I’m late finishing my hard copy of the Washington Post today and missed this excellent explainer by Ylan Mui and David Cho about this whole CIT bankruptcy thing that looms large.

If CIT goes under (the government so far won’t help out) it could really screw the Christmas pooch. All the stuff you see on shelves in a big-box store or in the malls? Almost certainly there on credit, and likely thanks to CIT’s ability to risk it.

UPDATE: A temp fix for CIT from creditors. Not nearly enough to sustain the holiday season, I think, but still.

Frisco, Texas, the setting of Tinsel,  is going to get a new Wal-Mart, but not without some debate angst. The store will be a 24-hour, 185,000-square-foot “supercenter” with a big parking lot. The developer apparently worked overtime to make it purdy enough to quell some complaints, but not all.

It’s rare for people in Frisco to chafe at big-boxes or other shopping-oriented development; one visit there and it’s clear that Frisco never met a box store it didn’t like. It’s no Wasilla, though — Frisco has all sorts of infrastructure requirements, master plans, and aesthetic design codes. It fully accepts its destiny as a homogeneous shopping town (which is great for sales tax receipts) and requires its box stores to be neat, orderly and by the book.

As one of the commentors in the DMN article notes, there are 20 or so Wal-Marts within 15 miles of where this one will be. One is on Frisco’s west side, 7 miles from the site of the proposed store; another one is 4 miles south of the site, but, it’s also just a  few yards south of Highway 121, and I’m pretty sure that puts it in Plano, which means none of the sales taxes get to Frisco. A lot of civic-minded Friscans (“Friscoites?” “Friskies?” I never settled on a nickname) try very hard to keep their spending north of 121.

Four miles, seven miles — it may not sound far, but in the retailscape of Collin County, those are both epic and symbolic distances. If you were to drive up Preston Road from Dallas all the way to the northern end of Frisco (a journey of 25 miles or so) you would see an endless cornucopia of chain stores, big boxes, strip centers, restaurants, etc., on a repeat loop. Convenience is king. Not so long ago, Preston Road was the Shawnee Trail, where millions of cattle were herded north by 19th-century cowboys. Now it’s a consumer’s paradise — or paradise lost, depending on your worldview (which wouldn’t be popular there; there’s not a lot Joni Mitchell singing “don’t know what you got til it’s gone” about putting up parking lots, if you catch my drift).

People at the meeting pointed out that it’s a miracle that Wal-Mart is ready to build yet again, since everything else in the current economy (besides Wal-Mart) has paused or stalled. Some Friscans at the meeting talked about their worries of traffic jams and cars cutting through the parking lot. Still others think a 24-hour Wal-Mart draws the wrong kind of crowd (some feel Wal-Mart has a special lure for undocumented immigrants). There’s another unspoken American cultural divide — some people are Target people, some are Wal-Mart people.

I also find it interesting that some Friscans simply feel like enough is enough. That’s new. As an occasional interlocutor in Frisco, I stand in awe of its ability to just keep adding stuff. In the three years it took developers to build a Safeway/retail/condo development in my downtown Washington neighborhood, Frisco built a half-dozen major strip malls.

After hearing loads of debate from citizens, the planning commission voted 3-3 Tuesday. It sounds like it was pretty heated.

One of the members who voted “no” is Jeff Trykoski, who is one of the main characters in Tinsel. Jeff is a good Wal-Mart shopper — a chapter in my book follows him as he rises way before dawn on Dec. 26 to buy up surplus Christmas lights at Wal-Mart.

But Jeff, ever objective, just didn’t believe that Wal-Mart’s developers’ plans met some requirements in the city’s overall zoning ordinance.

The comission chairman broke the tie and Wal-Mart got the go-ahead.

Housekeeping issues: I hear you, I know: I need an RSS thingymajigger on here. I am working on it. (And a “favicon,” whatever that is.) It will be some time before I get nimble and good here. Now I know what I always suspected: Nancy makes it looks easy.

And, yes, I’d also like to streamline the approval process for comments, and I’m looking into that too, as in, a one-time approval process that A-OKs trusted commentators for repeat gabbin’.

