it'll just play from that.  At some point in the interview, I seem to forget to breathe and the pace of my talking gets really fast.  But other than that I think it's okay.  The interviewer asked a terrifying question about whether Anonymous Lawyer "has a thing" for Anonymous Niece, which hopefully indicates he just didn't realize Anonymous Niece was actually Anonymous Lawyer's niece, although I'm not sure how he could have missed that.  Either that, or I hope the guy doesn't have any nieces.

Big piece in UK Esquire about the book.  I have the jpeg and I'm waiting for my UK publisher to tell me it's okay to post it.  And a cool UK blog review here.

The happy UK book stuff balances out the lack of concrete news on the TV side of things (hence why I haven't posted about it).  Still a chance it'll happen, and lots of people like the script, but there was more reason for optimism before the holidays.  We'll see.  In the meantime, my Office spec script is heading toward a third draft.  :)

Quick Anonymous Lawyer Link

The book's featured today over at Campaign for the American Reader -- the blogger who runs the site e-mailed to ask if I'd take part in his Page 69 test.  Very cool to take part on a project that's also gotten contributions from Paul Collins among many others.  Check out the Paul Collins post -- his recent book about Thomas Paine was really quite good, and I can't praise his other books enough either.

Readers Guide

My paperback publisher asked me to write a short "reading group guide" for them to use for the paperback.  I suggested maybe I could write it in the voice of Anonymous Lawyer.  This probably won't end up being the final version, but here's my first crack at it.  At the end of this, I wrote a dozen multi-part questions about the book, but I'll save those for another post.

To: Picador Marketing Team
From: Anonymous Lawyer
Re: Anonymous Lawyer Reading Group Guide 

Dear Picador Marketing Team,

In response to your request that I create a “Reading Group Guide” for Anonymous Lawyer, I respectfully decline. Haven’t we given the readers enough help already? There’s a cover on the book, the typeface is readable, and (despite my objections) you’ve decided to include page numbers. To offer any more assistance would be absurd. 

Frankly, I’m more than a little bit fed up with this entire process. You coddle your readers – by spellchecking the book, copyediting, making sure all the pages are in the correct order… this would never fly at the law firm. An associate comes to me looking for help, and I send him right back out there to find the answer on his own. When I give them an assignment, it’s their job to read my mind, not my job to waste time repeating myself. If they can’t figure it out, they should just learn to listen better. And if it takes a couple of hundred-hour weeks doing research I don’t really need and didn’t really mean to ask for, so much the better and at least the lesson will sink in.

In addition, I’m still a little sore that you rejected my suggestion for the book’s subtitle. I still don’t understand how you can say that “a diary of my experiences as a kind-hearted, tolerant law firm hiring partner dealing with the incompetence of everyone around me” misstates the whole point of the book. This is EXACTLY the point of the book. Maybe in the publishing industry you’re fortunate enough to have diligent, competent, well-medicated worker bees willing to cater to your every whim, but in the legal industry it’s a little more complicated than that. My associates, almost unanimously, are incapable of even the most basic tasks. I prefer my staples to be horizontally aligned with the paper margins, not vertical. This isn’t that difficult. And yet… at least once a month, someone hands me a document that’s vertically stapled. So I fire him. He deserves it. And then it happens again, a month later. And people wonder why law firms are hemorrhaging associates? 

You insist that there are readers out there who would benefit from a series of dicussion questions about the book, as if the text itself is not sufficient to provide weeks of discussion and debate. I simply cannot bring myself to aid the readers in this most basic task of coming up with things to talk about. Should we include a pronunciation guide as well, in case any of the readers need help with the bigger words? Maybe some pictures in case anyone can’t read? How about a cracker, wedged in between pages 134 and 135, in case someone gets hungry halfway through?

It’s like the time we decided to give the associates chairs in their offices. Until then, we made them stand, and it all worked out pretty well. No one could complain that his chair was less comfortable than someone else’s, we didn’t have to deal with having to replace broken ones, and there were no idiots wheeling down the hall to the copy machine because they’re too fat and lazy to stand up and walk. But give someone a chair, and they start to get greedy. First they wanted an associate bathroom, so they wouldn’t have to hold it until they got home. Then they wanted elevator privileges so they wouldn’t have to walk up and down the thirty-six flights of stairs. Then they wanted doors on the offices so we couldn’t spy on them. What kind of work environment allows people any measure of privacy? It’s ridiculous. Who do they think is paying their salaries? 

My concern is that if we give the readers discussion questions, they’re going to want even more. They’re going to want answers. They’re going to want a message board where they can discuss the book. They’re going to want daily blog posts with content completely unique from what’s in the book. They’re going to want to be able to e-mail the author and actually get a reply. For obvious reasons, we can’t have that.

