It’s natural, I suppose, for people intimately involved with something to forget that the rest of the world is not as obsessed or knowledgeable as they are.

We’ve all experienced it: we ask some computer geek to show us how to do something. The geek executes 15 keystrokes in 2.5 seconds and says “There! See how easy that was.”

And of course, we’re still clueless because we have no idea what just transpired. And then the geek gets annoyed because we’re not catching on!

People in the publishing industry are like that: We’re an insular community with our own jargon and own ways of doing things. Anything we do and say looms large in our lives and minds and we assume that the rest of the world is as knowledgeable and obsessed as we are.

The truth is that the rest of the world doesn’t give a rat’s ass! They don’t understand how our particular “system” works, and we shouldn't assume that they do.

The other day I experienced a humbling reminder of those facts.

A woman I met recently wanted to read my first two books. So she went to the local public library and didn’t find either book there (one is a scholarly book unsuited for a public library and the other is a book about Florida and why would a library in the middle of Iowa have a book about Florida?)

So she emailed me and asked me if I had any copies she could borrow to read.

Now if I were a better self-promoter, I would have explained to her that, hey, do ya think I'm doin’ this for free? No! Go BUY the damn books.

But I’m a softie and a lousy self-promoter. So I rifled through my shelves and found a copy of the plumbing book to loan her and then I gave her a copy of the Key West book to keep (because I have about twenty copies of the paperback on hand).

She's a truly lovely person person and I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that I only earn money from writing when people BUY my books.

The encounter was a good reminder that the average person has no idea how publishing and writing work. And why should they? It’s not their business to know!

Yeah, it’s frustrating when people ask me to loan them copies of my books.

Yeah, it's frustrating when I have a new book come out and people ask me for free copies. They don’t realize that I only get a handful of free copies and that I must give those to give to people who assisted the venture in some way. (For example, I get twenty free copies of the beer book. But my list of people who contributed in some way contains 45 names! So I'll have to buy 25 extra copies just to give to them.)

Or people say to me, “Gee, are you ever going to finish that book? What’s taking you so long?” Or, “How hard can it be to write a book about beer? Just find some facts and write them down!”

They don’t understand (and again, why should they?), that researching the history of beer or Key West or whatever takes years. That once I finish the research, then I start an even more challenging (and time-consuming) project: taking hundreds of thousands of “facts” and weaving them into an interesting story.

I’m not complaining. I do what I do because I love to research and I love to write.

Nor am I being critical of the public at large. Most people aren't writers. There’s no REASON why they should understand how the system works.

I do wonder, however, if writers have themselves to blame.

Certainly I blame myself. Here I had a chance to educate someone, who might in turn educate others, and I blew it.

Writers could -- and SHOULD -- do a better job of explaining themselves to the rest of the world. Of making it clear to “outsiders” that we don’t work for free. That we only earn money when people buy the results of our labor.

(That, by the way, is why I’m such a fanatic about “stealing” music. I won’t download music for free, nor will I accept CDs of music copied from a disk owned by someone else. Musicians work hard for their money. When we steal their music, we’re stealing their income.)

So what’s the point? Well, there’s not one. Except that I hope that the next time someone asks to borrow one of my books, I’ll stiffen my spine, summon my courage, and explain how the “system” works.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 05:27 PM | Permalink

There's a column in this morning's NY Times about the TED conference (Technology * Entertainment * Design), an annual four-day event during which VERY brainy people exchange ideas.

Anyway, videos of the participants' talks are now being posted at the TED site. These are fascinating presentations of mostly out-of-the-box ideas by some of the planet's brightest and most talented people.

Go to http://www.ted.com and click on "tedtalks."

Don't miss the talk given by Hans Rosling. Who knew statistics about income and infant mortality could be so fascinating?!

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 02:52 PM | Permalink

This morning’s Wall Street Journal contained an article about Starbucks and kids. Seems that some critics are howling that Starbucks is “marketing” to kids by serving up overly sweet confections and by selling DVDs and tapes of kids’ books.

Okay, I’ll bite: What the hell is wrong with that? The people at Starbucks are in business to make money. They want people -- all people, even, gasp, parents -- to frequent their stores. If a parent comes in with kids, well, he or she won’t come back often or again if there’s nothing there for the kids to consume.

The crux of the matter is, of course, fat and calories. Yes, the do-gooders who think government should monitor our diets are upset that some Starbucks products contain lotso calories and lotso fat.

Among them -- surprise! surprise! -- are the zealots at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of my all-time my least favorite organizations. (The outfit’s name cracks me up. At the very least, head watchdog Michael Jacobson ought to change it to something more accurate, like, say, Center for Pseudo-Science in the Name of Our Own Personal Pet Peeves.) The folks at CSPI are shocked, shocked!, by the amount of fat and calories in a Starbucks Frappuccino, as is Barbara Rolls, the Penn State prof who came up with “volumetrics.”

