It was a very good year

hen I was 17, my high school French teacher, Dana Danforth, a mentor in style, wit ("If you can't laugh at life, you're fucked.") and facial hair, turned me away from Sinatra before I'd even heard The Voice.

When I was 21, the Smoothest Man Alive, Jiorgis Kritsotakis, introduced me to Puccini (Bergonzi, Tebaldi & Serafin; Callas, De Stefano & De Sabata), Lebanese women, Greek slang and Old Blue Eyes in St Andrews.

And now, at 35, I can say, hell, I can bellow, "It was a very good year."

For it has been a rather good year. Two series of children's books. Three screenplays. New friends in new towns; old friends in old towns; new friends in old towns. Unfinished conversations picked up. The start of a grant writing career. A November moustache. A glass of Brunello on the house. Three welcome homes in three different places.

No, not every bottle poured sweet and clear. The dregs of the past two vintages continue to give this year's a bittersweet finish, but now they are more minor flavor notes, not skunked cans of beer.

More importantly, this is the year I cleared my throat; the year I danced with strangers; the year I filled out.

And yes, Frank, it was also a good year for small town, city and blue-blooded girls...

The Fund

ears ago investment groups started socially responsible investing (SRI). These funds invest solely in companies that have green policies, treat their workers well, practice fair trade and only feed their unicorns whole-wheat Lucky Charms. As of 2010, investors had poured $3.07 trillion into such funds (the global economy for 2011 was $69.99 trillion).

Shortly after SRI appeared so too did not-so SRI. And they called them sin funds. Sin funds invest in tobacco, weapons, alcohol and refuse to invest in any company that does not adhere to strict North Korean labor laws. A fast and loose smart-ass argument could be made that any dollar not in a SRI fund went the other way.

As people put their money where their hearts and beliefs are, this got me thinking about investing as an emotional endeavor. Naturally, I then took emotional investing to an extreme. You know, for fun.

Investors take comfort in products that have been around a long time. Traders make money off of volatility. What's the most volatile emotion that you can think of that's been around forever?

Love.

And so I wrote a screenplay about an investment group that starts a Love Fund and the public's reaction to it.

On Deck: Is love a limited or an unlimited good? A sloppy love story told around the one good Chinese micro-brew.

Skyfall

ne of the few things my Dad and I shared, one of the few things he passed on that I accepted whole-heartedly as a kid, was an affinity for James Bond. It didn't hurt that Bond stories surround the family; how Bond played on the waiting room TV as Pop waited for my birth; how the family who shared my mother's room during my sister's birth were the Goldfingers; how I got my middle name.

Daniel Craig has played Bond since my father's passing in 2007. Pop and I didn't like the look of him as Bond from the get-go. Stocky, brutish, blonde. Where once we had an outside chance of being mistaken for Bond if in a tux spotted at a distance by someone with the eyesight of a retired boxer, now we definitely didn't stand a chance. So it wasn't hard watching Bond movies after Pop passed because the visual connection was lost.

That is, until Skyfall...and the Aston Martin DB5.

I've heard audiences laugh, I've heard audiences scream, but I had never heard an audience oooh until the DB5 appeared to the surprise and delight of a packed house. Hell, I knew it was coming and it still got me. Sure, it took me back to the old Connery movies, but it also took me back to classic car shows Dad and I attended at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut where we'd take Polaroids of each other leaning up against someone else's Aston. When it appeared in Skyfall, I couldn't speak.

But after the movie, all I wanted to do was speak. For the first time in a long time I wanted to call my Dad. I wanted to talk to him about the movie. About what a great job they did bringing back classic characters, cars and the riff to the one song he ever learned how to play on the guitar. Talk to him about Scotland, the Bond exhibit we saw there, the Bond exhibit we missed in NYC the first time he ever took me into the city as a kid only to end up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibit on medieval chivalry. To hear his corny Connery impersonation. That's a Smith and Wesson and you've had your six. And to listen to the former mechanic tell me - once again - that for as beautiful a car as the DB5 was, my Mom's old early '90s Toyota Camry could out-handle it. (The DB5 had no power steering.)

With the exception of the occasional baseball post, I try not to veer too far from this blog's primary focus. But from one aspiring writer to the one who came before, consider this post an epistle in far more legible print than any of the letters either of us ever wrote to each other.

Project Update: Finishing up the third screenplay of the season (no, it's not a prequel to Citizen Kane). Will go for four before New Year's. Reviewing the final layout of Cookie-Wise Pablo.

Confession

ust finished writing the first draft of a Casablanca prequel screenplay.

That is all.

The October Challenge & Black Swan Sandy

ast month I challenged myself to start and finish a screenplay. I can now announce that I have written a complete draft of that screenplay. It will take some revising, but I am, for the most part, content with where it starts and how the story does not stray from its premise. Following an old teacher's advice, I pushed on throughout never stopping to go back. Rather, I kept a list of items to address, flesh out, include and fix which I'll tackle in the second draft.

Up next? Another month, another screenplay. I'm also editing the cognitive psyche kids' stories I wrote. One, pertaining to Black Swans, is particularly apt in light of Hurricane Sandy. Some folks said they didn't evacuate because they had lived in their neighborhoods for decades and had no experience with such a terrible storm and so found it hard to believe such a thing could either exist or do so much damage. They couldn't imagine such a storm because they had no first hand experience with one. It didn't matter what others told them be they meteorologists or folks who had experienced such weather elsewhere; those who had yet to experience such a storm themselves stuck to their pre-existing bias against a storm of such size.

Needless to say, that's a strong and potentially deadly bias. If we can become aware of that bias and loosen the grip we have on it, hopefully we can save some lives and stop making mistakes we seem to repeat generation after generation.

Extra Savvy Sketches + Text

s. Concepcion has successfully updated the first round of sketches for Cookie-Wise Pablo which you can now view below. Also included are the 16 corresponding couplets so it's less of a silent movie without the subtitles.

1) A cookie now or two later?

There may be no question greater.

2) That one right there is so enticing.

But a second one? That's better than icing!

3) "I will wait for two!" Pablo exclaimed. 

"You'll eat that one before I return!" Missy Monkey proclaimed.

4) "I will not!" Pablo disagreed.

"We shall see!" said Missy Monkey.

5) "Then hold this while I get the other.

When I return you can have another."

6) In his hands Pablo held the cookie

which quickly began to drive him kooky. 

7) It felt so soft and smelled so choice

that Pablo's mouth became quite moist.

8) His breathing grew heavy and his eyes grew large.

Where had that monkey gone, to Mars?

9) "I have to do something or the monkey will win!"

Pablo said as he mussed up his hair for inspiration.

10) All the static in his hair created a charge in the air. 

"Eureka! I've got it!" Pablo cheered with flair.

11) "Missy Monkey, two can play this game!"

Putting the cookie down, Pablo just walked away.

12) He walked down the path and he walked up the hill.

He walked by the water and he walked under a windowsill.

13) He walked through the Great Park

he walked and he walked until it got dark.

14) He came to a bench and Missy Monkey,

but wait, hold on, where was the other cookie?

15) "I just couldn't wait!" Missy mumbled

her mouth full of cookie crumbles.

16) "I did!" Pablo said with pride

as animals from the park slipped him Missy's cookies on the sly.

From the Engine Room

his post is the 200th for the Little Engine which first pulled out of the station in December 2007. Started as a way of publicly shaming myself to consistently make progress on whatever literary project I was working on at the time, the Engine continues to chug along allowing me to think through stories, characters, approaches and to push forward.

