I just finished reading the new Henry Rollins book, Before the Chop, which is a collection of his LA Weekly articles from the last couple of years, in their longer, unedited form.  Previously, Rollins would write in his journals all year about his travels and whatnot, and then at the end of each year, dump them into a book.  I liked this format, and was hoping he’d continue to do that, but it’s also good to get the regular dispatches as they happen.  The writing is a bit different between the two, and he spends more time talking about his music collection and infatuations in the column.  This is bad news as a recovering collector, because it’s hard to get through reading this book without spending at least $500 on new CDs.

One of the things that he talked about a few times that really interested me was the concept of Noise, and microlabels that support this genre.  I don’t know the history of noise as a musical genre, and I’m sure there are a million different ways to approach it.  I guess I’m most familiar with the more musically-based grindcore-derived stuff like Old Lady Drivers, and I’m sure to the non-metal fan, any grindcore is considered noise.  What Rollins was talking about though was the post-industrial stuff that came from labels like American Tapes.  For a good example, go to http://www.wolfeyes.net and listen to the videos there.

American Tapes is now apparently done releasing stuff, but they put out a thousand titles over a dozen or so years.  Every title had strange artwork, and was on bizarre formats.  Boxed sets of cassette tapes, CD-Rs sharpied up with artwork, lathe-cut vinyl, freaky-colored 7” records - they did a lot of weird stuff, all in limited editions, all carped-bombed out at a rate in which even a frenzied collector could not keep up with.  Their site (http://americantapes.us) still has stuff for sale, along with sound samples and pictures of releases and flyers.  Some of their stuff is pure art - miniature sculptures made with glued-on junk and spray paint that just happens to have a music delivery device of some sort wrapped inside of it.

This stuff amazes me.  I mean, I love zines and chapbooks and weird-sized booklets and anything like that.  Even if the writing sucks, tell me your half-digest gold-foil-wrapped broadside is letterpress printed and limited edition, and I’ll paypal you money as fast as I can open the web site.  I love collecting stuff like that, and to see someone who has done a thousand releases like that only makes me feel like a slouch for writing one or two books a year.

I wish I knew how to draw enough to do something like this.  I’ve been looking for some way of putting out cool little books like this, and spend too much time on eBay looking for a printing press, not that I’d know how to use it or have room to keep it.  I want to learn a lot more about design and find some way to crank stuff out like this, but it’s more of a distant dream, because even writing the books that I write takes a lot of time and effort.

I need to research this more, and find more places doing this sort of thing.  God damn you, Rollins.  This is going to be a huge cash outlay.  It’s bad enough a bunch of these albums are on iTunes and can be purchased with the click of a button.

This is a list of all of the stuff on my desk.  Note that I don’t always write fiction-type stuff at my desk, because I work all day there, and it usually works out better when I write sitting on the couch in the living room, with actual sunlight and windows and whatnot.

• Macbook Pro, Lenovo Thinkpad T410 - personal and work machines, respectively.  They both sit on top of each other, the Mac on the top, and run in clamshell 100% of the time, feeding into a KVM switch.
• USB hub - connected to the Mac.  It usually has an extension cord plugged into it for when my Zoom B3 is sitting on the desk and I’m playing the bass.  It also has a FitBit charging cradle plugged into it.
• WikiReader portable wikipedia offline reader thing I was talking about the other day, and its manual.
• A flexible cable tie that I use to hang onto all of the disconnected cords from the Mac when I take it elsewhere, so I don’t spend 45 minutes trying to dig them up again after they fall behind the desk every goddamn time I disconnect the computer.
• The Mac remote that came with my last MacBook, which still works for the new one, because at some point, Apple stopped including them, which is a damn shame.
• A printout of a McKinsey report on disruptive technologies which is mostly bullshit about automated cars that S printed out for me and I feel like I should read, but after skimming it, I thought it was mostly buzzwords.
• A pair of M-Audio studio monitors.
• A Toshiba 1.5Tb portable USB hard drive.
• A bunch of different smart vitamins that I never take, because I’m not smart enough to remember.  They currently include L-Theanine, Ginkgo Biloba, and Huperzine A.
• A set of nose filters, which you are supposed to put in your nostrils and filter out air to prevent allergies.  They mostly work, but are really annoying and they push out your nostrils and make you look like a pig-alien from that episode of The Twilight Zone where everyone was horribly ugly, and the really hot chick couldn’t get surgery to look like them.
• Someone’s address clipped off of the corner of an envelope.
• My iPad on a stand that’s actually a wire cookbook holder, but only cost $4.
• A bunch of Coke reward codes torn off of cases of Coke Zero.  I collect them, but I’m really lazy about entering them, so they accumulate.
• The iPad to USB camera connector adapter.
• A pair of foam earplugs, which always remind me of when I worked in a factory and had to wear them constantly.
• A stack of post it notes, in the following colors: pink, yellow, pink, a white one from Samsung for some “Change and Innovation” bullshit program that nobody paid any attention to, pink, purple, yellow.
• A bunch of cashed checks and the payment coupon booklet for my HOA.
• A hexagon-shaped pencil holder with about a dozen and a half pens, a Palm Pilot stylus, a couple of Ikea golf pencils, and a sword letter opener with the handle broken off.
• A half-empty bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, refreshing aloe flavor.
• A Verilux table lamp.
• A goLite M2 full-spectrum light.
• A Kensington trackball.
• An Apple Magic Trackpad.
• A Kinesis Advantage keyboard.
• A Guitar Center receipt.
• A cloth napkin.
• A copy of “Slap Bass: The Ultimate Guide” by Ed Friedland, on DVD.
• These stupid Virgin Mobile prepaid phone cards, which I cannot get rid of.  (If you use Virgin Mobile prepaid, please email me and I will sell them at a loss.)
• A pad of paper.
• A stack of received postcards.
• The instruction manual to a Meteor USB Mic.
• The medication guide for Zolpidem tablets, which I do not take, but which I found amusing, because it says “After taking zolpidem, you may get out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing.”  The activities listed include driving a car and having sex.

