So, in 2021, I unpublished all of my books and stopped writing. There were a few reasons for this. Maybe there’s a post in that. Bottom line though is that I’ve been trying to get back out of that and write again. And as I do that and try to figure out what to write, I’m trying to figure out what to do with the 17 books I’ve published since 2000. I have 1073852 words and 3649 pages in purgatory right now, and probably the same amount in never-published projects.

I’m slowly trying to work through this. In reading a few of my old books and thinking about it, one bit of low-hanging fruit is 2018’s Book of Dreams. When I gave it a quick read, it was 99.9% solid for me. I didn’t find it particularly problematic for me, especially when it comes to persona and general flow or structure of the book. I love the cover, done by Casey Babb. And when I read through the whole thing, I found maybe a dozen bone-headed typos or little nits that could be fixed in three keystrokes, but no major issues.

I mentioned this in my original announcement for the book:

I think this book is slightly less “Konrath” than my last few books. It’s not as manic or as fast-paced. NyQuil and Mariah Carey are not mentioned. It still has the same kind of humor; it just doesn’t lean on the persona as much, if that makes any sense.

I think that’s the key. And the fact that it’s all dreams is a big point for me. I write down my dreams a lot, whenever I can remember them, and I always find great stuff in them. I’ve snuck dream journals into a lot of zines and small collection books, and I use them as parts of ideas for stories.

Anyway, the book is live here. It’s in print and kindle. If you already have the 2018 version, there is no need to get this. The only thing that has changed are a few stealth edits, and a ”, 2023” on the copyright page. Same ISBN, same page length. The price is slightly higher for print. $9.99 is not the end of the world. I’m done trying to competitively price my books at 7 cents more than the print cost. Publishing is dead and I don’t care if it sells. That’s not why I do this.

I need to go through the rest of the books. I really wanted to do some special edition of Rumored because I love that book, and then I was reading through it last October on vacation and thought, “oh shit, that’s getting me cancelled” about 19 times in the first 20 pages. I don’t know what to do about that. (I’m not asking for advice. I’m never asking for advice.)  Dealer Wins is out because it’s 100% obsolete, and was largely filler in the first place.   The Necrokonicon (aka “the glossary book”) is more of the same. Memory Hunter - nobody got the joke, and I wrote my most structured book ever and people bitched about the lack of structure, so that one is dead.

I have a sequel to Summer Rain in my head that would probably mean a quick edit to the original and both of them going out at once, but that sequel has been languishing for years. I also have a sequel to Atmospheres in its fourth draft, which is roughly twice as long. I would love to fix the cover of the first one, do a new layout, add some bonus material, and release it at the same time. That’s a plan, but an uphill battle. The sequel needs maybe a year of full-time work, and I’m not working on it right now.

I reread He and thought it was horrible. It has incredibly inconsistent and cringey writing, and nobody got the concept (which came from a Hubert Selby book.) All the “little” collection books (Ranch, Help…, Thunderbird, etc.) have good and bad stuff. Maybe a bunch of that could be rolled into one omnibus. Maybe not. Maybe I should be writing new material instead.

Failure Cascade is probably the next-closest to being republishable. I like the cover, and I gave it a re-read and it was decent. I think almost nobody read this book, and it died right out of the gate. I’ll need to read it again with a thing of sticky flags and see what it will take to get it in shape.

I’m reluctant to write about exactly why I quit writing, but maybe I need to get that off my chest soon.

For the first time since September 13, 2010, I am no longer a remote-first employee. Wednesday was the first day back in the office. Well, it was the first day ever in the office for my job I started two years ago. So things are a bit interesting right now.

As per policy, I can’t talk about my employer, and none of what I say is their policy at all. I speak for myself, etc. I will need to dance around a few things here, so bear with me. I should also go back and explain a bit about why I’ve been doing this for roughly a decade longer than the rest of you.