But I’m a flexible person. I understand you have standard practices that you must enforce for your lesser works of fiction, the books that simply can’t be understood without a set of discussion questions, the inferior manuscripts that are so inaccessible to readers that they need their hands held as they walk through the pages. And I don’t want to seem like my book is better than that, even though we all know that it is. So, out of the kindness of my heart (Remember my suggested subtitle? See? I’m kind-hearted, damnit!), I’ve put together a list of questions. I’d prefer you see things my way and keep these to yourselves. I think I’ve presented a compelling case here for why they’re dangerous. Share them at your own risk, but don’t come crying to me when your readers ask you to pick up their dry cleaning.

Holiday E-Card

Anonymous Lawyer has a Holiday E-Card just in time for the last day of Chanukah and perfect for Christmas.  Check it out.

Thanks, Rocky Mountain News!

I just discovered my book is on the Rocky Mountain News "favorite books of 2006" list!  Awesome!

Q&A From The Panel I Was On

I promised a post about the questions I was supposed to be prepared to answer at the panel I was on.  I haven't been terribly inspired to write it, but I'm forcing myself before heading to sleep tonight.  So here goes.  The questions were provided by the moderator of the panel, in advance.  The answers aren't exactly what I said at the panel, but the essence is probably pretty close.

1. Why write? What drives you to do it?

Honestly, I don't know.  I write because it helps me think.  It helps me sort through the stuff in my head and figure things out.  It helps me save my thoughts so I don't lose them.  This is going to sound overblown, and it probably is -- and I would never, ever, be able to say this out loud to anyone without feeling like a crazy person -- but in a way, at least right now at the moment I'm thinking about this, I feel like without writing, or I guess I mean without expressing yourself somewhere in some form that's less fleeting than the thoughts that pass in your mind, why bother thinking?  And I guess, for me, I'm not sure where the satisfaction is in a life where you don't have a way of expressing what you're thinking about, of putting your thoughts into words, of reflecting on your experiences instead of merely experiencing.  Writing forces me to think, which I can't accept is anything but a good thing.  Writing forces me to have thoughts and opinions and feelings and emotions.  And I write because I'm better at expressing myself this way than out loud, or by painting a picture, or by blowing into a clarinet.  Or, looked at another way, I write because if I didn't, I think I'd feel profoundly alone in my head, and profoundly useless to myself. 

Okay, see, before the panel, I didn't actually write anything down.  I guess I barely thought this question through, because I didn't think any of this, let alone contemplate saying it.  I said something about discovering in college, when I started writing sketches and songs for a theater group, that I liked having a way to express myself, and that I started to feel like this was really something I got satisfaction out of doing.  But I was writing before then, even though it wasn't anything organized.  When I was about 7, my grandpa bought me a word processor.  Somewhere between a typewriter and a computer, made by a company called Brother.   It was a typewriter, but it had a little screen so if you made a mistake, you had 12 characters to catch it before it would be inked on the page.  The colored pens inside the holder started to bend and turn the font from something normal into something that looked like the machine had penmanship problems.  But I wrote a whole bunch of parody advertisements as a kid -- infomercial parodies, fake catalog ads, things like that.  And I've written songs since I was about 6 or 7.  So I was writing before college, I just hadn't found an outlet for it.  But, to come back to the question -- I don't know what drives me to write except that when I don't write I get very frustrated at myself, and I start to feel like I'm "wasting time."  I don't know why.  Other people don't necessarily feel that way.  I don't know.  But that's my answer.

2. What's the relationship between your identity as a lawyer and your identity as a writer?

I can discard this one pretty easily.  I have no identity as a lawyer.  My grandma keeps saying she keeps forgetting I went to law school.  I don't think she means really forgetting, like in a she-needs-to-see-a-neurologist kind of way.  Just that I'm not a lawyer.  I went to law school but it didn't take.  I don't think I think about things like they say law school is supposed to teach you how to think about them.  In fact I hope I don't.  I have no lawyer identity.  Aside from the way it all turned out, there's no good reason that I should have gone to law school.  But I'm inlined to believe that has something to do with how it turned out, and had I really internalized some sort of lawyer identity, I'm not sure I would have been able to write Anonymous Lawyer, while summering at a firm, without feeling really conflicted about it, which I didn't, at all.  I should have, right?  But I honestly didn't.

3. Clearly, you all have stellar legal credentials/training, have you formally studied writing in the same way? Elaborate.

