I’ve been too busy to do anything over here, too busy and slightly sick for a few days.  I’m trying to get caught up on 19 things today, and of course it’s a beautiful, sunny day out, and I think I’ve left the house once all week, so that’s beckoning me.  But I thought I’d take a second to brain dump on a few things before then, as I listen to some Black Sabbath (Master of Reality) and sit on the couch with my recently-returned MacBook Pro.

Ever since I started writing in 1993, I pretty much used emacs for everything.  Emacs is a text editor that originally gained fame on unix systems, although that’s misleading, because it’s a million things in addition to just a text editor, and it runs on pretty much every system you could thing of, aside from just unix.  It is infinitely extensible, using its own dialect of the lisp language, and I used a bunch of extensions in it to read my mail, read usenet news, write code, write books, write the earlier version of this site, keep a dream journal, and catalog all of my CDs.  I wrote all of my books in emacs, using it as a text editor and keeping track of various outlines and fragments and notes in a bunch of text files.  Right before publication, I’d usually move the files over to Word or FrameMaker, but the bulk of the work was in emacs.  I’d also use unix tools like wc and grep and find and sed to do all of my various slicing and dicing and counting and finding.  It wasn’t the best system in the world, but it worked.

I even made some money on emacs, tech editing a book for Sams on emacs.  So my brick-and-mortar book store debut on the printed page was actually back in 1999, although I wasn’t a primary author, and reading about how to write elisp config files is probably less entertaining than any of my more recent work.

But as cool as emacs was, it also sucked.  Every time some idiot in Norway suddenly had a great idea on how they thought tabs should work in a document, they would change the whole thing and I’d spend 22 hours straight poring over source code diffs trying to figure out how the hell to write a shim or workaround to duct tape to the side of the thing so it would work again.  Long lines and line breaks were also a huge pain in the ass, which takes some explaining, so hang on.

When you write a paragraph in Word or any other modern word processor, you generally don’t type return at the end of a line; you just type and type and when you hit the edge of the window, the word gets pulled to the beginning of the next line, and you keep going.  The only special character is a paragraph break, which comes when you hit return once or twice at the end of a block of the text.  In emacs, what happens is that when you reach about the 72-character mark in a buffer, it drops in a carriage return and goes to the next line.

That means when you type a file in emacs and bring it into Word (or WordPress, or FrameMaker, or an email message, or anything else not designed in like 1974) you have all of these extra carriage returns, and you have to do something stupid like write a script or do some search-and-replace to replace all of the single carriage returns with spaces and all of the double carriage returns with paragraph breaks, and hope you didn’t do any weird indented text or source code snippets that will be monumentally fucked by your search and replace.

And yes, there are some workarounds in emacs, like some long-line mode, which is totally not documented, or at least not documented well, and would involve me taking two weeks off of work to completely re-engineer the whole fucking universe and probably reinstall emacs 19 times and recompile it from source and install 2834 different libraries and twelve different versions of XCode.  And the second I would get it working, some college freshman in Sweden or Germany would add a fix that would completely break my system.

I should also mention that emacs has slowly been losing favor here, as far as alternative uses.  I got the Mac in 2005, and at some point switched to using Mail.app full-time.  That also meant ditching BBDB, the emacs address book thing, and going to the Mac address book.  CDs are a distant memory, thanks to iTunes.  I gave up on my own blog system and moved to WordPress.  Usenet is deader than dead.  So it pretty much just came down to daily writing for emacs.

Another big issue for me is keeping track of stuff, especially in bigger writing projects.  I’ve used two different approaches to books.  When I wrote Summer Rain, each chapter was in a text file, and there was a sea of text files for notes and pieces and outlines and whatever else.  This book took a huge amount of research and planning over the course of five years, and by the end of the book, I worked off of a paper outline that summarized the main points in each chapter.  I made heavy use of grep to search for things within each chapter.  When I needed to do a global search and replace, I would use emacs and dired, which worked, sort of.  Dired-mode is powerful, but good luck remembering all of the key combinations if you don’t use it on a daily basis.  Printing out the book for review was murder, not only because of the length, but because it typically involved catting all of the files together, dropping it in Word, and doing the carriage return/paragraph break shuffle.