I have two three requests already via e-mail from Googlers in search of the WaPo story I wrote in 2004 about the lingering gyno-cultural effects of Jake Ryan, the heartthrob character played by Michael Schoeffling in the 1984 movie Sixteen Candles. Schoeffling quit acting in the early ’90s and, according to some reports, became a furniture maker in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He’s the J.D. Salinger of Generation Ringwald.

The article used to be posted on the Original Recipe version of HankStuever.com and it was there for five years. Then came the Extreme Makeover on Tuesday.

Sure, I guess I could repost the full text of “Real Men Can’t Hold a Candle to Jake Ryan” here, but I hesitate.

One the one hand (and by far the most compelling reason to re-post), I’m pretty sure that Jake Ryan article was the only thing routinely drawing web surfers to my site at all. I still get e-mails about that story, about one every week or two. It eventually led to my happy participation in a documentary in 2008 that came with the DVD box set of John Hughes movies. (The doc was shot in a studio in Burbank; I had my makeup done next to John Kapelos, who played the janitor in The Breakfast Club and the “oily-variety beaux hunk” in Sixteen Candles.) So why not keep it here on the site?

I guess because something ticked me off about the three e-mails, which all went something like: I was searching for information on Jake Ryan and the link to it on your web site isn’t working anymore. Can you (fix it, e-mail it to me, etc)?… Implication: The thing I wanted is not working so please give it to me now. With no “hey, nice site, looks interesting, but I’m looking for …” They just clicked on “contact me” and insist on getting their free content. Which for some reason tempts me to say no.

Therapists call this “demand resistance.” It’s sort of like a rock show where the band won’t play their old hits. I totally understand the band: they have a new album, they want you to try it.

So may I just point out: You can get that article in the Post archives, for $3.95. It’s not that it’s worth anything to me. I got paid nicely, I have a great time doing what I do, life could not really be better. But it’s going to be a while before I believe in EVERYTHING FOR FREE. (You can also probably find it on a few blogs out there that helped themselves to posting the article in its entirety.)

The prevailing web ethic says I should just shaddup and be grateful that metacrawlers think “Jake Ryan” looks a whole lot like “Hank Stuever.”

So I’ll play your “Freebird,” babies — I will, I will — just let me be a total cock about it, for a minute. (And let me figure out the best way to post it. Quick, before I start getting e-mails asking for the 2002 story about Mormon underwear.)

Have a great weekend. While the Tall One is in Massachusetts, I am going to spend part of Saturday watching Rachel Manteuffel in a play at the Fringe festival. Then I’ll be at the office, working on a Washington Post Magazine article that is due Monday — about which my hopes are quite low. Also, if memory serves, I’m supposed to pinch-hit on the Style desk Sunday.

Note: Between now and the end of the year, I’m going to tell the story of how Tinsel got made. Mostly for myself, literary jackoff stuff, I guess, and before I forget it all. But I hope it’s interesting to others too. If not, skip it. Today’s episode is about the Idea.

Episode 1: Lunch with George

I first pitched “a nonfiction book about Christmas” to an editor four summers ago, during a deeply schvitzy July day in New York. I was there to do a reading at Housing Works bookstore for the paperback release of Off Ramp. George Hodgman, who was then at Henry Holt and who’d edited that book, took me to lunch at a little French place with excellent A/C. He wanted to know if I’d gotten anywhere with ideas for a new book to pitch.

Twice before we’d talked about a book “about television.”

Ever have an English or history teacher in high school tell you that your term paper subject is “too broad”? I can no longer remember what either George or I must have thought a book “about television” could possibly have been about, without being 800 pages long. A history? Hack social study? A very long essay? It was all way too broad. I think I wanted to do some kind of reported memoir about what I’d ever watched on TV and if it affected me, starting with Josie and the Pussycats and Mister Rogers and working forward. (Me, me, me. I was really into George W.S. Trow’s Within the Context of No-Context and My Pilgrim’s Progress at that point, which might have been a bad influence.)

Hodgman’s idea for a television book, on the other hand, sounded super hard to do, more Ken Auletta-esque.

Screw that. Another idea I had, about dead shopping malls, didn’t seem to float his boat. (Anyway, the Dead Malls website pretty well covers that. People are capable of getting poetic about abandoned malls all on their own, without my help.)

“Well, what else?” George asked.

Now listen up children and listen good: Never get involved with a book – or sign a contract – unless you’re dying, dying to do it. (Even you bloggers-who-get-book-deals based on material that’s already written! Even Sarah Palin, and the poor nameless ghostwriter who’ll have to translate her.)