OK, so when we got here in 2008, I was a commuter. I was actually a long-haul commuter, because I’m in the most northwest part of Oakland, and I used to work in San Jose. This was just under 40 miles, but you would be damn lucky to do it in under an hour. From fall of 2008 until spring of 2010, I did this every day. This was at Samsung, and we technically could not leave the building with our machines, use any sort of USB media, or connect to a company network from outside the building. Work from home was not a concept in the company whatsoever. I think I drove about 50,000 miles in that time period. The good news was podcasts and Audible were first becoming a big thing. The bad news was traffic got progressively worse as the internet boomed.

In 2010, my old boss Joel asked if I wanted to come back and work for him again. I said no, because I couldn’t move back to New York; I’d just bought a house. He said don’t worry about that. Work from home. Name your price. Fly out to New York once a year to eat on the company’s dime and see everyone, but otherwise he trusted me, and when could I start. Ironically, my last day was September 10th, and my first was the 13th. I installed FrameMaker in a VM, cloned the old repo I last touched in 2007, and I was fully remote for the next decade.

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At my old job, it was easy to be remote. Even when we were in the same cube farm, we were largely remote, because we never talked to each other face-to-face. Joel wasn’t into meetings, and most of us sat on an internal IRC server, chatting back and forth on our day-to-day there. We were also way ahead of the curve on using Jira and wikis and all that. When half the team relocated to Boston, we barely noticed. Other than time-shifting three hours earlier to match their hours, I had no problem locking in right away. These were people I’d known for a decade, and we’d practically gone to war together. This was easy.

Well, it was until the company went sideways and everyone left. They decided to do a big “pivot to cloud” thing and I started managing and I was in this weird lurch where people wanted me to drive to Palo Alto all the time, but I’d get there and none of my team was there. I’d waste three hours fighting traffic and get to this corporate campus where everyone had an office and their doors were always shut. The ship was already sinking there, and I won’t go off on a tangent on that one.

So I jumped to the new place two years ago. Once again, I will skim over the details there, but it was fully remote. They FedEx’ed me a laptop and did everything on Zoom and Slack, and I kept powering away just as I did before, even at the same desk with the same monitor and keyboard, which was a bit weird.

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Anyway. While I was gone in Vegas, an email went out, and the company went from a remote-first joint to a mandatory report-to-the-office two days a week, going up to three. There are two sides to this, and obviously as a manager I have to say this is great, and face-to-face collaboration is awesome, and something something synergy. There’s obviously some feelings about having to take time to commute to an office where none of my direct reports work and, like, talk to people. And my schedule was pretty much set up so I would start work at six in the morning, and then quit at maybe three and get a few hours of fiction writing in. It’s been a few years since that’s happened, but now it means a shift to the schedule again. I’ll shut up about this.

Wednesday was my first day back. I took the BART to Embarcadero, went to our new office, and worked all day. And I hate to sound like a return-to-office apologist, but it wasn’t bad. My commute is not horrible. The office is nice. They had lunch. But there were a few specific things that I enjoyed.

First, I have never worked in San Francisco. Honestly, in the 15 years I have lived here, I have probably only been in the city maybe two or three dozen times. I usually have maybe one or two runs into the city per year to go to a museum with an out-of-town guest or whatever. I honestly have almost no geographical knowledge of the city whatsoever. But taking the train there, getting out of the station, seeing all the tall buildings… it gave me a certain rush to feel that I was here. It reminded me of when I was a kid and would go to Chicago and have that sudden feeling that I was in a real city, that there were hundreds of thousands of people around and that things were happening.

Also, as much as I was being a contrarian about how face-to-face collaboration worked, I probably ended up straightening out more stuff before lunch than I’ve fixed in the last two years. But more than that, I need to get out of my head and get around people again. I have had this horrible interpersonal drama I can’t entirely get into, and I think a lot of it is from just ruminating around my condo, not being around people. I think a change of scenery will be good to me. I’m sure I will get sick of this once the trains start to fill up and break down. And I have no idea what to do about the writing thing. Write in the morning? Write during lunch? I don’t know. I’m not writing now, so…

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The bike. So, I bought a bike. I have a choice of commuting to SF or Berkeley. The Berkeley office is closer to my house mile-wise, but it takes like an hour to get there on a bus that stops at every block. The train is ten minutes door-to-door plus the time it takes me to cover the mile or so to the station on my end. But I can bike to Berkeley in maybe a half hour, so that could be a nice way to break things up in the summer. I also got $600 of credit on exercise equipment from work, and that includes buying a bike.

