Putting Yourself Out There

I’m gearing back up to return to the university in the fall. After a heck of a couple of years, I’m resuming my very slow attempt to get a few extra college degrees. Mostly, it’s an excuse to listen to people much younger than myself learn cool stuff, and an excuse to listen to people somewhat younger than myself share their expertise.

I get inspired by all of that.

I’m searching class schedules and realizing that my Spanish has gotten rusty again, so there is probably a summertime online refresher in the complicated tenses on the horizon. Even though, really, using the proper tense is not my problem so much as finding the correct vocabulary word. As in any word that might suit in that circumstance. The vocabulary was the first thing to flee my brain in the hiatus.

The thing that fascinates me the most, though, is watching the theater kids, particularly those who are (at 18, 19, or 20) convinced they’re going to be Actors! (and yes, the exclamation point is there for a reason). Most won’t be, not because they’re not good enough, but because they don’t listen well and they already think they’re God’s gift to the profession.

Mostly, I watch the ones who are insecurely secure in their dreams. These kids know exactly what they want in their lives, but they’re not sure they’re good enough to get there, so they work extra hard to figure out where they should be.

Sometimes it is not where they expect to be. In the theater department in particular, they have to take courses in all aspects of theater, and they sometimes learn that they love a part of theater that they hadn’t expected to like at all.

Surprisingly enough to my younger self, the one who didn’t have the courage to follow her musical abilities into a music degree or to even walk into the theater department at the University of Wisconsin, there are a lot of introverts in theater. Some of those introverts are writers, yes, but many go onstage and perform. Most, in fact, because they like being someone else in front of a group. It’s safer for them.

I get safe. It makes sense. I also get the fear of doing something revealing in front of a crowd. Mostly, that fear is gone for me now. Years of public speaking and talking on panels at sf conventions eased my mind.

Still, I was pretty shocked when I learned that a lot of actors and musicians suffer severe stage fright—people you’ve all heard of. If they have to go onstage, they sit in the dressing room and shake, or, in some cases, puke, because they’re so scared.

Had I known that…well, I doubt I would have done it, because puking is not something I voluntarily do, even for art…but it certainly would have eased my mind about what for me is relatively minor stage fright (in comparison to what these folks have).

Really, though, it’s what they are willing to do for their dreams and their art. They put themselves out there. More importantly, they figure out how to put themselves out there.

Every year, I have a conversation with at least one of my writing students who is terrified for some reason I never probe of putting their work in front of an audience. It always boils down to the fact that they’re afraid of being seen.

Sidebar from a nearly 65-year-old person who has worked in the arts her entire life: You are never seen. Not in your entirety. You may reveal all of your secrets and no one will care. Or they’ll comment on the portrayal of something minor, like the cat, and kvetch about that. It’s disappointing…and freeing.

However, the fear of being seen is a real and crippling fear, stopping a lot of prose writers and poets from following their dreams. Writers, unlike actors and musicians, can hide from the world. You can use a pen name, set up a legal entity that doesn’t use your real name (in an obvious manner), and never let your picture out into the world.

You can hide and publish your work. That’s the great thing about being a writer.

Usually when a writer figures out their own personal workaround, they put their work on the market, whatever it means for them.

I had one of those discussions this past week with a couple of different writers, some in person, one online, and when I photo-bombed the Writers’ Block webinar on Wednesday.

After that moment on the webinar, I spent a few hours thinking about how universal that fear is among writers. I’ve been in this business almost fifty years now, and I’ve seen it every year.

Then Dean and I watched a little bit of The Voice. We often watch something to rest our poor brains, usually at dinner. We’ve moved away from news (since there’s no way that will relax anyone), and gone to documentaries and The Voice.

We usually watch a segment or two and then go back to whatever we were doing. It will take us days to watch an entire 2-hour episode.

So that Wednesday night, we watched two members of Michael Bublé’s team duet on a song he wrote, called “Home.” Most of you know it as a super hit for Blake Shelton, but Bublé wrote the song and released it first.

Before the battle, Bublé talked a bit about writing the song. I can’t find the clip for that (mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s not that relevant), but I did find the one that caught my attention.

It got me thinking, and I went up to my office and made a list.

Most people who work in the arts realize that their work has to be put out into the world.