I also have a monitor and a webcam, but they are not really on my desk; they’re mounted to a stand that is mounted to the back of my desk.

I always hate dealing with the postpartum depression that follows writing a book.  I’m finding it’s even worse when I don’t immediately publish the book and get it out of my hair. I’m currently waiting for someone else to go through it, and I want to just rip it off like a band-aid on a hairy arm and be done with it, move on to the next thing.  I’m never happy with a book right after I finish it, and I’ve found the best way to deal with that is to really finish it, publish it and close the door on it, or I’ll pick at it forever.

I got this thing that’s a complete mirror of wikipedia on a little handheld computer thing that’s about as big as one of those light-up coaster things they hand you at a restaurant to page you when your table is ready.  It has a touchscreen and a couple of buttons on it, and probably runs some embedded linux thing on a low-powered system-on-a-chip that can run forever on a pair of AAA batteries.  It uses a micro-SD card to hold the entire wikipedia, which means it can be updated and allegedly hacked to work as a cheapie book reader.  I think it cost 20 dollars.  I don’t know why I bought it, but it has a “random” button, and I could spend hours hitting that button over and over, reading about Frank X. Schwarb, the mayor of Buffalo, New York from 1922-1929, or the Inner Dominion harness racing competition in Australia and New Zealand or Sergio Salvati, the cinematographer who used to work with Lucio Fulci.  It’s an interesting distraction.

I saw a friend of mine this weekend who I have not seen in 24 years.  She moved here in 2011, but we kept playing email tag, because I never leave the house, and driving down to the peninsula is something I avoid, probably because I used to do it ever day.  This is someone who was a good confidante back in high school, and I probably drove her nuts with all of my depressing tirades about whatever I was depressed about back in 1988.  It’s strange to see someone after such a long gap now, after we’ve both become adults (well, me only sort of) and we’ve missed those huge chunks of life between 18 and 42.  And there’s a time when I relished swapping tales about who ended up where and who is still stuck in Elkhart and who’s in prison and all of that, but I keep up with that stuff less and less, and feel sort of stupid for even keeping track of most of it.

I also sometimes feel very self-conscious when I catch up with people, because that whole exercise of summing up your life in the last decade or two and trying to make yourself not sound like an idiot and not appear to be an egotistical asshole is a difficult task.  I mean, I enjoyed talking to her, and liked meeting her husband and kid and seeing her house and all of that.  It was good to catch up and we had a good evening together.  But I always find myself wondering if I’m trying to project some kind of fake persona or if I’m going to say something stupid or fixate on some part of the past that the other person wants no part of.  Maybe I think about this too much.

This is related to a thought I had recently about writer’s block.  I recently outlined a book I’d like to write, spent a lot of time with post-it notes and got it all typed into Scrivener, but then couldn’t really get started with the actual writing.  A big part of that was that the writing wasn’t entirely in my voice; it’s an attempt to read a little big beyond my wheelhouse, and the thinking involved in writing like that made me hesitant to actually get the words down on the paper.  It reminded me of when I used to have these bad first dates, and I’d spend the whole time in my head trying to act like the person that the other person wanted to date, so they would like me.  And I’d second-guess everything I said, wondering if it was the “right” thing.  And I’d always fail miserably.  I think writing is a lot like that, because the best first dates I ever had were the ones where I honestly did not give a fuck what the person thought about me, and I just acted naturally.  I think the best writing I ever do is also when I don’t think about it, and just let the words flow.  It’s not always the easiest thing to do, but it’s what works.