When I wrote Rumored to Exist, I put the entire thing in one file.  That made it easier, but it also meant a hell of a lot of scrolling around.  It also made it absolutely impossible to do stuff like move around chunks and keep track of what was where unless I printed out every damn page and spread them across every surface of my apartment like I was on some William S. Burroughs kick and about to shoot my wife in the head and write some Serious Nonlinear Fiction.  (My apartment did have a lot of bugs, which was a plus.)  Around the time I moved to New York, I decided I needed to start over, and put the entire book in a file called rumored-seattle.txt, then opened a blank file and started copying over only the good chunks.

Thinking back on it, writing Rumored was such a fucking disaster.  I had all of the content done in a couple of years, but then it took a couple more years of rewriting and moving things around and adjusting things.  I printed out every page, then cut everything up and glued it to index cards that I tried to rearrange and sort and move around.  I tried writing outlines; I tried putting everything in excel one time, with thoughts of color-coding or sorting it.  I thought about writing a PHP/MySQL app to manage everything.  I tried using the emacs outline-mode.  Nothing fucking worked.

I eventually kicked my way through it, and got everything in one file, then sat in the Kiev restaurant with a red pen and a bunch of pierogies and went through the whole god damned thing and marked up every mistake and typo, and had a total and complete draft that if I got in those corrections, would be ready for the press.  Then I walked home and got caught in a god damned typhoon, and when I got home, I had a ruined pair of dress shoes, and a clipboard of pulp and pink pages, everything completely ruined.  I was pissed as fuck. That was on September 10th, 2001, and let’s just say things got put into perspective the next morning.

So I’ve been looking for new system.  Someone has figured this out, right?

I have tried a bunch of systems and software packages, and I think I have one that works.  I also realize that I’ve written for 1300 words, and haven’t even gotten into it yet.  So I should probably make this a two-parter and tell you about the software itself next time.  And I should probably wrap this up so I can actually go write with the damn thing and work on this book.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any music reviews, and it’s been an even longer time since I’ve written anything for Ray Miller’s Metal Curse.  But Ray sent me the new album from Boris, the Japanese experimental/metal band, so I’ve got a review of it up.  Check it out here: http://metalcurse.com/index.php/reviews/boris_-_new_album/.

1. Cap’n Crunch Atlantic Cod Crunch Berries
2. Olde English 800 Sport malt liquor with electrolytes
3. Lego Postal Rampage playset
4. The McDonald’s McHaggis, turnips, and fries value meal
5. Old Spice Pure Sport scented enema
6. The Capital One Planned Parenthood Abortion Rewards Visa card
7. Clorox Cool Ranch Toilet Cleaner
8. Prune Pepsi Max
9. Taco Bell CrunchWrap de Tripita
10. Smith and Wesson My First .357 Junior Revolver
11. Little Debbie Purim Kreplach cakes with liver
12. Sherwin Williams Your Mother’s a Whore house paint
13. Hawaiian Punch Guava Bacon Crush
14. Jello Pudding Contraceptives

I just finished reading World War Z, which means I’m like three years late to the zombie party, right? Well, fuck you. I was like fifteen years early. I was memorizing the locations of balconies and gun-selling sporting goods stores in shopping malls in case of a Romero-like outbreak that would require me to hole up in the Scottsdale Mall probably around the time most of the country was still obsessed with the artistic masterpiece of Baywatch.

Really, it all started in high school with Faces of Death movies, and then segued into those classic Troma movies, Surf Nazis Must Die being a favorite, even though it wasn’t even a horror movie as much as it was a dystopian disaster movie filmed for like $17. (“Who rules the beaches?” / “The surfers!” / “Who rules the surfers?” / “The surf nazis!”) In college, I got into death metal, and every other letter I’d get from some freak in rural Georgia or Sweden or Japan would include a giant list of horror movies I was supposed to worship. So me and Ray spent a whole summer renting every conceivable horror movie we could find in our shithole Indiana town. This was limited somewhat by the fact that I worked two full-time jobs and during the week slept in two shifts of two hours each and pretty much walked around like a zombie, minus the brain-eating part.

