I mentioned a while back that I started playing bass again.  Here’s an equipment update, since it seems like all I’ve been doing is amassing new stuff.

I previously wrote about my Cort bass.  It’s a Steinberger-licensed headless bass from the late 80s or early 90s, and it’s still here.  It looks okay in this picture, but that white finish looks a little yellowish, and the neck needs adjustment.  I am also not 100% with the tone, and wouldn’t mind ripping out the pickups and putting in a set of EMGs, but I have bigger fish to fry.  This one’s probably off to the shop for a setup though.

The next bass is the Ibanez, which is a GSR-190 4-string, made in 2007.  It’s been the main workhorse as of late, and I like it a lot.  It’s well-balanced, has decent tone, and a thin, fast neck, which I really appreciate.  One of the downsides compared to the Cort is that it goes out of tune every few days, just slightly.  With the Steinberger tuners, you could pretty much drop the Cort out of a plane at 40,000 feet and the tuning would still be dead on, but it also makes me wonder if I should someday swap out the tuners or something.

One change I did make: I had this coupon burning a hole in my pocket, so I ordered a set of EMG pickups, originally thinking I’d put them in the Cort, but then chickening out because there’s almost no space in its cavity for the battery and other junk, and I play the Ibanez daily.  The switch was incredibly easy; EMG now puts DIP-style connectors on all of their gear, like a PC motherboard, so you can completely wire a bass without any soldering.  The new pickups (the EMG X series) are incredibly punchy and very warm.  The best part is that they are completely silent.  My office is filled with noisy fluorescent lights and barely shielded WiFi and bluetooth and whatever else shooting energy through the air, and most musical instruments will pick up hissing and buzzing and Mexican radio stations and everything else, but the active EMG pickups are dead silent.

And then the new one.  Yesterday, I got a new Schecter Stiletto Studio 5. It’s a mahogany body finished in a see-through satin black finish, which is stunning, although hard to photograph.  From a distance, it looks like a stealth bomber’s paint, but up close, you can see through the wood grain underneath.  It’s a 35” scale neck, which means it’s an inch longer than a standard bass, making the sound much more incredible.  (Think the difference between a tiny upright piano and a big concert grand.)  It’s a neck-through, for insane sustain, and it’s got passive EMG HZ pickups and an active 3-band EQ.

The one thing about this bass is that it is HEAVY.  I mean, it’s like if you carried around an M-16 all day and someone handed you an M-60 machine gun - it’s a substantial heft, but it feels really good.  I’ve got a wider strap, but I feel like I’ll need to double down on chiropractic care in the upcoming months.  It’s not horrible, but compared to the light Ibanez, it’s a big step up for me.

I’ve never played a five-string before, and this is a bit overwhelming to me. The neck isn’t substantially wider or thicker than my 4-string, but there are three things going on.  First, that extra inch of scale is fucking with me, and while I can cover the first four frets on a 34” bass with a fret per finger, I need to change my technique here or something.  Second, I’m so used to the bottom string being the E, that I get lost and start doing shit on the wrong string.  Or even worse, my left hand is off by a string but my right one isn’t, or vice-versa.  And third, there’s all of this mental arithmetic of the different possibilities I can use to play the same notes.  It’s confusing, and will take a lot of time.

But - that low B string is absolutely sick.  Just the sound of it rattling away is awe-inspiring. I’m so used to the lowest sound a bass makes as that low E, and the B below it sounds like pure doom.  I went to Songsterr yesterday, and my first thought was to look up some Carcass songs, like off of Heartwork and Swansong, which are both albums that I think purists hate, but that over the years have really grown on me.  I started playing the song “Keep On Rotting in the Free World”, and the first time I hit the open B, I realized I made the right choice with this thing.

I was going to write more about effects, which are also rapidly multiplying here, but I think I need to go practice.  Actually, I need to do back stretches, then practice.