Every once in a while I check out the Engine's stats. Lately, a few numbers have caught my eye. First, readership is up about 33%. I assume this is either the result of worthy reading, cleverly placed hyperlinks and labels on my part...or what we may refer to as the "Pre-Date Internet Creep Check." Thank you, ladies.

Second, the Engine consistently gets readers from Russia. The Engine's most popular post since it's inception? A piece on Chinese drinking songs. I have reason to believe that the two are directly related.

Third, how do folks find the Engine? More often than not they search my name. There are some, though, who have searched my name + chapstick + poem. This is a very specific search by people who are most likely up to no good; probably even less good than the Russians. I know what they're looking for, but unfortunately for them, it has never appeared in this blog. And, apparently, anywhere else on the internets. Till now.

Here now, from A Midas Spring (2005), the answer to "my name + chapstick + poem", "I'd Smile More, But I Lost My Chapstick":

I'd smile more,
but I lost my chapstick.
I'd say more,
but the corners of my lips are cracked.
I am at the mercy
of tubed petroleum.

Glasses of milk prove deficient
and pacifiers socially so.
Lollipops are a viable alternative.
Your kiss may only add salt to this wound.

I can learn sign language
or I can gesticulate my way through.
But neither
bring the fluency
of a well-greased grin.

For those interested in the beats put down the night 'Chapstick' premiered in the East Village, peep DJ Sleep.

Project Updates: Cookie-Wise Pablo got a second round of sketches which I'll post soon with content and the Any Color You Want screenplay chugs along as it nears its October 31st deadline. All in all, progress.

The Page That Proves I Exist

oments after the Tigers eliminated the Yankees, I sat down to make progress on the Any Color You Want screenplay for the second time today. I wrote about eight lines all of which were about as good as the Yankees' swings at Fister, Sanchez, Verlander and Scherzer. I packed it in early, frustrated and without a good idea of what the next line would be, never mind the next 60 pages.

It's nights like these you'd think I'd consider hanging it up for good. Admittedly, I've been winging it lately with only vague prep done in advance, assuming it'll just come to me - if not in this draft, then in draft number nine. Creative writing, especially longer pieces (90+ pages), risks failure with every line. It is humbling. When done right, I'd argue, it's exhausting.

So why continue?

After watching a rather pale and very bearded dude for a year write from a distance, a beautiful woman once penned a poem that she handed over shortly before we parted ways. In it she included a question that has motivated me ever since. The question? "...and where's the page that proves you exist?" I'd like to think she was not referring to my long form birth certificate.

I write for a number of reasons. Writing allows me to flesh out my thoughts. It's cheaper than therapy. And novel ideas provide a fantastic high. I also write so that one day I can scribble, "The page that proves I exist," in her dedication.

Savvy Sketches

ood news on the Hooey Savvy front: Stephanie Concepcion of Staten Island has submitted her first series of sketches for Cookie-Wise Pablo. Each sketch corresponds with a couplet from the story. In return, I've submitted my thoughts and suggestions to keep the ball rolling. Here's a first look.

O captain! My captain!

eath. Taxes. And the New York Yankees. Three things I can pencil in every year.

When asked why I like baseball, a game some complain is too slow, is boring, doesn't have enough action, I allude to Bart Giamatti's essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

And:

"Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight."

More than any other sport, baseball mirrors our lives in its dailyness and in its grueling schedule. We wake up, go to work and return home in the same way baseball players run out to their positions inning after inning, day after day and return home afterward. More than any other sport, the fans can identify with the players' long season and not only wish them success, but survival through one year to the next. The game's parallel existence mirrors our own continued existence.

Fans of all baseball teams are free to claim this parallel. Few fans, though, can make a claim for immortality through their teams. Every year teams such as the Cubs, the Red Sox and the Yankees stay in the same location and wear the same uniforms they extend their lives past the lengths of our own. And in the same vein as "you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy to not get eaten", anything older than you or your direct memory is that much closer to immortality.

A few years ago Brian Cashman, the general manager of the Yankees said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Our fans count on the Yankees on a daily basis." I understood that to mean a few things. First, no matter how crappy our day, the Yankees will end it well. Second, no matter how unfair the day, the Yankees will play the game the right way and in winning, will (in a very small and personal way) level the scales of justice. Third, no matter how tempting the short cut, the high standard of the Yankees  -and their subsequent success - will give us something to emulate.

Cashman spoke of the entire franchise, but he could have been speaking about just one player: Derek Sanderson Jeter.

The Captain injured his ankle last night and it seems he will miss the rest of the playoffs. Saying he will be missed is an understatement. I refuse to write his eulogy today: That's like making his Yankeeography in 2002 (which they did) as there's more to come.

Some may argue that the Yankees and their fans have hit Giamatti's "stop." Even Whitman's poem, "O Captain! My Captain!" does not end well for its leader. Nor did it for Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society who also invoked Uncle Walt. But rather than sulk in loss, Keating's students atop desks picked up the mantle of captain, each of their own ship.

No, the game continues. And last I checked, the Stadium is still in the Bronx and the Yankees still wear pinstripes. Jeter will play another day. The Yankees will play today.

Thank you, Bobby

ver 13 years ago, shortly before walking across the stage, I ran into my college president, Bobby Vagt, and asked him what I had to offer a world that, in 1999, seemed to be doing just fine. In fact, unemployment was so low that even a year later the New York Times ran a piece about a community that's unemployment rate was so low that they'd taken to hiring ex-cons and...wait for it...liberal arts grads.

Without missing a beat, Bobby told me, "You know how to read, to write and to communicate." I didn't take much solace in those words at the time. I mean, the literacy rate in the U.S. is pretty high and, to some, grunting is a valid form of communication. Everyone knows how to do those things I thought.

No matter what my occupation has been over the years, I've continued to write on my own year by year putting together a portfolio of work while also continuing to read and to communicate what's on my mind be it in English, Spanish or New Yorkese.

Having dealt with people older and younger than myself, from different experiences and places and of different education levels, I've come to understand what the president meant that day: He meant that most people do not know how to read insightfully, to write clearly and to communicate consistently and clearly.

The other day I met with the president of a non-profit consultancy looking for a grant-writer. He bemoaned the lack of good writers out there. I smiled and thought of Bobby. Today I formally accepted their offer to be a grant writer.

If I've learned anything of the years (other than never to doubt Brian Cashman), it's that those who stick with something, who are not distracted and who make progress everyday are those who will most likely achieve their goals. In a small way, this new position is a testament to that.

And now...Game 4 of the ALDS. Go Yanks!

The Hot Stove

etting definitive goals over a short period of time coupled with a healthy dose of self-bullying has worked well for my literary output historically. Which leads us to my latest challenge: 112 scenes by November 1st or the end of the World Series (whichever comes last), in other words, approximately five scenes a day.

Because I take literary criticism about as well as first time mothers take backhanded compliments about their newborns, sometimes it takes a while to admit the criticism is spot on and I need to change my baby, if you will.

And so I am. The first 14 pages of the screenplay for Any Color You Want (ACYW) stays; the next 88 go to the recycling bin along with a number of characters that I enjoyed creating, scenes I enjoyed writing and a story I enjoyed working on for a few years.

In comes the characters, scenes and story I should have written the first time around instead of taking a more round-about route. While the round-about route made for a good story, by avoiding the question I laid out early on ("How would locals react to foreigners setting up a Peace Corps office in the U.S.?" or, "Can we ever accept foreign help?") I also avoided the hallmark of good dramatic writing: vigorously rubbing conflicting characters and ideas directly against each other and enjoying the sparks.

