Andrew Post

More Graff

2012-02-09T07:20:00.001-08:00

From the same spot. They're gettin' good.

Local Graffiti

2011-12-22T13:21:00.000-08:00

There's this park that my wife and I take the dogs for a stroll on occasion. It flanks the interstate, ponds on either side connected by a narrow paved path. To get from one side, where there's a fishing area and a playground to the other that features an open area to let the dogs run and swim, one has to pass underneath the interstate itself in this somewhat secluded cement passageway that without fail makes me think of The Brave One. But, this is in a fairly decent section of the Twin Cities and rarely is there any roughs hanging about. Really, you see more old guys in shorts that're way too short than any troublemakers. But that doesn't mean that the tunnel doesn't get the same treatment that seems to strike every tunnel ever made, a practice area for would-be Banksys.

Every time we visit the artwork I see that a layer of white paint has been put over the old stuff, but each time we return a week or so later, there will be new additions put over the old. Rarely are they in any color than what these bored suburban kids probably unearthed out of their fathers' garages, they stick mostly to the reds and black spray paints probably bought from Home Depot with the intended purpose of patching a porch swing or giving that old hibachi a new sheen. Still, some of the artwork is pretty great. Some of it is obvious messing around, especially the Monkey Love one, but the one with the tentacled eyeball shows promise of a future artist if the artist sticks to his or her craft. Here are a few I snagged pictures of the last time we went. And for anyone concerned, no, I did not "tag" any of these up myself; I merely document the artistry.

Knuckleduster blurb

2011-12-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

Fresh from the editors at Medallion Press . . . the blurb for my novel Knuckleduster (March, 2013.)

Forty years in the future, Brody "Knuckleduster" Calhoun spends his life in a cycle of violence and probation. To strangers, he looks like a junkie with orange-stained eyes. To the police, he’s a well-known criminal who’s racked up eleven harassment charges and seventeen cases of aggravated assault, all with a deadly weapon: his brass knuckles.

Brody is a vigilante for hire who tracks down women’s abusive husbands to repay pain with pain. He wants to help the women and doesn’t like accepting their money, but he has no choice. Injured in the military and sent home, Brody needs expensive batteries to power his carotene lenses. Without them, he is completely blind.

When Thorp Ashbury, an old friend from the service, invites him to rural Illinois, Brody seizes the opportunity to escape the city and violence. But when Thorp asks him to find his missing flower child sister in Chicago, Brody uncovers a conspiracy that could shake the foundation of everything he stands for.

To The Bone

2011-11-30T09:51:00.001-08:00

Like a lot of folks, I suffer from anxiety. It's not fun. Whereas most people become anxious over logical things; the state of their children's wellbeing or their bank account, mine is intertwined directly to health woes. I used to call it, the anxiety attacks themselves, The Bug. I pictured it as this six foot cockroach/grasshopper hybrid that walked upright, complete with multiple-lens eyes and a gruff Brooklyn accent. Most of the time, I'd tarry about my life just A-Okay, but every few weeks, The Bug would pay me an unrequested visit. Matter of fact, he's here right now.

(Now, don't take your poor narrator the wrong way. I don't actually see this bipedal, talking insect. No. I'm not that nuts. I just do what I do as a creative individual and put names and faces on things that don't typically have them.)

But, he's still around. Never further than one trip to WebMD away. Never more distanced than one peek at the back of my tongue in the mirror. Close enough to know and begin packing for a lengthy stay after I overhear a conversation where symptoms may be being listed.

I have died a thousand times. I have been pulled under by diseases both exotic and mundane. I have watched myself in my mind's eye as I drew my final breath an unaccomplished man, The Bug my ever-stalwart bedside companion far too many times to count. I hate the feeling of it coming on and I do not use that word often (or lightly when I do.)

It rattles me. Violently. To the point when it's set in and The Bug's daggered mandible is sunk in and locked fast--to the bone--that I begin looking at the world like a man four times my senior.

"This might be the time I see snow" or "I wonder if I'll still be able to smell fresh baked rye bread near the end." Those thoughts defy wording on how much they frustrate me. Broom them off and The Bug chases them right back in, smiling accommodatingly. Misplace something?

Yes. Thank you.

Someday I'll assemble the armor against shit like this with wisdom. Realize no one lives forever anyway and if it's not one thing it's another. Face each day with exuberance and positivity and maybe concoct a home-brew insecticide of understanding and patience.

To the worrier in all of us. Keep your shit together and repeat after me: "It's nothing, it's nothing, it's nothing..."

H+

2011-11-28T08:34:00.001-08:00

My second project for the winter (since I don't think I'm quite prepared to take up knitting or fashioning lampshades out of my own toenail clippings) is to begin work on an anthology of sorts, putting the word out there that I'm looking for work and possibly spinning this off into a blog of some type eventually that'll be a showcase for fellow writers of the SF/F genre. I think the first outing could be something in the transhumanism mindset, maybe with some cyberpunky short stories and whatnot. I'd like to see a collection that doesn't just cover straight-forward man and machine stories, but perhaps cyberpunk inspired poetry (if there's anyone out there mad enough to attempt such a thing) or even artwork. I thought about doing a dual anthology in one collection, one half being sci-fi while the other half would be fantasy since most anthologies seem to go one way or the other. (Maybe for good reason!) So we'll see how that pans out as the flakes begin to fly.

2012 Project #1

2011-11-28T08:09:00.000-08:00

So we're nearing the end of 2011. Winter brings up in me not only reflection on all of the stuff that's happened over the past 12 months, but also makes me yearn to undertake a massive project to busy myself while the snow drifts pile up around our back door.

Project numero uno is willfully dedicating myself to buying only self-pubbed and small press books in 2012. I'd like to say that I'm going to limit myself to only reading self-pubbed and small press books in 2012, but there are so many series that I've committed myself to already that I'd like to clear off my to-read list before 2013 strikes, so I'll complete my Big Press shopping list before the end of December and not buy another until the following January.

Thus far, I've purchased one already for that 2012 reading list and it's hands on the hips by my friend Jhon Z Baker. I couldn't wait until 2012 to get into the wondrous works within, and I've read probably half of the collection already. My recommendation: if you want to read some poetry that rends the heart, makes you scared of yourself at times because of cutting honesty, and really truly feel something genuine that boils from hard-to-explain emotions and sensations, I'd say you need to pick up hands on the hips. Jhon's work is Bukowski caliber and that's not an exaggeration.

Another work I'm planning on grabbing soon is Transubstantiate by Richard Thomas. He recently had a work in the latest installment in the Shivers ongoing anthology. Not only is Richard a great writer who can captivate and scare the get-out of his reader, but he's a genuinely nice guy who is always willing to message/tweet back and forth with a sense of humor and levity that I try to strive to have. The guy is great all around and he's going to be the second on my 2012 to-read list.

Another work I've been regrettably been putting off for way too long is Gordon Highland's Major Inversions. Gordon is a great guy as well and is always willing to lend advice and promote whatever you have to promote. The Velvet wouldn't be the same without him (that is to say it probably wouldn't exist); be it with his podcast and devotion to the twisted-brained consortium gathered 'round the sub-genre that is the Velvet.

Other works by people I've met through the inter-web include: Thea Gregory with Zombie Bedtime Stories, C.C. Ekeke with Star Brigade, one (or two) of the many works of Chuck Wendig, as well as tons others that I haven't put on the list yet.

Current Writing Playlist

2011-11-06T19:55:00.001-08:00

Chosen specifically for aiding in the creation of mood for violent cyberpunk fiction.

"Blast Off" - Bassnectar
"Doomsday" - Nero
"Genesis" - Cross
"Lights" - Ellie Goulding (Bassnectar remix)
"Loud Pipes" - Ratatat
"Major Tom" - Shiny Toy Guns
"The National Anthem" - Yoshida Brothers
"Omen" - Prodigy
"Rock It" - Subfocus
"Stompbox" - The Qemists
"Television Rules The Nation (live)" - Daft Punk
"Undisclosed Desires" - Muse

That is all. Thank you.

Could you be more vague...?

2011-10-27T18:08:00.001-07:00

"In time, you will know our name."

Wrong Brother

2011-10-27T07:37:00.001-07:00

My wife and I went looking for a birthday present for one of her clients last night. During a spin through Target, I accumulated a couple of books I've had my eye on for a while. One being Kristen Painter's Blood Rights and the other being Something Blue by Emily Giffin. Now, while you're picking your jaw up off the floor--yes, I sometimes read chick lit. I go through a figurative ton of hard SF that usually deals with dystopic, nobody-wins plotlines and a good entirely separate break from that is what I need. Plus, I recently sat through (and enjoyed--mostly) Something Borrowed and felt the ending strayed a bit into the region of "Really? That's it?" territory for me personally and I became strangely fixated on those characters long after the credits rolled. What happened to Darcy? What about that other guy, the one that's on The Office? What happened to his goofy ass? Did he ever find true love over there in England? This is me we're talking about. I know. Next it'll be china patterns and starting online polls as to which particular Febreze scent is the most popular. I'll just have to read a shitload of Hemingway and set Bone Machine onto a constant loop to reacquire my masculinity.

But I digress.

As we were checking out (and I was putting on a show for the Target clerk that Something Blue was very much not my choice amongst our purchases), I began to do this little game I often do with the people preceding or following us in line by furtively scrutinizing the items they put on the belt. I think, this being another aside, that it can be helpful for a writer to do this. Don't spend a lot of time studying the actual person themselves, but the things they're buying. Try to figure out who they are, what kind of life they lead and if they have kids or if they're married or whatever. I'll give you an example. What can you tell me about a person who buys these items: eighteen cans of Fancy Feast, a Weight Watchers TV dinner, a ginger-scented candle, and a box of tissues? That's right, that person is clearly a serial murderer. No, I jest. Lives alone, has a cat (duh) and likes things that smell nice and may or may not have a cold.

But anyway. To the point. The lady behind us was preparing for Halloween it seemed, because she was buying those enormous bags of candy and a myriad of spider and skull themed decor by way of wreaths and door knockers, etc. I had seen all of those items as we were combing that section of the store for said birthday present and I didn't pay it much mind. Nothing to worry about, nothing out of the ordinary. Mind you, I'm always on the look-out for someone buying plastic wrap, a shovel, latex gloves, bleach, and rope--but that never happens. Unless you shop at Walmart. I kid, I kid! But, what really struck me about what this woman was buying (a kindly, middle-aged woman) was the Halloween costume kit. It was one of those with the mask, the suit of weird slippery material that's probably repurposed motorcycle cover nylon that always makes me think of that scene for House of 1000 Corpses in which Tiny comes down into the basement with that fucking hilarious shirt emblazoned with: Cheap-Ass Halloween Costume.

But this lady was buying a costume for some poor fool to go trick-or-treating as none other than . . . Waluigi.

Now, if you're not a gamer like I, you probably have no idea who that is (much like that lady buying that horrid costume for some kid who probably spent the rest of last night bawling his eyes out). Also, lucky you for not knowing who Waluigi is. So allow me to ruin that section of your brain that was once unoccupied by not knowing about Waluigi and fill you in.

Back in the 80s Super Mario was all the rage, but in the 90s it began to see a bit of a slump. This being a few years before the N64 came out and Super Mario 64 blew the doors off the platformer genre and lifted Mario back to gleaming popularity. But we're not talking about then. We're talking the VirtualBoy whoops-we-blinded-the-fanboys days. The dark times. And in attempt to pitch a handful of spice into the pot and breathe new life into the franchise, Nintendo thought it'd be a cool idea to give Mario an evil twin. And Wario was created. (See what they did there, flipped the M to make a W? Clever!) And for a while, it was good. Or at least passable. We had Bizarro Mario, Wario, and he was greedy and always had those saliva strands clinging between this teeth and his bent, thunderbolt moustache and yellow and purple were his colors in direct opposition to Mario's fuck yeah USA red and blue. Clearly he was fucked in the head, as all Bizarro characters tend to be.

But then at some point, they decided to create a Bizarro Luigi. And since they couldn't do as they had done with Mario and just invert the first letter of his name since an upside-down L doesn't make a sound, they had to use the "Wa" part of Wario and tack it onto Luigi and make Waluigi, thus creating the worst fucking game character since Tingle from Legend of Zelda.

This is Tingle, in case you were curious. Behold.

And I was just stunned staring at this costume, probably making the WTF face all over. I kept thinking about that mom going home, busting in through the back door and that kid springing in from the living room all abuzz about seeing his costume and she pulls that monstrosity out and pulling a face of his own. It was probably along the lines of that same look we as a generation made every time our inept grandparents gave us a Chea pet for our birthday. Do you remember that shit? Yeah, so I was making that face at this costume and if the lady saw me making that face, she probably saw it again when she pulled it out of the bag for that poor kid.

"I thought liked Mario!"

"Mom, that is so not fucking Mario."

"Billy! Watch your mouth."

"No. Mom, at this point, the word 'fucking' must be uttered. It must!"

I mean, who the fuck wants to be Luigi let alone Waluigi for Halloween? He's lower on the "also-ran" list of characters than Scrappy Doo. Or that mush-brained Godzooki from that old Godzilla cartoon. I'll just come out and say it: Waluigi is a shittier character than Jar-Jar Binks. I have no qualms about saying that, either. None. I believe it in my heart of hearts that Waluigi is the absolute dregs of creativity wrought from that cash-in, pad-out-the-Mario-Kart-roster mindset. And for him to have a Halloween costume is just criminal.

I guess the moral of this story is listen to your kids. "Did he say Luigi or Waluigi?" Maybe you should, I don't know, take him with you to the store before buying the costume he'll have to wear or call to verify or something. Halloween is only but once a year. A time to play a role and be someone else and more often than not, unless you're living in some Bizarro world, you want to be someone cooler than yourself. Waluigi looks like a playground lurker, that guy who hangs around at the post office all day smoking thin cigars and whispering at you as soon as you walk past. The guy at K-Mart who, despite not even working there, will suggest which snow tires are best and invite himself over to your house to help install them. The guy with too many gerbils and time on his hands.

This guy.

No, no, wait. I got it. He looks like someone who might sit around late at night, reading Something Blue aloud with a tweedy British accent to an audience of dogs! Ha-ha-ha! Oh, shit, wait a minute . . .

a c0nv3rs4ti0n

2011-10-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

Allow me, if you will, to share a little something; an exchange between my wife and I, via text, we had today.

October 19, 2011 11:56 AM

Traci:
Stupid question: how do you create photo albums in your photos folder?

Andrew:
Heh. Good question. I think you may need to use iTunes on the comp to do that. I've tried, myself.

Traci:
That's dumb. Thanks, though.

Andrew:
Yeah. The Great Secret that Mr. Jobs took with him to the great motherboard in the sky.

Traci:
PDFs nice

Andrew:
?

Traci:
I mean pfff nice.

Andrew:
Oh. That makes much more sense.

Andrew:
Roffle.

Andrew:
(phonetic version of ROFL, by the way.)

Traci:
Yeah, got that! :)

Andrew:
Hahaha

Traci:
Don't you mean elohel?

Andrew:
Maybe... I read recently that someone tried to text "sucketh" on their iPhone and it auto-corrected with "Zuckerberg". Ha!

Traci:
Nice!

Andrew:
ohemgee I laffed.

Traci:
Ick.

Andrew:
And then iPooped.

(a few seconds of stunned silence here.)

Andrew:
Okay, I'll stop now.

Traci:
Lol. Literally.

Traci:
Your dad would like that joke.

Andrew:
Yeah, he does have that brand of humor doesn't he.

Andrew:
Great, now that's in my auto-correct dictionary. Every time I'm gonna write anything with the little i in front of it, iPooped is gonna spring up.

Traci:
Haha!

Andrew:
Or do you mean riffle?

Andrew:
Riffle! Fuck!

Andrew:
Roffle. Jesus.

Traci:
Yeah... fun, isn't it?

Grippe

2011-10-17T17:03:00.001-07:00

Man alive. Some kinda cold I've managed to get nabbed by. Midnight coughing jags, let me tell you, are so much fun.

Despite feeling like I've got the black lung, still plugging away at the social networking thing to attempt to get a good base made for when it comes time to begin spreading the news on Knuckleduster. I've discovered a marketing firm that I plan to utilize and with being a member of the Authors Guild, I'll be able to nab a domain for a website on the cheap.

Still, getting a lit agent is eluding me. Suppose that's fine, making plenty of headway on my own and I fully intend on sticking with Medallion for all my SF and YA works. Which leads me to my other bit of news...

Got a rejection letter for Memory Lanes this morning from Dzanc this morning. I can't even remember when I submitted to them. Must've been through Submishmash. (You know, that submission site that every author is expected to use but when you do, it seems like your manuscript is being sent to the waiting room from Beetlejuice.)

Forgive me (cough) I'm a bit under the weather and that can often make me (cough COUGH) somewhat (cough) short-tempered. (cough).

Burglar

2011-10-15T06:56:00.001-07:00

So there's been a rash of break-ins at our apartment building, according to a memo the office left us . . . a memo with grammar so horrid that it almost scared me more than the mentioning of burglars.

Regardless, I knew something was up. A few weeks ago, the wife and I were heading down to the garage for a night out and there was this man and woman by our car with a open bookbag and various tools. As soon as I hit the unlock button on the fob, they packed up and skedaddled.

Thought I was just being paranoid or a mistrusting misanthrope, but lo and behold, that couple? Yeah, the memo described them in detail and wouldn't you know it--those people sound really familiar!

Scared to leave the house now. Not for my stuff--they can take whatever they want--I'm afraid for the dogs. But, I guess all we can do us ensure we keep the doors locked (apartment and car) and hope for the best.

At It

2011-10-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

Took kind of a hiatus from blogging. Didn't have a ton to say, I suppose. A good chunk of that tied directly to the fact that I also took a break from writing in general. Resting the fingers.

Knuckleduster's sequel, The Butcher of Alloy, has gone rather well. It's going to be a rather large installment, to put it plainly. Brody is dealing with a lot this time 'round (as if he weren't in KD #1!) and I believe he's becoming an even more complicated individual than he was before.

Took a vacation "up nort" as they say here, to a campsite in the Jay Cooke State Park with the missus. What a beautiful place. Cabin, veggie burgers over the fire, no emailing, tons of reading. Speaking of which, I took on Neal Stephenson's latest, Reamde. Amazing! Perfect camping trip reading.

In the end, it was exactly the break my wife and I needed. So much time out in the wilderness, taking turns lugging the CamelBak, enjoying the fall colors and talking a whole lot as well as sharing a lot of comfortable silence, too.

Back at it (seriously) tomorrow on KD #2. Good seeing you again, friend. I promise I won't stay away so long next time. Cue up the Doogie Houser journal-writing music here.

Songs of the Summer (2011)

2011-08-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

A few songs I've had on an endless repeat while on walks, at the gym, 'round the house, etc. If when you ask me a question and I require you to repeat it, you can blame these fine folks.

"Commando" -- Ramones
"Solid Gold" -- Eagles of Death Metal
"Outside Chance" -- Heavy Trash
"Pirate Jet" -- Gorillaz
"Aya" -- Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
"Swampblood" -- Th' Legendary Shack Shakers
"In the Sign of the Octopus" -- The Hellacopters
"Satellite" -- The Kills
"Derezzed" -- Daft Punk (Tron Legacy score)
"Girl" -- Beck
"Bastard in Love (live)" -- Black Flag
"Complete Control" -- The Clash
"Poppies" -- Marcy Playground
"Burning Jacob's Ladder" -- Mark Lanegan
"Orgasmatron" -- Motorhead
"Cut Me Out" -- MNDR
"Into the Fold" -- Duke Spirit
"Bloodhounds on My Trail" -- The Black Angels
"Gold" -- The New Up
"The Funeral" -- Band of Horses
"Invaders Must Die" -- The Prodigy
"One Day" -- Matisyahu
"Lived in Bars" -- Cat Power

Forging Cooperatively

2011-08-15T12:25:00.001-07:00

So me and my friend Patrick (aka Brentley aka Jebus aka Scorpio Maxwell aka Scorpio aka Jebus Maxwell and pretty much every other combination you could come up with using those various monikers) have begun work on a novel together.

Right now we're blasted on Jolt Cola, sitting on the matted carpet of our collective mind's basement slowly accumulating the parts of things we love, hacking up and cannibalizing old plots, Frankensteining things together, making a lot of lists and charts and profiles so detailed they contain bloodtypes; timelines, lists of things not to do, lists of things we probably shouldn't but must--all in the name of assembling a hodge-podge Tarantino-style mix-tape of a novel as a flag decreeing our adoration to all things Speculative Fiction.

We use PlayStation Network to do our psuedo conference calls since long-distance is expensive. Which just kind of plays into the plot, funnily enough, of technology and loopholes (loopholes, mind you, not worm-holes. We want our readers to understand what they're reading, yeah?) And so far, it's been quite a tapped fountain of ideas. From the first nugget I had to what we're doing now are entirely different and I realize working with someone else is really good to help sharpen an idea, working cooperatively can save a lot of time. There's someone there to encourage a notion or to squash one before it can get too big and stupid. Mental whetstones.

I sent a what-do-you-think letter to my editor at Medallion and she loves the idea and based just on the quick riff on the character that Patrick created, she loves Lonnie our protagonist as well. So, here we go, full speed ahead.

Title forthcoming.

Glacier

2011-07-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

Several projects in the works and what I actually get to full completion and what I get half-done or partly-assembled are definitely camps of the warring variety. I suck at follow-through. I do. To quote my father, when speaking about me once: "Do you like to do shit the hard way?" Apparently I do. With that tidbit of an insight about me in your mind, read on to what I've been up to, knowing that each highlight has been a struggle and a half. I've been behind on my posting and letting y'all know what I've been up to, I know. Glacial, even.

*Applied to teach a speculative fiction class at the Loft literary center. Hope to hear back next week. Wrote out a six-week syllabus. That sounds easier than it actually was.

*Completed edits for Knuckleduster and got them sent off to Medallion. So much red pen . . .

*Got my card from the Authors Guild in the mail. I proudly carry it in my wallet wherever I go now. Note: Scott Turow's signature is small and weird, like a chipmunk's cocktail napkin doodle.

*Finished reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Loved every word. To call that book epic is like calling . . . something obvious something obvious. Sorry. I'm tapped out on clever metaphors. I am like entirely in love with Stephenson's work. I'm on the third book by him this summer alone. Snow Crash blew my mind, The Diamond Age set my imagination on fire, and already (only one chapter in) with Quicksilver and I'm envying his prose and dialogue so bad I wanna go back in a time machine and rewrite everything I've ever written.

*I have four fans on Goodreads. Thank you, thank you.

*Truth Alert. I haven't posted on here in a while because I got so wrapped up in The Avengers: Earth's Mightest Heroes animated series. Do you like superheroes? Do you not mind when stuff is animated? Did you grow up on Marvel comics like I did? Go Netflix that show, post-haste. You won't be disappointed, trust me.

Applying

2011-07-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

for the Author's Guild today.

Sent the 'velope out in the mail just a minute ago.

Come on, man. Accept me. I need some health insurance.

Now That's Some Happy Cardboard

2011-06-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

I often buy books in twos. And this is probably the best pairing since ... I can't remember when.

Summer of SF/F (vol. 1)

2011-06-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

Quickly now.

Stuff I've recently read (and loved.)

Late-Night with Thor

2011-06-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and I went to see Thor last weekend. But, we wanted to dodge the crowds as much as possible. Our theater near here is always loaded with dumbass teens, especially on the weekends. You know the sort. Floppy hair. Heh-heh-heh duuuude. Yeah, anyway. We wanted to avoid that so we got our tickets through that website that apparently only has paper bags dressed in homages of popular movies for employees known as Fandango and went to see Thor at 10:30 at night.