Wanting to have a book with your name on it is not going to be enough. In the talking stage, a book idea looks great! (So doable!) The 25-page proposal is sharp and focused and, in some cases, actually rooted in narratives and facts the writer has already started reporting and researching. Then the writer’s agent (yes, an agent, I’m skipping ahead a few steps) gets the proposal into the hands of the right editors. Sometimes a fun little bidding war ensues and the low-grade gossip about this may produce great euphoria for the writer and everyone else. Then the contract is signed and soon enough, a little bit (maybe a third) of the advance money comes … and then … the writer is in instant agony.

I have friends who got the deal and Never. Wrote. The. Book. Sometimes they wind up writing another book, to fulfill the contract, years later. Sometimes this book is far better than the one they proposed, but usually not. I even have a friend who, last I knew, was still writing a $700 check every month to a very big publisher, paying back her advance on the installment plan. (She’s that honorable. I’ve also known writers who got the check, didn’t get the book off the ground, spent what money was left after taxes and their agent’s commission, and now live as sort of open fugitives on the literary market.)

I have this weird feeling that if your book is going to be any good, then it’s essential that you constantly rue the day you ever opened your fat yapper and pitched it. You’re going to loathe your topic and idea long before you write a single sentence – or worse, circumstances or fate are going to prevent you from getting the story you thought you’d get. So you better be damn sure it’s something you can let take over your every waking (and dreaming) thought for the next few years. An unwritten book has to be like a baby left at your doorstep: either you pick it up and care for it, or you call a social worker (ideally another author) to come take the idea off your hands and find it a good home.

(Also, here’s what I mean by baby. Still want to pick it up?)

Well, what else? George asked.

I hesitated. Was now the time to bring up my Christmas idea? I hadn’t thought it completely through, really, but it was an idea I’d carried with me for a long time.

When I was a feature writer at the Albuquerque Tribune in the early 1990s, I remember putting “follow a family through two consecutive Christmases” on my list of stories-to-do. That list is still with me. Some story ideas on that list I did do (“follow a couple through their engagement, wedding and honeymoon” – check; “a story about a funeral home” – check) and some I never got to. A Christmas epic was always on the list. At one point I wondered if it would be better as a documentary film, but I seem to have forgotten to go to film school.

I told George of my idea — a story that treats Christmas as truthfully as possible. I also really laid it on thick with the economic impact of Christmas, the fact that everything we love about it is manufactured in China, and the disconnect between the message of Christmas and the business journalism that tells the story of the shopping binge and the global outcome. By the time we finished lunch, George and I had both settled on “a kind of Fast Food Nation about Christmas” as a pitch concept.

This was not at all the book I wound up doing, but it immediately sparked interest with the editor-in-chief at Holt. By the end of the day my agent had already heard from George and called me before I called her: “What’s this about a book about Christmas?” she asked. She loved the idea too.

We all agreed I would start work immediately on a proposal and have something in a month or so. If the publisher liked it, maybe we’d move forward.

Way too easy. I blew that deadline by about six months. I had a lot of research and thinking to do – it would mean leaving my job at the Washington Post for a year or more, and it would mean a lot of travel and time away from home and my boyfriend. I stalled. I read a lot of books and articles about the retail economy. I watched very closely as Christmas 2005 came and went, looking at it in ways I hadn’t before.

I had to decide whether or not to pick up the baby.

To be continued …

Gulp!

Between Conan and Jimmy last night I got swallowed in a bit to Home Shopping Network’s Christmas in July, a marathon sales event on the channel this week, featuring the latest ornaments and all that. I love listening to the callers, of course. Meemaw Nation is ready for Christmas, y’all! One caller cooed about a glowing ornament that has an angel inside it. She’d bought it for herself, last year, but gave it to a friend who has been “very ill” and kept the glowing angel on her dresser and loved gazing at it. The three women hosting the segment all cooed and awwwed in approval. The caller bought the complete set. The little counter at the bottom of the screen went bonkers — while I watched for 10 minutes, 8,000 people allegedly called in and bought the glowing orbs, and little banana hooks to hang them from.

Oh, and BTW, the new Hallmark ornament catalog Dreambook for 2009 is out — what? You didn’t go get yours yet?

