Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Month: January 2013

  • iTunes Rating Bankruptcy

    Last night, I declared iTunes rating bankruptcy.  I did a Cmd-A Cmd-I, then set the ratings to just over 12,000 songs to zero stars. I’ve been talking about this for a while.  Actually doing it gave me the combination of exhilaration and terror usually reserved for when you accidentally delete an entire hard drive.  It…

  • Journal mold

    I keep reading John Sheppard’s tumblr, which lately has been chock full of awesome short little bits of not-fiction about his life, and it makes me wish I could spin up some yarns here, especially since I ran out of ideas for blog entries in about 2007.  One of my wise ideas was to pull…

  • Generation whatever

    On Saturday, I went to the big Barnes and Noble at the Third Street promenade in Santa Monica, which I guess is just a Barnes and Noble like the one by my house, but it’s got the weird art deco letters on the outside, and I always go there when I’m at the promenade, which…

  • Angel City and the Circle of Life

    It’s Friday, and in about an hour, I’m off to OAK to catch a flight to LAX and spend a weekend celebrating my birthday.  No real plans, except for a quick trip, and probably a lot of nostalgia for the time five years ago when I lived down there.  I really do love LA, even…

  • Print Obsessions

    I’ve been obsessed with print lately, which is a real kick in the ass, because I sell almost no print books these days.  I can sometimes get a few people to kick in a buck to look at my stuff on the kindle, but sales of the dead tree counterparts have been absolutely abysmal.  If…

  • What I did on my birthday, 2001-2013

    2001: Went to Las Vegas Rented a Corvette Stayed up until 4:34AM playing casino war at the Circus Circus, won $250 Front row seat to see George Carlin at the MGM Went to take a piss at a urinal, and standing next to me was Charles Barkley (no, I did not look) 2004: Went to…

  • 42

    I am 42 today.  Don’t feel a day over 72. I’ve been going to Denny’s every year for my birthday, since I don’t know when.  I think it must have started when they used to give you free lunch for your birthday, but when I started hanging out with Bill and Scott, who both share…

  • Seattle sketches

    I always used to explore on Saturday mornings, driving around Seattle to find some new magical diner to eat that would cause my writing output to double or make me run into the perfect woman, except I’d always end up at Denny’s or at the movie theater at Mountlake Terrace, because I didn’t own a…

  • Quiet

    It’s oddly quiet here today.  I guess it’s always this quiet, but I usually have music going.  I’m sick today, not as sick as when I had a fever of 103 a couple of weeks ago and was wondering aloud if cats believed in angels and if we should go to the Hallmark store and…

  • Twenty Years Later

    I just wrote a review for David S. Atkinson’s book Bones Buried in the Dirt (go read it here) and something I mentioned in response to it is actually an idea I had that I will probably never do.  His book is told from the point of view of a pre-teen kid, and I mentioned…