It was great. Just us and some lonesome guy in the whole theater. The whole vibe of the cineplex was quiet, sleepy. Walking in, there was no music blaring. The a/c was on and the whole place felt chilly, even for a movie theater. We found our seats toward the front, had the pick of the litter since there wasn't a single one occupied. We muled in some twizzlers and bottled water. The movie itself was fun. I'll never turn down an opportunity to see Kat Dennings. She should've played Portman's part, I think, but that's just me. But, beauty isn't in style right now.

Either way, I think this is how we'll go and see movies from now on. Wait a couple of weeks, on this case, months, and go and see them at ten o'clock at night. Possibly even on a Sunday, just to cement the fact there'll be no crowd. X-Men: First Class will probably be the next. I see a theme developing with summer movies. Now that Marvel is owned by Disney, perhaps we should just wait for the day they combine with Gerber and AARP and they can own us all from cradle to grave.

On a lighter note, been doing some editing for Knuckleduster. A few of you who read this blog will be getting an email from Medallion asking if you'd like to receive an ARC of the book. Review nicely, please. *Nervous laugh quickly followed by serious stare.*

New approach to editing. I print out a chapter at a time, make some tea and sit out on the patio with it and give it the red pen treatment. I quit smoking so I needed to find a new way to get to writing and/or editing. I just wasn't making any progress praying for a nicotine high to fuel my creativity. But, I really like it this way. Tearing off a bite-sized chunk, red penning it, and making the changes on the computer. Progress!

On another note...

Just saw the trailer for the new Halo game. 2012 I guess. Halo 4, with Master Chief. Wow. I thought he was dead. I thought Microsoft retired that franchise, with that character. Good old Master Chief. It'll be him and Keith Richards in the after-world, the only things left unvaporized. Not by their choice, mind. I think their record label and developers, respectively, will see to it that they become immortal by some technological fluke only available to folks who can prove they can rein in a few billion per project.

E3. You always have a surprise up your sleeve for us. And it's always something we should've seen coming.

At a Glance

2011-05-27T12:24:00.001-07:00

Quickly, now. Read as if there is no punctuation, okay? Multiple updates at once. Ready?

Trip to Oz Cancelled.

So quite a large deal has happened over the past month n' some. My folks live in Alabama and the tornados, well—yeah, they came damn close to their place. Couldn’t reach them for a little while there and there’s nothing quite the feeling you get when having to call the Red Cross to see if your parents are still alive. But, as it turned out, the ‘nados stopped approximately five miles from their place. Safe and sound. The yard a bit mussed but that’s all. Praise be to who deemed it on that one. It's been a while since I was so scared I felt sick. Can never prepare yourself for that, I assure you.

Bookish.

So Medallion Press has picked up my second novel as well. 2014 you’ll be see the first of a trilogy entitled Fabrick. I pitched it as Harry Potter for late-middle schoolers that shop at Hot Topic. They really liked it and I (seriously) could write the stories of the fabrick-weavers the rest of my life. I might even do some artwork for the project as well, maybe a chapter-heading line drawing or something. Either way, major celebrations to take place following that news. Contracts sent off, a slot of 2014, and, yeah, tremendous. Couldn’t be happier in the capable hands of Medallion Press. They’re so good to me.

In reading news, I’ve gotten into the Witcher series of Andrzej Sapkowski. I read the first installment, The Last Wish, in about two days and immediately ran down to Barnes & Noble for the second, Blood of Elves, and have chewed most of the way through it already in a scant three days. Marvelous fantasy writing. Lots of lore, world-building imagination blasts with violence and sex and…just, yeah. Mix Scarface and Lord of the Rings. Presto. The Witcher.

There's a game series out as well based on Geralt the Witcher, which probably prompted the translation of the books to English from their native Polish and it was probably also the reason they now grace the overly crowded Sci-Fi / Fantasy section at my local B&N, but hey--I can roll with it. I hope the games prompt them to translate the remaining books, I really do. I have no fucking clue what I plan on reading after Blood of Elves and by gum I need somethin'.

Hang Out, Talk Over a Bad Movie, Drink. Repeat.

Next to camping, sitting around a fire or sitting by a calm freshwater body of water at dusk--doing this is something I absolute love doing with my wife. Especially when we get to that level of not-stupid-drunk but somewhere in the comfortable buzzy section of intoxication where big theories and memories of youth and stupidity came out and you're drunk enough to honestly listen to the other person instead of just waiting for your turn to speak. I love that. Especially with my wife because it never fails that she reveals something about herself that I didn't know before. We've been together for seven years and still she surprises me. I hope I surprise her still, too.

But that's what I plan on doing with her this weekend. She's been working tirelessly all week and I've been knocking it out with the Knuckleduster edits and banging my head against the wall spending an entire week on one goddamn chapter--we need a break, damn it. So, cheap wine (and possible pale ale) with possibly a horrible movie (Twilight is always good for nights like that--I'm not a fan of genuinely watching them, but when it comes to watching them to make fun of them, call me Super-Fan of that shit) and share and laugh and possibly get sick. GT's.

War.

Watched this thing on the NY Times website (which is great, by the way--nice design) about the troops in Afghanistan. It featured a video where one of the soldiers had a videocamera attached to his helmet and walking around in the countryside with his fellow troops when they get shot at.

So I spoke before about stomach-twisting things, and well, yeah, this got me too.

I think it's kind of insane that in this country, if you're male and over the age of say, twelve, and under the age of forty or so, it's safe to assume you've played Call of Duty. And the footage and the game are creepily similar. The sound of distant gunfire, all too similar to that sound you hear on the street if you live in an urban area like us on Fourth of July of grocery store bought fireworks. Sickening, certainly, but infinitely compelling at the same time. It was an interactive feature and just like that, twenty-five minutes of my life vanished. I was dressed to head out, with shoes on and everything, and there I sat, unable to peel myself from the stories of these soldiers, many of whom are younger than I am. And the footage, the sound of gunfire, and seeing through the eyes of a soldier as he lifts his gun and fires back...it just brought a whole new layer of reality to it for me.

That's not so say that I wasn't aware of what's going on before. I know all too well. My very close friend's husband is over there. One of my best friends served. My cousins were both in the Marines, one of which is having trouble (still) getting coverage for his PTSD. But, seeing it through the eyes of someone who is over there, engaged in the fight, it made me realize how surrounded in batting and comfortable life is here and without them, and all soldiers before them, we wouldn't have what we have. To attempt a shred of humor and turn a popular quote, "If it weren't for them, we'd all be speaking German right now!" I laugh, but it's true. So, hats off to them and I may not pray real often, but I do pray that all of that stuff ends soon. Very soon.

Viruses Can Bite It.

On a lighter note...

We got a bad virus on the home PC. It kept saying, "Congratulations, You Win," over and over and over. Not in a sound file or anything like that. It was like the computer was fucking possessed. Made me think at any moment Agent Smith would bust up into the apartment, jam his hand into my chest and assimilate me into the Smiths to dogpile Keanu.

Or something like that.

Short story long, if anyone who reads this blog works at Norton Virus Slayers Incorporated (what they should've named the company), if and when you're in the Twin Cities area, every single thing you consume that has alcohol in it (or cranberry juice if you're on the wagon) is on me. Forever. Until the Smiths assimilate us all and the machines win...and I'll help your landlady take our her...garbage.

Harry Potter & The Deathly Spinach Dip

2011-04-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Seems like DVD isn't quite dead and buried, but it's in the drawer at the morgue. Still warm, to a degree. But very much without a pulse.

I came to this conclusion when going to Target today to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Blu-ray. It's my first Blu, everything else I own is on DVD and VHS. (Yes, I still own a handful of VHS tapes, most of which are in the closet under the in-event-of-nuclear-meltdown kit and the leaf for the dining room table.)

Either way, it makes me sigh. I feel like DVD has barely been around at all. I mean, I am stuck in 1999 and probably will be the remainder of my years, but why are we moving on to a new format already? Especially one that isn't all that different from DVD. We still have to go to the store, buy the thing in its physical form. Of course, there is itunes and amazon downloads, and the download to hard-drive on Playstation Network, but...that seems more like an option and less like a format, to me. The special features is what got me. The DVD for Deathly Hallows is bare-bones as you could get. ("Different languages and scene selection?!? Wow, where do I sign?!") And I'm a sucker for special features, especially one that's so epic included on the Deathly Hallows Blu: the opening scene for Part 2.

Either way, I'm glad I got it. It'll look nice on my shelf with all of the other HPs if nothing else.

To celebrate the HP bonanza and to throw a wake for DVD as a whole, I decided to make spinach dip. Something of new territory for me, but I like the results. Here, I'll show you how I did it.

Spinach & Cucumber Dip for Special Occasions or Celebrating a Death, like that of DVD

Start with a hot pan. Throw in some finely chopped onion and some canola oil (or olive oil if you prefer.) Let that caramelize and then add a brick of frozen spinach. You can use fresh if you want, or canned (as long as it is very well-drained). Let that simmer together until it's all real squishy. Use a spatula to try to get as much moisture as possible out of the spinach. A lot of it will burn off if you shift the spinach mostly to one side of the pan while letting the excess water run to the other side to evaporate.

Now would be a good time to add some seasonings that tend to break down well when added to a hot pan, like garlic salt. Add some of that and then some more. Then, when your mixture looks like it has a serious case of dandruff, add some more. I'm talking lethal amounts. You can never have too much garlic in spinach dip. Seriously.

While that's doing its magic, prepare an ice bath. If you don’t know how to do that: just take one large bowl and fill it with ice water, and then put a smaller bowl inside. This will help to bring the temp of the spinach and onion mixture down quickly to preserve taste and other gastronomical things I only pretend to understand.

After you’re satisfied the spinach has gone gooey enough, put it in the ice bath, set aside. Take half a large cucumber and chop or blend until it, too, is a goo. Use a swatch of cheesecloth or a colander to get some of the liquid out—not all, mind, just some. Add to cooled spinach. Next, take a small container of sour cream (or plain yogurt) and add to the mixture. Mix well. Add extra seasoning as you like them. Some suggestions: nutmeg, Italian seasonings, garlic powder, ground black pepper, even capers or pine nuts might be nice in there as well.

Let cool in refrigerator until its…cool. Serve with pita chips, tortilla chips or on those little toast thingies only pretentious people buy.

Rick roll'd

2011-04-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

My blog seems to have found itself wrapped up into some kind of spam-machine and apparently gets suggested to view while using the "pingy" website. I do not recommend going to that site, since itself pretty spammy itself and overloads you with popups that can even dodge my relatively bulletproof popup-blocker.

I dunno how I ended up being a part of that and for anyone who found this blog through that site, I apologize. It wasn't my doing, honestly. But, for what it's worth, here's a picture of a soggy mouse.

Ear Worm

2011-04-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

My wife and I watch cartoons.
We don't have kids. But we still watch cartoons on Saturday morning. It's like a ritual for us. We make fun of the anime peoples' hairstyles and try to find sense in the Sonic X plotline. But, like all Saturday morning anime cartoons, they all begin with an incredibly snappy theme song. Yu-gi-oh or however the hell you spell it isn't so bad. Sonic X's theme song is pretty catchy, but the worst one of them all has to be Dragonball Z Kai's opening ditty. The lyrics are simple, the whole thing is done in sort of a mid-90s alt-rock love ballad kind of thing and it's...oh man...it infects your brain it's so catchy. My wife admitted she had a dream she was singing it last night. I found myself humming it while running the vac around the house.

Here, just for you, so you can join in the insanity:

Fat Dogs

2011-04-12T11:07:00.001-07:00

Good Lord our dogs got fat over the winter. Lenny, our Lhasa Apso (sp?) Boxer mix used to be this lithe little thing and now he looks like a sausage that got rolled around on the floor of a barbershop. Fuzzy, compact, and squishy.

Off to take them to a walk here in a minute, hopefully we'll get them down to a appropriate weight before the next vet visit. They always give us dirty looks when we get them on the scale as if we're swinging past Micky D's every day for some doggy drive-thru. They're just lazy is all, they like their sleep and the comfort found in our old hand-me-down furniture. Once around the apartment grounds, maybe up the street toward the main drag, and back.

They'll be useless the rest of the day, sleeping it off. Maybe that'll quell some of the barking fits they get into now that the weather has warmed and the dog park directly outside our apartment is full of mutts and owners. Let's hope, anyway.

Clamor of Keys

2011-04-11T10:19:00.001-07:00

Full-steam ahead on the writing/revising/editing front. What am I doing on here, you may ask, writing a blog instead of additions and changes to the projects? Lord only knows. Coffee break, a crack of the knuckles, square up my baseball cap, have a smoke, and back to it, all hands on deck.

Woot!

Library

2011-04-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

Sunday = library day.

I really look forward to this day. Call me a serious dork, but getting the travel mugs ready with good ol' coffee was black as crude and sitting in that parking lot in our car, windows down, me and the missus discussing books and writing and life and...and this time the weather will be warm...nothing better.

Currently in the middle of reading three novels, so I don't think I'll be checking anything out today. Maybe a movie or a magazine. Got an issue of Wired last time and read that thing from cover to cover. Love me some Wired. Can't tell you how many ideas I got from just one issue alone. Good stuff.

Last Sunday, and I don't think I mentioned this, but I discovered some really old books about the St. Paul - Minneapolis area, the history and whatnot. Leather-bound, gilded pages, heavy-ass grimoires of local history. Decades old, some of them. I'm talking like from the 1920s and 30s. Beautiful things. I really wish as much devotion went into book design now. I can't imagine how long it took to press some of those covers, embossed lettering into leather. Regardless, I want to steal them and bring them home and hide them under the bed. Not sure why, though. Reminds me of the books I found in my middle school library on gunslingers. They were pretty old as well, leather-bound and with those glossy pages that make that distinct sound when you flip; snap, snap. I checked one out and held onto it the whole semester, wayyyy past its date to be returned. Loved that book. Shame I had to return it. I liked seeing it on my shelf.

Anyway, off here in a few minutes once the missus is ready. Best day of the week, honest to God.

Self-Indulgent?

2011-04-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

To have a blog named after yourself, with your own name as the title?

Same posts, same stuff I always have written about, but this time easier to find via the Googles and Bings (band name in the waiting right there) should anyone search for my name and want my shit and not the PhD or that other guy with my name on Twitter or the other one that gets into religious arguments. Yes, I've Googles myself. Lay off. So have you. Yourself, that is. You've Googled yourself, on the computer and in other ways too I imagine.

Call it shameless self-promotion. Call it prematurely preparing to become a sell out. Call it what you will. I feel like an idiot doing it, so don't worry. And I'm not the first to have my name, big as life, on the main page for all to say: "hey, lookit that." Yes, I mean you: Caleb J. Ross.

I jest.
Mostly.

Hey, at least I linked you, right?

I do like the design, though. Very Justified and old-timey.

Book Stuff / Death and Taxes / Editing / Flynn

2011-04-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

So the contracts for Knuckleduster got sent off today. It feels good and right. The editors at Medallion are excited about the project and I can only imagine what they amazingness they'll design for the cover. I want to smell my book. It sounds strange, I know, but you know that smell of a new book from the B&N or the musty, amazing rank of an old library book? I can't imagine what my book, with my words, in a bound volume will smell like. If anything like the assembler of those words: cigarettes, BO, and peanut butter. Let's hope it smells better than that.

Good Lord, we did taxes yesterday. My wife has her own freelance editing business and in doing so, it makes taxes...unique. It's almost as if the gov'ment deliberately makes it hard for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit. As if they want to deter them into keeping it easy and just work for the man the rest of their days where the taxes are (relatively) streamlined.

I had difficulty with my own, from trying to acquire the W2 from Target, whom I worked for last year. Quickly: So I call and tell them I didn’t receive the form. HR lady isn’t in, they take my number. Next day, no call. I call them. HR lady still isn’t in. I ask to leave my new address. They tell me to call this 1-800 number. I call and the pre-recorded message is too fast and I try to be a diligent stenographer and write as it rambles off in its robot-speak monotone and yet—no. I have a scrawled list of six different possible web addresses and go down them one by one until finding the corresponding one. Amazing how “paperless employee,” when uttered fast, can sound like ten thousand different things. “Pay-per-less employee?” Payless Employee? (Note: the latter is about right, Target, if I recall my reduced hours and meager pay.) And from there, I had to spend ten bucks to access my own (reissued) W2. Short story long, go it. Printed, saved, double-printed. Fuckers.

So, off to H&R Block today for further soul deadening, as if going through our stuff (on our own) yesterday wasn’t enough. Christ I hate taxes. They’ve damn-near figured out teleportation. They can splice jellyfish DNA into pigs. And still, we have to tote our grimoire of receipts and bullshit to some old man who stinks of onions and types nothing quicker than glacial once a year, listening to canned Muzak and praying for a sudden aneurism to strike me and rid me of the misery that is taxes.
Homeless people are onto something, I believe.

But, this weekend, I’ll begin the edits for Knuckleduster. Sitting down to write something initially is a joy. I love dreaming stuff up, figuring out the plots, having my characters go through hell to get what they want to achieve. Especially with Knuckleduster, all of the weirdo creations and technological hoopla. But the editing process can make me see how often I use the expressions: “he looked” or “he shook his head” or “he dashed.” Dashed? Yikes. In Word, I’m gonna go to Find, Replace quite a bit on that ugly little shit of a word. Dashed. My God.

All good things, though. Truly. The snow has finally melted entirely, the sun is out—I can have the windows out and have the apartment smelling fresh and new. The dogs love it, too. Taking a walk ‘round the park, pulling with enthusiasm to smell this and that and this and this and that. Winters in Minnesota are killer (sometimes, literally) and it’s good, nigh liberating, to be able to see leaves budding and see the grass and the baby rabbits at the tree-line behind the building. Got to hit the trails once the mud dries up. There's a park near here we frequent in the summer. Trails, open fields, hills and...it's just splendid. And I don't use that word often. Just got to remember to stock up on tick shampoo for the dogs beforehand.

Saw Tron: Legacy the other night. Not as bad as people said. Good special effects for a majority of it and the soundtrack was fantastic. Great escapism and no silly helmets like in the original. Jeff Bridges, in my humble opinion, could make a movie where the central character is a man who’s on a quest for broccoli and I’d be captivated. A one-eyed cowboy, The Dude, Flynn, a heavily-sauced country singer—Bridges, man. That guy, I swear. Stoned Jesus.

Knuckleduster Has Officially Found a Home

2011-04-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

Got word from Medallion Press they're going to publish the first installment of Knuckleduster in March of 2013. I had to lay down. Trembling hands. Hugs with the wife. Went out, got wine, still feel as if DiCaprio at any moment will bust in and tell me I'm in a dream within a dream. Still pinching myself now.

Really thought for a moment there that it may've been a really, really, really, really cruel April Fool's Day joke, but no. Contract via pdf. Even if it was a joke, I'm still signing the damn thing, haha.

To everyone who has supported me and ran my stories, to everyone who has ever had midnight theory-making sessions on back porches about the future with me, to everyone who read my stuff and gave me critiques, for everyone who turned me down, for everyone who gave me a chance, for the teachers that didn't rip up my stories when I was caught writing those instead of taking notes. To my wife, who supported me through thick and thin and believed in me. For old friends, for new ones, for everyone--I love you all and thank you so much. I couldn't have done it without you.

Using My Words / Idiotic Ex-Job / Pubbed Stuff Thus Far

2011-03-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

So, the second go at a first draft for the second installment of Knuckleduster is under way. Got a few Ks worth of words down before I decided to outline the remainder of the plot. Of course, the first Knuckleduster has a semi-convoluted plot, but it was relatively easy to follow. The second, while I want a few elements and themes in there, it feels like I'm shoe-horning them in. Might have to axe some stuff. It's something I guess a lot of sci-fi writers suffer from, big ideas swallowing the character development stuff...and, well, you end up with something like Strange Days or Solaris (the remake).

I don't really consider myself a science-fiction writer per say, either. Before this series, the closest thing I came to this genre was the shit I wrote in my notebooks in high school when I was supposed to be taking geology notes. I mainly write literary fiction of a darker ilk, stuff that is very much grounded in present day reality. With Knuckleduster, it's a few decades in the future and while it's science-fiction, personally, if it were up to me, it'd be filed in that gray area of Barnes & Noble (that doesn't exist) between mystery and sci-fi/fantasy. But, if I even get to be put on a shelf anywhere in proximity to William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess, Brian Jacques, J.R.R. Tolkien--consider me smiling from ear to ear. It's not bad company, not one bit.

So I was canned from Target last year. Dunno if I've mentioned that. But, as it were, they don't have my new address. They have my old one from when we lived in southern Minnesota. So, my tax paperwork is...somewhere. Called today, since everyone knows that fantastic day of making that mind-numbing visit to H&R Block is coming up, and the HR person wasn't there. I asked if I could leave my address. She asked for my fax number. I told her I didn't have a fax machine and if I could leave my address. She said she'd call back and hung up on me. Jesus. Really. Really? I really hated that job, too, which really is the icing on the cake. They lost my paycheck once. How, you may ask. Fuck knows. Their filing system was shit. Nothing was ever in their system correctly and more than once did I call in sick (genuinely sick) and they claim to have never gotten the call. I remember working there, enjoying working in the deli and working with food, but the stress of that place, dancing on a knife's edge every day wondering when and if you'll be fired--fuck that. Favoritism is for assholes. They can keep their fucking red shirt and khakis and blow it out their asses, as the geriatric tough guys would say.

I wanted to throw this on here, since I haven't really put much of my writing up as of late. A friend of mine added one of my stories, the shortest I believe I've ever written, on her blog/journal/zine/thingy. But, below is everything I've ever written and (thus far) gotten pubbed.

"Scavenge"

"The Sugar of Mars"

"Harold" & "Happy Birthday"

"Bearer of Bad News"

The Quiz to End All Quizzes

2011-03-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

A new buddy of mine put some questions on his blog. Unlike a lot of quizzes, these are really good questions and I recommend you answer them yourself. A link to his blog, the original asker of the questions: Jhon Baker.

1. Do you write in the margins of books?
a. if so, what do you write,
b. if not, why not?

I don't typically write in the margins of books, but I will underline certain passages or lines that really move me. I've done a few reviews of books for my own personal journaling in a sense by writing the review and then taping it into the inside cover of the book. I have big handwriting and I think that's why I don't write in the margins, really, because I'd be running off the page all the time or inching in on the text.

2. How particular are you about your clothing?

I'm particular in the sense that I'm usually only comfortable in a small number of things, particularly this one pair of jeans and this one thermal I wear without fail. I consider myself having fallen off the Fashion Train quite some time ago and I don't try to keep up with trends. I like comfortable and nothing too colorful. I stick to blues and grays and blacks. So...I guess I am particularly particular about my clothing as it turns out.

3. Do you listen to music when you write/draw/paint/do what it is you like to do?
a. if so, what?
b. if not, okay then, next question.

It depends entirely on the project. If I am trying to really hammer down a mood when writing, I'll put on something that suits the vibe. If I mention a song that's playing within a scene I'm currently putting on paper, I MUST listen to that song for the duration of time that the song is playing within the scene just to keep it...real? Sometimes I like to fill silence with classical music or jazz if I'm feeling beatnikish.

4. Do you intentionally or mistakenly mix metaphors?

Both, and often.