I ended up buying a Cannondale Topstone 4 alloy from REI. I wanted a more commuter-oriented bike, but this gravel bike is honestly a better fit for me, and I like it a lot. Of course, I get it and the temps drop and it rains for two weeks straight. I’ve only had it out a few times, but it’s a great ride and a good way to get exercise and out of my own head a bit. Once the weather is not horrible, I’ll look at maybe going to the office once a week with it, and maybe taking it to the train station if I don’t want to take the bus.

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Seems like there’s more to talk about, but those are the big parts. Sarah’s in Ireland right now, and then Spain, doing family stuff. I am solo for another week. Lots of guitar, lots of writing, I hope.

It’s been three years, but I managed to get to Las Vegas for my birthday. It was a good trip overall, so here’s the stupid bulleted list trip report.

• Flew in Thursday afternoon, out Monday afternoon, with the actual birthday being on Friday, so the timing was great. The trip was slightly front-loaded with activities and we spent the back half of the trip in “well, what now?” mode, but the pace was pretty decent.
• This was a trip with a full crew. Bill shares the same birthday as me, and Marc’s often on these trips. We also had Lon, who I haven’t seen in a while, and my old roommate Andrew, who I think I last saw on one of these trips maybe ten years ago. And there was Todd, who I literally had not seen since he was on the 2002 birthday jaunt, when I stayed in the Elvis suite of the long-gone Stardust.
• Because I’ve had to fly business select on so many last-second Southwest flights, this was a free trip, airfare-wise. The trip itself was flawless; very easy in and out. I brought no luggage, just a computer bag and a duffel.
• No camera gear would fit in my duffel, except my Canon EOS M1, which is a bit garbage, and my iPhone took better pictures all trip.
• We stayed at the Mirage. This may be the last time we stay at the Mirage, because it was recently purchased by Hard Rock and will probably be gutted and turned into something else soon. (Or not, given the economy.) I am not sure I’ve ever stayed there, although I’ve wandered through a lot. Rooms were decent, and the view of the strip was nice. The food and the casino were eh.
• Went to Penn and Teller on Thursday. The show was decent. I think it was solid, but not outstanding. Some of the tricks were new, and this was one of the first shows of the year, so I think they’re still working stuff out. Great crowd, though.
• Dinner at the Rio, a bit eh. We went to some diner and I got a thing of nachos about as big as a bus tub. The Rio is such a mixed bag and I’m a bit surprised it’s still rolling.
• Birthday brunch at Bouchon was over the top. I had a chicken and waffles, and there were far too many pastries and breads. Amazing stuff, but I needed insulin after that one.
• Got a Swedish massage at the Mirage spa for my birthday, and my shoulders hurt for days. But, like, in a good way.
• For dinner we went to The Palm, which was also way over the top. Really loud in there on a Friday night. The food was great, and wagyu steak is always good.
• I’ve always had really good luck gambling on my birthday. That streak continues, but for accounting purposes, I won’t say how well I did.
• Had a good lunch the next day at the Grand Luxe in the Venetian. There are actually two of them, which is confusing. This was no Bouchon, but bacon was involved.
• We went to Resorts World, which is the first time I’ve been to a brand new casino probably since the Wynn was built? Or maybe City Center, I guess. Anyway, it’s a weird looking place. It’s absolutely cavernous, and looks more like an airport than a casino. We went to some bar to get drinks and then a few minutes later, they told us football was starting and we had to pay fifty bucks each to keep sitting there, so nope.
• Saw this show called OPM at the Cosmopolitan, which was really fun. It was themed like a futuristic starship’s variety show, and the interior was all cyberpunk/neon looking. There was an “android” hostess/MC who was funny, and then they had various acrobatic or musical things, all of which were impressive. The one I liked best was Billy and Emily England, who did a roller skating/acrobatic routine that was absolutely insane, especially in the close quarters of the very small stage.
• Went to the Trop for a Sunday comedy show that had Mike Binder opening for Rich Hall. Binder was garbage. He started off with the “I’m old and I don’t understand pronouns” and went from there. Rich Hall was amazingly good. He played songs and did a ton of crowd work. Very quick, sharp, and it was hilarious to see him pivot a song on a dime to start singing about the concrete world trade show. I didn’t know what to expect from him since the last thing I knew him for was the Sniglets thing thirty years ago. Absolutely didn’t do that, and it was great. The Tropicana, not so much.
• Weather was the coldest I’d ever seen. I think it was down to the mid-30s some nights, sitting in the mid/high-40s most days.
• I walked an extreme amount every day, usually between 12 and 15 miles. That almost counterbalanced my meal schedule going completely sideways and eating like 100 Weight Watchers points per day.
• The best part of this trip: I have not spent any time with guy friends in a long time, probably since three years ago. And the last time I was with a group this size was maybe 10? 15? years ago. I really needed this trip, and being able to just bullshit for hours with other tech geeks was absolutely awesome.