It is the start of a new year — four days into it, really — and I haven’t done shit.  I always have these wise ideas about some post-a-day project, either here, or some great new site that involves posting a story a day or a wiki page per day or whatever, culminating in a total of 365 pages of crap.  And I know that if I did find a concept like that, I’d peter out around mid-February.  That’s why New Year’s resolutions are for hacks, and I never make them.  I’ve got the same set of goals I had five days ago, and I’m still trying to plow towards them.

My excuse for not posting lately is that I’ve been sick with some contagion that completely leveled me for the last week or so.  This was the worst I’ve been sick in a while; I’m used to the usual sniffle or cough, but this virus completely nuked me from orbit.  I got to fly back from Milwaukee with this crap running through my system, and that night, the temp spiked at 103 and I started the 24 hours of Daytona, Nyquil-style, chugging another shot of the green wonder exactly every six hours to max out my dosage.  By New Year’s, I wasn’t eating, my throat completely torn up with white ulcerations to the point where even swallowing water hurt like hell.  I’m mostly better now, but that Saturday night, I thought I was a goner.

And I spent the week before that in Wisconsin.  And it was, well, work.  I appreciate the graciousness of my in-laws, but I never like dealing with family drama, and when it’s not your blood relatives, it’s sort of like watching a reality TV show you don’t want to watch, except you can’t change the channel.  And if we went to the Bahamas every year to do this, that would be different.  But when the temperature dips down to the point where we have to close windows and start wearing jackets here in California, that’s about my fill of cold for the year.

I did get to see John Sheppard for an afternoon, which was cool.  I drove down to Chicago in my rental car, one of those Chevy Malibu things that is nothing like the Malibu of yesteryear, and we went to a diner and then hung out at his place for a while.  His apartment reminds me in some ways of my place I used to have in Queens, except he’s up on a higher floor and has a good view, while I lived on the street and got all of the noise pollution of the Jersey Shore douchebags that hung out in front of our building.  Also, I had a bunch of junk, while he barely has furniture, just a place for the Macbook and a lot of room to paint.

His place, and the semi-lucid nyquil dreamscape of the last week, made me sort of nostalgic for the time at the start of my tenure in Queens, or at least the idea of it, the solitude.  Once it got cold out and the steam heaters started, the street life died down and I’d spend all of my nights and weekends locked in that little one-bedroom, never leaving the house, ordering out every meal and either defeating or being defeated by the computer on the card table, trying to smash out the good word into the keyboard.  I never had people over, never socialized, and had stacks of DVDs to watch and a PlayStation to burn up time, but I really appreciated the isolation, the focus on trying to write.

Maybe that’s just revisionist history, in some sense; I also think that from the time Rumored came out in 02 up to the time Fistful came out in 11, I pissed away almost all of my time.  I mean, I wrote here a lot, got a few short stories done, did a couple of non-fiction projects, but I also feel like I lost my way for almost a decade there, and wonder where that time went.  And now, six months after my last book was done, I fear that I am starting to stumble a bit, and I’ll blink, and it will be 2024 and I will still be chipping away at The Next Book.  That’s scary.

But I am chipping away.  No progress to report, but I’m still maybe halfway through this new one.

Other stuff - I have registered for a comedy writing class at Second City this month.  The end goal isn’t sitcom writing or whatever, but I need to explore a little outside of my wheelhouse, and this sounds fun.  It will probably burn up all of my free time for the next few weeks, but hopefully will be worth it.

I’m also still playing bass, and wish I had more time for that.  I just bought a third bass, and I will probably save that for another post.

OK, gotta go play stone soup with this manuscript and/or go play the new bass.

Despite all of my bitching about writer’s block, 2012 shaped up to be decent as far as writing output: two books, and twelve publications in eight markets.  My goal this year was to do two books (which was unrealistic, but I did) and average a publication a month (which I now feel was light.)  I also made 105 posts at this blog (albeit half of them being short little things) and a ton of twitter and facebook updates, so those should count for something, too.  But here are the big two, books and stories:

Books

I started the year with The Earworm Inception, which was for the most part written in 2011, and published in the first days of January.  This is probably my favorite of the two books, and it got pretty good reviews:

• Bibliomantics: “Bizarro often gets a bad rap for being not so grounded in the literary, but Jon Konrath’s collection calls all those beliefs into question with his vivid writing and intriguing story lines.”
• Voltaire’s reviews: “One reviewer mentioned that Konrath was good at telling these stories with a straight face. That is indeed a great way of saying—it’s so darned serious and then POW. Bloody face. Love it.”