5. Do you finish more than seventy-two percent of what you read?
a. please approximate how much.

I have to admit if I get bored with a book, sometimes I'll stop reading it, but I think that's an incredibly lame excuse to not finish a book. I've slogged through some even though I hated the characters or found the book badly paced or whatever, but more often than not (probably more than seventy-two percent of the time) if I put a book down, I'll return to it at a later time. Did that with Kavalier & Clay as well as The Hobbit.

6. What are your personal feelings about cliche?
a. realize that it is cliche to hate them before you answer.

I could really fill a book with this answer, but the short answer is basically that to find things cliche is to be jaded, I believe. We only go 'round once and to find anything cliche, really, means that you consider yourself one of those "been there done that" sort of people. Sure, there are bad cliches that're tired as hell: a majority of action movies nowadays. But then there are good cliches that never really get tired: stories about heroism or fall from grace or a good old-fashioned love story. Really, everything is cliche. Without The Honeymooners there'd be no Flintstones or King of Queens. It's just a matter of putting a good spin on things. Everyone hails Inception as being so original, but like every story, it borrows too.

7. Do you use a thesaurus?
a. If yes, how many different kinds do you have?
b. if no, how many different kinds are you hiding?

I use The New American College Roget's as well as Thesaurus.com. There ain't no shame in it.

8. What is your preference:
a. a frog reading a book paperweight, or
b. a monkey reading a book paperweight

My wife's nickname is Munkee, so we have a lot of monkey paraphernalia around our apartment, so I'm kind of bias on that one.

9. what are your vices?
a. what are your real vices?

I smoke too much and I have what could be considered a minor addiction to white zin. As for real vices, I've quit drugs and (heavy) boozing quite a while ago, but rest assured if they were suddenly made legal and were free--I'd be a junkie on day one.

10. If you came across a bag of money, no-one around for miles, how would you justify taking it and not reporting it to anyone?

I saw No Country. I'd leave that sack o' cash where it was. But that's not what you asked. Uh, let's see. I'd squirrel it away somewhere and only use it sparingly. I know myself well enough to know my conscience would gnaw at me every time I bought something that wasn't necessary to life with it, so I'd probably live daily with endless post-its around my house with "Finders Keepers" written on them.

11. if the coffee barista never charges you for your really fucking expensive drink, how long do you wait before insisting on paying or do you just keep the latte train rolling?

A guy at Walgreens once gave me extra change back and I never said anything. It eats me up, to this day. I think I must've been Catholic in a previous life. I have a problem with guilt. I'd tell the barista to charge me for the latte, post-haste, and I'd probably apologize too hoping he wouldn't ask why I was apologizing because then I'd have to admit that I was considering leaving without paying.

12. How do you sleep at night living in a world without Don LaFontaine?

In a world...without Don LaFontaine...people realized, yes, it is indeed a shitty one...without him.

That guy could make you think, while sitting in the theater: Now THAT is a movie!

13. How much research do you put into a statement before making an ass out of yourself in front of someone else who knows better.

It took me a second to remember who he was, okay?

14. Define theft.

Stealing without conscience and/or stealing something that is not essential to life.

15. Define theft as it applies to you.

Applies to me? How did you know I got arrested for shoplifting at seventeen years old?

16. Define honesty.

Something we should try to do as much of every day. It can be tough, because lying can open doors occasionally or puff up the truth. Being blatantly honest can be just as harmful, though. I, personally, try to be as truthful as possible and I will apologize beforehand if I have to tell someone something bad whether it be a criticism or a critique of their work or whatever, but I think really the old adage about "honesty is the best policy" really stands.

17. define how you want it to apply to others about you.

I don't like things sugar-coated. I worked at a place where every fuck-up I made was always breached in conversation to me in this round-about way and I can recall several times telling my innumerable bosses: "just tell me how it is." Pussy-footing around things just makes it worse and can often make me think that they're sparing things. Brass tacks, man. I suck at my job? Fucking tell me.

18. quick, how many fingers am I holding up?

Eleven!

19. This being the last question as asking 20 goes against my sadistic tendencies (I know there are the OCD sufferers out there reading this) I will ask, simply, if you only have 30 seconds to make a permanent judgment about a man - what would your criteria be - is it the same for a woman?

In order: body language, eye contact, handshake, amount of "um" and "uh" used in common speech without some kind of head trauma currently being suffered, the amount of swear words used and which ones. And for the most part, the same is used for a woman in my opinion, really. Except I tend to be more forgiving in the handshake department with a woman since that typically doesn't come up.

21. kidding. lying. What is your most harmful obsession?

That I am rotting from the inside out from some horrible disease that will not rear its ugly head as something to be genuinely concerned about until its too late and will strike me down when I'm about to achieve something great in my life whether it be a wedding anniversary with my wife or another life achievement. Being honest, I fret about that fucking stuff weekly. Well, that was bleak.

On a happier note, I enjoyed the quiz. Made me think. I remember a lot of those email quizzes from my late high school years and how the deepest question was often: Coke or Pepsi? But this, I really liked this. Pass it on, folks, but remember to give credit where credit's due and link it up from here.

Back into the Fray

2011-03-28T11:11:00.001-07:00

So I'm back to writing today. What am I doing here, you may ask? Well, I needed a break. I don't think I'll be able to go about it with the break-neck speed I used to. What I'm writing now is the second installment in what'll be a sci-fi/mystery Knuckleduster trilogy and I want to have the second part in somewhat of a workable first draft by the time the first one is released.

Lorie Popp, of Medallion Press (who rocks, by the way) is currently reading the first installment. It was an odd thing, since I submitted with them last year and they rejected it and when I finished another project and sent it their way, she inquired to know if Knuckleduster was still available. I had kind of put Brody "Knuckleduster" Calhoun on the back-burner to focus on other projects until I got some word back on it since I didn't see much of a point of focusing on a sequel when the first one wasn't getting a lot of eye-time. But, returning to near-future Minneapolis has been fun today. I had forgotten about a lot of the elements of my the world I created and as soon as I began any sentence with "Brody did blah, blah, blah" I found myself able to recall all of the funky inventions I had dreamt up and it felt like putting on a well-worn pair of jeans.

Truth is, among the characters I've created, I think I like Brody Calhoun the best. He's an incredibly imperfect individual, who suffers from bouts of uncontrollable rage and yet has an incredibly strong sense of right and wrong. He paints, he enjoys baking, he smokes like a fiend and spends his spare nights listening to classical music and laying about his apartment with the windows open despite it being the dead of winter just so there's a backdrop of traffic to remind him, yes, humanity is still out there. I know that people say that your characters are reflections of yourself and that anyone you create or dream up is a tiny fragment of you or who you wish you could be or someone you once were or currently are. With Brody, I wish I had the same gall to go out and make things right and make a difference in my community. But, again, he's imperfect and does it for a personal end and serving his community serves himself in a way--but yeah, I digress. You'll just have to read the goddamn thing when it comes out.

But it feels good to be in the writing chair again, with the coffee and the music I put on strictly when writing. I enjoy the breaks and going out on the patio for a smoke to contemplate the next paragraph (or if I'm bold) the next chapter and beyond. I feel somewhat rusty and perhaps three weeks was too long of a break. But I feel this quest that Brody is taking spanning three novels is something strong and I believe in it. It may not be incredibly marketable, it may not be what you'd even consider that terribly original when it comes down to science-fiction, but I think the character rings out as someone unique and taking a character to a worse place than he was before... it scares me and I like that.

Sponge

2011-03-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

I've taken a small hiatus from writing. I try to keep to that rule of "read more than you write" and I've been bad at it lately. So, I took three weeks off to catch up on reading, get back into the swing of doing chores, helping the missus with her business plan for her mag, and generally existing in the world again. It's easy to get preoccupied with projects and ideas and to block things off and remain indoors for far too much of the day. But, I can never stop glomming up ideas for things and when I turn an observational eye to the world, it's not only to appreciate the beauty of it but also to make mental notes of things I'd like to scribble about.

I call this time "sponging." I accumulate ideas, I let them stew and work around in my noggin for a while, then when they're put to paper I stop and go back to observing and gathering up ideas. I do this in many ways, not strictly research at the library (while I am doing that as well) but in watching the way people talk or behave. I like to people-watch, especially. Not in any kind of voyeuristic fashion, really, but you can gather a lot of ideas about someone just by the way they dress, the way they hold themselves, the way they might look over their shoulder every third step or so. All of those things can be gathered and Frankensteined into a character. People-watching feeds the "show don't tell" ability, I believe.

I guess it comes from this thing I came across about Lovecraft. In Stephen King's On Writing, he had a snippet of Lovecraft's writing and said it spoke volumes about the guy--that it was obvious he didn't get out much or converse with anyone besides the folks that lived in his skull. Then, later, watching a documentary about Lovecraft, I discovered that a lot of people (movie directors, other writers) saw in him a certain out-of-touch way that spoke a lot about how self-secluded the guy was and how it rang out in his dialogue especially. So, note to self on that one, eh?

Either way, that's what I've been up to lately. It's been a good weekend thus far, a lot of celebrating with the wife due to the good news I received on Friday. More wine than I care to admit was consumed by yours truly. It's been a while since I had a hangover and that initial swing-the-legs-over when getting up the following day was pleasantly not as seasickness-like as I thought it would be. So, chalk it up to a win?

So my research at the library, I'll touch on that briefly. Genetic experimentation is a weird thing. A pig that has green flesh on his snout and toes and glows in the dark because he was given DNA from that of a jellyfish? Two words: Holy. Fuck. Other installments into this little USA Today-produced book were about stem cell research and cloning...all of which is infinitely fascinating and scary as hell to me. Forgive me but I couldn't help but see that huge, twisted flesh-monster from Akira when reading about that. But, got some notes and ideas that'll surely find their way into my next foray into science-fiction. Knuckleduster is being looked at by Medallion as well as Switchgrass right now, and I have it in my head that it'll be a trilogy, so after brainwave manipulation I suppose genetic nightmares is the next logical step.

I look forward to Monday and this week in particular. It's been a tough slog this winter, with the Seasonal Affective Disorder rearing its ugly head and the snow storms and not to mention the tragedy in Japan. (Speaking of which, did you hear about that guy that dove into the flood zone to save his wife and then went back the next day to save his mother, having to swim through broken glass and floating cars all of which he did without a SCUBA tank or anything? Give that guy the swirly S on his chest because Clark Kent is a bonafide pussy compared to that hard-ass.) I not only look forward to good news for myself, but for every other struggling artist this week. I have loads of writer folks I know via the glory of the Interweb and a buddy out in North Carolina that's writing a short film. For all of you, I wish good news is in the mail for you...whether it be literal: acceptance of a short story or poem in a mag; or figurative: you get through a chapter that was chewing your ass for a month and a half with no clear end in sight. Hold fast for the oncoming win. It may be hard to see at times, but trust me--it's in there, on approach.

We're in this together, us creative types. One win after another, one step at a time, one day at a time. To quote my favorite poem by Hank Bukowski: "The gods wait to marvel in you."

Keep It Warm

2011-03-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Ah, dear reader. I am such a squirrely freak right now. After all of my bitching and ranting and raving...and just the other day saying how I'm "letting go" and everything, of course that's when good news hits.

Got a reply from Medallion Press today about a couple of projects and they're interested in both of them. Not only did Writer's House get back to me today, but I can say two of my other projects are under consideration as well. Insane. I don't mean to gloat and please don't take it as such. It just feels so good to have some progress made. To me, it's like just a single cog-turn of events, just a click of the hand, a minute twitch of activity--a sneeze. But to me its monumental. The fire in me has been stoked yet again and I feel like a creative person once more. I haven't written a fucking thing in weeks. Maybe come Monday that'll change.

Promise is on the wind and it smells like vanilla...and fresh ink.

Big in Russia / Bob / Weekend / Highlander Grog

2011-03-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

Have you ever looked at the stats of your own blog? It's really strange to see people in Russia and Spain have looked at your blog. I mean, I'm sure it was one of those times when someone cannot sleep and are just randomly clicking about on the interweb and stumble across your blog/journal/whatever by accident. I've done it, gone 'round the web and just read blogs at random. There's only a few that I religiously keep up on and I'm sure if they were to check on their stats and see some semi-weird lookin' guy in Minnesota was reading their blog, they'd make the wtf face, too.

Also, I get "followed" by a strange collection of people on Twitter. I'm sure that's normal, because people "follow" shit at random. I do. Hell, I follow Bob Saget on Twitter and I don't even really particularly enjoy the guy's humor, really. I mean, I watch How I Met Your Mother and that scene in Dumb & Dumberer where he's screaming: "There's shit everywhere!" still cracks me up, but following him on Twitter? I don't know. Insert digital shrug here.

But, either way, I'm excited about this weekend. The wife works out of the house and by the time she gets home, she's often exhausted with how boring her job is. We have a couple of traditions, one of which I told you about yesterday with going to the library on Sundays, but we also get up early on Saturdays and I make scrambled eggs and toast and we watch cartoons. And by watch I mean make fun of anime people's hair and speech patterns. Oh, and we always get this coffee from Roundy's called Highlander Grog. Holy fuck, if you have never tried The Highlander (and yes, it requires to be capitalized because it's that good) you must. It's like butterscotch coffee, but it has like an old-timey feeling about it, like it was brought to these times via Doc Brown having just gotten back from Scotland in the 1600's. I shit you not, it's awesome. What's even better is that Roundy's (that's a grocery store here in MN in case you were curious) doesn't carry it in bags bigger than half a pot's worth. So it's like pre-measured to be savored. Christ that stuff's good. I'm pretty damn serious about coffee, too. Hardly ever do the pre-ground shit, I prefer to grind it myself and I wouldn't think twice about paying ten to fifteen bucks for a bag of whole bean coffee if it's good. We're currently going through this San Fran Bay stuff and it's pretty good. Another I'd recommend would be the Twin Cities Blend by Peace Coffee. Strong, smooth--I won't bother trying to describe it to you. Describing coffee is a waste of time because you only get a certain amount of words to use. Like, for instance, describe a salad and try not to use the word "crisp." Impossible. But yeah, Highlander Grog and Twin Cities Blend from Peace Coffee...they're killer.

Have a good weekend, y'all.

Keep Neurotic + Carry On

2011-03-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

Got some relatively inspiring news today. Susan Ginsburg of Writer's House LLC has requested to see the first 50 pages of my novel. I sent it off, did my usual thing of researching the individual who has requested the material and...stopped. No. Not going to begin that vicious circle again by getting all wound up. I've got to take my wins as they come, accept them for what they are and not get all caught up in the pleasohpleaseohplease bullshit. I am glad they liked the synopsis and requested to see more. I sent it off. It's my best work I can do, I've edited the fuck out of those first 50 pages a dozen times and...yeah. We'll just wait and see. I marked it on my calendar, since I do that with everything I send off or get news from someone. I've decided that'll be my limit, as soon as I mark it down as I got word that they want it--that's it. I'm good, I'm leaving it at that.

Fingers crossed they like it and want to pursue it.

Rager / New Leaf / Hen and Eggs

2011-03-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated this thing in so damn long. I had actually forgotten I have a blog, which is probably bad. But, nothing really out of the norm has occured. More submissions, more writing. Oodles of query letters, pleas to editors and agents to consider (or re-consider if they have turned me down) to look at my stuff.

I've had to put things in perspective, though. I was seriously getting to the point where I was pissed all the time. An agent would write me back with a form letter of "not right for us, but thanks for considering us" kind of deal and I'd fire back with: "You probably didn't read it anyway, I hope you find your next Stephanie Meyer/Dan Brown you hack." I even ripped into one so bad since she had gotten the name of my book wrong. Said that they weren't interested in I Was a Teenage Sleepwalker and I promptly ripped her a new one.

Bad form.

So, you could say I've given up--but not in any defeatist way, but... I guess "let go" is a better way to put it. I'm trying to remove competitiveness from my life and remove from my routine that set me off. Which, unfortunately, meant "Hiding" a few friends on Facebook who've lately found success. I applaud them and I'm happy for them, certainly, but even if they're not intentionally rubbing it in the faces of us fucks still on the outside, I tended to take it that way. So, I axed it. No more pulling hair and flipping off the monitor.

I went through the self-help section of the library on our latest Sunday venture to the Wentworth Library. See, my wife and I have a routine. Every Sunday, we get crappy coffee at this gas station and maybe a banana or a Special K bar and sit in the library parking lot and converse about writing and literature until the place opens and then we go and scour for something to read for the week. Normally, I gravitate toward the science-fiction and literature sections, sometimes going over into the poetry or American history regions--but this time, I aimed my sights directly onto the self-help area.

I found some books on Buddhism and such, kind of prompted by my wife and how she's a student of Buddhism herself. I even meditated earlier this week and found it not only comforting but helpful in putting things into perspective. I know, I know, it's even mentioned in the Stuff White People Like: "Joining religions that you weren't raised with." But, I never cared for the wagging, scolding finger of Christianity, nor did I really dig the ideas behind nihlism or existentialism. Something in between works for me, and Buddhism seems to be it. Just do good shit, it basically teaches. Don't let any of your actions affect anyone else in a bad way.

I recall Robin Williams' Live on Broadway performance, miming a monk dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself ablaze. He narrated for both the monk and the person in disbelief as to what the monk was doing.

Aghast: "What the fuck are you doing?"
Solemn: "Making you deal with your shit."

Pretty much sums it up.

But, I like it. I always interested in Buddhism and eastern religion as a whole when I was younger but never really had the patience or resources to study it very deeply. I guess I always had a desire to find a balance and be just humble and good and quiet about everything.

I still submit to editors and publishing houses, but not with the same Ahab like obsession I used to. I used to work myself up into such a tizzy over it and agonize over my empty email Inbox and check my phone constantly. It's a slow process and I need to accept that. We're talking about words here, entire novels. It takes me a month to get through a 300-page novel, so I need to learn that it takes others just as long if not longer to get through what I've sent them--and I don't read with a editoral eye, either. But, there are bigger things in life and getting published won't solve any of them save for this somewhat fanatic desire I have to be able to say "I'm a published author."

Accomplishing just being good and comfortable with my life is important, too. It may come off as idle bitching and whatnot, and if you think that: you're right. But this is a blog, isn't it? No real theme here, no real parameters to follow besides a general gray-area that centralizes around writing--and even there, it's still a gray area. I don't want to nail down a specific idea behind this blog and I'm writing just to share, really. I hope I'm not alone in this feeling, which I'm pretty sure I'm not. It's a frustrating life, being a creative sort. I've said countless times that I'd trade my creativity to just be good at math or something of an immediately-lucrative talent. And that's not to curse my gift, I'm not. I like what I do, I think my stories are good and are meant to inspire and give blueprints to the imagination. I just have to realize that the stories are a gift from my life, the egg from the hen. And if the hen is sickly and insane with worries and frustration, the eggs will be bad by result.

One day at a time, though. One pantleg, then the other. Can't expect to be all pious and "ohm" in a day, right? Here's to a more constant (and positive) posting on this blog.

Patience on Post-Its / Research / Wind & Weather

2010-10-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

I'm still anxiously awaiting to get word from the editors re: the novel. I've put up Post-It notes in the apartment with Patience written on them. It helps, to a degree, to have that reminder. The literary world is incredibly slow, because we're not dealing with something as easy to digest as a movie or a song. A book takes a long time to read and the editors that you send your stuff to don't just have one book to worry about, upwards of hundreds to consider on any given day. I have to remind myself of that daily, just to keep a clear head about things.

Besides that, I've been working on another novel that's coming along (relatively) smoothly. It came from an idea when we were visiting some friends in NYC a few years ago and it's been sitting in the back of my head for a few years, accumulating its plot. I do that, quite often, get the spark of an idea and just let it sit on the back burner to get a stew-like consistency before I start building it up.

It's weird, there are no books whatsoever at my local library for pickpockets. There's some minor bits and pieces about them in other true crime books, but nothing that really explains the sub-genre of thievery very well. So, I've had to make up a lot of stuff on my own and try to make it sound convincing. There's that old writer's saying about you don't have to be a murderer to write mysteries, but it helps. I don't want to go around pickpocketing people or even try to pretend to know what I'm doing, but I just try to tamp around the scenes featuring someone picking a pocket to make it convincing. I guess that's all you can do, really. Science fiction writers do it all the time: estimate the weight of weapons and machinery that doesn't really exist and make it sound convincing. I guess I just don't want to get called out later when some pickpocket expert comes out of the woodwork and tells me I fucked up the description of their passion.

In other news, it's incredibly cold here. Our car, which is new to us, automatically turns on the heater to defrost the windshield when it detects the outside temp is near or below freezing. This comes as a major blessing since in our old car, the knob for the heater was permenently stuck on the "feet" setting.

A little bit of snow today, among the raindrops. Cold and windy as hell. Windy enough to make the front page of the newspaper actually. Stood outside while my wife and our friend were out seeing The Black Angels perform, having a smoke, and feeling like I was going to get peeled right off our patio. The wind sounded angry. I had to do something I hadn't done in a long time when I went to bed: turn on a radio. The wind outside sounded like ghosts getting into fistfights and I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep unless the smooth jazz station was drowning their fisticuffs out. The dogs were even a bit freaked. That's when you know there's some crazy weather going on, when the cows starting lying down and the dogs act all squirrely.

Might go out for some new phones today. Need one since this thing I got now is so busted and old it might as well be using rocks for batteries. I just wanted something that will beep or something when I get an email, that's all. Trying to get a few things off the ground and I just want to get notified of all emails straight-away, not get surprised when I hear an hour after the fact that something got shot down or accepted.

Other than that, slowly batting down the hatches to get ready for another decade-long winter in Minnesota. Time to put the covers back over the air conditioner units and find a snow shovel, bring in the patio furniture and check the tread on the tires of the car. At least we don't have to shovel a driveway living in an apartment. We may not actually own any property, but there is an upside to apartment living and that's one of them.

Beyond the Door

2010-10-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

It's really fucking tough waiting to hear back from an editor. Because, it's like you're seated outside this big, imposing door. A door a lot of people have gone through before, many of whom are still stuck on the same side as you either dejected, failed and miserable--or just awaiting similar news. But, sending something to an editor and having it in their hands and waiting to hear back, for that door to open, you don't know what's on the other side. It could just as easily be a jar of gold as it could be the guillotine. You've sent your stuff through the mail slot, your best stuff, your gleaming perfect little nugget of creativity and they're on the other side, examining it for flaws and when that's through, they're deciding which thing to steer you toward. The jar of gold, which would be nice, or the guillotine, which would not be very nice.

I'm just not such on the protocol here. Do I send a "hey what's up" email when it's been three weeks they've had the new draft? Do I just wait for them to come to me, call or email or whatever? Or do I just remain over here occasionally giving little raps on the door to see if there's anything I can offer? Because, that has gotten me them peeking out through a crack, a quick and polite no, and the door sealed up again.

I don't want to come off as some pesky, impatient turd of a human that's dancing around on the fringe waiting to be let in out of the cold, but I can't help it. This is big for me. This could be a career-altering thing. I mean, any alteration at this point in my career would be an improvement, really.

Every time I psyche myself up to send them something, I cringe afterward. I think to myself, "Fuck. I shouldn't've said anything at all. I should've just left it alone, kept my distance." But saying nothing, asking nothing, is just as painful. Living in a vaccuum of ignorance is hellish. But them looking at their Inbox and seeing yet another banal question from me and imagining them sighing and begrudgingly clicking it open doesn't make me feel much better, either.

I'll keep you posted as things progress.
Or I'll just come back and rant and bitch some more.
Either one.