• People who write music must perform that music to sell that song/sonata/whatever. They may be terrible singers. They might be shy as hell. But they need to make, at minimum, a demo tape.

Often they perform their own work, in some kind of concert, and it is that work that ends up catapulting them into whatever level of fame they will reach.

And then, partly because of the vagaries of the (exceedingly complex) music copyright laws, they may hear someone else cover their song. They might be like John Legend, who has said on The Voice that he cannot listen to a cover of one of his songs fairly. Or they might be like Bublé who not only assigned the song, but was honored by the way the singers performed it.

• People who write plays write them with production in mind. What is the point of writing a play if it’s just going to languish on your desk? The problem, though, with writing a play is that when it is performed, there will be an area that the performers cannot do or cannot say.

In early drafts of a play, the playwright will have to be nearby to do some kind of work to smooth out that section. Sometimes it’s because the star is a doofus and can’t say a word with more than two syllables, but mostly it’s because that section of the show, when performed in previews, did not work. Neil Simon deals with this a lot in his autobiography Rewrites.

• People who write screenplays know that they’re writing something that will be performed as well. I had a very famous writer friend who wrote the wordiest damn screenplays ever and had, in his contract, a clause that said not a word could be touched.

After his early years in Hollywood (when he didn’t have enough clout to have that stupid contract), he rarely sold a screenplay and when he did, it was a charity sale from a friend who would buy the screenplay so that the writer could retain his Writers Guild membership. (And then the charity friend would do a shooting script.)

• Artists know that their paintings or photographs will be displayed or used on covers or put on t-shirts and prints and everything else.

Even the lowest of the low, graffiti “artists,” the ones who deface buildings, understand that their art needs to be seen. (I’m grumpy about graffiti these days since Vegas has a lot of wall murals all over the city—and the freakin’ graffiti “artists” will deface them. Grrr. I hate people who deface other people’s art.)

• Even young poets these days understand that they might have to get up in front of a crowd at a poetry slam and declaim their poem.
• And let’s not talk about comedians, who are also writers, who get in front of a crowd, and risk bombing night after night after night. Dean and I saw one of George Carlin’s shows in his last years, and Carlin was testing material so new that he was holding paper torn from a notepad.

Some of it was funny. Much of it was not.

Fiction writers—people who write novels and short stories—are the only artists I know who expect someone else to publish their work. Fiction writers, particularly those who are traditionally published, believe that all they have to do is write it, and everyone will flock to their feet.

That’s an ingrained attitude, and a hard one to fight. Heck, a lot of these writers are worried when they decide to give a copy of their manuscript to an editor at a book publishing house or (worse) an agent.

Writers do not expect to have their work in the public view, and often fear it.

I’m not sure why this is. I think it’s just part of the culture.

There are movies that show writers at work, and someone else dragging that “brilliant” manuscript off the writer’s desk. Or the writer “gets discovered” in an English class (never happened when I was in school). Or someone else mailed off their manuscript.

That myth goes hand in hand with the idea that writing should be hard and writers should suffer while doing it. That myth also goes with the idea that anything written fast is terrible and anything labored over is brilliant. And that myth goes with the idea that being prolific is a sin. (Tell that to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare.)

Indie writers have a similar problem, but it’s couched in other terms. I don’t want to learn how to publish. That’s going to be hard. It’ll take too much money or I can’t do covers or…or…

Okay, I want to reply, whatever roadblocks you want to set up for your work, go ahead.

But real artists—be they musicians or painters or (yes) writers—need to have their work seen. They need to figure out how to get on that stage despite their stage fright and put their art in front of an audience.

Otherwise the art will be destroyed when they die, tossed out with the trash or deleted off their computers.

Oh…and let’s talk “covers” for a minute. Blake Shelton’s version of “Home” is very different from Bublé’s version, which is different from the duet that aired on The Voice this past week.

If you’re lucky as a writer, and if you put yourself out there, at some point, someone will want to do make another piece of art using yours as inspiration. Maybe a movie, maybe a TV show, maybe a dramatic reading or an audio book.

That’s a “cover” for lack of a better term. (It really is a derivative work, and it does fall in a different place in the copyright law, but go with me on this for a minute.) Instead of being all protective and saying that you must control all things, say yes…if the contract terms are good.