If you groaned when you saw the ACYW acronym, thinking perhaps, perchance!, I'd finally laid it to rest, well, you're not alone. Part of me groaned too. But think about this: Knows all those bands that had killer first albums and dud sophomore efforts shortly thereafter? They just burst on the scene, right? Came out of nowhere with this great material, right? Nah. Chances are they'd been playing that first album for years before anyone knew who they were. That crappy second album? That's their record label rushing them to put something out to capitalize on their popularity.

Has ACYW been on the stove for a while? You bet it has. It just needs to reduce some more. You can't hurry a good stock.

Progress Report: Cookie-Wise Pablo is with the illustrator! The Boston Squeeze is on the back burner till I hit the depths of winter and get the itch to grab Bull Durham or The Bad News Bears  before pitchers and catchers report. The series of seven kids books I wrote a few weeks ago? Still on ice. And then there's another screenplay in the works that's either blasphemous or wicked awesome. Hopefully both. But that's for another time. As you can see, I take writing a lot like baking: One project in the oven, one on the rack cooling, one setting up in the fridge, another on the table waiting to be placed out while I nibble on the works of others keeping my taste buds sharp.

What We're Doing Here

n the spring of 2009, a friend introduced me to chardonnay from California's Russian River Valley. I immediately had a favorite new beverage. I can only liken its buttery flavor to Rat's description of Bean's Apple Cider from The Fantastic Mr Fox as "liquid gold." Shortly thereafter, an adamant East Coaster began planning my his first trip to the West Coast.

A month before the trip, almost exactly a year later, I asked friends in the NYC fine dining world where to eat. Everyone had their favorite spots and old haunts. Cyrus, a contemporary French restaurant in Healdsburg, California, came up more than once. I made the reservation and thought nothing more of it.

Coming from NYC and from what was at the time the Best New Restaurant in America (Marea) according to James Beard, I thought I knew what fine dining was. I thought I had been to the top of that mountain. Thankfully, I was very wrong.

My three hour, 17 course meal at Cyrus was the greatest dining experience of my life. It was such a complete experience (they even gave me a copy of my menu as a memento), that I sent them a handwritten thank you note when I returned home.

To my friends from the Michael White days, no disrespect. My meals at Alto, Convivio, Marea, Osteria Morini and Ai Fiori were akin to eating with family and as such, hold a very special place.

Cyrus made their intentions crystal clear from the moment I sat down. Repeatedly, throughout the course of the evening, servers, sommeliers et al would bring me something and say, "We want to show you what we're doing here." Through a 17 course charm offensive, they quite effectively put me in my place.

In San Francisco days before, I had learned that city chefs liked to put fresh, local, organic produce on one's plate quite satisfied with themselves. That wasn't enough at Cyrus. At Cyrus, that's where the dish began. Then they showed you what they could do with that fresh, local, organic produce. Course after course after course.

For far too long my rule was: The only greens I eat are M&Ms. To be fair, they knew I was coming in and where I was coming from. It would have been very poor form not to clean my plate. But at Cyrus, Chef Douglas Keane got me to eat things I would have never tried otherwise. Chef Keane could have told me it was car tire reduced in Drano and I would have lapped it up.

Sadly, Cyrus is closing its doors on October 29th. Not only are we losing a great restaurant led by a great chef, but we're losing Nick Peyton, Cyrus' co-owner (with Chef Keane) and de facto maître d' par excellence. The man should run a school on how to run a joint. He makes Rick Blaine look like a bumbling amateur.

Before I even left the table that night I had learned something important: I had learned how far I had come as a cook at Marea, but I also knew how much further Marea and I had to go to reach Cyrus' level. I may no longer cook professionally, but I can appreciate majestic mountains such as Cyrus and the challenge of climbing to their peak.

7 Up, 7 Down

irst drafts of seven children's books in seven days are complete. The books are
based on the findings of a cognitive psychology study (previously cited) that I believe has the potential to improve financial decision making through better awareness of common biases we unconsciously employ daily.

The findings I chose to focus on pertain to biases of availability (the ease with which examples of the event come to mind), hindsight biases after Black Swans (eg, banning box-cutters on planes after 9/11), motivation to prevent Black Swans, the conjunction fallacy (people tend to think a story more probable with each bit of additional detail it has than less probable), and "anchoring, adjustment and contamination" (eg, deciding to buy one item at the store not ten of that item because there's a special or the store is about to close) - among others.

The seven books will sit on ice for a month then I'll look at them again with fresh eyes and work them over a second time. And then a third before submitting them to peer review and the harshest critics - kids.

Writing these books as 16 rhyming couplets forced me to keep them lean and to keep the action up. Originally, I thought writing in this fashion would lead to more dumbed down material with a watered-down story, but I think I've avoided that by keeping the stories in line.

On Deck: While I prefer writing about baseball during the off-season, I've challenged myself to finish a draft of The Boston Squeeze by the end of this calendar year. Batter up.

And now for my next trick...

ears ago friends introduced me to the work of German painter Gerhard Richter. Richter often layers paint which he then scrapes away at giving the piece a third dimension. What I like about Richter's approach is how he literally digs deeper.

In carving up my tome of a children's book on financial education, I settled on a single story that transcends financial education. This made me wonder - have I dug deep enough or have I just scratched the surface?

The depth of my exploration of this topic became particularly clear as I read Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. Make that the book's afterword. For as good as the book is, the afterword is even better because of Ferguson's discussion of cognitive psychology - particularly our ability to avoid biases such as overestimating success and underestimating risk and failure - and its impact on our ability to make good financial decisions on a daily basis. 

Question is, how many of us will ever read Ferguson's afterword? How many will read the 26 page study by Eliezer Yudkowsky that the afterword is based on? 10% of the population? 1%? How many of us have read all our email? Exactly.

In the last few years Rockabye Baby! started putting out albums called "Lullaby Renditions of..." various musical artists. They've done Radiohead, Bob Marley, Adele, Journey, Kanye West and many more. In each case they replace vocals with xylophones and other kid-friendly instrumentals. These renditions did for pop music what Baby Einstein did for classical music.

Yudkowsky's study discusses eight points in particular that are just as interesting as the findings of the marshmallow test. In a series I'm simply calling, "Big Ideas, Little Books," I will now for my next trick write a 32 page children's book for each of the eight ideas discussed in the study. And I will write them all in the next eight days. If DiMaggio can get a hit in 56 straight, I can write 16 rhyming couplets for eight days straight.

Knock-Knock

ertain events come with time stamps. Off-hand, I recall three: 9/11, the death of J.D. Salinger, and the first knock-knock joke by Syd, aged 2.

Master Syd's delivery of the joke is particularly notable because till then he preferred to stop after the initial "Who's there?" response and break out in laughter as if holding the punchline hostage was joke enough.

Just when he had conditioned us to expect his premature guffaws, he surprised us with the whole joke:

Syd: "Knock-knock."
Audience: "Who's there?"

Syd: "Syd."
Audience: "Syd who?"

Syd: "Syd down, you're rockin' the boat!"

The delivery of the punchline - on time and with gusto - brought the house down.

The knock-knock joke has made us laugh or roll our eyes since at least 1936. It survives as a corny hand-me-down from one generation to the next thanks to its tight five line formula; a formula that is so rote and delivered so quickly that the only bit in question is the last few words which we run up to like a cliff only to fall over like a lemming every time.

How did I get onto knock-knock jokes? Good question. After working on the marshmallow test story, I learned the importance of distraction from temptation. Writing knock-knock jokes is a good distraction. Telling them is even better.

Distractions are particularly important in "hot" times, that is, times when folks are apt to make poor decisions based on emotion (arguing balls and strikes after getting rung up only to get tossed) rather than better decisions during "cool" times (returning after a long walk following a disagreement).