Living with Story

2010-10-15T11:47:00.001-07:00

I've read and heard that the voice of a character that someone's trying to create a story for can begin to speak to them in a sense, that the writer almost develops a second personality. I've also read that a lot of fiction writers tend to go insane. Less so than poets, oddly enough. You'd think that'd be the other way around. But, I'm not really sure what to make of that, because I can't really say that I've ever heard a character speak to me anywhere else than when I'm actually sitting down to write. I may get trickles of personality from them or maybe come up with something for them to say while I'm at the gym or grocery shopping or something, but I can't say as if I've cohabitated my own head with one of my own fictional creations.

When I was slogging through Memory Lanes the first few times to get those hateful and awful first few drafts out of the way, I could hear Walter, the main character, talking in his nasal tone and his way to giggling at the end of a sentence he uttered himself and thought amusing. How he rarely swears and often dances around the subject of sex. And, in a way even more odd than just hearing the voices of my characters, spending great portions of my day narrating through Walter's voice, I sometimes came out the other side after a good four-hour writing binge talking like him. I tend to swear a lot and a lot my jokes I will, yes, laugh at them myself if I find them funny and often those crude jokes involve sex, so that might just lend itself to a different theory on character. Maybe our characters are little us's? Unexplored routes of our own lives, kind of like how those guys at CERN are discovering the possibility of dark matter and other dimensions. Maybe Walter is me, just a different me that took a different path that I've shaped and given a name and sent on a journey in the novel. Some people with pisshaw at you and wave a dismissive hand when you talk about characters and how they're people, to you, in your mind, that they're just as real as say, when the teacher in grade school asked you to draw your imaginary friend. But who's to say that even those weren't real to you, in a degree? Of course, we could start going down that long and blind-corner riddled route of discussing what's real and the interpretation of real and blah, blah, blah--but really.

Writing is blueprint making for imagination. Books go beyond movies and videogames and their transportation is further and more real because they're not so simple as just a two dimensional (and now, sometimes for an increased admission, three dimensional) displays of story and adventure and etc. A lot of people will say that a book is better than the movie because when they were reading it, they saw everything as they saw it and when viewing someone else's interpretation of what they experienced, first-hand, while reading it contrasts against their own and makes the movie displeasurable to watch because it's turning something set one way to them in a new way. Kind of like saying "The puppets were similar, but their outlines just a tiny fraction different." Of course, there are the times when the movie is better than the book because it improved certain things or distilled certain parts that work solely as a book and would be out of place in a movie. The nude beach in (the novel) Fight Club, for example.

And there are the other times that actors portray people's ideas of a character just right. Naturally, I can't think of an occasion like that right off the top of my head but the closest thing that comes to mind is Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys. I mean, the Grady Tripp in the book was different, but Douglas did a fine job stepping into his moccasins if there were a few details from the novel that didn't quite make it into the film. And of course, that may not be Douglas' fault, it may have been the screenplay writer or the director or whatever. Okay, I've gotten off track a skosh.

I guess what I was trying to get at first with this post was character and how hearing them in our heads isn't something I experience, personally, but I do. It's all ass-backwards, I know. It's like saying I like chicken but I don't. I think everyone's muse visits them in different ways and lets the prebirth ghosts of characters she drops into our laps find its home in us in different ways. Perhaps they live with you and Lestat is to Anne Rice just as much as her kids are, just another part of the household. Or maybe it's like Bukowski's Chinaski, an alter-ego by which to tell half-truths about real-life fucked up situations. Or maybe even to go so far as to say like what happened to Phil Dick in his later years, getting visited by aliens and putting himself into his novel, spoken about in the third person. Who knows. As long as you can get what they're saying out from that gray matter upstairs onto the page in front of you, who cares where it comes from or what planet it was harvested and FedExed to you from?

Either way. My best, dear reader. My best.

It's Been a While

2010-10-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

Remember that jam from the early 00's? Staind or Stained or however it was spelled. Yeah, I didn't care for it, either. But, that phrase will forever be connected to that song for me, even if someone who's using it has probably never heard the song itself. Funny how bridges are made like that, mentally.

Anyhoo, quite a bit has happened. Got some word back from Macadam Cage and they liked Memory Lanes, except it needs a plot. So, I spent a good week hammering one into it. Cannibalizing some plots I had worked out for another project and working for ten hour jaunts at the laptop, I got it all together and I really think it turned out splendidly. I had taken a break from writing after I finished that science fiction noir thing and I'm glad, because re-birthing Memory Lanes anew was like just that, hours and hours of labor. I'll be totally frank with you right now, dear reader, that I missed meals while writing that monster. I stopped going to the gym, a practice I am religiously devoted to. I stunk at the end of it. I didn't change out of my clothes for the entire week. I bathed, I ate breakfast and dinner, and when I laid down at night I could hear the narration ticking away in my head like some possessed machine trying, evermore, to churn that book out. Never before, I swear to Christ Himself, never before have I been so possessed by a project.

With it out of the way, I feel great. It's out there, sent back to the editor and I diligently await their response. It's hellish, waiting, isn't it? Especially when my days' work tends to top out at around two in the afternoon. I know that the publishing world works at nothing quicker than glacial of speeds, but call me impatient, call me ready to go, call me trigger-happy, but I find myself unable to sit still thinking that my manuscript has been cast over the fence of the Internet and no one is over there to catch it.

Nothing much else is new, really. Been tinkering away at trying to find a literary agent and I've been devouring books like mad. Mostly Chabon, since he's my main inspiration in style. I've also discovered Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow, which I bought yesterday afternoon and I have already chewed through half of it in feverish page-turning sessions out on the patio.

I send this out to you, dear reader, to keep your fingers crossed for me. I don't know if you're there or if I'm just shouting down the well with hopes that the sparkles I see down there are the reflection of eyes and not just sharp stones awaiting my plummet. Blink once, for me, if you will, just to let me know. Thank you.

Wife / FEAR / Hearing Back / Band of Skulls

2010-09-17T09:45:00.001-07:00

*It's been kind of a torturous week at the Post household. The wife has been working really, really hard and I, as husband, have been trying my best to make the time away from the desk as pleasant as can be. It's tough, though, when you see someone you love so very much struggling and there's nothing you can do. But, administering foot rubs and making dinner and keeping the house clean; taking care of everything else so she can strictly focus on work seems to brighten her outlook, if even slightly.

*This weekend, she's going to Rochester to babysit her nieces. I was more than happy to go to Walgreens and get a supply of M&Ms to make absolutely sure they won't go to sleep quickly. Devious uncle! While she's gone, and as little time as we've spent together lately, it should be fine--she'll get to reconnect with her nieces and talk about school and play games, while I'll be here at the apartment with our dogs and giving the house a good thorough cleaning and watching the Dennis Quaid thriller Horsemen. I think it'll be on par with Se7en, a thriller with some horror aspects and I've liked pretty much everything with The Quaid save for GI JOE: The Rise of Cobra. Good Lord that was a mess.

*Been playing the videogame FEAR a lot lately since I hear there's a sequel coming out next year. If you're a gamer, you know FEAR, I'm sure of it. I really think it was a tremendous title from one of my favorite developers, Monolith. They put out a series in the mid-90s I really, really adored: BLOOD and their aspirations to blend action and horror have always been top notch. BLOOD had elements from a lot of horror movies of the 80s, including levels that took place at Camp Crystal Lake and Freddy Kruger's boiler room. In the stead of 80s campy horror, FEAR took the idea of slow-mo Matrix-esque gun battles and threw in splashes of Japanese horror movies like Ju-On and The Ring to make for a fully unique experience that can raise your blood pressure one minute with an intense gunfight against several armed men, and then pitch you into another, equally blood pressure-rising experience when you're climbing through an air duct Bruce Willis style only to have a pale little girl with long black hair darting down toward you from the other end. The first time I played that section, I actually screamed. I shit you not. FEAR 2: Project Origin was kind of a let down since it focused more on the action and was clearly inspired by Halo to deliver a more actiony experience and less on the fear factor and a lot of the creepiness of the first game was lost. With the next one, I've heard that horror writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) is going to write the script and John Carpenter apparently has done some work for it as well. Hopefully, that'll improve things and bring the creep factor back to where it belongs.

*Still waiting to hear back from Macadam/Cage about Memory Lanes. No news is good news, yeah? Been fretting about it non-stop this week and while it hasn't really impacted my routine, I find myself stopping quite often with whatever I may be doing and stuck in a trance considering the What Ifs of the outcome. I have prepared myself for every result, which is something I recommend doing no matter what you're waiting anxiously for since that soul-deadening blast of bad news never really cuts you that deeply. Kind of a cue I picked up from this thing I read about samurai and how, every day, they contemplate their death by various ways in a way to prepare themselves for any outcome. Sure, it differs greatly from what I'm going through, but it feels good to be prepared in that sense.

*So I'm sure, if you're a TV watcher, you've seen the commercial for the new Mustang. Not only am I a born Ford lover due to my parents (my father is still in the process of restoring his Mustang) I also adore the commercial because of the great song that they have playing in the background. Thanks to YouTube, you don't have to wonder what song is playing in commericals anymore--you just search the commercial and look either in the video description or at the comments to find the song title. This is how I discovered The Flaming Lips' "WAND" through that Dell commercial from a few years back as well as Misfits through an Airwalk commercial (of all things) with their early work "American Nightmare." I get obsessed with songs when I don't know their names or artists and YouTube has always been a great resource for quenching my desire to know who sings what. To end this post, I have included the song, sans Mustang growls, for your listening pleasure:

Limbo

2010-09-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

---PATIENCE---So I'm waiting to hear back from a publisher re: Memory Lanes. I'd be lying if I'd say it wasn't agony, all the waiting. This week has been kind of hard already, with the wife working like crazy and having to go into the office to get stuff done as well as work here at the house on her various projects. Meanwhile, I'm trying to keep a positive attitude with the shit weather we've been having as well as help the wife out as much as I can... We rub off on one another, I think. Nay, I know we do. If she's in a shit mood, give it enough time and I'll be in a shit mood. If I'm feeling pissy, give it even less time and she'll be pissy, too. I suppose that's the classic symptom of a codependent relationship, but we spend so much time together a day that we've pretty much developed hive-mind and hive-emotion.

---WORRY-WART---Anxiety, lately, has gotten the better of me. Been freaking out about stupid things like cancer and lumps on the back of my neck. I get this way when something's bothering me. Do I just carry on worrying about the thing I'm actually worried/fretting about? No, I get anxious about thing-A and I end up worrying about implausible thing-B instead. Waiting to hear back from editors, for example. Do I worry about that? No, I worry about imaginary tumors growing in my voicebox. Jesus I'm a fucking wreck sometimes.

---LITERARY CONSTIPATION---Haven't written anything in a couple of days. Not too worried about it. Blasted out an entire rough draft in a matter of two weeks late last month. Letting it stew, let it develop some cobwebs before I go back to it and scalpel it piece-by-piece. I made editing sound like something Buffalo Bill would do to someone trapped in his basement, but hey, that's how I think of my craft sometimes.

---REST O' THE WEEK---Gym it up later. 45 minutes on the elipitcal (sp?) and then some weights. Tomorrow? Light shopping, 45 on the elipitical (sp? again) and no weights. Weekend? Russian Art Museum. That'll be cool.

Cutting The Cable

2010-09-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

With the end of True Blood coming up this Sunday, the wife and I are planning on getting rid of the cable. I know a lot of people think this is insane, that they'd sooner cut down on groceries than ever get rid of cable. But when there isn't really anything on, what's the point of keeping it? Especially when there's a whole slew of stuff to watch on Netflix instant viewing and on XBox Live, for a few bucks, download new shows a week after they originally air. Of course, they're only the basic channels so that cuts out HBO and Showtime, but I haven't really seen anything in their fall lineups worth keeping the cable for. Sure, Boardwalk Empire looks pretty sweet as well as the new season of Bored To Death, but it's not worth it. It's really not. (Note how much I'm sounding as if I'm trying to convince myself there.)

The only show this fall I'm looking forward to is The Walking Dead on AMC. But that'll be available on XBox Live and for somewhere around three to five bucks per episode, I'd rather pay that knowing that I'm getting something I enjoy than keep the cable on and still watch more Pushing Daisies and Stargate Universe on the Wii's Netflix service.

I think this is the beginning of a new trend. I think eventually we'll be getting our entertainment elsewhere and cable will become a thing of the past. Eventually, I think the cable companies will try to offer up more pick-and-choose plans where you can select the channels you want and your billing will go accordingly. There's a lot of channels I don't watch, like Lifetime. Lifetime and ABC go nearly unwatched in this household. And as far as reality shows go, that could cancel out pretty much everything on the standard channels: CBS, NBC, the CW. If I were given a checklist of the channels I'd actually want to keep, they'd go as this (and their attached reasons.)

Discovery Channel -- You can never have too much Dirty Jobs and documentaries about wildlife and rough and tumble European men trying to prove their manlihood by surviving in places that do not want them there.

AMC -- For the previously-mentioned The Walking Dead as well as Mad Men and Breaking Bad, plus they run some of the most notoriously bad/good movies ever: Catwoman, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

FX -- They run a lot of movies I like. Fight Club appears pretty often, a lot of the Marvel superhero movies run on there pretty frequently. Plus, they have Terriers and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

VH1 -- Can't beat a good Top 100 show featuring the Best Hits of the 90s or some other variation on clips of early-90s Sir Mix A Lot sitting in a giant styrofoam ass and opinions on early-90s style faux pas by F-level celebrities. Plus, they're the only channel that actually runs (current) music videos anymore. And if you know me, you know I love music videos. They have that Jump Start thing every morning which is pretty great, like, two whole hours of music videos that aren't Duran Duran or White Snake.

Bravo -- They have The Rachel Zoe Project and Work of Art. This channel cannot be stopped.

Come to think of it...why are we cancelling the cable?

Shrink

2010-09-05T11:26:00.001-07:00

I have somewhat of a personal celebration going on this month. Somewhere around the end of the month, a year ago, I started my weight-loss regimen. I didn't use any of those crazy diets like only eating cabbage and chocolate chip cookies, no. I was already a vegetarian, so my diet wasn't too terrible, but it was how much I was eating and how often I was eating it was the problem. I'm a pasta nut, any kind of pasta with a good Newman's Own sauce on it--man alive, you better count your fingers after you put a bowl of that shit down in front of me. But, that and soda and anything with high fructose corn syrup: out.

I started going to the gym, started walking on the treadmill half an hour six times a week, and began weighing myself daily. I didn't really do the weights since I wanted to get as much bulk off as possible before building muscle back on, something I just now started doing.

This is something I don't normally talk about. A lot of people say how much better I look and all of that, but it's weird to talk about yourself in this way. I feel like I'm being an asshole telling people I've lost nearly 70 pounds, all on my own, without ever talking to a personal trainer or buying any pre-portioned meals online. I do. I feel like I'm fucking bragging and I'm not. I'm proud of myself, sure, but I don't judge others for however they want to live. Eat what you want, do what you want, but as far as I was concerned, I hated how I looked. I'd get out of the shower and stand clear of the mirror when getting dressed. My gut...that was a fierce sight. Going from 240 pounds to 170 has really changed a lot for me, I feel more confident, my energy level is often pretty through the roof and I never feel randomly sick for no reason. It's good stuff. It took one year, but I got there, even surpassing my goal that I had set for myself.

So, yay for me I suppose. It was about ten thouand gallons of sweat and a few times feeling like I was going to toss my Cheerios after getting off that treadmill, but I feel a whole lot healthier and confident. A goal met.

Date Night: Foiled & Saved

2010-09-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

So we were going to go see the Drew Barrymore rom-com Going The Distance last night, but something with our bank is funky and while we can still write checks against our last deposit, we cannot get anything out of the ATM. Movie theaters, I'm guessing having been burned in the past by rubber checks, do not accept them and well--that killed date night, or so I thought.

Instead, my wife and I decided on a nice night in. We've both been working like dogs (she on her freelancer editor's gig and me being Mr. Mom) and we've both found ourselves in desire of a break from the norm. And while sitting at home, spending time together, isn't really out of the norm for us, it took on a different slant that felt welcome and nice. We watched G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra last night for shits and giggles and while there was a whole lot of shit, there wasn't a lot of giggles. That movie was painfully bad. It was kind of fun to see characters that I used to watch on the old TV show reborn in leather head to toe gear that came from the same store every other superhero and 80s action TV show icon has been shopping at. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was great in Inception, really seemed like he was phoning it in with Cobra. I want to trash the movie and all of its actors, but it just felt like a writing detail to me. The lines were so bad and the plot itself was like something a person who just suffered a bad head injury and had sat through every Jerry Bruckheimer movie ever would come up with. Even Dennis Quaid was bad and that guy generally does killer work.

We had breakfast for dinner, something that we do pretty often around here. I'm big on breakfast for dinner and it sure beats trying to find something we can have together, me being a vegetarian and my wife not being a vegetarian.

Earlier yesterday, I rearranged the entire bedroom and slid around furniture and groaned and sweated and struggled and finally got it done. It looks good, even if in the middle of the night last night I woke up in a fright because I didn't recognize where I was at first. After rearranging the bedroom, I cleaned my bathroom and really tore the place apart. I clean as if there's an epidemic coming, especially bathrooms. Latex gloves, the whole bit. I even have an outfit for cleaning the bathroom, a pair of old gym shorts and a ratty t-shirt. I sanitized everything, scrubbed every square inch--toilet, shower, floor, sink and mirror, all of it. Honestly, I'm still a little tired from all of that toiling. But, at the end of the day, watching a shitty action movie, I felt like I had earned the time to kick back.

Today, I'm bored out of my mind. Which, really, is common for me on the weekends. Hardly any of my fave websites update on the weekend and my email Inbox has remained empty all day (and yesterday). I won't speak of what I'm waiting on since I don't want to jinx it, but waiting is torture. I'd rather know now either way, but this in the middle could-be-couldn't-be stuff is hell. Fingers crossed. God's ears have been full lately with all of the talkin' I've been giving the Big Guy. Fingers crossed!

Later: gym, maybe a trip out for some groceries, laundry and dishes, salvage some sort of dinner together out of the odds and ends we have if I don't get to the grocer. Possibly Crank 2 or Stargate Universe as tonight's entertainment. Hopefully, something good will be on tonight. Otherwise, we might make it an Old Man Night. That is, unplugging the TV, putting the stereo on a Classical station and reading. Something I really need to be doing more of. I haven't cracked a book with the intention of actually reading it save for a few underlined passages in about a week.

Termineditor

2010-09-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

I figured writing something in the genre or noir and speculative fiction would be easy since all of the guard rails are set up and you just have to make the vehicle and keep it from going too far to the right and left of already travelled areas, such as The Matrix/Neuromancer-esque mind-jacking and the trampled paradigms of noir with the femme fatales and the inevitable getting-knocked-out-and-or-drugged sequence. But, as I edit this nameless novel that I'm still chipping the rough edges off of, I can't help but see myself wanting to steer my intrepid little vehicle toward those guard rails just to see if one good side-swipe with genre will illicit the rail to fall out from under my project-or if it will give it some good character by way of scratches of genre left in the paintjob.

Selecting a paragraph at a time and hitting Backspace kills me, even though I have the original first draft saved elsewhere. Moving blocks of text around and rearranging and rewording and rereading to make sure it all fits together can cause a person to go nuts. I think back on something the film director Robert Rodriguez said about clay pots, that if you spend all this time trying to make one perfect while another group makes one pot after another as practice, the one you fuck with and agonize over will look shit compared to the one that was just one in a series of attempts. Can this be applied to writing? Because with a writing project, say, a short story, you can tinker with it and tinker with it and eventually it'll be good. Sure, the more stories you write, the better you understand the craft through practice, but I don't think clay pots and writing really fit together. I may be wrong, I dunno. I'm tinkering with this nameless sci-fi noir opus quite a bit, this is day three in editing and yet, there's a lot that needs fixing and occasionally, I feel like the person trying to pick up dog shit with too little toilet paper and as I try to fix one problem, my fingers metaphorically punch through the toilet paper and now instead of a dog-shitty rug, I also have a dog-shitty finger to boot. I'll add a paragraph of something I think needs fleshing out and then I find that it was almost better without it. I think I need to let someone read this beast.

Date night tonight, I'm speculating. The wife and I may go see the Drew Barrymore rom-com Going The Distance. May be good, may be running-through-the-airport-terminal bullshit you always see in modern rom-coms, but hey--I love the movie theater. I'd go see Critters in 3D if it were playing just because I like the simple act of going to the theater, picking out a seat, the previews, the uncomfortable seats, the smell of popcorn, the people-watching session that I'm always afforded because the wife takes a thousand years in the bathroom after a movie...It's all good fun.

Weekend Plans: Get rid of old TV. Rearrange bedroom. Clean bathrooms (joy). Make a loaf of artisian bread with me bare hands. Of course, that's after I wash my hands from cleaning the bathroom.

I'm in a glass box of e-mo-shunn!

2010-09-01T10:22:00.001-07:00

Reading my blog is probably like the ticker tape spooling out of the side of a bipolar robot's head. One day I'm excited, one day I'm bitching, the next I'm dorking out over some other damn thing. Bear with me, people. It'll smooth out once things start to Jenga into place. (Yes, Jenga can be a verb--shut up.)

Got a request for a full manuscript from MacAdam/Cage the other day for Memory Lanes. Pretty stoked about it since they published a couple of my fav-or-ite novels of all time, Kiss Me Judas and The Contortionist's Handbook. And they were the publisher I was hoping to get Memory Lanes published through since, well, a few years ago when I was still trying to get a lit agent. Anyway, excited I am.

Working on another novel, taking a bit of a break from trying to get anything pubbed in the short story department for now. I got a few lines out there, three to The New Yorker and a few others here and there. I think I'll just let them do their thing and when I get them all back (rejected or otherwise) I'll go back to hacking at that tree.

I finished the first drag of this sci-fi neo-noir thing yesterday. Topped out at 84,000 words which is about what Memory Lanes and Hell, Pennsylvania worked out to be, approximately. A good length, too big not to small. Of course, today, while the wife is at work and I've completed all of my household chores for the day, I'm hacking away for a second go at this thing. Still, no title, either. Tentatively I'm calling it Knuckleduster. Kind of a hard slam to the face of a title, which kind of lends an idea of violence and pulpy goodness. Not really too sci-fi, though, but I'm thinking that the noir aspect of the novel is greater than the sci-fi since not too much whiz-bang laser gun fights or light saber bullshit plays into it at any point. The occasional artificial human, a few changes in the laws and all cars are electric and meat-eating is a thing of the past but other than that, it really isn't too drastically different than today, really.

But, yeah, excited about even hearing from MacAdam/Cage, let alone getting a request for a full from them. That and slowly plundering through Knuckleduster again, has made for a pretty exciting week thus far.

Listening to a lot of The Prodigy, namely the stuff featured in Kick-Ass, and Michael McCann. Makes for a good atmospheric backdrop to the noir. Check out their new(ish) album if you're a fan of The Prodigy from back in the day. It's different, but really quite fun and tremendous.

Nick Cave, Vincent Price, and Eric Hoffer

2010-08-20T15:48:00.000-07:00

So, here in a short while, my friend Allison will be arriving. Tonight, we're going to this great record shop in the Twin Cities called The Electric Fetus (best never ever for a store, yeah?) to get our tickets for Grinderman in November at First Ave. Yes, you may remember First Avenue from Purple Rain for those of you who don't live in the Cities. After which, we're going to sit down to The Haunting (the original). Good God what a good Friday.

New new pubs are up at The Legendary today as well. Jon Thrower, one of the editors there, really liked "Harold." I'm pleased to have met him and I'm honored to be a part of their website, they run some pretty great stuff over there and their site has a really original feel about it. The main page is really cool, with the sketch-style title and the pic of the man boxing with a 'roo. Check them out here: The Legendary.