Seems like some comparative lit class I took in college had a professor that told us that zombie movies were really about the communist scare. That still true? I don’t know. The Brooks book seemed to be pretty left-wing in some aspects, like the strange parallels between the zombie wars and Iraq/the war on terrorism. In both, you’ve got a military trained to fight the cold war in Germany, armed up for a giant thousand-tank battle, and a stealth bomber isn’t going to do much when you’re fighting an enemy with no radar, i.e. a zombie or an insurgent. But it’s appealing to right-wingers in the sense that it’s almost like military armament porn for chapters and chapters, descriptions of battles and weaponry and tactics and whatnot.

I don’t know why I didn’t become obsessed with zombies back in 1993 or whatever, but it’s probably because I’m always overly obsessed with things for a week and then it’s on to something else. I haven’t had my main computer for a week, and decided that would be a great time to take a writing holiday, partly because I’m burned out on this book I’m writing, and partly because I didn’t want to spend two weeks trying to recapitulate and resynchronize two computers’ worth of files and changes and additions and deletions after working on my spare computer for that week.

So I spent most of that time obsessed with the idea of building a PlayStation 2 portable. Not a PSP, but I mean buying a dead PS2 or ten, dremel-attacking the motherboard, scoring a surplus rear-view camera monitor from eBay, digging through my giant boxes of junk for some old camcorder rechargeable batteries I could repurpose, somehow duct-taping the whole business together into a little ball so I could waste infinite amounts of time playing SOCOM 3 instead of writing. A week later, and I realize this is the stupidest fucking idea I’ve had since I thought about building a serial killer-themed miniature golf course on my land in Colorado. Actually, that still sounds like a good idea. But you get the point here: I can only be gung-ho about this stuff for a week, maybe ten days. It’s why I don’t write five books a year.

I wrote a story about the zombie movie Burial Ground. It’s in Air in the Paragraph Line #13. I think it’s one of my best short stories ever. You have to go buy a copy to read it - I never put it anywhere else, and I haven’t posted a PDF of #13. If I had ten more stories like it, I’d bind them together in a little book and zap it straight to the kindle store. But I don’t, not yet anyway. But that movie, Burial Ground, is this bad/awesome Italian zombie movie that has a completely fucked and incomprehensible plot line, and although all of those horror movies have the one chick who somehow manages to get away, in this movie, the zombies totally win, and I like that.

Speaking of the dead rising, I’ve got new life and new batteries in the laptop. I’m writing this while sitting on the couch, and the battery is designed to hold 6900 mAh and it actually holds 7100. It was down to only holding 4800 and started freaking the fuck out and giving me a warning message that I should cut the shit and get to the Apple Store immediately. They sent my computer off to Tennessee (why? Apple’s just down the road.) and replaced the battery and the motherboard - I had a couple of random crashes, something with the video card. They don’t call it a motherboard anymore; they call it a “mainboard”. I think it’s some anti-sexism thing, like how you can’t say cables are male and female anymore, or how you can’t use master/slave in your tech writing. So I got freaked out by the whole thought of surrendering the machine and having it come back completely blank, but it’s fine now.

I remember one time in 1993, I stayed over at Ray’s when his parents were out of town, and we watched four or five zombie movies in a row, until they all melded into each other. (Actually, one was a vampire movie, called Vampyres, a bad 70s thing with some half-naked lesbian vampires that lured guys into their old house, then killed them and drank their blood. One of the dudes seriously looked like a late-70s David Letterman, and the movie used every conceivable excuse to get these two women out of their clothes and dyking out.  This was also before the whole vampire thing got co-opted by the cool kids and completely fucked over.  Go check it out on imdb and you can see a trailer that’s essentially three minutes of soft-core porn, prefaced by a stupid XBox ad.) Anyway, the next morning, Ray’s asleep and I knock open his door with my arms outstretched and walking slowly like I’m one of Romero’s Day/Dawn ghouls, and Ray wakes up and freaks the fuck out and immediately jumps out of bed and goes for a bat or a piece of wood or something he can use to bash my undead brains in with, until he realizes that the zombie apocalypse had not in fact arrived.