Chapter after chapter and situation after situation, be they in the marshmallow test story of Cookie-Wise Pablo or an additional series of Pablo stories I'm outlining based on cognitive psychology studies regarding heuristics and biases, the hot/cold dichotomy appears frequently. Often it seems that will power and intelligence aren't so much required to make good decisions as the ability to distract oneself from temptation or "hot" scenarios.

So, in one story Pablo distracts himself by going for a walk. In another, he writes and tells knock-knock jokes. What do you do to cool down?

Fouling Off Pitches

ther than the tried and true cliches we hear from baseball players these days during post-game interviews, add, "I got a pitch in my zone" or "I stayed within my zone." In other words, he didn't swing at crap. He got a good pitch and he turned it into a hit. But, you know, it doesn't always work out like that even when we get a good pitch to hit.

The other day I met with a former executive director of a large city Junior Achievement (JA) branch. Above all others, this is the group I want to pick up Hooey Savvy because they specialize in financial literacy programs and already serve 4 million students in the U.S. every year. In other words, I dug in and figured I'd get a BP fastball that I'd smack out of the park. What I got was chin music.

I learned that JA creates its own materials, ie, its own books and programs on financial literacy. I also learned that local branches must buy these materials from headquarters and that these materials form the foundation off which the branches work. The branches can use materials that do not originate from headquarters, but only as supplemental material. In addition, I learned that JA is a big bureaucracy and only reviews the materials for specific grades once every three to six years.

For as thick in the head as I am, the prospect of getting dusted by JA for the next few years sounds about as much fun as a Nolan Ryan headlock beat down.

On the fridge I keep the following quote: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer" (Einstein). Consider Einstein the Paul O'Neill or the Johnny Damon of physics - fouling off pitch after pitch, staying alive, grinding down the pitcher, till he got one in his zone he could drive.

Which is where I am with Hooey. I've fouled off a few good pitches and I may have to foul off a few more. But the deeper I get in the at bat the better a feel I get for what's coming.

In other news, I am close to agreeing with an illustrator to ink up Cookie-Wise Pablo - the 32 page picture book version. She'll need a couple months, but hey, it might just be ready for the 2012 holiday season. Also, thanks to John Odell at the National Baseball Hall of Fame I have some leads on vendor and usher jackets from back in the day for The Boston Squeeze. Of the photos John and the Hall of Fame's photo department provided, this is my favorite.

Swinging at the first pitch

ince posting about the marshmallow test the other day, I've given it some more thought. Taking the first offer of a marshmallow is akin to taking the first pitch. (I know, a baseball metaphor, shocking.) And good hitters take the first pitch, right?

Not Derek Jeter. Jeter has 3,238 hits and counting. His lifetime average is .313. His lifetime average when he swings at the first pitch? .381. Significantly better. This is also true of Tony Gwynn (.338/.375), Wade Boggs (.328/.362), Albert Pujols (.325/.370), Miguel Cabrera (.317/.406) and Ichiro Suzuki (.322/.382). Even Don Mattingly, who seemed to take the first pitch religiously, did better (.307/.363). So why doesn't Jeter swing at the first pitch every time? Because if he did word would get around and pitchers would intentionally throw junk out of the strike zone for him to chase.

604 of Jeter's 3,238 hits (18.6%) have come on the first pitch. So when does he know it's a good idea to swing at the first pitch? As someone who tends to hit first or second in the lineup, part of his job the first time up is to take pitches so his whole team can see what the pitcher has. So maybe he takes the first pitch in the first inning more often than not. But when would he swing at the first pitch in the first inning? If he and his teammates are familiar with the pitcher or if there's a nervous rookie on the hill who just wants to throw strikes and not plunk the mascot.

So then Jeter's going to swing at the first pitch later in the game then, maybe the third time he's seen the pitcher because by then, we can assume, the team has a better idea of what to expect, so DJ can swing away. Perhaps. But later in the game, the pitcher's more tired. Maybe Jeter takes the first pitch to wear the pitcher down. Or, being tired, the pitcher throws more first pitch strikes for hitters like Jeter to pounce on.

In short, Jeter's no fool. He's likely done his homework and put his common sense to work to know when to swing at the first pitch based on statistical information and personal experience.

So when should Pablo take the first marshmallow offer? If he thinks the one offering it can only produce the one now and not the two later. If he thinks the one now will be fresh and the two later stale. Essentially, Pablo should take the first marshmallow if he doesn't trust the person offering it to come through with the second marshmallow.  Because why turn down a good offer for a less likely one? If he trusted the person to come through on the bigger payoff even if it meant he had to wait, he'd wait.

I presume that the person administering the marshmallow test in most cases is a well dressed adult who speaks well and appears credible. The kids who trust the tester wait for the second marshmallow. Maybe the kids who take the first marshmallow are impatient, short-term thinkers as they've been called. Maybe they don't trust the tester. Maybe they're just really hungry right now.

While I think the marshmallow test could use some more variables (namely, the presentation of the tester and the time when the test is given (is it right after lunch? has it been a while since the kids have eaten anything?), I do, on the whole, believe in its general finding that not jumping at the first thing offered is a good idea. Why? Because there's a lot of crap out there and as soon as people know you'll buy it without flinching or saying boo, they'll keep offering you more crap.

That being said, as someone who has personally far too often waited for the second marshmallow only for it never to arrive, the savvy child (or adult) should take each offer in context and not turn down the first marshmallow out of hand. Because you know Jeter would take that first marshmallow 18.6% of the time.

The Marshmallow Test

aking progress incrementally has never been my strong suit. I tend to jump ahead - way ahead. But it's getting better. Now that I'm aware of it, I can write down my distant goal and then work backwards to find all the steps necessary to achieve it.

Case in point: Hooey Savvy's Cookie-Wise Pablo. A children's book on financial education: 27 chapters, 80+ songs and one budget dance. It'll be one tome, I reasoned, so parents and librarians wouldn't have to buy 27 separate books, which they wouldn't do anyway, they'd buy two or three if I was lucky, but they'd miss out on 90% of what I wanted to get across and nothing would change.

So have I changed my tune? Kinda.

While re-reading it recently, I came across my favorite chapter which I named the book after. "Cookie-Wise Pablo" is the marshmallow test in story form. What's the marshmallow test? Hey kid, do you want one marshmallow now or two later? Test after test has shown that kids that take the two later, that delay gratification, that plan ahead and save, that wait for the better deal, do better in life in the long run. If I had to make one single point about personal finance it would be: Wait for the two marshmallows, kid.

So I've extracted that chapter from the book, introduced Pablo in simpler more general terms, and am going to go with my best foot forward: A more traditional 32 page picture book about the most important thing I can say about personal finance.

It's far easier to digest. And hey, if folks like it and they ask for more, there's another 26 chapters waiting.

I've also returned to writing The Boston Squeeze which is a project I just enjoy getting lost in.

One for the money...

ver the years my sister has told me, in no uncertain terms, that I have no control over my facial expressions and that eventually, if they hadn't already, they would get me in trouble. That there were so many of them that she, after all these years, still had a hard time interpreting each eye-brow raise, twist of lips and rapid eye movement.

Yesterday, I finally saw with my own eyes what she meant.

In the morning, Judson Matthews and I shot my portion of the forthcoming Kickstarter video proposal. The last time I had to do anything akin to acting was Shakespeare & Company in fourth grade. Fortunately, Jud's an old hand and after a few rounds of takes we closed it out. He now needs about a week to edit those takes with footage he took the previous two days of B roll (time with little kids and their families, shots of an illustrator sketching out dry-erase board images) before I can then submit the project to Kickstarter for their approval.