Also, last night, checking the email for the last time as I usually do around eight o'clock or so just to make sure there's nothing pressing that needs my attention, I was surprised to get an email from Best New Writing . Normally, checking my email late at night garners me little outside of...well, nothing. But then again, that's not out of the ordinary because rarely do I see an email during the day, let alone after business hours. But, my relatively long short story "Firebug" is being considered for the Eric Hoffer Award. I was stunned, to say the least. I never really figure it would get considered for much outside of the online 'zines that feature quirky material. But, it was something that I've been working on for, no joke, over a year.

What originally started out as a novel, I slowly broke down into pieces to tinker on them individually, in chapters. The thing, in novel form, was about 300 pages and was somewhere around 100,000 words. It was becoming too unweidly and I wanted it to shine, so I reduced it to the strongest elements: the origin story of arsonist Leslie Root. First, his first big "real" burn, his family home. Second, his encounter with a child psychatrist as she tries to plunder his mind, and the third chapter, longer than the first two combined, was the story of him and his childhood friend, now in their 40s, going to try to summon life back into Leslie's deceased father's GTO. I just wanted to do my own David Copperfield with Leslie and really explore an entire man's life, but I think getting it published this way, which will basically be the first two or three chapters, will probably encourage me to take it even further and get the rest of it pulled out of the grave and finished.

I don't know if I'll win the Eric Hoffer Award. I kind of doubt it, really. I feel as if the piece is strong and really stands on its own as a short fiction piece, but I'm really not sure if it can compete with something a little more tied to reality. I have quite a few clever turn of phrases here and there, sure, but I mean--it's about an arsonist for Christ sakes. The prestigious people at Best New Writing probably prefer their characters to all be something akin to someone Hemingway or Faulkner dreamt up. But, fingers crossed, let's hope they can take a swing at a newbie like me and maybe offer me a pub, if not the award. Hey, I'll take what I can get.

Third & Fourth Pub + Reaching The End of Catcher (Again)

2010-08-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Got an email from Thrower at THE LEGENDARY (www.downdirtyword.com) that they're not only going to run one of my stories, but two for this August issue. That makes for a grand total of four stories published this month alone.

I have to say, I'm surprised that they're going to run them. One is about a man suffering a ghastly bout of hemorrhoids and he's trying to cure it before he has a really long flight to take back home. It gets to the point that the thing is talking to him, heckling him and berating him from his pants--trust me, it sounds silly as all hell (and it is) but I think it turned out pretty well. Another they're running is "Happy Birthday," a story about a miscommunication and prank gone horribly wrong. Both of which, I really never thought I'd see the day that either of them would ever get published. I kind of thought they'd be in my "short stories" folder forever, but hey, I guess there's an audience for any story.

I just finished my second read of The Catcher In The Rye as well. God, what a great book. A lot of people say because of its simplistic vocab and how it kind of meanders a bit that it's not worthy of being considered a great work--I say "Pishaw!" to that because not only did Salinger write a moving book about a believable young man (I, too, was quite the little shit at that age) but it kept its voice wholly throughout. He really spoke through Holden, and I've never read anything that keeps its voice so intact. Original! Man, it's just unlike anything else. That Salinger sure was no goddam phony, I can tell you that. I swear to God I can.

Sorry. I had to.

Anyway, looking forward to the new pubs in The Legendary as well as going to pick up my tickets for Grinderman this November--both happening tomorrow. If you're unaware of who Grinderman is, seriously go check them out: www.grinderman.com. It's Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds but more pared down to just a handful of guys. The energy is raw, it has such a hateful and toxic sound to it and it's like the worst nights everyone has ever had rolled up into one bands' singular sound. I recommend "Depth Charge Ethel" and "Honey Bee." Oh, and "Lovebomb." Go listen. Now. You won't regret it. Especially if you're as much of a goddam madman for Nick Cave as I am.

Again, I apologize.

Nothing New, Something New

2010-08-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

More stories out there, doing the submission mambo even more. I've decided to dedicate entire chunks of my day to getting published. While I appreciate the pubs I have gotten, with Underground Voices and Cannoli Pie, my addiction now has become a full-blown obsession. Sent some stuff out to The 34th Parallel, stuff to 5X5 magazine, that big Penguin submission I did earlier this week, trying to get in touch with Levine-Greenberg to see if they want to take on Memory Lanes, my novel.

Suffice it to say, I've had to create a new folder in my email just for rejections, aptly titled "Rejections." I don't want to delete them, no. I want to keep them to look back on, as the bricks I couldn't shove out of place in the massive wall that's restraining me where I am now and where I want to be. It's not a negative thing or even a grudge, but more of a "That's just one rock I couldn't over-turn, but let's try another."

Some of my stuff, I'll admit, will have a hard time finding a home. Some of it is too dark or too weird or, as one editor put it, not weird enough. I'm a hard sell, apparently. Which, honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I like what I write, because I write what I'd want to read. Sure, I like the mainstreamy stuff like Chabon and the occasional Stephen King. Hell, sometimes I even like really mainstreamy stuff like Clancy. But, what really gets me going, what really inspires me are the greats that are still, as of yet, undiscovered. Despite being published. Those being Craig Clevenger, Will Christoper Baer, Caleb J. Ross, Eric Rickstad. True unappreciated masters of the written word that have yet to have the spotlight focused in on them. And I'm sure a lot of them prefer that. But, with Clevenger's The Contortionist's Handbook getting made into a movie, it may just swing that spotlight toward all of us, the dark-studying, down and dirty focused, those that dare to write about most in-the-box folks wouldn't want to hear about.

Let's hope things swivel around our way soon. Let's hope a new golden era of writing is at hand and some of us that dare to write outside the boundaries of the over-crowded flock of humdrum regular will be at the masthead.

Trekking boldly...

Mustard Gas

2010-08-17T08:53:00.001-07:00

It's been a surprisingly cold couple of days here in Minnesota. That should come as no surprise to anyone--"Cold in Minnesota you say?" But it's August, it should be hot. Even here. But some kind of Canadian cold front has found occupation in our little city and I can barely sit outside in anything less than full jeans, two t-shirts and socks. Normally, when it's hot, I'm out there in just a thin t-shirt and jeans, sans socks. If I could, I'd go the rest of my life without socks.

But they sprayed this morning to keep the grass looking nice, which is a good service that our apartment complex provides. I mean, the place is really great. They vaccuum the hall every weekday, they're always on top of fixing things in the unit within a week of you reporting them broken, the gym is always super-clean. But the major inconvenience of them spraying the grass is pretty major. One, it's bad for the environment. And we're supposed to be hailing Al Gore as our new Green Jesus and everything and cutting back on that shit, but here at Southview Gables, apparently, that isn't the case. Plus, when they do spray, you have to take your dogs to another part of the property to let them do their business. It's normally easy for us to just let them out the back door, but now we have to take them out the front and risk them getting into a fight with another dog (ours are pretty hostile toward other dogs) and on top of that, it nixes sitting outside the remainder of the day because it smells something fierce out there.

I sat outside this morning with the cup of joe and Catcher and could only stand it for twenty minutes. Came back inside and took a deep breath and realized that it had been pretty tough breathing out there. I wonder what that shit's made of they're spraying. The name of the company is printed on the side of their truck: Green Acres. Yeah. Green as in florescent-glowing toxic waste maybe. And Acres could just be a typo and they really meant achers, as in the sores we'll develop around our necks like a necklace of tumors when we get older from breathing that shit in.

I bitch, but I do appreciate the service. The grass here is really green and it looks good, I just wish it weren't (adopting my Al Gore / Forrest Gump accent) "so bad for the en-vi-ro-ment."

Salinger & Dahlstrom

2010-08-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Currently re-reading Catcher in The Rye. Last time I read it was in college and I thought I knew everything back then and didn't care for it. Re-reading it now, humbled and put in my place by all of the rejection letters and failed attempts to get anything brewing--I now see that Salinger was a master of the written word. I remember, while in college, that I was reading it at work as well as between classes.

Reading this morning out on the patio with a cup of coffee, I remembered a lot about college. See, I was going to this shitty community college just because I thought it was the right thing to do. Done with high school? Check. Met a girl you're most likely going to marry? Check. Job? Check. Well, you might as well go to college. So I did and was taking these real simple beginner classes just to get filled in on the shit I apparently missed on the entry exam. Believe it or not, I fucked the English portion of the test. I don't know, it was probably the proper use of grammar and identifying the adjective and all of that garbage you really don't need to know to be a genuine writer. Either way, I was taking this class with Greg Dahlstrom. He was this kind of short guy, wore the professor attire in spades: complete with the thick-rimmed glasses and tweed jacket with the elbow patches and all. He even had one of those classy, old fashioned briefcases that had the same kind of leather they used to bind Encyclopedias in. I could've skipped all of my other classes, but his I really looked forward to. It may sound like the English major in me talking, but I really learned a lot from that class. I was reading a lot of graphic novels at the time, namely Frank Miller and Ben Templesmith stuff and he always wanted to take a look at them. I had been watching Wonder Boys a lot then, and I thought I could be the Toby Maguire character and he could be my sagely Grady Tripp. I remember once, on a paper I wrote about child abuse and how I didn't exactly have a violence-free bringing-up that he took me out in the hall. I had particularly honest in the essay and I thought, "Oh shit, here we go--I'm in trouble now." But he just told me that his father was a shit to him as well and that reading, literature and such, as well as our histories with fathers that needed anger management, made us kindred spirits. His words. And the dude hugged me. I mean, it may sound weird to you, getting hugged by your teacher, but it was this real sincere moment that I'll never forget. The guy was just genuinely awesome and, to this day, I'm sad that I dropped out.

So, I've decided to write Mr. Dahlstrom a letter and mail him some of my published short stories and tell him what I've been up to. I mean, that was over five years ago--so much has happened in my life since. I'm now living in the Twin Cities, I'm married, I'm trying to get my novel published. I'm sure he'll get a kick out of hearing one of his students didn't just go back to retail and sat on their diploma. I mean, I never got a diploma, but I took his class and learned from it--so that must count for something.

So, once I get my shit together, I'll write Mr. Dahlstrom a letter. I couldn't find his faculty profile on the college's website, so I assume he must not be teaching there anymore. I hope he's doing well, onto bigger and better things, and like my wife suggested, maybe he's writing now. He obviously had a passion for the written word and really knew his shit. He, from a rather unexpected confession in the middle of class once, told us (it was a small class--20 students at the most when we all actually showed up) that he used to have a history of alcoholism and smoking two packs a day. Something, if you saw the guy, would never guess. But it makes sense to me now, how many of us that are writers and fiction-lovers also have a great love of the bottle and sucking on burning things held between two fingers. That confession made me like the guy even more, it made him human and real and not just a figure that strolled around the school with that perpetual polite grin on his face. That dude from The Silence of the Lambs. The warden that was always toying with Hannibal. He looked just like him, except without that air of douche-bag. I don't know, man. He was a great guy, I'm telling you.

I don't know, maybe I shouldn't write him. It would be kind of weird to get a letter from someone you taught all those years ago and he probably doesn't even remember me because I was only at that school for probably a handful of months at best. But, I don't know, teachers and their shit pay really need encouragement now. Especially the English teachers. Seriously. Where the fuck would we be (where would I be) without English teachers? Smoking weed with the trailer court kids still, probably.

Semi-Lazy Sunday

2010-08-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

Dunno if you know this, but Penguin books is taking unsolicited submissions through October. When my wife heard about this through one of her friends, we immediately decided that we'd work on our cover letters this weekend for our novels. Mine, we more or less took my query letter I've been sending to agents and cleaned it up, switched some stuff around and gave it a good, thorough editing. Reading it through, it sounded clean, clear, and concise and only took up a page and a half on Word, which was nice. We both crossed our fingers as I hit "Send" and immediately wished I could reach into the computer screen to pull it back through the phoneline to edit it more. Alas, it's out there and in Penguin's hands now.

Submitted more stuff around, this story I wrote that could quite possibly be the bleakest thing I've ever written. I won't spoil it for you since I'm pretty sure I have a good shoe-in with this one lit mag since they only run stuff under 500 words and this story topped in at 472 words, editied through and through.

Not a whole lot dorkiness going on tonight. True Blood as usual on Sundays, which is always a treat. Lots of gore, nudity, swearing, intrigue. The show leans into the soap opera direction at times with all of the he-loves-me-he-bites-me-not bullshit, but that I can forgive. I've gotten into a lot of series in the past that had that and could spend hours talking "What do you think will happen next?" with friends. Gilmore Girls is one that comes to mind readily. That and LOST.

Yes, I watch Gilmore Girls. What of it. Well, watched, past-tense now the thing is off the air. Give me a show where it has teenager intrigue and adult intrigue and lots of humor, great montages that actually feature good music and so many pop-culture references that you can't even begin to count them in even just one 45-minute episode. Go ahead. Yeah, no, fuckin' Glee does not have that. No, nor does your fuckin' American Knocked-Up School Girl Backstabber McGee on ABC Family. Only the Gilmores had that. Sorry.

Hopefully, this week I'll hear something back from somebody. I'm starting to get that itchiness of being left in the dark and it can oftentimes make me clean the house over and over again like a pill-popping 50s housewife.

Hey, at least it's not crack.

Riff

2010-08-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

So I finished that Hemingway short story collection. Jesus, that man knew his shit. There's all of those stories about the guy, too, which just kind of add to his legend. Namely how he ripped some journalist's shirt open to compare who between the two of them had more chest hair. Don't call Papa a pussy, apparently, is the lesson to be learned from that. Not unless you want to rid your shirt of the top six buttons.

Stephen at Cannoli Pie on Twitter called me a great fiction writer. Really quite a compliment. I don't fancy myself much of a decent writer, really. I mean, I like what I do. I like to noodle around with a story and rework things and tinker with them until they move with a slippery, greased stream of consciousness kind of vibe and to a degree it feels self-servicing and masturbatory, but I guess that's what makes a good writer. If you like the shit you're putting out that's all that really matters. And if others like it too, then, hey, you must be onto something. Kind of a back-assed way of saying thank you, so strike the whole paragraph before this line and read only: Thanks, Stephen.

Saturday! Already! Christ this week went fast. I've spent the morning doing very little. Laundry, some dishes, spent some time outside with the mp3 player and some contemporary blues, of whom the recording artists' names I cannot remember at the moment. Stuff from the True Blood soundtrack, mostly. I watched the last half of The Dark Knight on HBO and thought about the previous Batman movies and how much they truly, completely sucked. Yes, even the Burton-directed ones. They missed the heart of the character entirely. After The Dark Knight, 21 Grams was on and I found it far too depressing to be watching just three hours short of getting out of bed. The movie made me think of a Denis Johnson short story. Good, beautiful--but really makes you think: "God, my life at any moment could take a hard left turn and turn to absolute shit." A notion I'd rather spend my day avoiding putting any thought into.

With lunch, I watched half of It Might Get Loud. A great documentary about music and the history of the electric guitar as told by three music legends. Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. I watched it mostly for Jack White since I'm not that big of a Zepp fan and I think The Edge is a douche bag. (Oh, no. My followers just decreased for making that cutting statement.) I really think the guy is pompous and thinks way too highly of himself. Jack White, some may the say the same about him, but I think he has talent with the guitar that The Edge cannot even touch. Jack does it all in-instrument, with talented fingers. The Edge seems only be able to summon great sounds out of his when it's filtered through ten different laptops. But, U2 is good. I listen to them once in a while and I have a lot of friends that really devoted to them. If they were to read this, it would probably hurt their feelings. So, if you are, I apologize...that you have horrible taste in music. I kid! I kid! I like U2 just fine, I think Bono is a great upstanding human being who actually uses his wealth and fame for good causes.

Anyway, seeing Jack White in the beginning sequence of It Might Get Loud make a guitar out of some wire, a magnet and an old glass Coke bottle blew my mind. And the thing sounded pretty good, too! It made me think of Tom Waits and that huge dumpster he turned on end and put some cello strings on. It was featured pretty widely on the Blood Money album. Go ahead and listen to that one real quick, I'll wait. Seriously. One of his best, I think. "God's Away on Business" is tremendous. If I had known of that song before me and my wife got married, I would've definitely had asked the DJ to put it on his list for the reception dance.

I'm all over the place with this post. Too much cold coffee. That is all for today.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Someone publish my stuff, god damn it! Seventeen stories out there and not a single nibble? Come on!

That is all.

Toodles.

He Went The Hemingway

2010-08-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

So I'm currently reading Men Without Women, the Hemingway short story collection. Naturally, it puts everything else I've ever read to shame. The guy really knew how to say something without saying something. "Hills Like White Elephants" especially.

I've been studying the masters' short stories lately, namely Salinger and Hemingway. It's hard to find collections by more contemporary writers where the anthology isn't under one writer's name and it doesn't have a stupid zombie or vampire theme. Makes me think, to a degree, that writing has gotten a bit sensationalistic and classic prose and story-telling has gone bye-bye. To sell a book now, it seems, the content needs to be of a fucked-up family saga or features emo teenage vampires. And for us older 20-something folk, we get zombie stories and tired I'm-so-going-to-disturb-you Palahniuk wannabes. Even Nick Cave, whom I adore, reduced the twisted, complicated narrative he had in And The Ass Saw The Angel for a more sparse, tight prose in The Death of Bunny Munro. Either by self-applied pressure to write a more easily-digested book or the fact that he had finally quit drugs, I'm not entirely sure.

I wish more people wrote about their lives without having to inject sensationalistic (and supernatural) elements to it. There are so many young men (some younger than myself) coming back from Iraq. Surely, a lot of them have stories to tell. And I'm not discounting their abilities in any way, but my generation was raised by the VCR and documenting their experiences and feelings and reactions seems to have gone the way of a Facebook update and not along the cursor of a word processor. Again, not putting down the troops whatsoever. I have a very good friend who served in Iraq in the Marines as well as a cousin. And another cousin that was in the Army who is now going through trying (nay, struggling) to get coverage for his PTSD.

I take off my hat to them for they are of a far braver ilk than myself. I suppose it makes me sound like an asshole wishing these soldiers of my generation would write down their stories. I'm sure going back through their mental rolodexes of horrific sights is a tough thing. I apologize if this has offended anyone in any way, I just think that the writing community as a whole is suffering and we need the real man's touch reapplied to writing--stories of valor and conviction, I think, could not only bring a realism back to fiction but also work as a huge part in opening people's eyes to what really goes on outside of our sheletered cul-de-sac Wal-Mart/McDonald's-infested lives.

But it's a generational thing, not a soldier thing. I, like a lot of you, were probably baby-sat by Sesame Street and Disney movies. We're a sit back generation, not a get-up-and-do generation. Quentin Tarantino recently said that actors of the 60s and 70s, were a harder group because a lot of those actors, Charles Bronson comes to mind, had actually served in battle. And modern actors, in his opinion, are soft. I have to agree with that, but I also have to disagree. My generation is growing up to be true men and women, and this war that looms on the fringes of every cranked-up TV broadcast journalism spiel has put a sugar-coated veil over the reality that my 80s-born generation is a generation of hard-working, intelligent group that has just now grown out of our raised-on-Walt upbringing. We're shedding the idea that everyone's life is perfect, that nothing ever goes wrong and nobody on TV ever lies to us. We're growing up into real men and women--who, for generations following, will undoubtedly will read the stories we have to tell, once we get the post-traumatic stress disorder coverage that our men and women of the military deserve.

Tastes Like Absinthe

2010-08-12T12:15:00.001-07:00

So I invented a new zero-calorie drink, which goes good with a cigar, a comfortable chair, and a sunset. It doesn't have a name, make one up for it yourself. Personally, and yes I am speaking from experience, it tastes like absinthe in a way.

What you'll need:
1 medium glass.
1 Earl Gray Green tea bag.
1 pack of Truvia.
1 pitcher of sugar-free lemonade (Crystal Light works).
2 or 3 ice cubes.
A working microwave.

Put about two inches of water in the bottom of the glass. Don't worry, this is just for steeping, you'll add more water later. Put that in the microwave for 1 minute. Any longer and it'll be too hot to handle with bare hands and you'll have to use a towel like a smelter removing a mold from the fire and it just looks awkward and dangerous. Burns can happen and they suck, so let's try to avoid that. Next, steep the tea bag in the water for a couple minutes. Go read a poem or something. Come back, remove tea bag (don't forget to squeeze out the excess) and add the Truvia. Stir. Add ice cubes and immediately get some cold water in there so the ice doesn't melt all the way, because drinks look cooler with ice in them. Ask the creators of Mad Men. Fill the glass with water to about an inch below the rim, fill the remainder with sugar-free lemonade. Throw in a splash of seltzer if that's your thing or you're on the wagon. Throw in a wedge of lemon (or orange) and jam it to the bottom with a swizzle stick.

Tastes best when outside, trust me.

NOTE:
Green tea is good for you, it's got all kinds of anti-oxidants and apparently, helps prevent certain cancers. If you're drinking it with a cigar, like I like to do, then you're okay--the green tea is counter-acting any of the cigar's ill affects! Yay!

Submission Mambo

2010-08-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

So, I'm trying to get more stuff published now. It's practically become a full-blown addiction. I equate it to tattoos. Once you get one, even if it's a tiny one, as soon as it's healed and you see how great it looks, you want to get every inch of yourself covered. Now that I've gotten two publications, I want to put out everything (and the best I can write) out there.

A few random notes:

*Did a couple of comics for Cannoli Pie. Not sure if they want them or if that's their bag or not. I'll put them up on here if they shoot them down.

*I've realized that Twitter, and the verb of twittering, is a lot like shouting into a well that you can't see the bottom of. Someone might be down there listening, but you never really know for sure.

*It's almost too hot to go to the gym today. But I must. I must do my six miles and sweat like a nun in a whorehouse. Why? Because I do, that's why.

*Wrote a story about high school today. Namely, about a friend of mine that joined the Marines. It was kind of hard, talking about some of the aspects of it, that last week before he went off to Basic. But, I put as much humor into it as possible, which was easy, because that's all we did in our little group back then was laugh. Ah, memories.

*Got some of that Resolve carpet cleaning stuff. Rest assured, I will let you know how well it works. I, Mr. Mom, will be the guinea pig on that one. Even the carpest don't get perfectly clean, anything will be better than the state that they're in now.

La Roux "Bulletproof"

2010-08-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

I like this song and video because not only is it incredibly catchy, but it has a certain M.C. Escher meets TRON vibe to it. I think the music video as a whole, especially since MTV rarely runs them anymore, is kind of a thin of the past. Now, they're seen mainly on YouTube and the artists' official websites and rarely anywhere else. It's too bad, too. It used to be a great showcase for up and coming directors to show their muscle and could be a great thing to kick back and enjoy, a quick 3-minute short film. Think about Michael Jackson's Thriller. That thing was a work of art, man. That was an event when that thing (in its entirety) came on in my childhood home. Also, remember how many music video directors have gone on to do major Hollywood productions. David Fincher did a few Madonna and Rolling Stones videos and now he's the director of Fight Club as well as Se7en and Benjamin Button. Yowza! Let's get back to the music video, MTV. We've had enough reality TV to last us a lifetime.

The song, during our camping excursion, was relentlessly stuck in my head. So, here it is, for you, too, to ear-worm it up!

Cannoli Pie

2010-08-09T08:41:00.001-07:00

A short story of mine is up at Cannoli Pie. It's kind of a personal one, moreso than "Scavenge" was. But I think by mining the bowels of my history, I managed to unearth something that was pretty good, if dark. Which brings me to this: I got an email this morning from an editor of another e-zine telling me my stuff was too normal. If you know me at all and have read any of my stuff, you know this is quite a bold statement. So you know what I did? I sent him the story I wrote last year about a man with a possessed hemmoroid. Chew on that for a while, buddy.