A few years ago, I dismissed this kind of crap with eye-rolling and groans, but not anymore. Now I see complaints like this as another face of the cult of victimization and as yet another example of the mania for government-as-parent.

Let’s just say that these attack dogs succeed in banning Frappuccinos (and french fries and shakes and doughnuts). Seems to me that what lies at the bottom of this slippery slope of excess government is parenting-by-mandate: Some government agency (The Bureau for Parental Authorization? The Agency for Permission to Parent?) will decide who is fit to parent and who is not.

You’re overweight (at least according to government standards)? Sorry, no kids for you. You enjoy a drink or two before dinner? Too bad, Jane, no permission to parent for you! You eat the occasional Big Mac? We’ll schedule you for a hysterectomy.

Obviously this sounds insane, but so does the notion that government ought to dictate what foods can and can not be purchased in a supposedly free marketplace. Now excuse me while I go eat some bacon and eggs.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 02:29 PM | Permalink

Anyone remember that song?

Yesterday I finally finished proofreading the manuscript. That means I finished reading aloud 412 pages of text -- backward.

My voice is shot and my brain is gone.

Proofreading provokes a particularly intense form of existential angst (hmmm....is that redundant??):

Sitting there slogging my way from one page to the next, listening to my droning, increasingly raspy voice; becoming alarmed and unnerved by the number of typos; wondering how many of the bastards I'm MISSING as I read .....

..... I wondered: Why the HELL am I doing this? I just spent five years of my life on this book. No one will care. No one reads anymore. People who do read don't want to plunk down actual cash for books (remember: writers earn zero dollars from borrowed and used books).

Down into the slough of despair I slid.

Yes, let's hear it for proofreading. Every writer's favorite activity! No wonder so many books are full of typos, misspelled words, dropped lines, and innaccuracies. Who in his or her right mind would knowingly subject him/herself to such torture??

Oh. Right. Because there's almost nothing as satisfying as writing a book; as exhilerating as creating something from nothing.

So I guess proofreading is the writer's equivalent of labor pains: women give suffer fifty kinds of torture giving birth, and then that sweet little face blows the memory of that pain right out of their minds.

Yes, you guessed it: I'm chomping at the bit to start a new project so that, three or four years hence, I can sit at my kitchen table again for seven straight days reading several hundred pages of text aloud backward. Chomping at the bit to fall in love with writing all over again.

What kind of FOOOLLLLL am I? Who [always falls] in love?

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every day we hear about more deaths in Iraq. It's entirely to easy to ignore the news. Indeed, for the most part, I've simply stopped following the story.

But it was hard to ignore the news about the two young soldiers who were tortured and murdered. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker stand as a horrific -- and tragic -- reminder of the real "story" out of Iraq (and Afghanistan): Which is that the longer we stick around and "fight terrorism," the more terrorists there will be to fight.

Our presence there is the fuel that feeds the rage that leads young Iraqis (and Palestinians and Saudis and Egyptians) to join the "insurgents" and so add still more fuel to fires that will likely burn for decades. Fuels the rage that leads otherwise sane people to torture, mutilate, and murder other human beings.

If we'd gone into Iraq (or Afghanistan) and built power plants and schools and water purification plants, things surely would have turned out differently, less tragically.

But we didn't do that and now there are far more terrorist "insurgents" than there were on September 11, 2001.

I don't see how this can ever end.

And why do I find myself thinking often -- and with regret -- of life in these United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

And no, none of this is meant to detract from or politicize the deaths of Pfc. Menchaca and Pfc. Tucker. I cannot begin to imagine how their families must feel right now.

Not only have they lost a precious family member, but they must live with the knowledge that Menchaca and Tucker were so brutalized in the last moments of their lives that their remains could not immediately be identified.

I grieve for them, and for all the families -- American, Iraqi, or otherwise -- who have endured the tragedies that this hatred and rage have spawned.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 01:22 PM | Permalink

The process of pushing the beer book through production continues.

Right now I'm wading through my least favorite part of the whole project: proofreading. That means I'm reading the ENTIRE, I repeat ENTIRE, manuscript aloud -- backward. It's the only way to catch typos, words that shouldn't be there, use of the same word twice in the same sentence....

It's also boring beyond belief. I'd rather do just about anything but.

It's also one of the most important and necessary tasks of making a book. 'Cause there ain't nuthin' more annoying than reading a book full of misspellings........ So that's how I'm spending the next few days.

This blog entry is a prime example of why I rather resent blogs ever having been invented. Once you have the word "BLOG" on your website, well, you're more or less obliged to post SOMETHING in said blog.

But what if the blogger doesn't have much to say? Well, heh heh, we all know the answer to that question, don't we??: blogs overflowing with the exquisitely boring minutiae of someone's life.

