Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Month: December 2006

  • I hate it when the government kills the main characters in my books

    Like I said before, I have a moratorium on “here is what I did last year”/”here is what I want to do last year”/”here’s how horrible the year was politically, even though I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about” posts. I’m pretty sure you can read that at any other blog or site…

  • Year in review blues

    It seems like every blog and news site out there is currently stuck in the “year in review” and “new year’s resolution” modes. First, I have to say that being away from your usual routine of reading crap on the web has done wonders for showing me what bullshit some of my regular reads are.…

  • End of year shuffle

    Jesus Christ. If you dig around in the archives, you will find mention of the fact that every year, because of a design decision made back in 1997, I have to do this whole firedrill of moving all of last year’s entries into another directory, starting a new one, and of course, fucking it all…

  • Places I’ve Been

    My book is done! Check it out here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/31228. It is called Places I’ve Been: From Amsterdam to Alaska in Pictures. (Yeah, I know, lame title.) It’s a 10×8 book, hardcover or softcover, 94 pages, and it’s all color heavyweight coated stock. I threw in a lot of photos from Amsterdam and Alaska, plus Hawaii,…

  • Current projects I will never finish

    I put Past Masters Vol 2 on shuffle yesterday and now I have “Hey Jude” stuck in my head. I also listened to the song “Rain” 58 times, and I am convinced that the Beatles were real, real, real, real high. There is a good article about John Sheppard in Time Out Chicago. Go read…

  • South Bend Indiana in works of great literature

    I’ve been sick since about Friday or so. It’s the usual December 0% humidity, everyone else is sick sort of thing that gets me every year. Vitamins have kept it semi-controllable, but I wish I could sleep 20 hours a night until it went away. And that doesn’t jive with getting any work done, or…

  • Another book idea

    Okay, I have decided (until I possibly flip-flop a month from now) that I will be doing a ten-year anniversary book for this journal. I’ll start on it after the new year. I don’t think I want to do it in a chronological order, though. I’m thinking about grouping things vaguely by topic or something.…

  • Light box thing

    As of yesterday, issue #11 of Air in the Paragraph Line outsold issue #10. It’s also the best-selling of my lulu books, except for the annotated version of Rumored to Exist. I still wish I could find some scheme to move more copies. I’ve been hearing good things from the first copies that went to…

  • Full spectrum

    I bought a full-spectrum light box. It’s actually not a box, but a bunch of weird-colored LED lights in a thing that’s about the size of a portable CD player or alarm clock. It’s used for light therapy, to allegedly curtail seasonal affective disorder and mess around with your sleep cycle in some beneficial way.…

  • The pain of weekly updates

    I was digging around old journal entries, and it bothers me that I now write in here once a week, at best, and back in 1997, I wrote longer entries on a daily basis. I’ve been thinking about this because the end of the year is approaching, and I have to do the annual firedrill…