Good birthday. Good trip. I need to do this more than once a year, though.

I am fifty-two today.

I’m trying to think of what the number 52 conjures in my head. A deck of cards, obviously. Games of “52 pickup” which we “played” with my little sister. The B-52 bomber, which my dad worked on when I was born on a desolate Air Force base in the middle of nowhere. The number of weeks in a year. The number of hostages Iran freed on my 10th birthday. Denver is at 5200 feet. (Well, 5280.) It is the fifth Bell Number and the third untouchable number. There are 52 white keys on a piano.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I like even-numbered ages. I liked 50, and did not like 51. 52 sits better with me, but it’s also solidly in my 50s. And 52 sounds way older than 50 for some reason. I do like the even number. And I dislike odd-numbered years. Unfortunately, there’s only 19 days where both my age and the year are even. Age is just a number and time is an abstract concept, but I do like a good even number for some reason.

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I am getting old. 52 is old. I mean, we all are getting old, but this year, I look in the mirror and… yeah. I’m no longer young. When I was in my 40s I could sort of pass for 30s, but now I’m definitely in my 50s. I had to get my driver’s license renewed, and I don’t recognize the guy looking back at me. I look seventy. Not having hair anymore really does it. Things are happening to the skin on my neck that no face cream will fix. The eyes are not the eyes of a thirty-something. I shouldn’t care about any of this. I do.

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I am going to Las Vegas for my birthday this year. I’m writing this before I leave, so it’s autoposting while I’m already there. This is the first big trip to Vegas in a while on the actual day of my birthday with Bill, Marc, and a few others. I think the last one like this was 2011. I don’t know what Las Vegas will be like post-pandemic (or during pandemic? I don’t know what their cases look like these days).

I’m staying at the Mirage this time, and maybe the last time, because it was bought by Hard Rock and it’s rumored that it will be completely gutted this year or next. I can’t remember if I’ve stayed at the Mirage before. I’ve been there a lot, and I know I stayed at Bellagio before. (2006?) It’s amazing that at one point, I knew enough about this to write a book, and now it’s a bit of a blur. And I generally don’t stay in hotels with casinos anymore. The last few times I was in town, I decided I needed a kitchen. So this time, I’m back to the regular grind of being on the strip.

A few plans this year: Penn and Teller, Bouchon. There will be steak. I’m not sure what else, but it will be good to get out of town for a few days and see friends.

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A lot of amazing people left in their fifty-second year. Zappa. Houdini. Christopher Reeve. Chris Cornell. Luke Perry. Bob Ross. Grace Kelly. I’ve now outlived Shakespeare, Napoleon, Proust, James Gandolfini, Roger Maris. I’ve outlasted Alois Alzheimer and don’t have his namesake disease (yet). I’ve lived longer than Walter Reed and haven’t stayed at his hospital or caught yellow fever (yet).

Whenever I make these lists, I’m grateful I’m not on them, but it also makes me think about how these people are old, and I don’t even feel like an adult half the time, let alone an old, fully-formed person. I have a healthy dose of imposter syndrome when I think about this, and it’s deeper than thinking I haven’t accomplished enough. It’s this uncanny feeling: I am not an adult, am I?