Speaking of, I should go do some actual writing.

[…]

Drifting - pain - autumn’s cool air.  People surround city streets, the majestic banks of nobody, glass towers, palaces of low-frequency shudder.  Tensile tear of sharp metal scales of black, bleak, black, mumbling jets.  I hear one pass now, every night, every night since they took the cranes so near and yet so far I thought it would hit my house during the windstorms, if my house didn’t hit it first.

Implanted lies, bullshit on a chip.  I slit my flesh deep, probed with the cutters for any subdermal circuitry.  Nothing.

Watch me play all 28 instruments with one button.  Am I a musician? It’s all on ROM.  Beethoven’s 9th.  But I pushed the button.  I did.  I’m the musician.

It’s Antarctica, but you’ll have a good coat and some gloves, so don’t worry, -60F will feel like a cool summer breeze in Arkansas.  No, you don’t have to exchange your money.  The strip bars, McDonald’s, and Gap stores all take US cash.  And American Express.  No Discover, though.

And in Iraq, we use Internet Explorer.  Check out our new website, where you can click Saddam Hussein’s face to hear the sounds of Scud missiles being launched at your IP number.

I finished my next book yesterday.

26 pieces.  38,845 words.  It has a title, but it may change.

I’m not really done done yet, because I have to come up with a cover (which I hate) and a book description (which I also hate) and maybe think about a new title.  I also have to do the interior design, which is easy.  But the text is done.  It’s not getting any extra stories, and it’s not getting reworked to add in that alien abduction subplot or love story.  It’s done.

The book is similar in structure to the last one, which means it was a clusterfuck to put together.  This kind of book is essentially plotless, short pieces or cogs or lumps that are put together from smaller pieces, paragraphs torn from free-writes or inspired by tweets or built up from notes taken on a phone.  The little scraps become big slices, and the slices get moved and rearranged and connected until they are big pieces.  And then the big pieces are arranged and reordered and sometimes split back apart and cannibalized and dropped.

To give you an idea of how much cutting was involved, at one point a little over a month ago, the 38K word manuscript was just over 100,000 words.

My last book was done on 6/25/12, and this one was born soon after that.  I actually had a few false starts on other things, ideas for books that fell apart after the outline stage.  I keep these outlines, and maybe later one of them will get revisited and become an actual book or story.  And I keep the scraps of writing that come out of them, and some of it ends up in other places.  A sizable chunk of this book is made from pieces of a stalled book about alien abduction.  Other parts are from an aborted book that examines my childhood in Indiana, which I stopped writing when I decided I didn’t want to write about childhood or Indiana.

The biggest drive on this book was to do another book similar to Rumored.  That didn’t really happen, but I started chasing that this January, and kept at a daily writing quota.  On 1/13 I had 47,252 words in this manuscript.  On 4/3, I had 100,390.  I wrote every single one of those days, even the days I was on vacation, off of work, or sick.  There’s a piece of advice attributed to Jerry Seinfeld (although I can’t find the exact quote from him, just thirdhand references) that the best way to get shit done is to set a daily goal, and then mark each day on a calendar that you do the goal, and aspire to not break the chain by skipping a day.  My initial goal was to stick with adding at least 500 words a day to this draft for a month, and I stretched that to almost three months before I shifted my focus from writing to editing.  So in that sense, the book is already a success.

I didn’t write another Rumored, and I didn’t write my Infinite Jest.  This book is about half the size of Rumored, and somewhere between my last two in length.  I think that’s fine.  But the eventual goal I keep chasing is to have a book that’s around 100,000 words long, and has a solid nonlinear structure, but still has enough plot to make people not freak the fuck out when they read it.  It won’t be a fully-plotted murder mystery thriller thing, because there are enough of those out there, and that’s not what I do. I don’t know what that is, but it’ll happen.

I’m now entering the horrible postpartum depression that always follows when I finish a book.  I always wonder if people will like a book after it’s done, and think about what should be next.  I still have all of these release-related tasks, and I’ll probably play a lot of bass just to think about anything but writing.  But I need to do some post-mortem and write down what did and didn’t work for this book, and then seriously start thinking about the next one.  I have some vague ideas, but nothing solid.  I need to get enough of an idea in front of me though that I can start up that Seinfeldian chain again.

Anyway, I’m happy to get the ninth notch carved in the wall.  (Nine books written?  Shit.)  More news on what’s happening with it when I can tell you more - stay tuned.