That’s all.

A singer doesn’t have to get permission to cover a song. I can sing “Home” badly in front of an audience if I want to, but if I get paid for it, I need to let the songwriter know that I’m going to be covering the song. The songwriter cannot say no.

It gets complicated after that. (Okay, it’s already complicated.) But implied in all of this is that the music needs to get in front of an audience. The play will be performed. The screenplay will become the basis for a movie. The painting will hang on a gallery wall.

What makes writer-artists any different? Why should we fight so hard to create something and then be afraid to put it in front of an audience. Particularly since we’ll never see that audience. We don’t have to hear from them either, if we keep our email private and don’t go on social media and don’t read reviews.

What makes fiction writers so dang delicate? Every artist has fears. All of us do. If we want to make a living at our art, we learn to overcome the fear.

It may take a dozen workarounds. It might mean the writing equivalent of puking in the bathroom before stepping on the stage. But if you value your own work and your own dreams, you learn how to get past whatever is stopping you.

Just like other performers do.

“Putting Yourself Out There,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Picture of Gavin is there because, despite appearances, he’s terrified of putting himself out there.

My months seem to vacillate between great and crappy when it comes to reading.  I read a lot in July, including some wonderful student manuscripts (buy these, you editor types).  But when it came to actual published books…sigh.  The best word I have for most of them is dull.

In fact, one book was so dull, I quit halfway through.  I told Dean the next time I picked up a hardcover by that author, he was to hold an intervention, by reminding me that I hadn’t finished the last four of her hardcovers.  This from an author I’ve been reading for 20 years.  At first, I thought it was me, but I talked to several friends about it, and they’re having the same reaction to her fiction.  Apparently she’s forgetting that books should have some conflict in them.  <sigh>

Another favorite author wrote a passable book about the Iraq war.  I struggled through it, expecting it to improve. But if you follow the news, you would not be surprised by any of this book, including the part marked “The Secret.”  Oh, except for the icky incest stuff that he just glosses over.  Yuck.

So I’m complaining. But I read as many books in July as I read in June.  I just don’t have hardly any to recommend. One more cranky note: Esquire’s redesigned website is utterly unsearchable.  I can’t find any of the articles on it, and actually had to Google the Jacobs. That didn’t work with the Jones. So order the back issue. And because I’m feeling cranky, I’m not adding a link.  (Ah, technology.  I want it now…)  However, I did find a link to the photographer, which is what I have below.  You can find the issue (or essay, which is brilliant) on your own.

July, 2010

Bensen, Raymond, “Can The Cinematic Bond Ever Be The Literary Bond?”, James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, edited by Glenn Yeffeth with Leah Wilson, BenBella Books, 2006.  Bensen, who has written Bond novels, gives a history of James Bond the character here, and it’s utterly fascinating, particularly for writers.  He tells how Ian Fleming struggled with Bond, and had difficulties with money, how the movie deals influenced the novels, and how some of the movie deals fell through.  Bensen explains why the cinematic Bond had to be different from the literary Bond.  If you’re a writer or a Bond lover, read this essay.  You won’t regret it.

Bethke, Bruce, “James Bond: Now More Than Ever,” James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, edited by Glenn Yeffeth with Leah Wilson, BenBella Books, 2006.  Perhaps a more important pop culture essay before Daniel Craig’s Bond, Bethke’s essay still helps us understand why Bond matters, even when he’s an embarrassing relic of the Cold War.  Fun, interesting, and a perfect end to a very good volume of essays.

Blumenfeld, Laura, “Up All Night,” The Washington Post, July 4, 2010.  I almost never recommend newspaper articles, primarily because they date quickly.  This article, like so often happens on Sunday, reads more like a magazine article.  It’s long—3300 words (most newspaper stories are 600)—and fascinating.

Even though this article is about people within the Obama administration, it’s not about politics.  Instead, it’s about the people who prepare the national security briefing for the president—everyone from the Attorney General to the National Counterterrorism Center Director.  I know that people did similar work in all modern administrations.

What fascinates me is how hard the work is.  After they finish the daily part of their jobs, they do this part.  And frankly, reading about, sorting, contemplating all the various threats to the U.S. must be the hardest job of all.  I have no idea how they manage to catch those four hours of sleep they seem to survive on.