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Any time I make one of these posts, there’s always some forward-thinking statement about what I want to do in the next year of my life. I do a bit of that in my end-of-year summaries, and the two are almost back-to-back posts, so there’s a lot of redundancy there. (Also, I’ve already broken the no-Taco Bell goal.)

Year 51 was grim and not entirely happy. And I obviously want better than that in year 52. Otherwise the goals are the usual: write more, read more, do more, be more. So I will do that.

I know I’m always writing these “the death of” posts left and right about malls and stores and whatnot, but I really hate when I have to write one about a person, especially a person who I’ve known my entire life. And I’m not a fan about writing about family, because people get weird when a fact in your brain doesn’t match the narrative in theirs, which is why I’ve largely given up on autobiographical fiction or whatever it’s called this week. But this post isn’t about any of that; it’s about my uncle Jim, who died on the 27th.

My uncle Jim was my dad’s oldest brother, the oldest of the seven kids. His real first name was Ambrose, which I didn’t even know for years, because he was always Jim, or Jimmy. (My grandfather and my great-grandfather were also Ambrose. Prior to that, the names were significantly more Austrian: Paulus, Johann, Georg.) My grandfather died in a car accident when my father was six. Shortly after, my uncle joined the Navy and spent the next twenty-some years all over the world, working on planes, living on aircraft carriers. I vaguely remember him returning when I was maybe four or five. My memory was that he flew home and gave me the pack of peanuts from the plane. Nobody in my family ever traveled, so this was amazing to me at the time.

We lived in my dad’s home town from when I was an infant until I was seven. This was Edwardsburg, Michigan. It’s immediately north of Elkhart, and it’s a small village that had maybe a thousand people back then. My grandmother lived there, and was retired. My uncle retired from the Navy when he was 40 or so, and moved back in with her around 1975, to take care of her until she passed in 1993.

My uncle never married. I’m not sure he ever dated. He didn’t smoke or drink; he never swore. I can’t remember him even raising his voice. What I do remember is him always being around, always helping, coming over to do things around the house. My parents had this rundown cinderblock house, and they were always continuously adding onto it, sealing off the front porch into a room, covering the bricks with wood planks, adding in new windows, painting new trim. He was always around doing yard work or playing with us. And we spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house, which was maybe a mile away, near the lake. That place was a central hub of activity for all seven kids, their kids, the neighbors, and many others. Almost my entire memory of Catholicism was going to the service, getting donuts, then going to my grandmother’s to play with my uncle and my cousins.

I have a lot of memories of specific things we did, things he taught me: playing golf, collecting cans for the deposits (ten cents in Michigan), playing card games, reading books. He and my grandmother were garage sale fiends, and any time he found a trove of Encyclopedia Brown books for sale, they were mine.

I also think a lot of his selflessness, and how he took care of my grandmother. He always drove her everywhere: to appointments in Elkhart; to see family in South Haven; to Florida in the winter when her health was poor. I remember him coming back from one trip and telling me all about watching an early Space Shuttle launch. I think he was a father figure to all of us cousins, and later the second cousins. (There were I think 13 cousins, and I don’t even know how many second cousins.)

After my grandmother died in 1993, he continued to live at the same house, and it was still our central hub for the family. I would go there any time I was home. Unfortunately, his health deteriorated over time. He managed to live alone until maybe four years ago, when he fell and went to a rehab center. He managed to hang on until he was 88, which is phenomenal. It’s sad for him to have gone, but he lived an amazing life. There was much tragedy in his lifetime, the loss of both parents and four siblings (one to suicide, three to cancer, all too young). But there was such great humility and service and selflessness in his whole life.

My uncle used to take us to McDonald’s when we were little. There wasn’t one in Edwardsburg; you had to go to one in Elkhart. This was pre-McNuggets, pre-Happy Meal, everything fried in beef lard, everything inside a shade of brown. I know it’s stupid, but when I got the news Tuesday morning, I went to McDonald’s for lunch and ordered two cheeseburgers and thought of that. A dumb tribute, but a strong memory to a long time ago. He will be greatly missed.