All of which to say: the season has begun. Sears can’t resist the urge and has opened Christmas Shoppe displays already in its stores.

This sort of thing drives some people APE SHIT. Purists don’t want to see or hear about a Christmas anything in any store before Thanksgiving. Not because they hate Christmas, but because they hate the commercialization of it, taking umbrage at the sensation that retailers start shoving Christmas in our faces earlier and earlier each year. It’s a perennial gripe. But this year, it’s extra fraught, because retailers like Sears (which once so warmly identified with the unofficial start of Christmas by delivering its Wish Book sometime in the crisp early autumn) are slowly bleeding to death as it is. They want Christmas now. Now now now. It’s their last hope.

You or I might see this as a bad business plan. Irritate me about Christmas now and I’m likely to go all Bill McKibben on you and just skip the holiday, or make this the year my family snaps out of it and instead we decide to have ourselves a down-home Laura Ingalls Wilder holiday, where we give one another fruit, homemade rag dolls, and love. (Imagine what that would do to the economy.)

But you and I are not part of Meemaw Nation. Ornament-collecting grammas and nanas will save this economy, one way or another, if it’s the last thing they do.

How about you? How does seeing Christmas deco in the mall in July make you feel?

This is my blog. (Check one-two. Sibilance. Is it on?)

How come? Why now?

I know I’m eight or nine years late starting one. All this time I had the only outlet I ever needed, writing for the Washington Post’s Style section about darn near anything I wanted, for 700,000 or so paying customers who get the print edition and millions of unpaying, deadbeat customers online. When the Post was starting far too many blogs in the mid-‘00s, I carped in an in-house memo that none of the paper’s writers should be blogging at all; we should be writing stories that are blogged about. I also have enormous issues about writing for free.

Well, some things have changed. I still work at the Post (last I checked), but I feel like now I have some reasons to blog. (As for writing for free, well, it’s a fucking renaissance out there, isn’t it? So long, six centuries of the printed word! Hello, crapola!)

The big reason is pretty shameless – I’d like to get people to buy and read my book, Tinsel, which comes out in November.

The other reason is it’s nice to be able to type the word “fucking” and just hit publish. I need the sort of valve so many others have discovered on the great grassy bloglands of the new frontier – a quasi-space of my own to write whatever else I’m not being paid to write.

We’ll see how it goes. I have no idea if my employer even allows me to blog. I think I’m just supposed to take it easy on tales of internecine warfare in the Post newsroom and that I should not, like, endorse candidates for public office and that sort of thing. I can only hope this blog brings trouble, because trouble means it’s being read.

What I’ll do here:

Whack off every other day or so on matters pop-cultural. Stuff I’m reading, stuff I’m crazy for.

1. Talk a lot about the making of Tinsel, which is a nonfiction narrative about Christmas, America, baby Jesus, the economy, three families, and a modern-day exurb outside of Dallas called Frisco. When I was down in the dumps writing Tinsel, I loved to read other authors’ blogs about process – down to things like word counts, what font people type their manuscripts in, how the editing is going, galley proofs, debates over the cover art, how to get inspired, all the highs and lows. Between now and the release date, I’ll slowly recount the story of how I pitched, reported, wrote and edited the book. And when you’re good and bored and Christmas is at our throats again, I’ll file dispatches from the skirt-hitching phase, as I try to attract customers and do readings in bookstores, etc.
2. Muse often about the pitfalls and joys of writing creative nonfiction – working so hard to get everything exactly right, and yet also trying to make art out of journalism.
3. Write about stuff I see and do – other people’s book parties, trips to the mall to watch the shopocalypse, etc.
4. Link to stuff that pertains to #2, especially as the Christmas season approaches and the shopping malls struggle to lure the consumer species back to its natural habitat.
5. Share feedback I’m getting about the book, even if it’s unkind or runs counter to the story I’ve told. Also, answer questions.

If I could be any blogger in the whole world, I would be Nancy Nall. I’ve read her every day for five or six years and you should too. Nancy, who found life beyond newsprint, treats her blog like a morning stretch before her real work begins, but seems always sharp. It will take me a long time to do it with the agility and smarts that she does – but that’s my hope.

Now it’s launched. Have a look around the rest of hankstuever.com and tell me anything you think I should know.