I'm ignoring the legal credentials/training and letting it slide as a given that Harvard is a fine school.  I would pursue -- certainly not on the panel, but here -- the question of what constitutes good legal training and whether law school is doing much of anything to get you there, but it's clearly not the focus of the question.  I credit pretty much anything good about my writing to the stuff I did for the theater group in college, getting to work with the writing professionals they hired there, and getting to see my work on its feet, in front of audiences, and see the reaction.  To get the chance to see and hear my stuff performed, sometimes very soon after being written, sometimes through six or eight or ten drafts, was extraordinarily valuable.  To have the chance to workshop material in meetings, to see other people's work at every stage of the process, to give and receive feedback and then see the results of that feedback, to be forced to revise and reconceive and figure out how things can fit together in the bigger picture... all of that was tremendously valuable and as good a training as I can imagine.  I've taken some writing classes since -- a couple of classes, in college, after college, and in law school -- and none have come even close, or really added much value at all.  It's unquestioned in my mind that the four years of theater stuff trained me to whatever extent I'm able to do this with any degree of competence or ability.

4. Let's talk about moving between genres -- what's been your experience of that?

The question ended up aimed more at form than genre.  The novel is my first piece of fiction.  I don't think it reads like a novel, because I can't read most novels without losing interest and putting the book down.  I'm not sure I see a huge difference between any of the stuff I've written -- blogging, writing the novel, and now working on the pilot script all require different conventions, and there are plot elements that needed to be in place for the novel that weren't required in the blog, and there were things that needed to be massaged differently, but it still all felt like writing, and I'm not sure I have a satisfactory answer to this question.  I've written before about the difference between Blog and Book, and the process of making that transition, but fundamentally I don't think it was all that complicated.  It's all just writing.  If I were to work on a graphic novel, maybe that's different because of the art aspect, but even then I'm not sure it's really as different as it seems....

5. Obviously, blogging is relevant to all of your writing at the moment -- can you give some thoughts about blogging as a genre? Why does it appeal to you? Why do you do it?

The connection to an audience.  The instant feedback.  The motivation it provides to write regularly.  The ability to throw something out there and, right away, see if it sticks.  When I was first starting out with the blog, at the beginning of law school, my goal was to write things that were funny or appealing enough that people would link and I would get new readers.  And you throw something out there and sometimes you expect nothing and it gets a reaction, and sometimes you expect a reaction and it gets nothing, and it's an awfully addictive high to get someone linking to a post or sending you an e-mail.  With the Internet -- especially 4 years ago when the blogosphere was so much smaller -- I felt like with the right post, with something funny enough, good enough, smart enough, I could reach anyone, I could make an opportunity happen, I could stand out.  That's an awesome feeling.  That's powerful.  And then you start getting e-mails from readers and it can make you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself, that you're not necessarily all alone in the world, all alone in your head, and... blogging is big, blogging is a hugely empowering thing, I can't be more emphatic about that.  Even just as a testing ground.  Write a hundred words, throw it out there... do it every day for a year and you have half a book.  And a hundred words is nothing.  Nothing.

6. We've all heard the old saw that studying/practice law saps people of their creativity, and makes it hard for them to write in anything other than legal jargon. Do you agree? Do you think lawyers have to do some "untraining" or re-education in order to be able to write creatively?

The answer I gave to this is that as a law student and as a summer associate I just didn't really think of any of the legal writing I was doing as "writing."  It was something, but it wasn't writing.  It was just assignments and work and something you had to do.  But if you're writing to express something inside of you (and if you're not, then why are you writing?) then how can you confuse this with a memo about tax law?  It's not the same activity.  I don't have a ton of sympathy for anyone who's worried about law sapping them of their creativity.  If studying or practicing law is all it takes to sap you of your creativity, I'm not convinced there was much there to begin with, and if you're using it as an excuse not to write, I'm not sure you're a writer.  Maybe I'm just naive as to the power of an 80-hour workweek, but, really, I'm not convinced the people worried about this are the people whose writing I really want to read.  Sorry.

7. What's the advice you'd offer to any lawyer who came here tonight wanting to know how to make the move from lawyer to lawyer/writer?

One of the other panelists gave the right answer to this, which was "have something to say."  If you don't have something to say, I don't know why you're writing.  Frankly, this is part of what I'm struggling with as I work on the very beginnings of what could plausibly be a second novel.  I'm not sure I have something to say right now, and if I don't have anything to say, I shouldn't be writing a book, and no one should have to read it.  As I write, I've been discovering that maybe I do in fact have something to say, which is good because otherwise I'd need to find a real job.  But, really, if you don't have something to say, keep the law job.  And the other part of the advice is that you're not a writer unless you're writing.  Write something.  I don't think people have to write every day to be writers, but you have to write something, I don't know, at least every couple of weeks or I'm having trouble believing you're a writer.  That's why blogging is really neat, incidentally.