Kind of like this blog entry...........

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 03:06 PM | Permalink

Welcome to my non-blog or, as I prefer to call it, my Observation Post.

Why, you ask, is this not a blog? (Yes, I’ll get to the main topic, beer, in a minute.)

Here’s the thing about writers and blogs: Writers write in order to earn a living. Some write books. Some write magazine articles. Some write both. A few specialize in blogerature, but most writers earn their living in print, not onscreen. As a result, we don’t have time to maintain a daily blog because we’re too busy writing the books and articles that make up our bread and butter.

So if a blog is a literary form updated daily or at least regularly, this isn’t a blog. I won’t be posting the excruciating details of my life on a daily basis. Or every other day. Maybe not even every week. Not because I’m lazy or boring, but because I don’t have time to do so.

Okay, now that we’ve got that settled, on to more important stuff. Beer. Not, I hasten to add, that this blog will be only, always, and forever about beer. I’m ready, willing, and able to rant on just about any subject. (Don’t EVEN get me started on the subject of customer “service” at the phone company.)

Anyway, back to beer.

2006 marks the 130th anniversary of Budweiser’s American debut. In March 1876, Carl Conrad, a St. Louis wine importer, introduced Budweiser, which was brewed for him by his friend Adolphus Busch at the brewery owned by Busch and his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser.

In 1891, Busch gained outright ownership of the beer, which had already made him and his Anheuser-Busch brewery famous. He once commented that he was “often greeted as “Mr. Budweiser” instead of Mr. Busch.”

Today, Budweiser is perhaps the most famous beer in the world. (I didn’t say the most liked; I said the most famous.) This one brand accounts for a whopping eighteen percent of all the beer sold in the United States.

That probably explains the minor uproar that erupted over a front-page story that appeared in the April 26 edition of the Wall Street Journal. According to the report, sales of Bud have slipped recently because consumers want a “stronger,” more flavorful beer.

A-B officials explained, that yes, over the years they’ve reduced the amount of hops in the lager. Now, however, in response to a changing American palate, they plan add more hops to the Budweiser brewvats.

“See,” said some folks (including many bloggers). “We told you so. Bud is nothing but watery swill and now even A-B is admitting it.”

Not so fast. This tempest in a teapot (or brewvat) demands the perspective of history.

This is not the first time brewmasters at Anheuser-Busch have tinkered with company recipes, nor is A-B the first brewery to alter its beer. The history of the American brewing industry is one of constant change and adaptation. Indeed, Budweiser itself is a product of the most important moment of adaptation.

The American brewing industry was born in the 1840s, during a wave of German immigration. In the 1840s and 1850s, brewers sold their beer primarily to other German-Americans. Many English-speaking, “native” Americans refused to drink alcohol, and those who did mostly drank whiskey, scorning scorned beer as too heavy and filling.

But in the 1860s, a second-generation of brewers entered the business. The most ambitious among them, men like Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch, longed to expand their markets. To do so, they had to create a beer that would appeal to Americans.

So they and other brewers began experimenting. Using translucent, relatively light-bodied Bohemian lagers as their model, they began adding corn and rice to their brewvats.

The results were a revelation: The new lemon-colored lagers were nearly effervescent. They sparkled with a brilliant sheen and, thanks to the corn or rice, possessed a rich, creamy flavor. The new brews were not easy to make, nor were they cheap: in 1878, a bottle of Budweiser retailed for a dollar a bottle, at a time when a schooner of conventional all-malt lager sold for a nickel.

The new lagers elbowed heavy all-malt beers right off the table. In 1875, the Schafer brothers of New York tried to switch back to an all-malt lager. Sales plunged. Consumers wanted nothing to do with the old-fashioned heavy stuff.

Budweiser was perhaps the most famous, because the finest, of the new American-style lagers. Between 1876 and 1882, Conrad sold twenty million bottles of the stuff! In 1891 alone, Adolphus Busch sold fourteen million bottles. That may not sound like much now, but back then, that was a LOT of beer.

So if A-B today is reinventing Budweiser, well, August Busch III and his son August IV are only following a path paved by the men who preceded them.

To me, that’s the important story: for more than century, one generation after another of Busch men have kept a firm hold on their creation and an even firmer grip on the title of “nation’s largest brewery.” And they’ve done so by paying attention to what customers want, and by focusing first, last, and always on quality.

You may not like the kinds of beer A-B makes, but even the most diehard anti-Buscher has to admit: the Busch family does what it does better and with more consistency than any other beermaker in the world. That’s no small feat.

I don’t know about you, but I admire excellence, quality, and passion no matter where I find it. So I tip my virtual hat to Anheuser-Busch, and send that fine American institution my sincere best wishes on this, the 130th anniversary of the birth of Budweiser.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 09:52 PM | Permalink