I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the redbuds and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the mountain laurels fill the air with the scent of grape Kool-Aid, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the mosquitoes?

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.

Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and the grim aftermath, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. A story on Grist.org suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.

That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that radioactive waste….

These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.

It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys—each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, Moby-Turtle?—loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media—who could resist such a story?—and Hohn became obsessed with them.

The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho Jeff Meikle), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.

There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “peach cobbler” and “tax rebate.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which unnaturally swollen sluggers rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.

Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our NCAA tournament brackets, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for their baby-blue uniforms, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)

I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of Easter chocolate will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Some of you may not know that I am officially a Published Author and therefore—let’s face it—kind of a big deal, but it’s true. And I have to confess that I’ve never really gotten over the thrill of seeing my name on a book cover, which is highly, even dangerously, addictive.

I was reminded of my own importance recently when I was asked to moderate a session at this weekend’s Texas Book Festival. The session is called “A Level Playing Field: Texas Baseball in Black and White,” and features two books about race and Our National Pastime: Our White Boy, by Jerry Craft, and Playing in Shadows: Texas and Negro League Baseball, by Rob Fink. Apparently my friend Dick Holland, the former head of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, suggested me as a moderator because he recalled that, many years ago, I had written a book about baseball.

What Dick, and the organizers of the book festival, probably didn’t know is that I was quite possibly the most naïve first-time author in the history of the publishing industry. If there was a mistake to be made in the course of writing and selling a manuscript, I probably made it; heck, I probably made some mistakes that hadn’t even existed before. Even today, the full extent of my ignorance fills me with awe.

Now, I’ve been a baseball fan since childhood, but this particular misadventure started about twenty years ago. After that tirelessly self-promoting cretin Pete Rose was busted for gambling, I became obsessed with an early twentieth century major league star named Hal Chase, for reasons that remain obscure; perhaps I read something comparing Rose and Chase, though I honestly can’t recall. Chase was phenomenally talented, handsome, charismatic, and also, apparently, an incorrigible cheat; in fact, he was accused (though never convicted) of helping to arrange the infamous Black Sox scandal. I decided to write an article about him for The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, the annual journal of the Society for American Baseball Research. In the course of researching and writing the article, I began to think that somebody should write a book about Chase, and I couldn’t think of a single reason why that somebody shouldn’t be me.

In reality, of course, there were plenty of reasons why that somebody shouldn’t be me, including the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry. Did I need an agent, or should I try to sell the manuscript myself? Should I write it on spec, or should I hold off until I found a publisher willing to pony up an advance? In retrospect, the story of how I became a genuine published author is filled with missteps, ineptitude, and, ultimately, blind luck. I offer it up here as a cautionary tale to other would-be authors.

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me almost a decade to produce an actual finished book. In my defense, I was working on it mostly on weekends, since I had a full-time job, a wife, and two young children. In truth, though, the research and writing was the fun part; the hard part was trying to figure out what to do if I ever actually finished the thing. Early on, a dear college friend suggested I seek advice from her sister, a big-time literary agent in New York (she represented A. S. Byatt, among others). I had no illusions that she would want to represent me herself—I was a nobody, and besides, she specialized in fiction—but she said she’d be glad to offer some suggestions if I sent her a sample of my writing. I sent her a draft chapter or two, and she wrote me back to say she really liked them and would like to take me on as her client.

Well, heck, I thought, this writin’ business is easy! I had found myself a real agent right out of the box. Piece of cake.

Meanwhile, I was grinding away on my research. On weekends, I’d head to the Library of Congress, where I spent countless hours cranking through film of daily newspapers. I traveled, at my own expense, to Cooperstown and San Jose and Tucson to conduct research and interviews. In 1994 I even wangled an introduction to Ken Burns, hoping to convince him that Chase should feature prominently in his forthcoming documentary Baseball; he listened patiently, and later very graciously put me in touch with Chase’s granddaughter, who was estranged from the rest of the family.

Probably the best thing I did in the course of my research was put one of those “author seeking information” notices in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Soon thereafter I received a letter from the director of the University of Illinois Press, who said that he had seen my notice and thought my book sounded like one in which they’d be interested; I thanked him and smugly referred him to my big-shot New York agent.

Some time later I got another note from him saying that he had never gotten a response from my agent. Then I realized that she wasn’t responding to my letters and phone calls either.

After a year or so it became clear even to me that she wasn’t actually doing anything on my behalf; I suspect now that she had agreed to take me on as sort of a favor, given the connection with her sister, but (perhaps understandably) I had ended up at the bottom of her list. I finally sent her a polite letter saying that I had decided to end our relationship. (She never answered it.)

So I was back at square one. Illinois was no longer interested, and neither, after an initial flirtation, was Oxford University Press, but I finally found my own way to McFarland and Company, an outfit in North Carolina that published a number of baseball history books. I imagined battling with their editorial staff over word choice and the overall structure of the manuscript, like Tom Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins; instead, they ran exactly what I sent them. They told me that they would publish my book in paperback only, which was mildly disappointing, but I was in no position to argue.

Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball’s Biggest Crook finally appeared in 2001, and as of this writing ranks 1,655,584th in sales on Amazon.com. (Woo hoo!) The nice people at McFarland send me annual royalty checks (typically for about thirty-seven dollars), which allow me to call myself a professional writer. With any luck, I’ll never actually sit down and calculate the amount of money I’ve earned from my book versus the amount of money I spent producing it.

The really scary thing, though, is that I’m sometimes tempted to try it all again. Just this week, while we were having lunch, my son asked me when I was going to write another book, and it got me thinking again about that idea I had several years ago, for a biography of the old R&B singer Chuck Willis….

See? This writing business is just like crack.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself (again!)
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (still!)