Yesterday's Panel

Well, none of you came!  Or, if you did, you didn't say hello.  It's okay, I wouldn't have gone either if I wasn't on the panel.  I understand.  Based on my blog reader e-mails this week, there's a good chance you live in Turkey anyway.  But you missed a fine panel.  I think it went well, and I'm even convinced that no one realized that for about a minute at some point, while one of the other panelists was talking, I completely zoned out thinking about something else and only came back to attention when the moderator said my name and asked me a question.  I'd estimate about 30 or 35 people showed up -- they sat around the perimeter of the room and the panelists stood at the front, leaning against a very uncomfortable piece of furniture.  By a show of hands, it seemed like the vast majority of people in the room were lawyers, and many were aspiring writers.  I sold a good number of books, which made my publisher happy.  And while I was signing books at the end, I accidentally knocked over a glass of red wine someone had left on the table.  Amazingly, the glass didn't break.  Even more amazingly, I blocked the fall of the wine almost completely, so it only landed on my pants and the floor, and missed everyone else.  My pants are at the dry cleaners.  Should their efforts fail, The Gap probably still has a few pairs left.  My publisher gave me a case of books to take to the event -- that's 24 books.  I needed to sell at least a few, because 24 books are pretty much too heavy for me to comfortably carry.  I made it okay with the carton from my publisher's office at 23rd and 5th to the event at 27th and Lexington, but I was very glad to have fewer to carry back with me.

The other panelists were more lawyer than me.  One of them, Gretchen Rubin, who clerked for Justice O'Connor , has a blog called "The Happiness Project" where she's writing about the year she's spending testing out the principles and ideas in a bunch of books about happiness.  I've read a bunch of the happiness books (and blogged about them).  I can't figure out why Gretchen's happiness blog is as compelling as it is, and I'm afraid it might be for the wrong reasons.  When I first looked at it, I ended up reading a good portion of the archives, and really had to force myself to stop.  That doesn't happen much, especially with blogs.  I think I was mostly just surprised at how earnest the blog is.  How genuinely she seems to be taking on the project of incorporating all of these happiness principles into her life.  There's no cynicism there.  And maybe it's a comment on the state of the world today that the lack of cynicism seemed so unusual to me while reading it.  Like, if I was testing out happiness theories, and writing about it, I'd probably spend most of my time talking about how I think most of it is useless gobbledygook.  But maybe that's why I cry myself to sleep at night.  No, I'm kidding, I don't.  Well, usually.  And I'd like to think there are lots of people more cynical than I am about the state of the world.  In any case, Gretchen's blog: worth taking a look.

A bunch of the audience questions at the panel were about blogging and blogs... how to start a blog (easy!), what the best blog service to use is (honestly, having used both Blogger and Typepad, I think they're both pretty good and wouldn't necessarily tell someone to choose one over the other... Typepad's a lot more customizable, but Blogger's completely free... but they're both fine, I have few if any complaints), whether to blog about work (maybe not, if you like your job more than your blog, but if not...).  The moderator (who was really terrific, and has a website here) sent the panelists a list of topics to think about beforehand, just a general guide to what she was thinking she'd ask about.  I think it might be sort of interesting to write up my answers to those in a blog post -- not necessarily exactly what I said at the panel, since I can't remember what I said, but just so you can feel like you were there, even though none of you came.

But I'm heading to dinner with a friend, so I'll do that later tonight or tomorrow.  I know, so exciting.  In any case, panel was good, and I feel like the more of these kinds of things I do, the more comfortable I get, which is a good thing.  I felt like I did an okay job and wasn't as ridiculously terrible as I kind of fear I'll be whenever I have to do something like this.  Even got approached afterwards about a speaking gig elsewhere, which is flattering and looks like the chance to discuss it will get me a free lunch at Balthazar -- so I can't complain.

Panel Tonight

Just a reminder to anyone interested: I'm on a panel tonight with some other lawyer-writers (although they are a lot more "lawyer" than I am, obviously...) talking about writing and our books and whatever else the moderator asks us....  I just received word that my mom and stepdad and grandma are probably coming, which should *finally* give me some credibility when I tell them I'm not very good at these sorts of things... :)  I'll have some copies of the book to sign and sell, five bucks off the cover price. 

Details: Stone Creek Bar and Lounge (140 E. 27th St. btwn 3rd/Lex Aves), 7:30 tonight.  Say hello if you come.  I'll give a recap tomorrow.

UK Lawyers?

My book is getting released in the UK in February, with a different cover, from Vintage.  I just suggested to the publicist over there that maybe I could write an FAQ of some sort, for her to use when pitching to the UK media, in the voice of Anonymous Lawyer, explaining the differences between US law school / law firm mechanics and culture, and what the process is like in the UK.  I think that could be funny.  I'm wondering if there are any UK lawyers or law students reading this who might be willing to help me out a bit, by explaining what it's like over there.  Maybe just a quick e-mail back-and-forth?  In exchange for a free copy of the book?  Shoot me an e-mail if you want to help.