I don't hold grudges normally. I don't. And that wasn't a grudge-y thing to do, was it? He wants dark, I can do dark. I'm smiling to myself while writing that not only because I'd like to see the look on his face when he reads that story and I'm also listening to Tom at the moment, which always makes me smile. ["Knife Chase" is the tune, if you were curious.]

But, getting back to the subject of this posting, my story is in the August issue of Cannoli Pie. I can't express how much I love this magazine. I mean, you get art, you get literature, you get album reviews and (drum roll) a recipe! I mean, how fucking cool is this thing? I, like a lot of you, are probably of the mindset that cooking can be an art when it isn't picked up at a drive-thru window. So, kudos to a strong start for my friends over at the Cannoli, your mag fucking rocks.

Back from camping as of Sunday, I still have yet to go through all of our lake-scented clothes. They stink something furious, man. I imagine they smell the way a Viking encampment smells: sweat, campfire smoke, tobacco products, blood (I didn't manage to get all the way through a week of camping without hurting myself, no.), and a good helping of general lake rank.

So, today's all about the laundry. One third of the Jersey Shore daily routine isn't bad, though, right? Gym and tanning can wait for another day when I'm not so god damn sore all over.

[note: the author of this blog does not condone watching Jersey Shore or behaving like those goons at any time in your life. It may be hazardous to your health and overtanning has proven to cause skin cancer and a unfavorable Oompa Loompa-esque appearence.]

Rocking Out Fanboys

2010-08-02T09:52:00.001-07:00

Something I discovered deep within the pits of YouTube. If you're a mega-dork like me and enjoy electronica music because it makes you feel like you're listening to the tunes of the future and you like TRON, then guess what? You're in luck today!

Here's what I can only guess was the test footage for the Tron sequel with some Daft Punk laid over it. Good, atmospheric stuff. Really puts me in the mind of Aphex Twin. Enjoy.

It may be small, but it's really up there for the music. Stop bitching.

Planting Ideas

2010-08-02T09:13:00.001-07:00

So I saw Inception last weekend.

The thing, without exaggeration, blew my mind. It's been a long time since I felt so awestruck after a movie. I've been going to the theater for quite a while now ever since Fight Club in search of the next movie that's really going to twist my mind and make me see things a different way. I was afraid that the older I got, the harder it would be for me to be knocked out of my own self-constructed tunnel vision of perception. Little did I know, roughly three hours is all it took for me to be wholly corrected.

I had heard that it was mind-bending and cerebral and--not to discredit those who review movies for a living--but lately, pretty much anything more dense than the plot to Toy Story 3 has been considered mind-bending. It's a pretty loose term now that I think is in steady employ in film review's vocabularies because that's what people are currently searching for in their movie-going experiences. They want to be tricked, fuddled with, messed about. Over the past few years, we've just been going to the same adaptations of the comic books we've already read, blown away by the realism of perhaps a totally-CG character but never really in awe of a story. And if we take a minute to remember that story, above style and eye-candy, came first. Cavemen exchanged them over campfires, remember? Story? Plot? Oh yeah, those things.

Chris Nolan, I can tell, is probably equally frustrated with the dumbing down of movies as well. His stuff has always been pretty broad and detailed and puzzle-like. Especially his incredible Memento, which I still watch pretty often. Of course, he's paying his dues with Batman right now until he can stand up on his name alone, but that's okay. His Batman movies have been alright, I guess. Passable. (I hope you're smiling at that, because I am.)

I just hope that Inception shows movie execs that people are walking-around-with-ribs-showing starving for something other than a big, dumb, loud Transformers-esque movie. We're humans, we're supposed to be seeking out knowledge and ideas and poking fingers at the reality around us to test its integrity.

It's a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. Something we can all profit from in the end: better entertainment that satisfies to a deeper degree. Sure, I like seeing shit blow up as much as the next guy--but most times, I want to be shown something spectacular as well. And in this film and everything in the future that Nolan dreams up, I think is exactly where we will find it.

First Publication

2010-08-01T16:26:00.000-07:00

So it took a while, and I had to wait from the time I got the news from the ed at Underground Voices all the way through July, but my story "Scavenge" is finally up. I was in the midst of writing a science-fiction short story when my wife came into the room, sat next to me on the couch and gave me a set of kisses on the cheek. "Your story is up," she told me. We had been anxiously checking all day. Seeing it there, in stark white type against a black background with the huge vibe-setting picture of someone out of focus and face-down with yellow crime scene tape across the bottom of the image--I was smitten. I nervously read the story for the umpteenth time and felt a joy like none I had ever experienced before. I was now a published author.

Later that day, I explained to my wife that as excited as I was to see it up there, it came with an immediate sensation of nakedness. I couldn't really put it into words and she picked up on my train of thought immediately and said: "It's like you just told someone you liked them." "EXACTLY!" I gushed. She gets me so well. That's exactly what it's like, because it's out there and there's absolutely no taking it back now. But, I have to say, I am pleased none the less. I feel like I'm really on the right track with things.

Let's just hope I can return from a week-long vacation to a full email Inbox of agents and e-zine editors pleading for my stuff. But that's not what vacation is for--vacation is for getting away, deliberately worming yourself into a summery spot where there is no cell phone reception. A break is much needed, for both the wife and I.

My story can be found at: http://www.undergroundvoices.com/UVPostAndrew.htm

Review: The Strain

2010-07-29T18:19:00.001-07:00

Guillermo Del Toro. The name is synonymous with fantastical stories; a crafter of tales that, without fail, manage to capture the imagination and transport the viewer (or in this case, reader) to fantastical and altogether beautiful worlds featuring a cast of fascinating monsters—some with hearts as in the case with 2004’s Hellboy, some hideous like his oft-debated Mimic, but always you find yourself under their alluring spell, because as he’s proven time and time again—monsters are beautiful.

I’ve been a fan of his work for years, I’ve seen him do completely commercial (yet still thoroughly enjoyable) movies like Blade II, and I’ve seen his art house roots come out where image and story unite in a perfect balance with the chilling The Devil’s Backbone as well as the heart-rending Pan’s Labyrinth. Each one of his stories is always unique, always show the viewer something different and unique while still holding true to a handful of a go-to checklist of aspects always featured in every one of his stories. And I will put this as my only complaint against The Strain, that knowing his stories as well as I do (I’ve seen Hellboy about—no lie—close to a hundred times) I went through the book encountering one, then another, and another of the things he always does. Just to name a few: swampy underground locales, at some point an autopsy always occurs, there is always some squishy thing in a jar, and an old man who is knowledgeable and probably the best foe to the baddie they’re facing but has weakened in his old age only to pass the wisdom onto a younger, stronger new recruit. Keep in mind that I’m not listing these things as complaints because I don’t enjoy them—I do, in spades, but reading along and waiting for them to appear took me out of the story slightly.

Guillermo Del Toro was born in Mexico and, as I’ve read in interviews with the man, had it rough. He’s had a gun held to his head, his father has been kidnapped, he’s seen people beheaded and burned alive. His grandmother used to make him wear bottle caps in his shoes as punishment for drawing images of monsters he dreamt up in his imagination. That same grandmother, attempted three exorcisms on him. These experiences, I’m sure, have influenced the writer/director to see the world a different way from the rest of us who have lived comfortable, unscathed lives. And like any great artist, he has put his pain into his art and has liberated himself from it. You can feel his character’s pain and yearning to escape. Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth escapes the tyranny of her brutal and militant step-father with her imagination. Hellboy lives behind a six-ton steel door, a prisoner in his own home. Fragments, I’m sure, that’ve come from Del Toro’s own life, turned keenly into plot elements in stories. Someone once said, "We don't write to remember, we write to forget."

But I digress. The Strain, not to spoil anything for any of you who have yet picked it up, is like an epic and horrific story. It’s broken down into small vignettes that explore the lives of numerous characters and how they’re all affected by the vampire pandemic. There’s Ephraim Gooodweather, the recovering alcoholic CDC agent, Setrakian the Old Professor who operates a curio shop that doubles as a vampire hunter’s headquarters that would make Van Helsing green with envy. There’s a Mexican gang-banger named Gus, the Russian rat exterminator Fet. A death metal rock star Bolivar, who I can only imagine being played by Marilyn Manson if this novel gets the Hollywood adaptation. Along with these folks, there’s a handful of others who encounter the virus in different ways: a housewife that’s afraid to leave her house, even when her husband contracts the vampire virus and ends up killing their two Saint Bernards, a man who’s wife and daughter were on the plane that the virus first broke out onto who considers committing suicide only until his daughter, looking very pale, mysteriously arrives at his doorstep days after the pandemic is unleashed onto New York City. Never was it hard for me to remember which character was which and who was going through what—it was all very deftly and expertly weaved together and brilliantly paced.

Truly, I have very few complaints outside of Del Toro’s go-to elements. But at the same time, maybe those are what make his stories his own. Maybe the autopsies and the things in jars are like his branding and without them, his stories just wouldn’t be the same. But on the other hand, I feel as if perhaps he’s gotten attached to certain plot devices and goes back to his earlier work to cannibalize as a way to avoid having to come up with new twists. Seriously, you have no idea how much that pains me to write since I love everything he’s done so immensely, but I’m being a honest reviewer here. At the same time, though, if you go through the career of any storyteller and things constantly pop up in each of their stories. David Lynch, for example, there’s always a blond woman and a brunette woman—one good and one evil. Steven Spielberg and his alien or Nazi movies. Chuck Bukowski and, without fail, at some point in almost every one of his books, he hits a woman. Quentin Tarantino and the shot from inside the trunk of a car. So, there’s that. Maybe it’s just because I know Guillermo’s work so well that I can so easily pinpoint each of his trademark plot elements. Again, it kills me to write that.

I’d recommend The Strain for anyone who wants to get into a trilogy that is already promising to be something tremendous. It’s as the cover says, it’s both parts Matheson’s I Am Legend and King’s Salem Lot. Fast, bristling action and enough blood and gore to satisfy any horror reader’s bloodlust. It’s both pulpy and brainy and a read that goes surprisingly quick for 600-plus pages. I simply cannot wait until his next installment this October.

Let's Pretend

2010-07-19T14:50:00.001-07:00

On days that I'm not submitting like a mother to all of the literary zines and agents and, of course, writing--some days when I have the house to myself I like to pretend that I still understand online gaming.

See, I used to play World of Warcraft. I broke my addiction sometime last year and, like any addict will tell you, yes, I do miss it. And sometimes I consider going back to it, laying down that monthly fee, buying those stupid game cards from the Target cashier, putting it on the conveyor belt with a bottle of water and a pack of gum and having them look at it like, "Oh, they got you too?"

But I don't go back to it. I retain my own life, free of living through any sort of avatars, and I'm a better person for it. I mean, it's a collossal waste of time. But, that can be argued of any gaming, really. But MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, in particular, can really eat your time up. I mean, people have gotten divorced because of World of Warcraft. They've lost their jobs. Pretty soon, all they have is that fucking level 76 Dwarf paladin SKOOSH15.

I go back and explore the MMOs available online for free occasionally and I get all the way through the email sign-up portion and when it comes to actually downloading the thing, I always click out of it. I think of all the stories I could be writing, the chores I could be doing, the books I could be reading and I'd prefer to do any of those things over sitting there, clicking on the huge swamp rats that occupy any starting area of pretty much all RPGs, online or not, for hours on end.

My point is, though, when I go and look at the lists of available online games, I generally break them down by genre since I'm not really that into fantasy-setting stuff, nor am I into working as a pilot in a so-realistic-it's-as-equally-as-boring-as-real-life EVE Online sort of games. And something, recently, struck me as odd even though it probably shouldn't have.

There are hardly any MMO games set in the "real" world. No present day stuff outside of the military shooters (and, hell, most of that stuff seems more like sci-fi now anyway now that so much of real life technology has found their way into Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company). I guess it just struck me as odd as how many MMO games take place in a Tolkien-inspired world with talking tree people and furry-footed midgets. (Excuse me. Little People.) Is that the prefered place that people want to go? More far fetched than any sci-fi game? Further out there than any Halo universe or even the Star Wars stuff? I thought World of Warcraft was more like in the style of an 80s heavy metal album cover than a fantasy world setting. Maybe I was missing the point. It made me curious because for everyone who really adores fiction and worlds of make-believe, I don't really know that many people that dig fantasy with all of the orcs and elves and magic (or is it magick?) and all of that hub-bub.

Maybe because it's so far flung and so out there that makes it appealing. Games are escapism at its best and how better to launch yourself out of the daily grind than to visit some place so unlike the world you live in now? It made me wonder, too, because the games wouldn't exist without a demand and there must be a serious demand for them since that list was fucking epic. I mean, we're talking 50-plus games in this list. I'd link to it if I could find the god damn thing.

But, yeah, just an observation.

New Car Smell

2010-07-07T07:50:00.000-07:00

So we finally got our new car. Thanks to the wife's father, we won't be owing anything to the dealership but just owing him instead. Which I am grateful, don't get me wrong. But if we end up in some financial bind and Mean Dick shows up to break my legs one of these days, then I will wish we owed the dealership instead because all they'll do is take us to court. Which, I guess, can be worse than getting your legs broken by your father-in-law.

Anyhoo, we got a Prius. Which, even double-checking the spelling of it, seeing it there, it still looks wrong. It feels good to own a Hybrid car (or is just lowercase "hybrid"?) since, according to Al Gore, we all need to do our part to reduce our carbon footprint or whatever. Really, the only thing I took away from An Inconvenient Truth was the polar bears that drowned because there were no more ice floes to pull a Rose from Titanic on. But, none the less, it feels good to see the car's energy screen displaying when you're running on actual gas and when you're using the electric. It's a futuristic little car, with all of the panels and digital displays and just the general shape of the thing. It makes me think of Minority Report, mostly because that movie is the only time I saw a vision of the future I genuinely believed. You know, except for the psychics that tell the police to arrest innocent people. They can do that on their own without psychics, silly! Especially the cops around here. Jesus. Another one, a few weeks ago, was found stealing pounds of meth from the drug lockup. Pounds of it. God bless the Midwest, where nothing (apparently) ever happens.

But we're going to take a roadtrip today to drop off the old car to Traci's father today out in Lanesboro. It's probably a two and a half hour drive all the way down there and it doesn't take long once out of the Twin Cities to find yourself in flat-as-hell countryside with very little to look at. Plus, you barely get ten miles out of the city before all of the good radio stations vanish from your dial and get replaced with half-received fuzz-blasted Mexican polka and pop country. (Is there anything worse than pop country? Oh, yeah. Kid Rock.) But I like a good drive, either way. Put on some good old Stooges and sing along all nasal to Iggy and friends and try not to get run off the road by an eighteen wheeler.

I guess that's probably my favorite part of a roadtrip, picking the music. It'll be the soundtrack for your journey and a lot of people will just as soon take their whole CD book, but I think that's a poor choice. Take only particular things that will shape the mood of your trip. Driving cross country to bury grandma? Put some B-52s on your speakers and suddenly your minivan full of misery is the god damn FUN BUS. Listen to things ironically, that make you laugh just at the sheer silliness of it. Going to your sister's baby shower? Blast some Misfits on the way over there, namely "Hatebreeders." Good times.

I think this roadtrip, going all the way down to the resort town of Lanesboro, MN will need some recent Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Bob Dylan collection aptly named DYLAN, and perhaps just a skosh of the Ramones. Why? Because nothing makes a roadtrip seem comfortably shorter than listening to the same 30 one-minute songs over and over.

I say I don't wanna be buried...in a pet cemetery...

Rejection and Various Other Miseries

2010-07-02T09:27:00.001-07:00

It's hard to know what to make of a letter an agent will send you that pretty much says "We were interested, but now we're not." Almost as if they liked your idea, saw your horribly shitty writing and decided, "Y'know, I should probably skip this one if I want to retain any kind of honor in my career."

But, the good news is, one of my short stories is getting published at Underground Voices next month. It's funny, it was something that I worked on for about three or four hours when I was in a really shitty mood. I think I was struggling with the bevy of rejection letters for MEMORY LANES and, as any writer will tell you, we react through our art and, well, I wrote a story about a woman who gets eaten by her cats. Yeah. Happy stuff. But, Underground Voices liked it, now, it's my first publication. So, not bad, right? I can say I'm a published author as of August 1st when the story actually runs. Pretty cool.

But, with MEMORY LANES, it seems that I keep getting thanks-but-no-thanks letters on Fridays for some reason. As if the literary agent community wants me to have a craptastic weekend with my head full of self-doubt. Give me shitty news on a Monday, for chrissakes, please. Does this make sense you to, non-existent reader? I'd rather have bad news on a Monday than on a Friday. Weekends are for kicking back and dreaming of what the next week will hold, not mulling over shitty news and lying awake sleepless with the thought of being a complete hack and failure at four in the morning. Yes. I've been there.

Everyone, have a happy Indie Day. Thankfully I don't have plans this time, unlike last year when a dumbass friend of mine said that we'd hang out and then never bothered to call. Thanks, you drunk fuck. I spent last forth getting drunk on bottom shelf vodka and watching Factotum with Matt Dillion in the Bukowski role and feeling sorry for myself only to spring out of bed at six in the morning to puke my guts out. Happy days. This time, though, I've made no plans and I just intend on watching the fireworks from the back porch and maybe sharing some boxed wine with the wife. Oh, did I mention some shit-head groped her last forth and I wasn't there to do anything about it because I was sitting around at home waiting on my shit-head friend who never called? Yeah. That was awesome.

So there's no way to end up on an upper note after all of this negative bitching-rant business, so I'll go the complete opposite direction and end on an even more dour note than I started on!

Dead kittens!

Science Friction

2010-06-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

See what I did there? Yeah, I'm mature. I know.

So I'm still going through Neuromancer, starting to near the end. It's been a pretty great ride, something really fun and actiony. It puts me in mind of a Christopher Nolan film; lots of action, but there's some serious brains going on behind all of those fireworks. But I'm getting that nostalgic thing where you're really getting into a book and really loving it and it's getting close to the end and you're starting to feel that kind of sadness that it's coming to a close, kind of how we all went through just recently with the end of LOST. I don't know. I get attached to things.

Book Shelf

2010-06-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

So at my apartment complex there's an office area where the gym is as well as the banquet room and the pool table and such and there's a room off to the side with two internet-connected PCs and a...book shelf! So anyone can come and drop off any of their old books, pick up new ones, etc. I check it every couple of months just to see if anything incredible has been dropped off there. I think that it's really a repository where people who have broken up can drop off their ex's books without having to go through the hassle of collecting the stuff and actually driving it to the Goodwill.

Last time, I donated a couple of books on puppy training since our dogs are so painfully misbehaving little shits that there's no hope for them whatsoever and this time, I donated Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. You probably know Ellis from his comic book work, which that he is really good with--novels, not so much. Why? Because Crooked Little Vein was easily the worst book I've ever read. And I'm a fan of some pretty questionably bad authors, too. So, gleefully ridding my shelf of that piece of shit, I dropped that off at the apartment building's book shelf and found Zen and The Art of Motorycle Maintenence as well as Hunters & Shooters: An Oral History of the Navy SEALs in Vietnam, two books with enormously long titles that will both round out the subject matter of my book collection.

Next to donate: Angel Time by Anne Rice. Sorry, Anne. But that book stank somethin' fierce.

The Walls of Dorkdom

2010-06-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

Everyone has something they're positively dorky about. Whether it be a movie (or a series of movies), in the case of my sister-in-law: a particular lead singer of a particular band from New Jersey, or even just a comic book series or one novel that was written well over a hundred years ago (yes, there are Dracula fanboys and girls.) It's liking something so wholly that whenever you hear it mentioned in a conversation you're not even in, you feel the need to contribute. Whenever you see the tell-tale sign of another person being into what you love whether it be a t-shirt they're wearing or a tattoo--you absolutely must introduce yourself and discuss the current state of the thing you both adore. For me, I like a lot of things but I'm not dorky over them. I like a lot of The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies, but I don't love them. I don't feel the need whenever at a comic book shop to gather up in my arms as much tie-in swag that I can possibly carry. And I'm not shitting on those two franchises, they're both kick-ass stories and I understand why people cosplay as the characters and quote the dialog endlessly. They're both great stories. But they're just not for me.

The Metal Gear series, namely the Metal Gear Solid series is the particular kingdom of dorkiness where I lay my head. The convoluted storylines, the array of characters and how each of those characters always has some tragic back story and everyone has more than one name. The craziness of the enemies, the superpowers that always have a theme: the guy who can control swarms of bees, the guy who has a thing for spaghetti westerns so he carries six shooters when everyone else carries automatic rifles. I love how there's like twenty Snakes running around in any particular entry in the series. The music is great, the dialogue is great (most of the time) and the voice actors are always spot-on perfect. I love that I've been playing the games since they first debuted on the PSX in 1998 and I still don't entirely understand the plot. For me, Metal Gear Solid is pure escapism and the tales within its world entirely plausible but almost seem likely at some points. Especially the sciencey stuff: the cloning, the bipedal walking tanks, the wacky weapons and superpowers and whatnot--I think all of that stuff isn't just science fiction, it's science fact, it's in the mail it's just not here yet.

So, I don't know what the true point of this post was other than to share with you something I really, really enjoy outside of reading and watching really crap TV. I think it's kind of a put-on for people to act like they don't enjoy a really well told story, no matter the subject matter. If it happens to be science fiction, so be it. If you enjoy it, then just enjoy it and don't think about what others will consider of you. Michael Chabon, in his Maps & Legends talks about how he despises the expression guilty pleasure. And I have to agree, I don't like it either. You should never feel guilty about pleasures, outside of sexual ones of course. But the stuff that entertains you and allows you to unwind and find comfort and escapism should never be something you feel guilty about. How we all get there, to that imaginary place where life is full of adventure and excitement, is all different. You may like Twilight, I might like Metal Gear, others might even like some wonky anime like One Piece or Death Note. Whatever floats your boat. I don't think we should judge what others like, because in the end, with all of the oil spill business going on and the war and weird weather we've been having, as a country, a little escapism here and there probably won't hurt.

Noir: The Immortal Genre

2010-06-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

So I just finished Robert Coover's Noir. I don't know what to really make of it. I mean, I reviewed it and did my thing to expound upon how much of a love letter it is to a genre as much as it's an addition to the genre itself. But I guess it's more of a love letter because it doesn't really do anything to expand or renew the genre, if anything, it just reminds us of the reasons why we like it so much. All of the crooked characters, shady locales, the gruff hardboiled slang and way of talking, all of the smoking and etc. I mean, I love all of that stuff. From Frank Miller's Sin City, which is a huge love letter to the James Cagney tough guys as Noir is. And then there are the tiny compliments to the genre, which kind of bend it a little, such as The Big Lebowski and Donald Westlake's Parker novels (excuse me, Richard Stark's Parker novels.) And then there's the new additions to it that take it and bend it and make it something new and old-fashioned all at the same time: Kiss Me Judas, Neuromancer, the Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. But the genre will never die as long as people are still interested in the seedy underbelly at all. I mean, if I knew I wouldn't get my face blown off the first week, I would certainly go and become a private eye. How much fun would that be? Then be able to turn around and write about your adventures? What a life! I heard of someone doing that once, changing careers just to have something to write about and it seemed like most of the time it turned out pretty well. The guy who wrote Bringing Out The Dead, whose name escapes me. That book became a movie by Martin Scorcese for Christ's sakes! Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

But I guess since the world of crime has changed, the world of noir has to change as well. I wonder if there's any tales about private eyes taking on modern crimes like identify theft or possibly internet predators or something like that. That might be an interesting twist to put on the genre, something to shove it forward a little. Take an old fashioned character like Jack Nicholson's gumshoe in Chinatown and plunge him into a modern world of wi-fi and iPhones and shit like that and see him bumble about and eventually just pull his piece out of sheer frustration. Hey, that sounds pretty good. I think I might write that next!

