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 something that John Knowles did with A Separate Peace, which is to write a book that takes place a generation later.  With Knowles, he wrote the book Peace Breaks Out, which takes place after the main character returns to his old prep school to become a teacher.

Something I was obsessed with a bit ago was writing a sequel to Summer Rain, that would take place twenty years later.  I ultimately wasn’t fully happy with Summer Rain after it was published, for a few reasons.  The book wasn’t successful, but it was also a first book and suffered from extreme nostalgia a little too much.  If I wanted to make the book a commercial success (which I didn’t want to do) I probably should have killed off some of my angels and stripped out all of the death metal and replaced it with grunge rock or college radio music or whatever.  Anyway, the book never felt resolved to me, in a way that just a copyedit or a different cover could never solve, and I always wanted to either rewrite it completely, or do something else like it that had a better chance of working.

An idea that knocked around my head a bit ago was to take this Knowles approach, and write a book where the main character of Summer Rain had to go back to Bloomington twenty years later.  I wasn’t sure what plot device I’d use to get him back there, maybe the death of a friend, or just a reunion or an itch to drive back to 47404 and see who and what still remained of that summer.  It’s a problem I have in real life, as I never have a legitimate reason to go back, and when I do end up returning to Indiana to see my family, I’m on the other side of the state and it’s usually snowing and the roads there are barely paved as it is.  I never explored the end game of the character in the book, as he wasn’t graduated at the start of the fall 1992 semester, and I didn’t extrapolate that he’d end up moving to Seattle (or whatever) so a certain amount of the book’s start would be this backstory, the explanation of how the character made it out of Indiana alive, and what he did in the two decades following college.  There’s always a certain amount of fun in that kind of world-building, and it’s one of the things that got me hooked on this idea.

Another big part of it is just diving into that nostalgia again.  I barely remember what Bloomington was like to me, but I can spend way too much time digging around bloomingpedia or old books and notes, and it’s something that still has a sick appeal to me.  I thought that after the book and publishing The Necrokonicon would get it out of my system, but there’s still a part of me that perks up when I find a picture of an old VAX online, and I sometimes feel like there’s at least another book that could come out of that part of my life.  I’ve finished a few short stories about it, and I have a whole book that I never completed that’s just a collection of them, but I do have that occasional itch to do something bigger.

And as I thought about it, there’s a lot of character exploration that could be done.  I mean, there were people that I knew who were vegan anarchist punk rock terrorists in the early 90s that have fallen hard into yuppiedom in their later years.  Some of the people I knew who were very successful and seemed like they were destined for greatness have fallen into lives of mediocrity, divorce and middle-management blues.  Some friends who railed against The Man became The Man; some people who seemed like total losers made millions in the dot-com era.  Very few people remained on the path that I thought they were on back in 1992.  Some escaped Indiana for greater things, and many basically became their parents.  Some completely fell apart.  Some are dead.  And some truly achieved greatness.  There’s a lot of ground that could be covered.

The problem with that is, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not that into “straight” writing anymore.  Another issue is that I fall into a heavy self-censorship mode when I write about reality, because I’m afraid of offending someone.  And the best stories that I could tell about reality are probably by the people who would be pissed off the most if I told them.  And every time I think I’ll get past it by changing names and hair colors and whatnot, I get some fuckwit who decides to get on my shit because I said US-33 between Dunlap and Goshen was a four-lane highway, when really it’s five lanes of interstate, or whatever the fuck.  When I try to write fiction, people give me too much shit because it’s not fiction.  It’s enough to distract me from finishing, at least.

If I had infinite time, I’d probably look into this.  But, I don’t.  I wrote a long set of notes about it, and filed them away, in a crate next to the arc of the covenant.  Maybe I’ll get to it eventually.