Take a look.  If you think being at the high end of government is easy, this article will change your mind.

Curtis, Jamie Lee, “Bye Bye Beauty: Memories of My Mother,” More Magazine, May, 2010.  Toward the end of her life, actress Janet Leigh reminded me of my mother in her last few years.  Both women were thin to the point of brittleness.  Both women’s bodies radiated tension.  Jamie Lee Curtis mention that Janet Leigh’s hands were always clenched.  A candid photo of Leigh illustrates this, and that photo, more than any other, reminded me of my mother…and her constantly clenched fists.

There are other similiarities between the two women and I wondered for a while if that was why I liked this essay.  But I don’t think so.  The women were very different:  Janet Leigh was married four times, the last happily.  She had a decades-long career.  She was a famous beauty.  My mother married once, and my parents’ happiness came and went.  Mother was a homemaker most of her life.  She probably could have been a famous beauty in her youth, but no one discovered her the way that they discovered Leigh.

I think the fact that they were both tense, slight women allowed me to identify with the essay.  But the fact that Curtis wrote from the perspective of an adult daughter trying to understand her mother was probably the thing that kept me in the article.  I guess we all struggle with this, particularly if our parents are difficult people.  The essay is wise and warm, worth reading.

Dreyer, Eileen, Barely A Lady, Forever, 2010.  I’m so happy to see Eileen Dreyer’s books again.  I love her work, whether she’s writing romantic suspense or category romances as Kathleen Korbel.  In fact, her category, A Rose For Maggie is one of the best examinations of post-traumatic stress syndrome I’ve ever seen—and yes, it’s a romance.  It’s so good that I recommended the book to a therapist friend of mine, who happened to hate romance (until she read it).  Then she bought a dozen copies, and gave it to her clients with PTSD, to show them that you can recover and have a good life.

Anyway, Dreyer’s career got sidetracked by Hurricane Katrina.  She wrote a wonderful romantic suspense novel set in New Orleans about a hurricane bearing down on the city—and the book premiered in hardcover in the summer of 2005.  I don’t think there was ever a paperback.  The book, prescient as it was, was too painful to read that year.  (Fortunately, I read it before Katrina.)

So this book.  It’s a departure for her.  It’s historical romance.  And I mean good old-fashioned historical romance. The kind with real historical details. The kind with a war that is a war.  The kind with a plot, and characters who act like people in their time period.  When I finished the book, I noticed that a few readers in their reviews complained that the characters were “not nice people” and I had an epiphany.  That’s why I’ve been finding romance so dull lately.  The characters are “nice” and there’s no real conflict.

Yep, the characters in Barely A Lady are flawed.  Yep, our hero can be a bastard.  Yep, our heroine made a singularly bad choice as she tried to save her own life.  That’s how life is.  And it provided tension and it makes this book a fascinating, unputdownable read.

I loved this novel.  Buy it.  Keep Eileen Dreyer writing books, because I want to read more.

Ebert, Roger, “Whole Lotta Cantin’ Going On,” Chicago Sun-Times blog, July 18, 2010.  Fascinating short essay on the uses and purposes of criticism by a man who spent his life as a successful movie critic.  Inspired by the varied reviews of the Christopher Nolan film, “Inception,” Ebert writes about why reviewers differ, and when that difference of opinion is useful, and when it is not.

What’s fascinating here is the tone of respect Ebert has not just for filmmakers but also for his colleagues.  That respect is sometimes lacking in the newer film critics and used to be lacking in the blogosphere.  As more and more people come online, however, that tone is shifting to something more constructive.

If you’re interested in what purpose a film critic sees in his work, take a look at this.  Excellent stuff.

Jacobs, A. J., “How To Raise Men,” Esquire, June/July, 2010.  The tagline for this article says it all: “I mean, a lot of us are dicks.  So how do you make one who isn’t?”  Lovely essay on fatherhood, raising boys, and how boys biologically differ from girls. (And it’s not just genitals, you people.)  When the boy’s “Y-chromosome” kicks in, Jackobs writes, it’s a remarkable thing to see.  He adds, “If anyone thinks gender is a purely social construct—as I once did—they should spend a few hours with my sons.”  His line about how his sons try to stay quiet when his wife is sleeping just about had me rolling off my chair.  Read this.