After the shoot, I caught some of our session's playback. Jud did a great job making the scene look crisp and professional. But man, I had no idea that the face had so many moving parts. I also noticed the big difference I felt as a viewer when watching the presenter smile as opposed to being serious. Needless to say, you are all right: I should smile more.

The other good news from yesterday is that I now have an illustrator, Claudia Santillan, who put together this sketch of my pseudonym, Hooey Savvy. I look forward to working with Claudia as Hooey starts to hover off the ground.

The Calm Before The Storm

log's been awfully quiet since leaving Corpus Christi, but that, hopefully, is about to change. In the next few days the Kickstarter video proposal will be in the can, I'll submit the entire project for approval and then around Tuesday, June 12th the project should go live to the public.

Since starting Hooey this past fall, I've set out on a journey of a thousand steps. Finally submitting the project to Kickstarter and then, hopefully, to the public are the next big steps. Ideally, they represent steps #76 or #77, not #998 or #999. The next six weeks or so will be tell-tale.

Moment of Clarity

y last post, about twenty hours ago, asserted that, "the way forward is clear." After writing those words and before falling asleep I figured within 24 hours something would come along and muddle everything up.

On the contrary, the way forward has become more clear and simple. Go figure.

I've been banging my head against the wall under the assumption that the next step required landing an illustrator before I could start Hooey's Kickstarter campaign. This fell under the idea that the book had to be completely done, or at least appear so, to shop it.

I am a fool.

The emphasis now puts the focus on the Kickstarter campaign as the way to complete the project. Of course, the Kickstarter campaign will hopefully answer an even more important question: Does this project have popular support?

So what now? Now I revisit the script I've written for the Kickstarter video, I talk to videographers, tighten up the choreography of the Budget Dance, find some eight year old talent and maybe even a band to play a little ditty. I focus on the video, get it rolling and continue to monitor the rest.

Project Update: In search of an English to Mexican-Spanish translator, I posted a project description on Guru and have already received one application. Getting the translation done while I work on the video et al should be a time saver.

Corpus Christi Chronicle #3

riving into Corpus Christi on May 1st I put the fate of Hooey in the hands of a friend of a friend from college. Driving out of Corpus on May 14th, the friend of a friend and his wife had become my friends and the fate of Hooey looked sound.

I left Corpus Christi yesterday morning and while it's good to be back in familiar environs and not grabbing lunch from a hotel vending machine any more, I have to admit I already miss Corpus. I had just started to make friends, to make in-roads in the elementary school community and a couple restaurants already knew me by name.

A couple nights before leaving, a pair of cards from Houston living in Corpus asked me what it was like coming from NYC to Corpus and how I'd been received. It took twelve days for someone to ask me that. While it did surprise people that someone would come from NYC to Corpus intentionally, I was always treated well. I attribute that to the project.

I spent little time talking about myself and a vast majority of the time talking about Hooey. Time and again I got positive feedback and constructive criticism from locals. What I did not leave Corpus with is a green light to bring Hooey to a Corpus elementary school classroom in the fall. That being said, I'm merely sitting at the intersection waiting for the lights to change, not pulled over, four way flashers on, a dated road map sprawled out over the driver's wheel.

As always, there's more work to do, but the way forward is clear.

Project Update: First and foremost, big thanks to Bro Krift, Elaine Marsilio Krift and Nancy Vera in Corpus for their hospitality, their local expertise and their pick-up-the-phone-and-get-'er-done ways. Thanks also to Michael Kruse for putting me in touch with Bro. Unfortunately, the search for an illustrator continues. This remains the biggest roadblock to advancing the project to its next big stage: Kickstarter. With renewed focus, I'm talking to a handful of illustrators, but if they're to have Hooey ready by the fall school year, shit's gotta start very soon. If I have to start drawing stick figures I'll do it.

Corpus Christi Chronicle #2

hile I wait to meet with an attorney at the Corpus Christi Independent School District (CCISD), the principal of a school in that district (depending on how the first conversation goes) and a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC),  I've spent the majority of my time lately praying for Mariano Rivera and building the case for Hooey Savvy's Cookie-Wise Pablo through the requirements of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS; pronounced teeks) for elementary school students from kindergarden through fourth grade. Now that Mo's assured us he'll be back, I can focus on the task at hand.

The TEKS identify what students should learn each year and what they should be capable of. On its own, Hooey addresses the former, but not the latter. To correct this, I'm drafting a book-affiliated list of activities for students in or out of class. Activities include drawing key scenes from a given story, recording a version of one of the book's songs, taping a kids version of the Budget Dance (akin to "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes", but with rent, food and transportation among other items); writing a book review of Hooey; asking one's parents about their first jobs; and polling fellow students on allowance dos and don't as well as allowance going rates.

Fortunately, the TEKS do a nice job of laying out what they're looking for. I just have to meet that need with a little Hooey for each grade level. The social studies TEKS in particular already include economics and taxation (government) so I can clearly say that this or that chapter of Hooey will meet this or that requirement for this or that grade level.

Nap time, lunch and recess aside, what were your favorite educational activities in elementary school?

The Closer In A City Of Closers

ast summer, by far the shittiest summer I'd had in quite some time, I attended a Yankee game in the Bronx with a buddy. After the game, we hit Stan's. In Stan's I found a poster, this spot-on New York poster, which gave me a little perspective and hope. After a litany of bad news, the poster reminds the reader that, "We have the Yankees" and features a picture of Mariano Rivera on the mound.

On days like today, days when Rivera is not in the bullpen, but on his way to the disabled list with a torn ACL and, quite possibly, the end of his freakishly consistent and superb career, it's easy to say, "No, we had Rivera." Say what you will about Derek Jeter's intangibles and the Core Four, without Rivera do the Yankees achieve the success they have since '96? It can be argued that Rivera was the difference maker; the one player who set the Yankees apart from all the rest. The Yankees could play nine innings: With Mo, the opposition could only play seven, especially in October, 14 out of the last 15 Octobers.

I take solace in baseball because like daily life there is far more failure than success. Hell, the best hitters of all-time, the guys in the Hall of Fame, failed 70% of the time. With that in mind, Rivera's success provided solace against all the failure: Batters failed against him 79% of the time (.210 BAA). Watching Mo pitch was like watching a beautiful aberration. His skill, his talent and his performance never diminished. Clocks stopped. Entropy receded.

In the summer of 2009 when the Yankees hosted the All-Star Game in the new Yankee Stadium, another ad ran in the subways. It ran horizontally and was broken into seven or eight square blocks each block depicting a different iconic part of the city. The line? One I'd never heard before, not even between fans, but which rang truer than any I'd ever heard describe Rivera: "The closer in a city of closers." Poetry, just like the way he pitched.

All the broken bats on a pitch everyone knew was coming. Go ahead. Hit it. Mo fooled no one and everyone. He even sent bat makers back to the drawing board. And to those few that did hit Mo's cutter? Congratulations. We tip our cap. You beat our best. You lucky fuck.

Of course, the "No, we had Rivera" reaction is just that. Complete knee jerk. Do I think he'll pitch again? Yes, I do. Will it be in a real game? Hey, it's Mo, so you never know. If nothing else he'll pitch on Old Timers' Day; that great Yankee tradition of local baseball immortality; that annual Thank You from fans to former players and former players to fans each for remembering the other. Some day. He may even jog in from playing centerfield like he always wanted to.

Till then, the poster's right: We have the Yankees.

Corpus Christi Chronicle #1

olks in Corpus Christi don't beat around the bush: And amen to that! Today I started knocking on doors, shaking hands and making my pitch to local school administrators. In return, I got two encouraging signs and two clear hurdles.