"Sad Sack"

2010-06-21T16:23:00.001-07:00

You feel sorry for yourself and you know you shouldn't. You know you should just get out of the house, go down to the bar and meet someone new. She might be out there, tonight, sitting at a table with some of her friends and looking around the joint when the conversation dies down. She's looking for you, right now. But for some reason, you can't get off the god damn internet. You travel the websites that promise to reconnect you to old friends and old lovers and it's all fine and good, you feel like you're just an adult that has a head full of memories and this is how it should be. But then you run across her profile after entering her name and state you both graduated and the year and etc. You're stunned because she looks just as you remember her. A thousand pages of your life flap past, all the way back to those years and you almost feel whiplash from it. Your heart swells at the thought and memory of her, of those young puppy love years. Jesus, you think, I have gotten old. You count the years that've gone by since you broke up right before going your different directions to different colleges. It's been a long time. You sit there and stare at her picture, those brown eyes and that face and you want to die. You think about all the good times, the bad times, the times you just hung out and it wasn't good or bad but it was just co-existing and enjoying one another's company in silence. Cuddling, kissing, holding hands, seeing the fireworks figuratively and literally. That first summer of romance was fun, full of giggling and play fights that melted into make out sessions that lasted hours. You click out of the screen when you think you can hear your roommate fussing with his keys outside your door but it's just the drunk that lives across the hall. But it's too late you've already closed out of the window. You consider looking her up again, maybe sending her a message and saying hello. You think better of it and go do something else, because just going back through the memories--that was enough for now.

Anxious!

2010-06-21T16:05:00.001-07:00

Hopefully I'll hear something back from some literary agents this week--fingers crossed people, fingers crossed!

"Oil"

2010-06-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

So it's my turn to take the grease out to the trap. Son of a bitch. Well, might as well get at it early, I decided. The jugs that it come in are like milk jugs except they're in these cardboard outer shells that aren't supposed to be taken off. Whenever you try to push your hand down through the cardboard opening to get to the plastic handle, it skins your knuckles. This I can ignore. Someone has been nice enough to drain the old oil out of the fryers and put in the new stuff. I see this with the twenty-pound jug in my hands and I'm surprised that my coworkers have thought this far enough ahead and I feel kind of dumb having dragged the thing all the way from the back for nothing. I unscrewed the lid and poured a little more in, just so it was a completely wasted effort.

They put the old oil in these buckets we get from the bakery department. The two fryers hold somewhere in the ballpark of ten gallons of fryer oil each, and so it takes four buckets that hold ten gallons each to hold all of the oil. It's cold old, one of my coworkers tell me, so I grab a coat on the way out. I load up the buckets into a grocery cart and I go. Through some double doors, into the back area where everything sits on high shelves. Everything smells like cardboard and sweat. The cart I picked doesn't want to steer properly and its swerving all over the place. I kick as I walk, I swear at it and tell it to do its job. I feel like a parent.

Once at the back doors of the Target, I have to get someone's attention to buzz me out. No one's around. I stand around like a fool in a winter coat and a cart full of slippery, greasy buckets and I wait. Someone comes up and looks at me, in my boots and coat and stocking cap and doesn't say anything and presses the button to let me out. At least someone in this joint has some brain cells, I think to myself.

I don't know if you've ever pushed a shopping cart through the snow. I'm sure you have, you're a regular person that goes to the grocery store like anyone else, even in the winter you need to buy food. So, you've done it. It sucks, doesn't it? It's hard as hell. And when you put all that weight of twenty gallons of fryer grease into a shopping cart and you're not wearing the right shoes and the snow is half-melted and refrozen to create a sort of slush that makes traction a laughable thing, it's a shit job. You push along with snow flakes like razorblades cutting at your eyes and you consider just pushing the cart away and going to your cart and quitting your shit job. I know I did, that day, pushing that cart in the snow slipping around like I was trying for laughs.

Once at the trap, after what felt like a week's worth of slipping around the back lot like a fool, the area that they don't bother to plow because no customers actually go back there, I start unloading the grease into the trap. It looks like a dumpster except it has this grating across it to prevent any debris from getting in there. Inside, it smells like donuts and when you put your hand over the grating, even in ten below weather, you can feel the heat radiating up from the grease. It's bacteria or something in there making all of that heat. Looking down while the first bucket drains the rest of the way, I saw that it was a mix of so many different shades of brown. It made me think of going to Alabama with my mother to visit families and down there, at that time, no one had indoor plumming. It was all outhouses. And there you'd sit, doing your business, on top of everyone else's like it was some communal tradition or something, adding your piece to the mix, the melting pot. It was the same color, all those shades of brown swirled up together.

I get the last bucket on top and let it drain. It makes sickly gurgling sounds like what I imagine a gnome to sound like thirstily draining a ceramic bottle of XXX booze. I look around at where I'm at, at the loading docks with the tractor trailers and the hissing and groaning eighteen wheelers. Epic machines. I imagine my boss getting hit by one, her skinny body splitering apart like a deer does when it gets hit, shattering apart like an Indy car in a flurry of legs and liquids and parts and everything. I snicker at this, the thought of my boss getting hit by an eighteen wheeler.

I'm a sick fuck.

Waiting...

2010-06-16T13:34:00.001-07:00

You can be a talented writer or artist all you want to be. You can be self-motivating and self-promoting and manage to bust out oodles of product in a day if you want. And that's all fine and good and I congratulate you if you can manage to do that without ever hitting that brick wall, but in the world of literature and writing (in general) you depend on others to get things moving for you. Waiting is a big part of any kind of art-making. And even something as solitary as writing a novel involves others. You have people who want to see things differently, who want the story to move in this way or that, who want to edit parts out, to remove this or that or want you to include things or whatever--and it's even worse when doing a screenplay (or fixing one for someone, for that matter.)

And even though Target let me go, I'm still plugging away. Doing housework while Traci works her ass off, I'll go and get the mail or walk the dogs or vac the house or do dishes, write here and there when I get inspired. I check my email on the Wii since the laptop at this point is still broken. And check I do. With regularity of someone with an addiction problem or a monkey that can't stop pressing a button. I mean, the definition of insanity is redoing things expecting a different result and I'm doing that like a crazy person. Except, thankfully, my Inbox isn't always empty. I get a lot of rejection letters for my query for my novel.

I should start from the beginning. I was working with a literary agent for well over a year on my novel Memory Lanes. We were editing, going through it, getting it all prim and proper as if we were going to send it off to prom. Me and the agent, who shall remain nameless, were like a couple bringing this novel up as well as we could in order to really impress the publishers. And one day I changed the entire thing. I went through and changed it from present tense to past tense and it pretty much killed our working career, but since the story is about memory it had be done. But, it killed our relationship. I proved myself to be a flake but she promised to keep on with me and slowly but surely our working relationship died. And now, I'm looking for a new agent. Sending out query letters by the truckload with a newly rewritten query letter that should knock the socks off of anyone. Of course, it doesn't, but out of the fifty-odd letters I've sent out, I've gotten four maybes, two requests to read the full manuscript--so, hey, maybe we're onto something.

Waiting sucks, sure, but if you once in a while press the monkey button and get a cookie deposited into your hand instead of an electric shock, who's to complain?

A New Analogy

2010-04-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when I first wake up in the morning I'm struck by an idea. These have turned into actual novels, and sometimes, they turn into nothing. Oftentimes, though, they are fragments or mental pictures of something else--something I've figured out in my dreams.

I figured out today what it's like to work from home and to be waiting for others. It's like playing tennis in absolute darkness with ear muffs on. Stay with me. You hit the ball back. You're not even sure if it made it over the net. All you know is that you certainly hit it, since you felt that vibration run up your arm. There it goes, that neon green sphere, sailing into the darkness. You wait. You listen. And before you can fully react, there it is, again, returned to you. You wind up, hit it back immediately. You don't want to be rude and fumble with it, requiring someone to serve it and start the process all over. No, you want to be efficient even though the person you're "playing" with isn't. The game is not fun because you're quick to return the ball while you are left sweating and staring and blinking into darkness, racket at the ready, shifting from foot to foot. They never return the ball until you've gotten into something else. Midnight Frisbee golf, perhaps. Bowling. Curling. And then bam, your ball is returned to you by persons unknown.

Quick, write them back before they lose interest! Am I still going to get paid for this screenwriting job--I better right them back, BAM! Am I ever going to see my short story on that literary blog--BAM! I wonder if my agent has gotten a chance to read the latest version of the manuscript--BAM! You shift your weight from foot to foot, listen to the darkness and whirring in your ears shielded by those very stylish pink ear muffs. You can't hear them wind up, grunt as they swing or that thwack of the ball meeting racket. You can't hear them typing the email back to you. You just have to wait and hope that you don't lose an eye when they do return it to you. You just have to be ready and wait and listen to the noises recycled inside the ear muffs that sounds strangely like ocean.

Advice

2010-04-07T08:53:00.001-07:00

Advice to all writers and those who wish to get paid to do what you love: Prepare to wait. A lot. I mean, not like hours or anything like that. It's not a waiting room kind of wait. I mean weeks, months. Checking your email and rechecking your email. You become the girl that got invited to the dance, then sits and waits by the phone. It rings and it fills you with bright, searing joy. But up until that point, you are sitting there staring at it--checking it to make sure there is still even a dial tone. Waiting and waiting and waiting...There is nothing worse, no. But just know that waiting pays off. Patience is a virtue, as they say, and someday once you have filled that imaginary "waiting pool" and you've paid your dues, good things will come to you. But before that, you have to wait so fucking long you'd swear the world has given up on you and has forgotten you even exist...and then wait some more.

But don't give up, hold in there and, yes, eventually, someone will get back to you.

Letters

2010-03-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

So, I know this thing kind of gets shots out into cyberspace (if the kids are even still using that expression) and no one really reads it. The unread blog is kind of the modern message in a bottle, isn't it? And I guess the glory of blogging, I'm told recently, is brevity. It is your friend. Be brief, funny, snappy.

I'll be honest with you, my dear reader. Like, blatantly honest. More honest than I've ever been with anyone, in person. I have no friends. And, I know, it sounds like I should be putting on 30 Seconds to Mars and making sure my guy-liner looks alright, but--I'm serious. I don't keep up with people very well and I know that's why I can't keep friends. I make them, at work or when I was still in school or what-have-you, but I end up losing them because I'm the "sorry, I can't, got plans..." guy. I decline, decline, decline until they don't try anymore and then I wonder what happened. It sucks. Yeah, it sucks.

So, kind of out of the blue (when I should've been working, actually) I went to Writers & Poets magazine's website and I checked out the local authors. I stumbled across one in particular that really kind of impressed me. He's written several novels, he lives in the Twin Cities area, and he seems nice. I wrote him an email and basically rambled a bunch about being a writer as well and that I wasn't looking for advice or anything like that, I just wanted to find someone to talk to, a kindred spirit to shoot the shit with. I didn't exactly say that last bit, but you get the idea.

I don't know. I'm in a weird place right now. I have an agent looking at my stuff, a few short stories out there being considered. I spend too much time in my own head. Maybe I need to leave the house more often. Maybe a weekend getaway would be good. I don't know, I think I just need someone to talk to, maybe.

Shatner My Dad Says

2010-03-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

So, the Twitter phenomenon "Shit My Dad Says" is going to be a TV show featuring William Shatner. I mean, I like the Shats, I am a fan of the old school Star Trek and all, but doesn't this seem like another one of those Geico Caveman TV show ideas? Why do we need a TV show based on "Shit My Dad Says" anyway? Isn't the feed on Twitter entertaining enough? That's the thing that kills me nowadays. Watchmen was a good graphic novel. Let's make a sub-par movie! You know what I mean? Let's just let awesome things be awesome the way they are. Besides, they're planning on calling the show "Bleep My Dad Says." Come on, the title is right there: "Shatner My Dad Says." Or even awesomer (brain storming like an exec here, stay with me!) "Shat My Shatner Shats." Eventually, let's just admit it, the title will become: "Shatner Shats Shat Shats? Shat!" Yep.

I guess that's how Hollywood works nowadays. The truly creative people are like you and me and spend our time blogging and bullshitting about at dead end jobs. Meanwhile, those who actually make the "big" decisions in Hollywood just make The Hulk over and over again until they get it right. And when finally one of them notices us blogger types just telling the world what our zany dad said, then suddenly it's GET THE RIGHTS TO THAT! PACKAGE IT! PUT A CELEBRITY IN IT! COMMERCIALS, COMMERCIALS! IPHONE APPS! LUNCHBOXES! I mean, I don't mean to get all Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park on you, but seriously--cut this shit out.

The Truth In Lies

2010-03-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

As writers, according to a lot of my heroes, that makes us all liars, apparently. We may be writing about unicorns that fight wars and use smoke grenades and machine laser-guns and etc, but in the end, what we're putting to paper (or screen) has to be believable. In order to suspsend belief, to have someone to continue to hold onto our hand as we guide them through our tale, we have to have them believe that the ground beneath their every step will not give out at any moment. Because, a strong foundation is what everything: relationships, actual non-metaphorical buildings, plots, rely on entirely for their stability. Without that cement slab, well, you might as well kiss your BATTLE UNICORN story goodbye.

And I think it goes beyond adjectives and clever sentence-weaving and turn of phrases. For every dose of imaginary, there has to be a drop or two of reality. I mean, that's how those CG wizards do it. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the monsters of The Lord of the Rings were based on real animals. Their behaviors and movements were studied endlessly for reference material. They were based out of real things and that's why that screeching thing that dives over Frodo and Sam is so convincingly terrifying, is because it's based on something real (besides just our fear of giant flying things with sharp teeth.)

Injecting droplets of ourselves into our stories is what makes them sound convincing. I think this is where that classic mantra "Write what you know" is really meant to be rephrased as, at least, in my mind. I mean, sure, you can write about your Battle Uniforns going into battle and the thoughts that pass through each of their minds as they prepare their swords, helms, and shields. Think back to when you were a tyke on the little league football team and how nervous you were in the minivan on the ride over to the field that particular Saturday morning. Think about how you puked up your Fruity Pebbles in terror of the thought of getting not only tackled, but (gasp) injured. As your mother steered you into the parking lot of the school and ran over a twig and you heard that snap sound, you flinched, for you knew that was exactly how your leg was going to sound when the 180-pound ten year old plowed into you. See? Not all that much different from preparing for battle. Now, Clegg the Battle Unicorn sounds a little more realistic when you channel your memories and feelings into the situation.

It's putting the truth in the lies. I mean, you can even go less abstract with the idea. Maybe you're writing about a teenager breaking up with their first big love. I know a lot of us push away those thoughts and bottle stuff up and bury it, but we as writers are a different breed. We revisit things constantly. We pick at our emotional scabs. So, I'm sure given the slightest prompt of even hearing the words "break" and "up" in close proximity to one another brings something out of you that you could probably write a whole paragraph, if not a whole chapter, on--am I right?

Unpack your emotional baggage. Sift through it like you're looking through that shoebox full of ex-boyfriend stuff. Unfurl ornately folded love notes and go through them. Really remember stuff. Re-feel it. This is what makes up the texture of a book, of our lies. Because without the texture, without Clegg the Battle Unicorn's nervous vomiting personality quirk, it all seems very flat.

So, take a Sunday afternoon when there's nothing on TV except for one of the god-awful romantic comedies they run on the UPN Saturday Afternoon Movie, when the kids are out playing, or when your husband has gone into a sports coma and just take the day to retread some stuff. Go back to high school for an hour. Smile at the good stuff, frown at the bad stuff. Experience it all again. Pain, embarassment, jealousy, even that pitch-black word that should only be saved for the right occasion: hate. Go through it all and live it again. Maybe not high school, but a divorce, a loved one's death, the day you got married, the day your kid was born, the morning you woke up and realized that you actually like your life. Pull from life, pull from your past, dig it up and air it out.

Find the truth in your lies.

Patience is a Virtue

2010-03-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

No one likes to wait. Sometimes, waiting can be good if what you're anticipating is really worth it and when you finally get what you're after and the payoff is amazing, then it was worth it, right? And the waiting itself, that anticipatory period where you drive yourself crazy thinking about what it will be like to have said thing or to do said thing--keep in mind here, even though this sounds incredibly dirty, that isn't my intention. And what's even worse than unintended euphamisms is being let down after a long waiting spell. Some old codgers will say, "That's what you get for getting your hopes up." And some will say that next time you won't be so prone to getting into stuff blindly, etc. Pardon my French, and trust me, I did just warn you: Fuck all of them.

Seriously.

You want to look forward to something? Do it. Do you think Columbus kicked around gravel in the parking lots of his youth, telling himself he'd never discover the New World? No, he got his fucking ships and he did it, he looked forward to it, too, I'm sure. He probably sat there looking at the globe, or as it was then, the circle, and simply was beside himself with anticipatory joy. So, use him as your role model next time someone says you're looking too forward to something or they're trying to put it in your head that you'll be let down. That's just because life fucked them over, that's why they're sad. Fuck those people, ignore them and never listen to another word they say. So they're your husband/wife or your teacher/parent. So what. Fuck them, they know nothing. You deserve to look forward to something. Good things will come to you. You deserve everything you get out of life and if you like looking forward to things and telling people about stuff you're looking forward to; do it. I know I am not normally as vulgar or opinionated on this blog, but consider this a kind of digression into self-help I'm doing here. You are not being naive, you are looking forward to something and yes, that thing will be good. And if it's not as good as you expected, the next one will be doubly better. Why? Because that's how life works.

Keep your chin up, carry on, and fuck everyone else.

Regards and apologies,

Your Humble Blogger
-Andrew

Manual Labor & Date Night

2010-03-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

There's satisfaction in manual labor. I've known this for quite some time, but it never feels quite as good as when your mind is on something. Having had quite a rough morning, I have now learned the joy of letting my mind settle onto cruise control and let my hands and back just go about their business cleaning my bathroom. See, my wife and I have a good arrangement for an apartment--we have separate bathrooms. I have the one directly off the master bedroom, while she has the larger one with the washer and dryer. My bathroom is cramped but can get awfully dirty in a short amount of time. I have been meaning to clean this place for literally a month. Like, every spare weekend, I will go in there first thing to do the things that you do first thing in the morning--and see how god-awful filthy it is...and inevitably end up putting it off for another week. But today, after my wife had constructed a list of things that we needed to get done around this and saw this to be one of them, I thought...she has noticed, I need to do something about it. It means that it has gone beyond what I think is dirty and into the realm of having-other-people-notice.

And so the cleaning begins and it's awful. I mean, it doesn't say a lot about me because I was the one who made it so dirty but I was surprised by how dirty it was. There was a patina of something on the counter, kind of like what collects when you use hairspray in the same room day after day, a tacky kind of invisible layer over everything. But I don't even own a can of hairspray. What is this film all over everything? Does contact solution cause this? Could it be considered soap scum? Did alien slugs leave their trails all over my countertop?
Either way, that was the least gross thing I encountered in there. I'll spare you the details of the rest.

But, after hearing from my agent that she hasn't gotten to my manuscript yet and it will still be a few weeks kind of glooms me out. I was hoping to hear some positive things back sometime this week but that just doesn't look like its in the cards just yet. The last draft of Memory Lanes, I really thought it was good and I'm excited for her notes on it. It just sucks that it will have to wait another few weeks before I hear anything about it. Which, you know, thus the cleaning. To get my mind off of things. That and the car is in the shop again, which, I swear that car sits in his stall down in the parking garage at night and weeps quietly to himself, kicking himself in the tailpipe for never having signed that god damn DNR.

Moving on.

So, last night we had a sort of a "date night." Which, by our standards usually means a trip to the movie theater, maybe dinner out somewhere, a walk around the mall or Target. We're easily entertained people, keep in mind, and we don't need to have dinner on the Space Needle and go bungee jumping or elephant hunting to have a good time. So, after discovering that absolutely nothing of interest (or that we could agree on) was playing at our local theater, we thought we'd get Chipotle and check out the Hollywood video in that same plaza since its closing and they had signs all over the place advertising all DVDs were $2.99. So, that was our date night.

Walking into the Hollywood video, I immediately noticed how hot it was in there. Apparently, when you got out of business and you're trying to cast off the last bit of your stock, you can't afford to turn on the air conditioner. There were two clerks behind the counter, neither of them in uniform--he, a husky guy with a trucker cap and plaid shirt and she, skinny as could be, in some jeans and a T. It was all at once depressing to see the place in the state that it was in. Hollywood Video, a place I used to love to go on Fridays and despite the line and despite the noise and despite seeing what I really wanted to rent be completely empty, I loved going. With Netflix and Blockbuster video offering movies sent directly to your house or the ability to just rent stuff OnDemand directly through your cable provider, video stores are just about as antiquated as the VCR itself, it seems. And seeing the place nearly wiped clean of movies was a sad sight indeed. There were all of the shelves labeled Comedy, Action, Drama: but all were empty save for a handful of unwanted movies. They were what you'd expect to be left behind, the indie fare with the no name actors, sex romp comedies and Mexican action movies. Stuff with Dolph Lundgren. About a hundred and one different takes on the vampire genre. But, with a sale like ten movies for twenty bucks or pay 2.99 each--we thought, why not, might as well pick ten. So after probably an hour of searching through them all with screaming kids playing hide and go seek in the ghost town of empty shelves and nearly sweating from the heat and listening to the sound system that wasn't playing advertisements and trailers for movies like Hollywood Videos usually do, instead, we had Creedence Clearwater and My Morning Jacket courtesy of the trucker hat-wearing employee.

Of the movies we sifted through, we walked away with:
The Commitments
In Bruge
Novocaine
Mad Love
Franklyn
The Informers
The Brothers Bloom
Blue State
Eastern Promises
Away We Go
Pretty good haul, considering that The Informers just came out and Away We Go still goes for like fourteen bucks at Best Buy. I had to laugh because we had just sorted out the old movies we weren't watching anymore and pawned them. And now we're back to trying to squeeze and rearrange our DVD shelf to accommodate more.

So, with two burrito bowls from Chipotle, ten movies and a bag of Twizzlers, and two Diet Cokes from the vending machine at our apartment building, the total of our Date Night ended up being forty dollars exactly. Not bad, seeing how we got so much. That would've been one movie and a cheap dinner somewhere like Subway any other Date Night.

Slow Boil or Flash Steam

2010-03-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

So, I've been wondering about something lately. I've been reading a lot lately and have made sure not to settle in one kind of fiction or another. I like to keep it fresh and jump from period dramas to science fiction, to fantasy, and back to good old literary fiction. And in doing so, you not only experience several different kinds of stories, you also get a wide array of how they're told.

So I just finished Maps & Legends by the infinitely talented Michael Chabon. And he is famous for his slow build, construct the world around you one nail at a time kind of approach, and now I'm reading Beat The Reaper by Josh Bazell and talk about a huge difference in pacing. First we have Michael Chabon, describing how the furniture looked in the 1960s, how big his glasses were, what the old man's house smelled like--and then you have Josh Bazell who, upon the first page of the first chapter, is having the main character get mugged and referring to the mugger as "fuckhead" and there's broken arms and all this go-go-go kind of thing that never, even now when I'm on chapter 12, has not let up.

