What You Don't Know About Gravel Could Choke A Horse

In NYC, there is concrete and asphalt. Sidewalks are concrete, roadways are asphalt, and that's all there is to it.  In the GNC, we have concrete, mostly for foundations, asphalt for roadways, and we have gravel for everything in between. We have more varieties of gravel here than Dunkin has donuts. I know this because I have just researched, purchased, had delivered, spread, and graded twenty tons of Item 4. Shopping at a quarry is not something I had to do when I lived in mid-town Manhattan, but I did it last week in the GNC.

A nugget of Item 4 (I don't know why its called that, since as far as I know, there is no Item 1, 2 or 3) is about the size of a sugar cube.  Imagine twenty tons of sugar cubes being delivered to your apartment in a 4-axle container truck and being brought up in an elevator. Twenty tons of Item 4 would fill every room in your NYC apartment from floor to ceiling with enough left over to fill the swimming pool at Asphalt Green.

To give you an idea of the varieties I had to choose from, there is: bank gravel (gravel mixed with sand or clay), bench gravel (gravel located on the side of a valley above the present stream bottom, indicating the former location of the stream bed when it was at a higher level), creek rock (rounded, semi-polished stones that are dredged or scooped from river beds and creek beds). Crushed rock (rock that is mechanically broken into small pieces then sorted by filtering through different size mesh) is different from crushed stone (which is generally limestone or dolomite that has been crushed and graded by screens to certain size classes). A special type of crushed limestone is dense grade aggregate or DGA.

The most common sizes of crushed stone are 3/8, 5/8, 3/4, 1 1/2, 2 1/2.  If you really need another size, I'm sure you can find it. Crushed stone is measured in inches, but fine gravel is measured in millimeters (particles with a diameter of 1 to 2 mm).  Go figure. 

There is also lag gravel (coarse gravel produced by the removal of finer particles), pay gravel (also known as “pay dirt”, a nickname for gravel with a high concentration of metals) and  piedmont gravel (coarse gravel carried down from high places by mountain streams and deposited on relatively flat ground) not to mention  plateau gravel (gravel from a region above the height at which terrace gravel is usually found) and terrace gravel.  

There are more species of gravel, but this is a blog not Wikipedia.  

Let's not forget Item 4, which is good for driveways.  Item 4 is about $25 per ton delivered, so I just paid $500 for pebbles, and the GNC has rocks everywhere I look.  Go figure.

Building A Platform

Yesterday in the mail, came another rejection from an agent I had invited to represent my manuscript . It was my return envelope, with my three sample chapters inside, but nothing else - not a letter, note, scribble on the pages, nothing. I understand being busy, but "No. Thanks." doesn't take long to jot.

I am learning from talking to other authors that nowadays: the time from agent-finding to traditional book-on-the-shelves is now up to three years; the the average number of copies sold at an in-person, in-store book signing at Barnes & Noble is one; that if the manuscript doesn't have "robots and vampires" it has little chance of getting any traction with the first screeners at literary agencies.

We authors in the GNC (there are some) are witnessing the "disintermediation" of the publishing industry by the internet, leaving all but a special few with no access to the "old" channel.  One agent wrote to me in his rejection note that he liked my characters and plot, but that Costco and Walmart sell more copies of fewer titles than Barnes & Noble does of all its titles combined, and therefore publishers are publishing for Costco and Walmart shoppers.  My characters and plot wouldn't appeal to them.  That says it all.

So, unless you're Stephen King or John Grishman or endorsed by Oprah, I guess it has to be self-publish, e-publish and sell from your own "platform".  

Excuse me while I go the Walmart to try to find a book on "Building A Platform."  Ah yes, here it is, in the home improvement section!