Jones, Chris, “The Madness of Men,” Esquire, June/July, 2010.  Above I noted Jamie Lee Curtis’s tribute to her mother.  Here is a very different tribute to the other parent.  Chris Jones’s father counsels people in deep trouble, people who often rescue other people from their troubles.  As children, Jones’s friends called his dad Dr. Death because of the pictures he often had in the house of horrors his clients had seen.  What this man has heard, what he’s counselled people through, are worse than anything I can imagine.  Yet he manages to keep his own equilibrium.  A tremendous essay that  I hope makes it into next year’s Best American Essays.  Read this for a remarkable portrait of a remarkable man.

Lahr, John, “Master of Revels,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010.  Lahr used the occasion of a revival of “Promises, Promises” on Broadway as an excuse to write a piece about Neil Simon. I’ve read both of Simon’s memoirs, Rewrites and The Play Goes On, and still there were things in this essay that I either didn’t know or didn’t remember.

I particularly like this passage: “When [Simon] was writing his masterpiece ‘The Odd Couple’—which was turned into a movie and a TV series that ran from 1970-1975—Simon thought it was ‘a grim, dark play about two lonely men’ that ‘would probably be the end of my career.’”   That passage again shows me something I know, but forget in context with my own work:  A writer never understands what he’s writing—and never will.

Excellent piece on a superb writer, and on art in general.

McPhee, Martha, “Finding Love Over Lasagna: My Life in Recipes,” More Magazine, May, 2010.  In the year before my mother died, I asked her to write down the family recipes.  I’m glad I did; so many of them would have died with her otherwise.  After her death, I sent copies to my sisters at their request. We all use the recipes, written in my mother’s spidery hand along with her short comments (“your favorite”; “Aunt Esther’s specialty”).  I think about her whenever I open the notebook she wrote the recipes in.

I just never thought of recipes as a map of a life. But they are.  I have dozens of recipes that are unique to me.  Those, yes, which my sisters share, but also the recipes I’ve collected over the years from newspapers and magazines, pasted into my own notebook.  A handful of recipes in my own hand.  Some favorite, food-stained cookbooks.  I could write a history of my life in recipes, and it would be a very different history than one I wrote about my writing career or one I wrote about my travels.

In this essay, Martha McPhee wrote a short history of her life in recipes.  It’s lovely, and as you can tell from the above, clearly made me reflect.  It’ll do the same for you.  And—bonus!—it comes with recipes, so you can try some of the food she discusses.

Morefield, David, “So You Want to Be an Evil Genius: How To Avoid The Perrennial Mistakes of Would-Be Conquerers,” James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, edited by Glenn Yeffeth with Leah Wilson, BenBella Books, 2006.  Fortunately for James Bond (who according to Lawrence Watt-Evans, below, is something of an idiot), his opponents are really dumb.   With luck, they won’t read Morefield’s essay, which advises everything from not hiring “the hot chick” because she’ll always fall for Bond to “do not kill your minions” before Bond does.  Enough said.  Go giggle your way through this one.

Quinn, Julia, To Sir Phillip, With Love, HarperCollins 2003. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, I got grumpy at romance novels for no apparent reason.  I stopped reading some of my favorite authors again, for no apparent reason.  I quit reading Julia Quinn’s delightful series about the Bridgertons, for no apparent reason.  When I ran out of reading material one night, I picked up To Sir Phillip, remembered the Bridgertons, remembered why I liked Julia Quinn, and got back into her work.

Although Quinn’s novels are often humorous, they have a serious undertone.  This one deals with post-partum depression, the cycle of child abuse, and learning how to love.  Sounds like a downer. It’s not.  And Sir Phillip’s children, twins, whose mother was never the same after they were born (and who committed suicide) are wonderful out-of-control monsters who need someone from a large family to understand them. Enter Eloise Bridgerton, a spinster not because she hasn’t had an opportunity to marry but because no one has measured up.

I loved this book, and will happily read the remaining Bridgerton novels—trying to scatter them out between the dark reading I’m doing for other things.