The only other time we got seriously freaked out by a movie was when we went to a midnight showing of Saw in the theater. I don’t know if it was because we went to the midnight show or because the theater was empty, but after the final credits rolled, the first words out of my mouth were “dude, we need to go to Wal-Mart and buy some guns and enough shit to board up every window of your house.”

One of the things I liked about World War Z was how the news of the living dead propagated around the world in such a distorted fashion. The whole book takes place as a series of interviews after the war is over, like one of those World War II/greatest generation books. And in every zombie movie, you’ve got this start-of-act-2 disbelief rap going on, like when the scientists land on the zombie island and the one idiot says, “what, is this a village of lepers?” and then gets eaten alive. There’s always that part where you are screaming at the screen “RUN YOU STUPID BITCH!” and you know if you were really there, you’d get the fuck up on the roof and nail shut every door and get the closest deer rifle and plant some 12-gauge slugs into the brains of the undead. But of course, you wouldn’t. You’d go to read what the hell happened on twitter to see if the zombie thing was real or just some viral social networking astroturf campaign to sell the new Nissan Sentra or some bullshit. News would get suppressed, or distorted, or spun. If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow, every idiot on Fox News would be blaming it on Obama. In WWZ, the outbreak spread through China because they kept their mouths shut. Israel was smart enough to close their borders, which of course made all of the Palestinians believe it was a big Jewish conspiracy. Etc. etc. It’s not like President Morgan Freeman is going to call a press conference to tell us all that we’re under zombie attack, and Bruce Willis is going to steer a nuke into the center of the zombies and save everybody as a shitty Aerosmith song plays.

So yeah, good book.  I was expecting something aimed at 14-year-olds, like a Mack Bolan book, but Brooks looked at a lot of different angles, and I enjoyed the hell out of that.  I’m not exactly going to retool and start cranking out genre fiction here, but I got at least a dozen good ideas thrown into the plot-o-matic over the whole thing.

I wasn’t set to go down the military history wormhole and start reading books about Iraq, but while I was going through one of the Henry Rollins journal books, he mentioned Buzzell’s memoir, and I picked up a copy.  Going into it, I knew nothing about it, none of the background, his history, and I never read his blog.  I didn’t know if he was a staunch anti-war type, or a flag-waving republican.  I didn’t even know if he lost his arms and legs from a car bomb, or if he was now a regular commentator on Fox News.  All I knew was that Rollins liked him, and the book was well-blurbed.  Even Vonnegut gave it a good blurb.  So I was hoping for the best.

Then I started the book, and found out that he’d kept a blog during his time in Iraq, and this was a book made from the blog, and my heart sank.  I hate when people repackage blogs into books.  One reason is that blog to book people rarely repeat their performance; they’re almost always one-shot wonders.  And I love to be proven wrong by this, but it’s just an issue with the format.  You put your all into a blog, every part of your life, and you only have one life, so you only get the one book.  Sometimes you get a follow-up, but it’s always the same book, the confusion and the grind of the post-blog-book world, dealing with publishers and press and all of that junk we don’t care about.  I especially don’t like the blog-to-book when I’ve already read the blog in question.  It’s like getting a greatest hits album from a band that’s got every single song you already have from them, and maybe a shitty live version of the one song you can’t stand to listen to anymore.

And yeah, part of my hatred for this is jealousy.  I’ve been blogging since 1997 here.  I did put out a book of the first three years of blog posts here, and nobody bought it.  I think I could probably get a decent book out of the thousand or so entries I have completed here, but I doubt it would sell.  And yeah, you’re saying, “but Jon, you didn’t go to Iraq and get shot at.”  No, I didn’t.  But it isn’t about the action as much as it is the character presenting it.  Buzzell presents himself in a way that makes him very likable to a certain segment of the population, and that translates into a story that people can relate to and that people will follow.  My likability… we’ll leave that for another discussion, although I think you know what my perception of that is already.

All that aside, the book is interesting because it’s hard to figure out who Buzzell is.  He’s this sort of boomerang kid, a former skate punk not into going to college and not into the popular scene like the rest of his high school.  He’s not pro-war or anti-war, but decides to enlist because it’s better than sitting on his parents couch or doing a data-entry job for nine bucks an hour.  You get the idea now that anyone volunteering for the army at a time when it was almost a guarantee to get sent into war was some bible belt Republican who loved God, guns, and George Bush.  And Buzzell shows that this isn’t entirely true, that you could come from some other background.