First, the good. Both school administrators, a director and a principal, approved of Hooey and the need for tools such as Hooey to address financial education.

Second, the hurdles. Both school administrators also made it clear that while they liked Hooey, it and the participation of students had to pass the legal smell test and the educational requirements of the state of Texas. Fortunately, the director walked me to the legal services office and the principal led me to the Texas Education Agency's Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), the backbone of the state's public education system.

The attorney was in a meeting, but I'll follow up with him. As for TEKS, I'm writing up a compliance report for the principal that clearly delineates how Hooey satisfies the state's requirements on a number of fronts with specific examples from the book.

In other news: I met a sister-team that is putting together a quote to illustrate Hooey. New York rapper Maslab looks to cut a track from Hooey.

Tomorrow: Follow-up with the attorney; the search for an illustrator continues at the Metro School of Design; and other games of phone tag continue.

Here's How It Works

he idea went like this: Pick a community with a low average credit score; give away copies of Hooey Savvy's Cookie-Wise Pablo to kids at one school; challenge another local community to see which could improve its credit score most in a year; winner gets local bragging rights and better lending rates.

Unfortunately, from the research I've done and the people I've spoken to, that's not how it works.

A couple years ago Consumer Reports (CR) ran a piece about credit score companies and which one to go to for one's score. Along the way, CR did a nice job of educating the reader about who creates credit scores (lots of folks it turns out including Ford and I'm sure other car companies) and who uses the scores (lenders such as banks for mortgages or car dealerships for financing). So what did CR conclude?

"These credit scores probably aren't worth your money."

Not only is that not reassuring, but a disclaimer that one of the scores isn't even sold to lenders and is "not an endorsement or guarantee of your credit worthiness as seen by lenders" is scary. This sounds a lot like the testimony given by rating agencies before Congress that only said they provided "opinions" on creditworthiness. In other words, at the end of the day, lenders are going to choose which of your scores they like best (read can take you for).

As CR learned, one person can have a variety of credit scores, say, from good to excellent. So if I'm a lender and I see someone who qualifies as excellent, I'll want to lend to them, but at the "good" score rate to make more money.

Consumers have the power to ask what score a lender is using, but if you really need that loan are you going to bust the lender's chops? If you're the lender, are you going to take any flak from someone who needs your money when there's another sucker being born in your waiting room?

Lenders picking whatever number they want is bad news for borrowers. What's inconceivably worse than that? A bank (GS Capital Partners, take a wild guess what the GS stands for) buying a credit scoring company (TransUnion). What's to keep them from making everyone pay through the nose?

If I can't promise people that better credit scores will directly lead to better lending rates, I won't. Fortunately, I've come up with another idea which I'll bounce off folks in Texas when I get there next week.

Your Community on Hooey

s I work on the Kickstarter proposal and marketing plan for Hooey Savvy's Cookie-Wise Pablo, my kids book on financial education, I really want to show that it can have an impact on a community. To that end, I'd like to quantify that impact by tracking one community that reads Hooey against another similar community that does not.

Unfortunately, I sincerely doubt a single kids book can improve the average credit scores of a community in one, three, six or twelve months. It may take years. But, hey, you never know. Long story short, I'd like to show folks the progress they've made in a tangible and/or quantifiable way. What I do know is that it shouldn't take millions of tax payer dollars to achieve.

In Nudge, a book about libertarian paternalism, the authors, economists at the University of Chicago, give numerous examples of clever government initiatives that yield big results at little cost. Competition and public humiliation always seem to go down well. In this case, we could pit two communities against each other to see who can improve their average credit scores the most in a year...with the scores updated monthly in the local paper or painted on a wall in a very public place for all to see. Throwing in a prize for the winner (other than better credit scores and lending rates) never hurts. Getting elected officials to line up behind an out-of-towner might hurt.

Project Updates: Got a rather uncompetitive quote from the L.A. illustrator and so the search continues. Am hoping folks in Texas will be up to the task. Floramay Holliday is interested in giving some of Hooey's songs a go. She's got a great voice, lots of experience and a natural way about her music. I'm excited to hear what she comes up with. Thank you, Dewey Ervin, for bringing her talent to my attention. Have a meeting with Equifax next week in Atlanta. Looking forward to learning more about the company. Early work on my baseball work of fiction, The Boston Squeeze, continues to come together a little everyday.

Booked

ooked my flight to San Antonio today. Looking forward to talking with people in Corpus Christi and Harlingen, two cities with a couple of the lowest average credit scores in the country, about their experiences with money and education.

What do you wish they had taught you in school about money?

That Yankee Bastard

nce upon a time I played in a fantasy baseball league with a bunch of dudes from Georgia. My team name? That Yankee Bastard. TYB (or, in the rare week I had the upper hand, That Bastard) had its moments (Thank you, Justin Verlander, for that 86 point no-no in '07!). But having gone to school in the South, I have a good feeling for what flies and what hits the fan.

That being said, from what I've been told, Texas is not the South. I know Texans, I went to school with Texans, I like Texans. Believe it or not, I've found an odd kinship between New Yorkers and Texans. Both groups have a certain, "This is how we do things" mentality. (More explicitly, in NYC it's, "This is how we do things. Don't like it? Go fuck yourself." In Texas, I take the follow-up sentences to be implied.) Texas females are one of the few groups of newbies to NYC that I don't worry about.

But this time, I'll be on Texas turf.

Looking ahead, I've drafted a sketch of what I'd like to accomplish on this first trip:

1) It's important that I get a good feel for what financial education is being currently offered and how Hooey can complement that.

2) It's equally important to listen to folks in the community to make sure Hooey addresses the financial problems or gaps in learning that they say currently exist.

3) As a you-don't-even-have-to-open-your-mouth-'cause-we-already-know Yankee, I need to propose a simple, straight-forward, easily executable plan that will not get rejected out of hand. That plan, at this time, is to provide every public school third grader and every local public library in the chosen community with a free copy of Hooey Savvy's Cookie-Wise Pablo (in English or in Mexican-Spanish). I won't ask for it to become part of the curriculum and I won't ask for librarians to read it. I'd just like it to be available at home or in the local library.

4) I need to shake a lot of hands and arrange a lot of face time. I could easily email all the folks that I've built a database around, but they can just as easily drag and drop my ass into their trash cans. By making the trip I show I am interested in their community and that my ass, for as scrawny as it is, does not belong in the trash.

5) Thanks to the standards set by "No Child Left Behind" and the Texas Department of Education's buying power, it would behoove me to bring Hooey in line with these standards as best as possible.

Those are the broad strokes. Jamie Oliver didn't just show up in West Virginia and commandeer an elementary school kitchen. It takes time and trust. If I can put in the time and build the trust, hopefully I can accomplish a fraction of what he has.

Project Updates: The L.A. illustrator has looked at the text of Hooey, likes it and is putting together a budget proposal. To fill in other gaps in the budget, I've also reached out to a local video production guy about a short Kickstarter presentation, have put together a preliminary list of Kickstarter rewards to offer and have some musicians potentially interested in recording some of the songs from Hooey. The Boston Squeeze continues apace. Have finally found a format that will carry the story and, thanks to Mr. Patrick Jordan, I've staked out some possible locations for the Squeeze's fictional Boston-area stadium. It's not a Pettitte curve yet, but it sure ain't a hanging curve.

No A Students Anywhere

xperian, one of three major credit rating agencies, reported the top ten and bottom ten cities in the U.S. according to average credit score this past fall (on a scale of 501-990). The top ten cities clustered around the Midwest, notably Wisconsin (congrats Wausau (789), Madison (785), Green Bay (780) and LaCrosse (777)!). The bottom ten cities were overwhelmingly located in the South and Texas (Texas, of course, being Texas).