After Earworm, I spent a lot of time working on a successor, and in June, came up with Sleep Has No Master. This book was about 50% longer, and went through far more editing, title changes, cover art changes, and complete reworkings than I’d want to do on a book.  It also got some good reviews:

• Metal Curse: “The uniquely witty Kon throws off-the-wall, left field, side-splitting references at the reader harder than Pedro Martinez can throw Don Zimmer. I simply couldn’t put this down.”
• Bibliomantics: “This collection is a mind-fuck of epic proportions.”
• Voltaire’s reviews: “This collection is basically insane psychotic scripture, laced with prescription drugs, Colonel Sanders, and large quantities of heavy metal. In other words, it is perfect bizarro.”

I also helped publish John Sheppard’s book Alpha Mike Foxtrot in 2012, and took the cover photo for Haiku in the Night by Ben Ditmars, which is good.  But I spent most of the second half of the year festering along on another book that is nowhere near done, and I feel like the next “big book” like Rumored to Exist is still out of reach.  I’m hoping to spend all of 2013 getting that under control.

Stories

Here’s the stories that I published:

• “The Chainsaw Baron Prophecy” at Fictionaut (2012)
• “Princess Di’s Mercedes and the Dead Man’s ASL Chimp” in Tall Tales with Short Cocks Volume 2 (2012)
• “Krill Warriors” at Paragraph Line (2012)
• “Time Travel And The Posse Comitatus McDonald’s Standoff” at Fictionaut (2012)
• “The Zombies of Kilimanjaro” in Tall Tales with Short Cocks (2012)
• “Dwarf Meth Madness, Again” at Horror Sleaze Trash (2012)
• “Peak Oil” at The Mustache Factor (2012)
• “The Locality Principle” at In Between Altered States (2012)
• “I Believe I Can Flee the State” at His Cock is Money (2012)
• “The Gamecube Junkie Abortionist’s Revenge” at His Cock is Money (2012)
• “The Log Lady Incident” at Weirdyear (2012)

That’s more than 2011, but most of those were early in the year, and I haven’t been submitting much lately.  I don’t think I could double that number in 2013, but I wouldn’t mind increasing it a bit, or at least finding some other new or bigger markets.

I think the most important metric to me is that it seems like more people have found my work in the last year.  When I look at some of the reviews, comments from facebook friends, and people reading my tweets, a lot of the names are people completely new to me in 2012.  Some of you old farts have stuck in there too, and I’m grateful for that.  But I’m just as grateful to those of you who have discovered my writing this year, and have come along for the ride.  I don’t do this for money, and I’m certainly not going to become famous writing books about people who crash airplanes into department stores to obtain an erection.  It’s important to me to write exactly what I want to write, and because that isn’t vampire romances or detective murder mysteries, it means I have to look that much harder to find like-minded readers, and it always makes me happy when I do.

So thanks to everyone who has checked out my stuff in 2012.  I hope I can do even more to make 2013 a success.

So here’s a new one.  Ben Ditmars has a new book out called Haiku in the Night. He’s a facebook buddy hailing from Ohio, and for some reason I seem to know an unnatural number of people from Ohio lately.  I think the last time I was there, aside from going through the airport (which is really in Kentucky anyway) was when I drove back for a funeral in 1999.  Maybe I need to go back again.

Anyway, I don’t even have my copy of the book yet (it’s in the mails) but I thought I’d post this because I actually shot the photo used on the cover of this book.  It was taken when I was in Berlin earlier this year, and it’s just a lazy snap taken on my phone in the hotel restaurant, waiting for my breakfast.  What’s strangely coincidental about this is that the cover of Sleep Has No Master was shot on the same trip.

