A Good Sign

Many of my friends around me are starting to publish books. I take this as a good sign, as friends can only lift us higher. I think about groups of friends, collaborators, collectives, tribes, rising together, supporting each other, eventually "hitting it" together. Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman were roommates in NYC when nobody knew them. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were buddies during the lean struggling years in Paris. I firmly believe it's good to surround yourself with friends who are doing things or going places or becoming people you want to be. I'm in a writer's collective called the Non-Fiction Novelists. We all have great books brewing and some are starting to come out. We take group photos, with the thought that down the line, young writers will look at those photos and say, damn, they all knew each other and hung out back before they took over the literary world. As for now, when I see my friends' books in bookstores, I turn them to face outward to encourage other people to buy them, like in this photo. Jaimal's book about running away to Hawaii and finding surfing and Buddhism is great. If you find it in a bookstore, turn it out, or better yet, buy it. Jaimal is reading at San Francisco's LitQuake Festival this Monday night (10/4/10) as part of Words and Waves: An Evening of Surf Lit http://litquake.org/events/surf-lit