Those who reported on Experian's information hypothesized that the findings were based on two particular causes: high unemployment and high foreclosure rates. Nothing shocking there, I suppose. If you're unemployed how are you going to pay your bills and your mortgage?

But are those really the only two reasons?

Let's go to the 2010 U.S. Census for a minute, shall we? A little demographics, please. Each of the bottom ten cities had either Hispanic or African American majorities, often exceedingly so. The top ten? Not so much. Only San Francisco (781), helped by an Asian population of 33.3%, by a shade over 1.5% had a "minority" majority.

So minorities, Asians aside, don't know jack about how to balance their finances, right? They can't hold a job, they just take handouts from the government, right? Or they're all suckers. Yeah?

This reminds me of the folks who said the former-Soviet republics didn't understand capitalism and that's why their economies didn't take off after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As economist Hernando de Soto later explained, they understood capitalism, but their new governments never updated the laws to allow for capitalism, property rights in particular. In other words, the best explanation usually isn't that straightforward and requires a little more digging.

It's also difficult to overlook the long history in the U.S. of higher mortgage lending rates to minorities ("African-American borrowers pay an additional $425 for their loans. Latino borrowers pay an additional $400. (The average fee for all bowers was $3,133 on loans that averaged about $105,000)" (Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Here's my hypothesis: The top ten cities, Wisconsin's in particular, are areas known for their Scandinavian/Germanic roots and heritage. Are the Scandinavians and Germans financial geniuses? They seem to do well, but that's not what interests me. What interests me is how long they've been in the country, never mind the Midwest alone, and how they seem to have a tradition of handing down (pardon the repetition) good financial habits and knowledge.

The bottom ten cities? Three Texas cities (El Paso (710), Harlingen (686) and Corpus Christi (702)) on the list are near the Mexican border. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a high percentage of the folks who live in these three cities do not speak English as a first language and have not been in the U.S. for longer than a generation or two. In other words, I have a feeling they have little to no tradition of handing down good financial habits and knowledge that fit within the U.S. financial and legal systems.

Question is, what will help them more? A Mexican-Spanish version of a book on financial education (to start a tradition of good financial habits) or something else, such as...receiving their monthly bills in Spanish? or having mortgage or credit card applications to review and fill out in Spanish? (assuming that is not already the case).

And the African American communities, you ask? English should not be a problem for them, you say. And you are probably right. The best hypothesis I can come up with is that white communities in the U.S. have had a 400 (approximately 12-13 generation) year head start in terms of amassing capital and partaking in the U.S. financial and legal worlds whereas the African American communities have had less than 100 years (or approximately 3-4 generations) as citizens with rights (ie, technically able of participating in the economy and politics of the country as opposed to being intentionally kept out which still happens informally). Never mind the interruption of knowledge transfer that incarceration brings which both communities have predominantly dealt with the last 20-30 years in particular (and that's erring on the short-end).

In short, I suspect we in the U.S. have relied upon family members to teach us about money because I don't think it is happening in school consistently if at all (Wherefore art thou, Home Ec?). While it's easy to target the bottom ten cities, Experian reports that the national average credit score in 2011 was around 749, or in terms of grades, a C. So the best cities with their 780s, are what C+/B- then? And 686 is, say, a D? No A students anywhere then.

Wall Street and Washington can point fingers at each other, but until we educate people better about money and the basic laws surrounding money, the same mistakes will continue to occur. 

Needless to say, I have some homework to do. Homework that requires a little travel and talking to folks.

How did I get here? I got here by asking myself, "Are you sure that the educational book you've written will answer the questions and problems of those who most need it?" I'm still not sure and so I'm going to find out.

Progress Report: Talking to an illustrator in L.A. for Hooey. Conceptually making progress with The Boston Squeeze to make it tighter because, to be honest, it was getting out of hand. If I can make it go from a knuckler that doesn't knuckle (its present condition) to a tightly wound Andy Pettitte curveball, I'll be a happy man.

Jimmying Square Pegs Into Round Holes

his week Spring Training ended and managers and general managers around baseball had to decide who to keep with the big club, who to send down and who to "designate for assignment", baseball's euphemism for getting canned.

The Yankees' Justin Maxwell, 28, hit .310 this spring, but because of the number of outfielders the Yanks already have, he got cut. Francisco Cervelli, 26, the Yankees' backup catcher the last few years got sent down to AAA after the club traded for another catcher who's older, has less experience and isn't as familiar with the club (probably as an insurance policy against the smattering of concussions that Cervelli's had the last few years). And then the Washington Nationals sent down John Lannan to AAA after being their Opening Day starter the last two years and having a good spring. Who knows what that was all about?

One of the hardest parts about writing is tossing out material. Last summer I outlined 10-12 pieces for a collection of baseball short stories. Each story had its own angle and its own cast of characters.  I liked all of it. Now that I've decided to make the collection of short stories into The Boston Squeeze, the brief history of a team, I have to admit that some of the stories and their characters won't make the cut.

I've been racking my brain how to make them all fit, but it just ends up being like jimmying square pegs into round holes. Sure, I could break out some sandpaper or a chisel, but they'll still wobble. They're not a good fit.

But like Cervelli, I know where to reach them when I need them. And hopefully they'll be back with the club soon.

Alicia's Blue Hats

ust finished watching Field of Dreams in preparation for Opening Day. While I've seen it a hundred times, this time I particularly appreciated the scene where Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) interviews long-time residents of Chisholm, Minnesota about Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. The last man he interviews goes into great detail about Doc Graham's relationship with his wife...by telling a story about how shopkeepers in town stocked nothing but blue hats knowing that Doc would buy one for her if he walked by.

A lazy writer only creates Doc Graham. A good writer creates Doc and his wife. A great writer creates Doc, gives his wife a name (Alicia) and builds a history between them that we only hear about second hand - never see. Amen.

Baseball's Afterlife

n 1997 the expansion Florida Marlins (established 1993) beat the Cleveland Indians (established 1901) to claim their first World Series title. Baseball purists scoffed at their victory. They hadn't paid their dues. They hadn't been around long enough. Wah wah wah.

The Marlins then disbanded the team and lost 108 games in 1998, the worst finish by a defending World Series champ ever. Since 1999 (including their 2003 World Series title year; average attendance 16,089), they have never finished better than 15th in attendance (2000), only better than 26th that one year.  Hoo-rah.

In baseball more than perhaps any other sport, this is justice. No one should play 162 games a year and win it all by mistake goes the thinking. Stretch this thinking out and no one should have one great year and make the Hall of Famer. No one should do one great thing and be awarded keys to the Pearly Gates. The highest honors - immortality, never to be forgotten, remembered for eternity - come with time. That's tradition. Tradition is built over time.

A number of religions offer versions of the afterlife and baseball is no different. Baseball, the religion of Bull Durham's Annie Savoy, offers its players, executives and broadcasters a whole slew of options: Cooperstown; retired numbers; days at the stadium in one's honor; fans booing new players who try to wear your old number; and for those lucky enough to play for the Yankees, Old-Timers' Day.

With the days of gold watches upon retirement and pensions going the way of the Expos, the tradition of Old-Timers' Day becomes a bit more precious. While I find it hard to believe the Yankees are the only team that has retired players that their fans are willing to come out and see again, I have no idea why only one out of Major League Baseball's 30 teams celebrates their retired players every year. But as they say, the less of something there is the more precious it is.

The same can be said for induction into the Hall of Fame or having one's number retired; the odds of such achievements make Mario Mendoza look like a Sunday beer league batting champ. Assumption into baseball's afterlife depends on performance (either wonderful or wacky) over a long period of time.  That's tradition.