Anyway, check out Ben’s books here: http://niceoldspice.blogspot.com/p/bucher.html

And I don’t profess to be an expert photographer, but I do have a bunch of stuff over on my flickr page.  And as I told Ben as he was struggling to find a free photo to use for his cover, if you’re a writer looking for free art and you find something on there you like, email me and I’ll give you rights and a full-sized image for free.  Check it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/

I am back from my trip to Reno.  I won $100 on a slot machine.  I bought a new bass.  I had a dream about cookies.  I saw a big lake.

OK, first, slot machines - I have a mixed opinion.  I know they require no skill or thought.  I go to Vegas with a bunch of people that have about three PhDs’ worth of math classes between them, and to say they’re involved poker players is like saying George S. Patton knows a bit about mechanized infantry.  They, of course, frown upon the one-armed bandit, as there’s no strategy and you can’t beat the odds.  But usually when I’m at the point when I’m in a casino, I’ve been awake for days and am completely brain dead, and pressing the “repeat bet” button over and over every five seconds is about the only strategy I can mentally afford.  If I’m lucky, I break even.  This time, I hit some mystical combination of symbols and wildcards that gave me something like $106.  I then quit, and moved to a video poker machine, where I turned $20 into $26 over a period of about 45 minutes, which isn’t stellar, but is much better than turning $20 into $0 in four seconds.

In my quest to do anything except write to force myself to eventually write, I bought a new bass guitar at a pawn shop in Reno.  It is an Ibanez and it’s red and has P/J pickups and an incredibly thin and fast neck.  The pawn shops in general were slim pickings, a bunch of beaten Chinese Fender clones and the occasional Squier for $20 below list price.  But in a place with a giant wall of assault rifles, I found this single bass hanging, and once I felt the low action, needed to buy it.  I talked them down $50 on the price, and then it was mine.  I’ve probably played it ten hours since I’ve been back, and I’m very happy with it.  I’m still obsessed with this game Rocksmith, and started buying all of the songs in iTunes, because I’m not well-stocked in Pixies and Black Keys albums.  (This game is very heavy in bands beginning with “The”, including -White Stripes, -Strokes, -xx, -Horrors, and probably ten others I forget.)

When in the hotel, I had this incredibly detailed dream involving baked cookies, and then woke up and there were no cookies.  S took this as a cue to bake a batch of cookies yesterday, and I’ve eaten so many of them, I think I’m going to puke.  They’re good, and that’s the problem.  I have to go to the dentist later today, and I think instead of brushing my teeth just prior to my cleaning, I will eat as many cookies as possible, so I know I’m getting my money’s worth.

Although I have not been writing, I’m on the verge of publishing John Sheppard’s next book, and someone just asked to use one of my pictures from Germany for a book cover.  Coincidentally, my last book used a picture from the same trip.  And I had a similar dream experience in Berlin, although it did not involve cookies.  We’d landed in Berlin after a hellish day of flights across Europe, and got to the hotel well after dark.  We set up camp in this Hyatt, and I went to bed with the drapes closed.  My dreams involved a massive suite of a hotel room, with a wall of glass overlooking a terrace that stood at the top of this massive and modern city, like a scene from a movie.  When I woke up, I pulled back the drapes, expecting this incredible cityscape, and found our room actually looked out at a concrete Daimler office building that was only a few feet away.  The rest of the Berlin trip was great, but that single post-dream moment was a huge letdown.

I mentioned a big lake.  It was Pyramid Lake, and I was going to start talking about it, but then did a wikipedia check, and it turns out that every fact I was told about the lake by one of S’s relatives was half wrong.  Like, I was told it was a freshwater lake, but it’s not.  And that it was the filming location of T_he Ten Commandments_, but it was actually The Greatest Story Ever Told.  So, I guess I don’t have any stories to tell.  I took some pictures, but I’m finding I have far too many pictures of desert wasteland, probably as a result of owning 40 acres of it.

I am itching to get another book out, even though the next one is only half done.  Part of me wants to take a bunch of my choice photos, and put a bunch of my archived tweets on them in Helvetica, and release a hipster-esque book, but I know nobody would buy it.  Maybe I will anyway.