My computer is in the shop.  It has some random reboot situation, which is either from a bad motherboard or bad memory, and because it’s still under warranty and it has aftermarket memory, they want to prove that it’s the memory’s fault, although I’m pretty sure it’s the motherboard.  This is the first generation to have the NVIDIA GPU and discrete graphics, and I think it’s a lemon generation, because others have complained about a dud GPU.  But it could be the RAM, who knows.  EIther I’ll get a new motherboard for free, or they will say the RAM is bad and I’ll pay $50 to get it replaced.  The problem is not having the machine until then.

(And yeah, all you PC people can start with your HA HA MACS SUXXOR stuff.  But if this was a PC, purchased in 2010, it would have died about two years ago, and the warranty would have been long gone, and instead of getting help from an actual human at a store a mile from my house, I would have had to either fedex my computer to rural China and wait six months for an answer, or possibly bring it to a store that also sells refrigerators, junk food, and Beyonce CDs, and explain to a person who can’t read what happened.  There are only three steps in PC troubleshooting:  Reboot, Reinstall Everything, and Throw It Out And Buy A New One.  The fact that this machine has lasted three years is amazing - a three-year-old PC is a doorstop at this point.)

Anyway, I am now working off of my 2007 Macbook, which is plugged into the same monitor and keyboard and mouse, giving me the partial illusion that I’m on the same machine, but it’s a few versions back on the OS, only has a fraction of the speed and memory, and is missing a bunch of stuff like my entire music and photo libraries, my mail, and all of my documents.  I did install Scrivener here, so I can write, and I have copies of my latest books and projects, so that’s good.  And I have all of my homework and whatnot for my class, so I can do that.  But it is unusual to not have the bulk of my files around, even if I do have them over on an external drive just in case.

All of this does have me thinking about buying a new machine, though.  I wanted to limp along this MacBook for another year or two before shopping for a new machine, but I’m now wondering when the best point is to upgrade.  The rumor is that the middle of summer will be the next cycle for the MacBook Pro, and that they’ll be all-retina.  If I had to buy a Mac now, I would probably buy a non-retina, just because I don’t need to spend the money for a nicer display if I spend 80% of my time docked.  I’ve also thought about buying a MacBook Air and a Mini, using the Mini as a home server sort of thing, and the Air as a “terminal” and portable machine.  I don’t know exactly how this would work, or if there would be any advantage.  I would probably spend two hours a day moving files back and forth between the two.

Okay, I need to see how Scrivener does on a vintage six-year-old machine…

I have won a number of contests in my life, both games of skill or knowledge and the plain dumb-luck sort. Here is a partial list:

1. As a very young child, I vaguely remember winning a plastic model car from a contest at a radio station. It wasn’t at the radio station; it was on Cassopolis Street in Elkhart, probably a remote location thing at a used car lot. I don’t remember actually being at the event, and I don’t remember the model car at all (it probably required glue, and I wasn’t even at the level of snap-together models if this happened so long ago I don’t remember it) but every time I drive past that location (which is probably now either a Mexican grocery, a cash-for-gold place, or a meth lab) I remember winning that car. (This could be a planted memory though, like when kids “remember” they were involved in Satanic sexual abuse and their babysitter had a pit of corpses of other little kids, and it turns out you just think this happened because an episode of Geraldo back in the 80s talked about it. I don’t know if Geraldo did any specials about used car lots giving away model cars, though.)
2. I won a Huffy BMX bike from Honeycomb cereal. Many people my age remember Honeycomb cereal giving out these tiny metal replica license plates (no way they’d do that now; some kid would try to swallow one and every ambulance-chaser lawyer within fifty miles would jizz themselves) and if you got a special plate, that said “winner” (or maybe “bandit” or something like that) you would get a free bike. I did not win this contest, though; when I won, they had a book of various puzzles, maybe the sort that you scratch off with a coin like a lottery ticket, and the penultimate puzzle revealed if you won the bike or not, and I did. My mom did not believe me, and went over the entire puzzle book and read all of the fine print, trying to verify if I indeed won a bike, or simply “won” the 1 in 726,934,834 chance of winning a bike after mailing in the puzzle. But I did win, and we sent the thing via registered mail to where ever the Post Cereal corporation is (Battle Creek?) and a matter of time later (Weeks? Months?) a cardboard box showed up via UPS, and it contained this unassembled red and gold bike. I remember this was on a rainy Saturday, and I assembled the bike and rode it in the rain, and when I came home, the bottom parts of the bike were covered with fresh earthworms, which were out of the ground and all over the roads of my subdivision. Anyway, this was a huge stroke of luck, because I had a crappy non-BMX bike, the kind with a banana seat, and BMX bikes were huge — we’re talking Justin Bieber huge — and this made me a brief blip on the collective radar of the kids at my school. It was significantly less cool when I was still riding the same 20-inch BMX bike in my freshman year of high school, so I guess these things balance out.
3. I won a $50 gift certificate to the Concord Mall. I think I wrote a short story about this, or a chapter within a book that will never see the light of day.  It was at some Saturday activity organized by our scared-straight Jesus freak vice principal, which Ray somehow talked me into going to, probably because he thought he had a long shot of getting his dick touched by some girl that talked to him in his social studies class, and of course nothing happened, but I did get the $50, and I spent it on a new walkman, the first Metallica album, and the first Queensryche album.
4. I won a college scholarship from my dad’s work, based on my ACT test score. It paid $2000 a year for four years. I did not get the last semester of it because I fucked up so much academically, something which I think I discussed in my first book Summer Rain. (Actually, I think it happened a semester after that, but maybe I allude to it; I’m too lazy to go look.)
5. My wife recently won a raffle prize of two round-trip tickets on Amtrak from Oakland to Reno, and we planned on using them to go to visit her uncle over Thanksgiving, but after we made all of the plans, we found out that Thanksgiving is a blackout holiday, so we drove and I think we gave away the tickets.  I think Amtrak tickets cost like ten dollars, so this was not that big of a deal.
6. Here’s a stupid one. I was at that casino way south of the strip with Bill Perry and a couple of other people (I forget who - Marc? Tom?) and we were waiting to see Kathleen Hannigan and playing blackjack. I was watching a playoff game and not paying attention at all, and hit on a hard twenty. I still managed to win.

That’s the extent of my good luck. Everything else has been bad.



I just went digging through a box of old zines and other crap, looking for blank stationery. I always steal the paper at any given hotel, and I think when I left my place in Astoria, or maybe when we moved to Denver, I threw out this huge collection of yellowing stationery, mostly from Vegas casinos that have since been imploded. So I recently had to start over. I don’t know what I want to do with any of it, but I have a vague idea about doing some kind of chapbook, like a prose-poetry project, with each page being handwritten on a different piece of stationery. This doesn’t translate at all to the Kindle, and 99% of my book sales are now on the Kindle, but it’s still something I want to do at some point.

There are a few things I really miss about doing a zine, and the one big one is getting weird shit in the mail. I still buy a lot of zines, and I’m a sucker for anybody publishing something on indiegogo or kickstarter or any other place that takes PayPal, especially things that are hand-printed or letterpress printed or photocopied or in weird sizes. 90% of the time, I don’t even read the crap, I just hoard it. I like anything like that if it looks cool, if it’s an oddball size like a pocket book, or has a deckle edge binding or is a limited numbered edition, or anything like that. I have a big box that’s filled with nothing but old books and zines like that, half-digest sized things that were photocopied 50 at a time in a Kinko’s with a bootleg counter back in the early 90s.

(What I’m trying to say is that if you publish crap like that, you need to tell me. And at some point, somebody’s going to have to kick me in the ass and talk me into publishing a perzine about medical disorders. Maybe when Hobby Lobby goes bankrupt, I’ll get a printing press on the cheap and do this.)