And both approaches have their individual appeal. I like having this great mosiac of a story weaved for me, every little piece incrimentally adjusted and put into place and I also like the Chuck Palahniuk method of "None of that bullshit matters, here's the story, here's who dies, here's what blows up." And both are fine. One makes for a read that you sit and have tea with and listen to classical music (That describes practically every weekend for me right there) and then there's the slam-bang read in a two days at the gym kind of read. And I like them both, oddly enough. What are your thoughts on them? Do you like the slow burn epic storytelling approach or the "House is on fire" approach where only the most important things need to be taken (told)?

Also, still going strong with the current novel. Close to 50,000 words already. The average novel is about 70,000 or so, but I feel that I am nowhere near the end of this thing. I'm not going through his life day by day or anything like that, but I am settling on certain points of his life that may seem mundane or not worth going on about and really digging into them in search of any little nuggets of inspiration. I can always cut them out later. But, this is the story of a man and all of his years are the sum of his being and I feel to make this a true character study, the closest I've ever examined any character, I need to really get in there with the microscope and analyze. It may make for a boring read and it may be the best thing I've ever written, who knows. I just hope it doesn't come of as a Ulysees.

Revamps, Etc.

2010-03-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

So I finally cured myself of my reading-nothing spell that I’ve been suffering by finishing off Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon. He hit on a lot of things that I’ve read and a lot of things that I pretend that I read and understood, and he just generally added another dimension to things that I couldn’t believe that I had missed. His stories about growing up, discovering himself as a writer, his experiences and how his sophomore effort nearly killed him. And he talked about being a writer and how it’s like we’re all creating things, golems so to speak, that will in the end, possibly, try to kill us. Liars, that’s another thing he called all writers, liars. Which is true, you have to admit. We’re making stuff up and trying our damndest to make it sound convincing. Lies, by definition.

And so I landed on The Lemur by Benjamin Black and Beat The Reaper by Josh Bazell. I’ve started (and nearly gotten halfway through) The Lemur already and it’s proving to be a pretty interesting little book, kind of puts me in the mind of Bret Easton Ellis for some reason, even though that’s probably way off from the intent. I don’t know, something about well-to-do people and books that take place in New York (the 1980’s or any time) just scream Bret Easton Ellis to me, not sure why.

Beat The Reaper I’ve heard a lot of good things about it looks to be an interesting read that’ll take me a good chunk of time. I like long reads as long as they’re worth it. Sometimes a book is just long for the sake of being long and I tend to avoid books like that. The Historian just screamed that to me and that is why, to this day, I have avoided reading it, much to my wife’s persistent urging.

So while I’m waiting for work to roll in through my freelance job-bidding website, I’ve been tinkering around with what will be my second novel. While my agent has Memory Lanes, I always find myself going back to this second novel and working on it while she has the first. Maybe it’s become habit that digging up the epic thing and dusting it off while I know my career might be taking another step forward into the unknown. But, this second novel, which I’ve been calling (since last summer) Hades, PA, is pretty much the telling of one man’s entire lifetime. The first draft I completed after a couple of months last summer was probably about 100,000 words or more. And it was in the first person, which this time around, I’m not doing. I’ve become kind of tired of first person narratives, how a lot of them are trying to sound contemporary and modern and hip and just end up sounding like, well, like blogs. I want to be told a story, not hear your bitching about being a dissatisfied twenty-something.

Other than that, things are going smoothly around the Post household. Got my Xbox sent back to me finally from the repair center. Turns out, instead of actually “repairing” your system, they just trash it and give you a new one that was manufactured with the three red lights of death in mind. Something about the motherboard being place above something that heats up too much or some faulty fan or something—either way, it’s fixed and now I can commence my obsession with Fable II just in time for Fable III to come out.

Anyway, that is all that is new, which isn’t that much. Until next time.

Nothing In My Current-Reading

2010-03-20T12:29:00.001-07:00

Oh, Goodreads.com.

You are a wealth of suggestions and for every book I finish reading, I cannot wait to click onto your site and review the book I just read. It's almost as satisfying as slamming the book back onto the bookshelf into its alphabetically predetermined spot after reading that final page.

But, alas, right now, I have nothing to put on you for my currently reading. I just finished The Lightning Thief and now, I have nothing to read. And, just as a note, no, I do not make it a habit of reading YA. No, I don't think it is beneath me, but I just don't really have an interest in it. I was a kid once already and you know what? It kind of sucked. So, I'd rather not retread those years, thankyouverymuch.

I guess I just don't know what I want to read. And I don't really want to start something unless I'm actually going to finish it. I'm reading Hamlet right now, and I guess that counts, but it's not like one of those stimulating reads where I'd stay up half the night even when I have to work at five in the morning the next day kind of reads. I like that old English thee and thy and hark and all of that business. It makes me feel smart. Shut up. I don't tell you what to read.

I consider going back to my Jim Butcher Dresden Files series, but for me it started to get a little redundant. And it kills me to say that, I really love that series but it was in a way. Christ, I know, some of you are going to be so mad at me now. But, you know, in a couple of weeks, I'll be eating those words and apologizing to you all because I'll be back in full Jim Butcher obsession mode again.

I guess it might be the wealth of depressing movies and books I've been reading lately that's made me crave something lighter in the realm of The Lightning Thief. I just got through a bevy of depressing books: The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave, Angel Time by Anne Rice, The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman, and then the movies we've been taking in lately have been nothing but depressing: the animated (and surprisingly violent and dark) 9 and Feast of Love which was the most depressing movie with nudity I've ever seen, and the feel-good hit of that year: The Hours. And I think since so many of the books I own that are on my to-read shelf are bleak and depressing that I've just kind of shut down that actively reading part of myself. Sure, I've taken in a couple of graphic novels lately. The fantastic Batman RIP and Final Crisis. But, even those were depressing.

Maybe it's the time we live in or something. Maybe it's the state of the world. I mean, we were living in a pretty candy-colored bubble world before 9/11. And don't let this minor turn in this blog turn you off from me completely. I'm not going to go into all kinds of whacked-out theories on 9/11 and all of that, I'm talking strictly about art here. Remember, this blog has a theme and it's writing and I need to stick to that in order to retain a fanbase.

But, being honest, 9/11 did affect our art. Before 9/11 we had stuff that was pretty daring like Fight Club and South Park and stuff that was pretty optimistic and We Can Do It kind of stuff like the X-Men movie and things of that nature, and then 9/11 happened and all of a sudden, we have stuff with an edge coming out, sure, but it's all kind of defeated in a way. Or so leftist that it's just downright unsettling (V for Vendetta) and even comic books turn defeatist, like Final Crisis and Batman RIP. Like, the whole idea behind these things is the world is fucked so who cares. Suddenly, Watchmen becomes more popular. Like, being nihilistic isn't just for those weirdoes that love A Clockwork Orange so much, it's like a genuine everyday feeling and a theme for art, of all kinds. And frankly, I'm just kind of sick of it.

But, being optimistic is being naive, apparently, nowadays. You can reach your head up out of the sand and say, hey, I'm going to write something positive and fun and light! And people are like, what, are you dreaming? And it's just kind of aggravating. I mean, not that anyone is saying that to me, but you know what I mean. I just wonder when the lightness will come back to art. I don't want to read about Superman becoming a vampire or the alternate world Superman where World War II was actually won by the Nazis. Why? Because that's depressing. I want him to save Lois Lane as well as the day. I want Batman not to go crazy and die, but to find out what The Joker was up to and actually stop him. Why? Because I think we should move on and face forward and be positive again.

But maybe 9/11, war, earthquakes and all of that business has an affect on us that we can't really help and it trickles down into our art, whether we like it or not. I mean, someone once said that to write is to forget and maybe we're all just processing, as writers, and getting out that ugliness in our art, and then others are picking it up and reading it and it's just soaking into them and so on and so on...I mean, my writing is all dark. All of it. Just as a list of synopsizes for you, my novels are about a woman that kills herself because her husband dies in a car accident. A man who is losing his mind and is at the same time, trying to take care of his teenage daughter. Another story is about a man whose wife and daughter are murdered and he goes from state to state trying to track down their killer. Another one is about...well, you get the idea. They're dark.

But I was in high school when 9/11 happened. And those are the years where you're the most effected by things, am I right? Remember seeing some sappy movie when you were in high school that you'd laugh at if you were to see it for the first time now, but you cried your eyes out at when you were sixteen? I don't know, maybe because I've grown up so much during this war and this general state of depression in this country that it's just in me to write dark things, meanwhile I'm taking depressing literature in and pushing more out without really being a filter at all--just moving the depressing stuff around, stirring that pot of dreary goodness.

But, I guess until a change comes along and there's a new hippie culture and we all start growing our hair long and having key parties and caring less about carbs and more about having fun, this is all we can expect out of art and how it makes us feel.

Prozac Nation, indeed.

Blogs, To Have One Is To Exist.

2010-03-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

Blogs.

To have one, is to exist.

It's there to say, hear my voice--for I exist. And I guess that's why we write anything, really. Because we want to be heard, listened to, as much as we've had to hear and listen in our lives. And, really, that's not asking for a lot, I don't think. I think we all like to talk to someone and see in their eyes and maybe even their posture that they're really listening to you, really soaking it up. I know that I can occasionally be one of those "waiting for my turn to speak" people, especially if it's a conversation centered around something I know a lot about or I'm currently really interested in. But, I think it's important to listen as much as it is to speak. I guess it's like writing letters, to receive one you usually have to write one.

I don't know if this is the standard blog-writing kind of way of going about things, but I feel the need to introduce myself. I mean, if you're reading this, then you've probably stumbled across this one evening while you're bored out of your mind at home when there's nothing good on TV or there's a good quiet spell while at work. And for that, I thank you. For stumbling upon my little blog thing here, that is.

I'm Andrew and I'm twenty-five years old. I was born in Pennsylvania and I've moved around quite a bit during my life. My father was and is still to this day an engineer and while that may not sound like an occupation that would cause someone to have to uproot their family every three years, I can personally attest that yes, yes it is. So from Erie, Pennsylvania, the place of my birth, to North East, Pennsylvania which is close to Lake Erie, but not as close as Erie itself, duh. For there we spent three or four years, and then off to Warren, Pennsylvania, more inland than the other two towns and a bit small population. That town was nowhere near anything with any sort of culture, so it was kind of a repressive little place as you can imagine. And from there, to the Youngsville, North Carolina area. There I spent the last half of my high school career, fell in love for the first time, made some friends that I still talk to today, and generally figured things out about myself. But, during all of those trips, all of those moves, all of those different schools, towns, bedrooms and classrooms, one thing has remained consistent through all of my different personalities and interests and styles I've chameleoned onto myself and that's been writing.

When I was about around five or so, I remember playing outside, I was making a home for a man that was just this knobby little twig. Between two flat rocks, I made a bed out of grass, a kitchenette area, even a tiny bathroom. When my mom saw me and asked me what I was doing, I explained all of the ins and outs of the knobby twig man's house and she immediately said, enthusiastically, "You're going to be a writer when you grow up!" And I know, as cliché as that sounds, that really happened.

When I was in kindergarten, we were all asked to write a story and accompany the story with pictures. Mine to me was as original as could be, little did I know that it was basically the story of Moby Dick made up of very short sentences and crude crayon drawings of pissed-off looking stick figure men and bulbous blue whales diving and spraying dotted-line spritzes of mist out of their blow-holes. But, none the less, it spent a good few months on the fridge, a badge of honor worn with pride upon our household appliance. Something I wrote and illustrated myself.

After discovering the prepubescent wonderland of comic books at around age eight or nine or so, I began creating epic (like, seriously, ten pages or more!) of my comic book hero gone literary, The Hunter. His costume was something rather unique while not very practical for someone who was diving off rooftops and trying to remain as stealthy as possible: he was striped, yellow and black, like a bumble bee. He carried dual machine gun pistols and had a glowing green eye that also doubled as a robotic reticule aiming assistant. He lived in a cargo helicopter parked atop a hill overlooking the city he so laboriously guarded. He fought evil cybernetic CEOs and criminals that would pollute the city streets and playgrounds with drugs. Remember, I was a child of the 80s so Robocop, Judge Dredd, Demolition Man, True Lies, Timecop, Terminator, those were the popular go-to movies of my youth. The Hunter mini-novels, I stapled together and illustrated with a single front cover drawing of the masked vigilante in mid-gunfight, borrowed a couple sheets of my mother's lamination paper and presto, had my very own completed and self-published book. I would let my dad read it, and humoring me by whisking through it in a matter of ten minutes during commercial breaks of his Nascar races, would hand it back to me and say that he liked it, that it was full of action and well-paced and then politely go back to ignoring me.

After discovering the adolescent joy of violent videogames and horror movies and horror movies based on violent videogames, I began writing more thematic, genre stories when I was about ten years old or so. I, like so many boys at that age, really enjoyed watching the movies that our parents deemed were too violent for us, which made us seek them out all the more. Those being the Return of the Living Dead movies, the Alien and Predator films. And, of course, the Duke Nukem 3D videogame, as well as Doom, Mortal Kombat, and the most notorious of the bunch, Resident Evil. And so my writing began to drift in that direction of the horror-themed. My drawings became more sinister, as I began drawing zombified dogs and half-eaten soldiers lurching about missing an arm and such other wonderful things. It became a point of concern for my parents, my violent drawings, and I began to become embarrassed by it, feeling like one of those weird kids in the movies that goes on to strangle the family dog or something, so, for the first time in my life, my art began to become private. I didn't share with my dad like I used to, nor did I ask to borrow anymore lamination sheets. My notebooks began to fill with stories of secret missions to remote locales, about soldiers and secret agents and biological warfare and accidents and secret test labs and horrible monsters. I invented entire secret branches of the government, a branch located out of Arizona referred to AZ. I was obsessed at this point as well about aliens and government conspiracies and area 51, so, naturally, AZ was a part of that as well. The main character in these stories was always a guy whose name, even to this day, puzzles me as far as how I came up with it: South Perry. The guy's first name was South, as in the direction. And Perry sounded to me like something actiony, like the word that came up on the screen in one of the many JRPGs I played when a character dodged an enemy's swipe.

So, me and my friends would write these stories and we would include one another in them. One of my friends, Colin, his stories were always fantasy-themed and he weaves these tales of ships that flew on seas of sand and how we were all captains of these ships and he was the lead captain and, well, as you could guess, he was a JRR Tolkien fan and his stories bored the hell out of us. Then there was Kyle, who was a huge fan of Beavis and Butthead and Ozzy Osbourne and everything guns and motocross and four wheelers, would create these insane stories where the three of us were driving somewhere in this intricately described fantasy car and then all of a sudden, these guys would shoot at us and our car would explode and then we'd be mad, because, well, that was a bad-ass car, and we'd kill them all in these really descriptive ways and more shit would explode...and so on. But my stories were a balance between the extreme mundane detail of Colin's and the mindless violence of Kyle's. I tried to write the best stories that they, at the attention deficit peaks of their lives, would actually read until the end. We'd write them during class, exchange them in the hallways, and then read them in our next class or after we were done with our class work and were supposed to be diligently working on the coursework. And when it came to gym class or study hall or some other period during the day where we'd see one another and had a chance to critique one another, Colin and Kyle would always hand me my notebook-written stories, with their frayed edges of being ripped from their spiral bound notebooks, and just say, "Man, that fucking rocked."

And so there the bug had bitten me. From that point on, I began to write not just for myself, but with an audience in mind. And I know, that's something you shouldn't really do because it makes you dumb things down or whatever, but I like writing with that in mind. I like being able to create suspense or implant cliffhangers or have a really great twist. I just think its great when I write something, really pour my guts into it, and have someone read it and they're just blown away by it. I don't always get that reaction, because, you know, not every story can be a killer, but when you do get one that really knocks someone's socks off, it's like getting another much-needed hit of that drug of choice. It goes straight to your brain, right into that section of your cortex or wherever your addiction center is location, and boom--you're hooked all the more.

So, I guess, from this point on I'll be covering some writer-based stuff, since it looks like for a blog to be catchy and popular, it has to have a theme. You can't just put a journal on here and tell the world about your office job and your cat and expect people to keep coming back for more...But, that's alright. Writing. There's my theme. Words and all that goes along with it. So, I hope you come back and I hope you've liked what you've read so far.

I really do.

END OF THE SEASON

2009-12-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Christmas Blizzard is what they called it. On the weather radar, Minnesota dropped into the middle, at first it looked like a small smattering of some kind of rash. A dot here, a cluster of blue there. And then, like the onslaught of some kind of alien invasion, the literal wall of snow drifted inward, clicking closer to the Twin Cities, drifting and populating the region like an army of figures on the boardgame Risk being shoved in. It wasn't just a storm, but an occupation, like the blizzard was going to install a new world order upon Minnesota. Much to my wife's and my own chagrin, it meant we weren't going anywhere this holiday season.

I took five days off from work since over the last few years of my life, I have to either work the day of Christmas (Avis Rent-A-Car needed someone to clean some cars just in the event someone needed a rental car that day and I was the only one who hadn't had kids yet, so that naturally nominated me to be the sole car-cleaner that day) and at Target where I have been employed for the last two years, required that someone come in at midnight or one o'clock in the morning to prepare sandwiches and salads for the next day. I was tired of it. Having to tell family that I wasn't able to stick around for late-night coffee and brandy because I had to navigate awful roads back to the red and white monolith of Target to make food for people that probably weren't going to be shopping anyway. And I had enough. I wanted time with family. I wanted to see my in-laws, because, unlike most husbands, I love my wife's family. And to be totally frank, I love them (and feel more comfortable around them) more than I do my own flesh and blood family. And when word kept moving about Target, among employees and overheard conversations about this Christmas blizzard, I felt like an idiot for taking a whole five days off.

But it's been nice, to spend time at home with my wife and our dogs. To reconnect. I find myself often getting stuck in Target World and I feel that the red and khaki we're forced to wear becoming less like clothes and more like a tinting of my skin. I end up waking up in the wee hours of the morning and thinking less about what I want to do with my free time and more about what kind of "challenges" I have at work that I need to meet, execute gracefully, and smile about it.

It's been strange at work, lately. A lot of people have been fired or have left for other jobs. I have survived so many employees of Target. I've trained several dozen people only to see them leave for a better job. Better paying, better (looser) work environment, etc. And I smile, thinking that I'm doing something right by having survived the constant turbulance of Target, but really--aren't I the one doing something wrong that I can't find a better job than this? I don't know, I generally like Target. It's provided me with a relatively steady work schedule and even though I have to be there at five o'clock in the morning to hit the ground running and get a thousand things done, I have the entire afternoon to myself most days. I can write, I can watch movies, play with the dogs...Because, really, Target is there as my nine to five. Writing is what I want to get paid to do, after all.

My literary agent, April, got into contact with me just about a year ago. She loved the sample chapters I sent her. She thought the characters were hilarious, that the plot was original, the whole world of my fictional version of Pittsburgh was interesting. She really loved the sample stuff and wanted, immediately, to read the rest. Fast forward a month and I'm going through editing, cutting stuff, repairing things, snazzing things up. Fast forward some more and I have a stretch of sleepness nights. We're close to the end of editing and I feel a splinter in my mind that won't go away. I need to change the tense of the novel. It's about memory and it's written in the present tense. It doesn't make sense. It's stupid, I need to change it. It began to become all I could think about. So I told April, "I'm sorry but I really need to change this. As a writer, I know I can do better." And so I pulled it, worked on it for a good three weeks, changed a majority of the book and came up with what I thought was a thousand times better. Sending it back to her, she returns to me with news that she's going on a few conferences and won't have time to read the new version of the novel for some time. More time passes. I begin another project and finish a rough draft. Now we're close to early September and April tells me via email while I am in the airport waiting for our flight to Virginia for a friend's wedding that she has faith in me, faith in Memory Lanes, and that we're going to "bowl a strike" for it. It fills me with a thrill that I cannot put words to. I am an easy dog. Pet me once in a while and I'll stay in the yard. She tells me that she's going to Paris since the Reece Halsey literary agency also has an office there and that we'll regroup at the first of the year for the finishing touches on Memory Lanes. Now, it's late December, just after Christmas, and I am reinstalled with a thrill to get back to working on the novel. I check my email daily to see if she has written me. I feel like a smitten schoolboy, checking his locker for any possible love notes from his mysterious love interest that signs her messages only as, "Your Secret Admirer." Literature, writing, books, publication--these are my secret admirers whose identity I have not had the honor of discovering just yet. But it's close. It's very close.

I enjoy these early days of my writing career. I've heard stories of how other writers I really admire used to work shit jobs just to make a living while they tried to get their writing careers off the ground. Chuck Palahniuk used to fix trucks. Michael Chabon used to work in a discount book store. All the while, I'm sure, they were taking notes, making observations about their surroundings and the people that inhabited their world, unknowingly having aspects of them sampled for parts of the ever-watching authors' works. I just fear that corporate will catch wind of my book and realize that I am a Target employee and find some way to put a stamp or sticker on the cover of it when it's published that boldly reads: "Written by a Target employee!" I dread that, I honestly do.

I also enjoy these long stretches away from work because it gives me time to reevaluate myself. I can get out from under the crimson fog of Target to see my real goals. My writing, possibly buying a house, a new car, stuff like that. But when I'm at work, I certainly keep writing in the back of my mind. I am so seasoned from having prepared the same sandwiches and wraps and salads over the past two years that I can put myself on autopilot and think about other things. I think about plot, clever turn of phrases I can use, stuff like that. And people at work are beginning to learn what I really do. My boss asked me about my book the other day, even though I had never said anything to her about it before. Word is getting 'round. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

But as I take a break from writing, as I check my email like an addict checking his phone again and again to see if his dealer has called back sometime in the night, I go outside and have one of the last cigarettes of my life (since I am quitting in January) and I look out on the dog park across the way. We live in a relatively nice apartment complex in Inver Grove Heights, a good mile away from St. Paul. It's mostly suburbs, little shops and the big box stores, car dealerships and the like. And since we live on the ground floor, we have a back door that leads directly to the fenced in square where the dogs can run around and play. Now, it's just a fenced-in lot of snow, a few trampled trails of footprints circling around one another and the occasional dark patch of dog feces. Off in the distance, since the dark park is relatively large, like Olympic-sized swimming pool sized, there is a headless snowman. The flattened bottom, the torso atop it, one visible stick around harpooned into his side, and the vacant spot atop his shoulders where his head (a few days ago) once rested. There, sunk into the crunchy frozen snow, lays his featureless head, the black rubber dog toy that once stood in place for a hat, a few feet from that.

It's a grusome sight to me, inexplicably. A headless snowman standing inside of an empty expanse of chain-like fence. Like some prisoner of war, standing decapitated in protest of his captors as if to say, "You can cut off my head--but you'll never take...my freedom!" And what makes the sight even more unsettling is how terribly quiet it gets during the Minnesota winter. Despite living just a stone's throw away from a major highway, there is no sound outside. No birds stir upon the reaching skeletal hands of the leaf-less trees. No hum of highway hustle and bustle. Just a silence that causes your ears to reach, really reach, to find any sound. And it's even more strange since we live in an apartment building with a few hundred people living in it. And in the summers, music can be heard beyond their closed windows, show tunes and country-rock ditties. But not today. It's a Sunday and everyone is home. And there is still a silence.

And this, standing there, smoking and listening to something louder than me, will inevitably find its way into my writing somehow. My work is less about people, exchanges of words, and more about moments. A moment can last hours or minutes or even just mere seconds. And standing outside, feeling the cold creeping up through the holes in my books, my hood pulled up around my head working as a funnel for sound--and hearing nothing but the wind--it's a strong moment to me. Call me weird, but that's just how I see it. That's my observation.