At the end of the day, whether you're let in by St Peter or the Baseball Writers Association of America, you gain immortality. In other words, you are not forgotten. You are remembered for eternity.

What is unique about what the Yankees have done by making Old-Timers' Day an annual event is that they have made heaven a living tradition; whether you were an all-star or not. You wore the pinstripes, you did us proud. Put the uniform back on. Play in the sun. Tip your cap when the crowd cheers your name. Thank you.

As the '97 Marlins learned, it's possible to be great and to be forgotten by one's fans. Had the long-suffering Indians won the '97 Series members of that team would be heroes in Cleveland forever because the Indians have tradition. The team has existed longer than most of their fans. In other words, by existing longer than the lives of their fans there is a foreverness about them. The Marlins, with the newfound celebrity of a lotto winner, could not claim that.

To write about an expansion team in The Boston Squeeze is to write about those on the short end of immortality; those who lay the foundations of the tradition, a foundation that can eventually support immortality, a foundation similar to the ones we build with our lives, our families, our communities and so forth.

The Squeeze Is On

n recent years it has become de rigueur for authors - rookies in particular - to handle their own marketing. At first the idea grated on me, especially when it made the marketing folks of publishing companies look redundant which didn't stop them from taking their cut. Now with groups such as Kickstarter, I like the idea of putting together my own marketing campaign (probably because I'm not paying some clown to watch me work).

I mention this because as you may have noticed my posts recently now bounce back and forth between the business end of getting Hooey Savvy off the ground and writing the next book. So for Hooey, I'm working on how to present my project on Kickstarter and acting as project manager.

The next project, a collection of baseball short stories I'm tentatively calling The Boston Squeeze, is coming along. I originally wrote it as 10-12 independent short stories, but now I'm working them together under the umbrella of the Squeeze, Boston's fictional National League expansion squad. That idea alone has me tickled, but I'm also excited about the new process I've developed to write this one which I'll discuss next week.

They All Laughed

esterday the old Gershwin tune, "They All Laughed" came to me. While the song has a romantic angle to it, it's based on once-considered laughable business ideas; the thought of Edison recording sound, the Wright brothers saying man could fly, Whitney's cotton gin, Fulton's steamboat, Henry Ford's Tin Lizzie. It's also about how quickly the public changes its tune once the laughable idea becomes popular.

Yesterday someone told me I couldn't contact a certain illustrator about my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy. Why would a five-time New York Times best-selling illustrator want to work with you, this person asked. Maybe it's because I have a really good fucking idea, I thought.

And so today I emailed Mr Peter Brown proposing my idea and why I thought his work complemented my story well. If you'd like to get in on the act, email Mr Brown and say:

"They all laughed at Mardus,

When he asked to work with Brown.

They all laughed at Hooey Savvy,

Now they've all got it down.

It's the same old cry.

They laughed at him writing you

Said he was reaching for the moon.

But oh, will you come through

and make them change their tune?"

Have a good weekend everyone!

Seeing-Eye Single

ormer baseball commissioner and Yale professor Bart Giamatti once wrote in his essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

The last couple seasons I've indulged in baseball the way some indulge in drink adopting the quotidian schedule of my team and its players in lieu of my own. This past summer, though, I started to chart a different course. No, I did not stop following or playing baseball. That's heresy. Rather, I started started writing a collection of baseball short stories.

Why spend the off-season doing what I did every off-season (Reading DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall, watching The Bad News Bears and waiting for pitchers and catchers to report) when I could create my own?

That's part of the reason for the collection. In truth, I find that I only write about something when I find there to be something seriously off-kilter about it. I wrote Any Color You Want in 2007-08 because I thought it priceless that the U.S. continued to send Peace Corps volunteers out into the world, but that we couldn't take care of ourselves (and wouldn't take help from others). I wrote Hooey Savvy because despite all the talk about the financial crises, people are still afraid or uncertain about how to talk about money, never mind teach kids about it.

So what's out of whack about baseball? Like any religion or family, baseball has its traditions. Whether we know the origins of those traditions is another matter. Whether we follow those traditions is yet another. Those are two angles I look at.

Otherwise, the language, history, and culture of baseball lends well to stretching out metaphors. Once upon a time writers used symbols and metaphors to avoid political persecution. Today, it seems, symbols and metaphors (indirect speech) are the spoonfuls of honey that we coat our crushed up pills in. I can rewrite E.B. White's essay Here Is New York and deride the quaint 18 inches of privacy of his extinct city (to a chorus of Bronx cheers) or I can write a comedy about a ten year-old blogger of a minor league team who is called out by the players (to a chuckle or two) and make the same point. I prefer the haha route.

Plus, I'd like to have the book have its own corresponding set of baseball cards for all the characters in it. If nothing else, that'll force me to focus on giving my characters detail.

In my previous work, I've swung for the fences with big ideas. This is more of a seeing-eye single before I go back to the home run derby later this year.

Progress Update: The fourth draft of my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy, is done. And yes, it is more memorable than it was a draft ago. 27 stories, 80 plus songs, 120 pages. I've passed it on to some teachers and folks who know far more about economics than I for their feedback. Now I need to read up on the competition. I'd also like to hit the road to conduct interviews in areas with average low credit scores to learn what failed and what education is or isn't doing to remedy the situation.

I Like Byron, I Give Him a 42...

This past summer I fumbled along as a pastry cook to my chef's irritation. In an attempt to improve my production, he asked me what the greatest American invention was. A rhetorical question, I allowed him to answer: The assembly line. "Set up your assembly line and let it work for you," he told me. I did it because if I didn't I was gone. With time I learned that it took the thinking out of cooking and whenever you can take thinking out of anything you gain in speed.

My last novel, Any Color You Want, took at least nine drafts and a few years. But, that's the way novel writing goes, right? It takes drafts, it takes years. It's not cooking. It's not something that comes out of the oven the same day ready. Right?

Or is it? In Michael Eldridge's screenwriting course he made us fill out character questionnaires. These questionnaires forced us to think long and hard about each character, major or minor, to the point where these characters themselves could have entire screenplays written about them.

In preparation for The Boston Squeeze, a book of baseball short stories that I started writing last summer, I dug up the seven questions Eldridge asked us to consider for each character. I then tweaked what he gave us and built my own assembly line.

But perhaps "assembly line" is not the appropriate phrase. It has a physical, orderly connotation to it. Let's call it mapping. I'll map out each character, story and location three times each because I find my first attempt typically errs on the side of cliché. It takes another two to break through that wall of stereotypes to find the individual.

Once these are ready I won't have to think about each character, story or location. I can just write.

For some, the idea of a literary assembly line is apostasy. Writing should flow, they argue. It should come from inspiration. I do not believe there is one approach to writing. I have yet to attend a reading where an attendee didn't ask the author about their "process" during the question and answer session. I have also yet to attend a reading where an author gave a good answer. By good, I mean a detailed, useful answer. Like Mr Keating in Dead Poets Society, I have no desire to Moneyball writing. But I believe that there are detailed processes available for writers that, if followed, will not only separate them from amateurs, but streamline the writing process.

Another benefit of this system, hopefully, is more consistency. A good writer will retain command over his characters from start to finish; a poor writer loses track of his characters' characteristics. This leads to the characters either saying or doing things you'd wouldn't expect them to or you get the feeling that they aren't characters at all, but rather personifications of whatever clever thought or idea the author just had and can't help but share the story (and character) be damned. Oh have I done that before.

I won't know the results of this experiment till the Squeeze is through, but I'm hopeful.

Progress Update: Sent in Hooey Savvy to the copyright office. Yeehaw.