This paper collection, which also doubles as a dust mite collection and is one of the reasons I have to take an insufferable amount of allergy medication, also has a bunch of travel-related junk. Usually when I’m on a trip, I will grab whatever junk I see, like business cards and stickers and pamphlets and free newspapers and brochures, and shove them in my pockets or my camera bag. Then, when I get home, I will shove all of this stuff into a box, and forget about it for years. And then, when I’m looking for some tax paper for my accountant, I will waste three hours of an afternoon looking at German brochures for pathology museums in Berlin and wonder what the hell I could do with this stuff. I should start a scrapbook of it, but I don’t want to cut up the originals. I also don’t have a cricut machine, a spare room to hold scrapbooking supplies, or a vagina.

At some point, I need to scan in all of this stuff maybe, or create a tumblr of it.  What I really need to do is attach a scanner to our Roomba, so I can just throw all of the paper on the floor and have the robot vacuum cleaner automatically scan everything on the floor.  And it would need some kind of WiFi attachment to upload everything automatically.  I think even this might be too much work, though.

I don’t do new year resolutions, but one of my not-a-resolutions has been to write in this thing every day, hell or high water.  And of course, the big catch is what exactly to write.  I would write about life, except life pretty much just involves work, trying to write, and medical appointments.  When I dig to find some piece of life to write about from years ago, I find myself writing about a period of life in which, during that time, I thought things were insanely boring and I looked at some other part of my life as exciting, which is ironic.  And I don’t like to write pieces of what will end up being books here, because I think it’s a ripoff when people read this journal and then buy one of my books and find out they’ve read everything already.

I had this idea, a couple of years ago, for a project that involved an article a day in a giant interconnected wiki, similar to the Necrokonicon, that would tell the non-story of the decade from January 1, 1990 to December 31st, 1999, in thousand-word chunks.  It’s not that my life was incredibly interesting in that period; it’s just that “hey remember the 90s” nostalgia seems to be a thing, and I’m the guy that still uses the term Walkman to refer to a portable music machine, or “tape” to describe how to record a TV show.  I think I wrote maybe two or three of the articles before I lost wind on the thing.  I don’t know if this is a good idea, but it’s ideas like this that propel writing, and a concept like that is infinitely easier to pitch to a potential reader than “a bunch of weird stuff happens, and vomital buttsex with dead people” which is the synopsis of my last three or four books.

(When I said “medical appointments” above, that wasn’t foreshadowing that something horrible is going on, except that I always feel like shit, and it’s nothing that any doctor can explain, other than when a general practitioner says “maybe it’s allergies” and sends me to an allergist, who does $3700 of tests and wastes weeks of my time, only to give me a prescription for Allegra, which my insurance doesn’t cover, and tells me “maybe it’s a sinus thing” and sends me to an ear-nose-throat doctor.  Because no doctor wants to get sued, no doctor wants to be the one holding the bag, and will just send you somewhere else, meaning doctors are essentially worthless.  And yeah, diet and exercise, thanks in advance for telling me that.)

I’ve been stuck on this project, which is “write another Rumored”, i.e. come out with some follow-up to my book Rumored to Exist, which is my favorite of all of my books.  I don’t know how that book ever got done, or what makes it intrinsically better than any of my other books, but it was a bit of a seven-year perfect storm of writing, and up until the type was set, I was convinced it was the worst possible thing ever.  I think it’s how I found my voice, but it’s been very difficult to replicate, at least in long-form.  I think part of the success of it was its structure, because it had a certain “gimmick” to its form, and with that and a theme, it made it easy to glue in bits and pieces of almost any kind to fit into the work.  I don’t know if I should just use the same thing again, or wait until something magically appears, or force it.  I know that sitting around trying to make it happen won’t make it happen, but sitting around watching Pawn Stars marathons won’t make it happen, either.

Okay, speaking of.  I just took a shower (not sure why) and thought of a million ideas for a book outline, which I now need to capture.  I’m not a big outline person, but maybe I should be.  Maybe 2013 should be the year of the outline.  Or maybe I should write 50 shitty outlines and then scribble insane notes in the margins, and then bind all of that up and make it the book.  Stranger things have worked.