Robinson, Kim Stanley, “The Lucky Strike,” The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20^th Century, edited by Harry Turtledove with Martin H. Greenberg, Del Rey, 2001.  I had heard about this story for years, and had never had the chance to read it.  It’s solid alternate history about the flight to drop the first nuclear bomb over Japan.  At first, I wasn’t sure how the story would end up being alternate.  Then it became clear.

The story also did what good alternate history does.  It made me question—especially Truman and our generals, and why they picked the particular target that they did.  Yes, it’s a political story, and yes, it’s worth reading, just to get you to think.  Top notch.

Roberts, Adam, “‘An Englishman’s Word is His Bond’: Is Bond English?” James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, edited by Glenn Yeffeth with Leah Wilson, BenBella Books, 2006.  This is my favorite essay in the volume as I detailed in a blog post on the Smart Pop website. Go look there for the long version. The short version—I found this essay full of fun surprises.  It’s memorable, well written, and—you guessed it—thought-provoking.

Steele, Allen, “The Death of Captain Future,” The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20^th Century, edited by Harry Turtledove with Martin H. Greenberg, Del Rey, 2001.  First, let me simply say that this story had no business being in a book marked “alternate history.”  The story is not in any way alternate history.  I’m going to do something here that  I normally don’t do:  If you want to buy this anthology because it has “the best alternate history stories of the 20^th century,” don’t waste your money.  The book has mostly stories from 1980 on, and most don’t qualify, in my mind, as alternate history at all.

However, and this is a major “however,” if you like good fiction, go ahead and buy the volume. There are lots of good stories here, including the Ward Moore I mentioned last month.  “The Death of Captain Future” is one of those good stories, definitely worth reading.

I missed “The Death of Captain Future” when it first came out because I simply did not have the time to read it.  I was editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction at the time, and Allen didn’t send the story to me first (dammit).  The story won the Hugo, deservedly so.  It’s a space opera tale about a man who likes the old pulp heroes, and wants to model himself after them.  Only he’s unpleasant and difficult and—well, it’s a marvelous story, and I suggest you find a copy wherever and whenever you can.

Vukcevich, Ray, “Over Here,” Boarding Instructions, Fairwood Press, 2010.  Ray Vukcevich has long been an unsung Great American Writer.  Only a few of us seem to know how wonderful he is. And as wonderful a writer as he is, rarely does anyone label his fiction “heartbreaking,” and “moving.”  Generally, his work is considered weird or odd or intellectually intriguing; often it’s just plain amusing.

But “Over Here” is utterly brilliant.  A heartbreaking story of war and the results of war, told through music and imaginary friends.    Ray Vukcevich’s work is always good; “Over Here” goes beyond good to excellent.

Watt-Evans, Lawrence, “Chinks in the Armor: James Bond’s Critical Mistakes,” James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, edited by Glenn Yeffeth with Leah Wilson, BenBella Books, 2006.  When looked at from a cold, clear eye, Bond—James Bond—is an idiot.  And Lawrence Watt-Evans points out why, in a very funny if politically incorrect essay.  For a while this was online on the Smart Pop website.  Check to see if it still is.

Yeffeth, Glenn with Leah Wilson, James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, BenBella Books, 2006.  This collection of essays came out before Daniel Craig’s first Bond film which makes it a little incomplete (not that you can fault a book for being ahead of its time).  Other than that, I found this to be one of the best Smart Pop books I’ve read.

BenBella has published Smart Pop books, essays about popular culture, for about ten years now.  I’ve written for a few of the books, and I’ve read more than my share.  This is one of the few that I’ve enjoyed from cover to cover.  All of the essays are good. Some are lighthearted fun and some have excellent analysis about Bond and his iconic role in our culture.  I’ve listed some of the best essays individually, but I recommend the entire book.

Zettel, Sarah, “Covalent Bonds,” James Bond in the 21^st Century: Why We Still Need 007, edited by Glenn Yeffeth with Leah Wilson, BenBella Books, 2006.  This essay had me from the line: “Every time a new [James Bond] movie comes out, my inner adolescent smacks down my outer feminist, and we all buy a ticket, grab a tub of popcorn, and enjoy.”  Yep.  Me too.  Zettel discusses the two Bonds in a completely different way than Bensen does.  Bensen gives us the history; Zettel tells us why one is more enjoyable than the other, even from a politically correct position.  Well done.