The story continues through basic training, on to a Stryker brigade at Ft. Lewis, up near Seattle.  A Stryker is a big 8-wheeled combat vehicle, way bigger and more armored than a Hummer, but not as heavy or treaded like a tank.  He worked as an M-240 machine gun operator, first as the guy hauling the ammo, then working up to the guy actually firing the thing.  Buzzell’s writing is solid; his two main influences are Bukowski and Hunter Thompson.  He only has some of the fluid poetry of Bukowski at his best, and it’s not the kind of rapid-fire manic energy Thompson wields, but fans of both authors would settle in well with his prose.  I think the unfortunate part of this blog-t0-book thing is that his earliest posts were not as polished or refined.  It seems like he just started to find his voice by the end of his time in Iraq.  So the additional stuff he wrote afterward, and any articles you find of his post-book are much more excellent in style and quality.  But the writing is solid enough, and it reads fast, so I appreciated that.

The politics of the book are mixed.  In some ways, it seems like Buzzell would be the typical W-following line-toter.  In other ways, you’d think he was some Berkeley radical anarchist more interested in throwing the system.  It’s hard to tell where his loyalties lie, and I have no problem with that, because I’m the same way.  I think if you adhere to the far left, you’re going to have problems reading this, hearing about shooting people and the implied cultural insensitivity here, like Buzzell’s insistence on using the term hajii to refer to any Iraqi people, which some would consider derogatory.  It’s probably a bit too war-porn for the die-hard Nancy Pelosi fan.  On the other hand, it probably contains way too many f-bombs for those of you who read the bible six times an hour.  (That’s a constant complaint in other reviews, and I honestly don’t give a fuck if he uses the word or not.)

Probably the one criticism I had about the book was that in places, the writing just showed us things, and it didn’t tell us about it.  I mean, it seems like, as an Amazon reviewer put it, he started with 50 pages of blog posts and pushed it out to a 350-page book.  And that’s fine, but there were times when he could have told us more about how he felt, or how things really looked.  Like, in the epic firefight scene that’s the keystone to the whole book, there are monumental things described with a single sentence.  Like, “The Pepsi bottling plant across the street was all up in flames.”  That’s it.  You could write at least a paragraph if not ten about the surreal situation of growing up drinking soda and then having that childhood image of the Pepsi logo transplanted to this giant factory in flames, the sounds of the timbers crumbling, the glow of the glass and plastic melting en masse… whatever.  He did a good job of documenting what happened, but didn’t cover as much how those things made him feel.

And maybe that’s deliberate.  I mean, the picture he paints is that he’s this tattoo-covered, party lovin’ dude that uses blackout drinking as a stock response to almost anything, suddenly thrust into war.  Maybe having feelings about the action goes against this tough warrior persona.  And maybe that’s why people identify with it.  I mean, nobody asks Chuck Norris how he feels about punching a guy in the throat, and more than a few people love them some Chuck Norris.  But I look back to some of the military memoirs or creative nonfiction that I like - for example, Tim O’Brien - and they add this third dimension, which makes you feel more like you can relate to the tension and drama.  Maybe he hasn’t had time to contemplate what went on. O’Brien wrote his books years after returning from the shit, and he had the distance; he wasn’t liveblogging the Vietnam War as it happened.  That’s why I’m curious about Buzzell’s act two, what comes after this book.

And yeah, full disclosure: I published John Sheppard’s verisimilitude work, Tales of the Peacetime Army, which I liked a lot more for the depth of the writing, although it wasn’t about the war of the moment, which is probably why it didn’t sell.  (I’m not trying to snake-oil you into buying a copy - go read it for free at the above link if you want.)  John also wrote the most excellent In Between Days, a novel about returning from Iraq and dealing with PTSD and the bleakness of America these days, which I keep saying is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  But it also didn’t sell.  (Maybe John needs to get some tattoos and do some blackout drinking.)

All in all, this is a decent and quick read, although it made me have more questions than answers when I finished.  If you never read the blog, and you’re into reading military history, it’s worth a look.  It’s a good book.  Not great, but good.