Don't wanna be right

Poe's law strikes again:

I honestly cannot tell if the above graphic (found in a Google image search which somehow conflated my search terms - what should I be for halloween - with other tangential interrogatives - should I celebrate halloween at all and thereby risk my immortal soul - as algorithms are, I suppose, wont to do) is completely and utterly (and cluelessly) earnest in its admonitions, or a smirking parody of that way of thinking (or the outsider perception thereof).

On the side of sincerity, there's the fact that the text is deeply hokey in a way that seems utterly unironic.

On the side of satire, I mean ... if you want to put people off of something, why would you superimpose your message over an image that is so wicked awesome? Did you see that jack-o-lantern? That thing is rad as hell.

Ah well. Happy Halloween, anyway! And hey, remember a couple years ago when I used to talk about the How the West Was Weird anthologies I contributed stories to? Well, the fine folks at that publishing house, PulpWork Press, have an annual holiday anthology, too. And this year the holiday in question is Halloween. Hie thee to Amazon and you can buy a paperback copy or download a copy on your Kindle - and if you happen to be reading this on the intended posting date, today is the last day you can snag that Kindle edition FOR FREE!

Things take longer than expected

So, remember this, almost exactly a year ago? When I said I was going to spend the year leading up to my 40th birthday going back through the previous four decades of pop culture and sampling things I had never sampled before? My 40th birthday came and went, four months ago this coming Sunday. Whence the Life in a Year?

It proved tricky, is whence. To sum up: it stumbled right out of the gate, picked up a little without quite gelling, continued in fits and starts interrupted and crowded out by other things, and all in all proved a much more difficult quest to complete in the time allotted than I anticipated.

To elaborate a bit: at the time it should have properly kicked off, late January of 2014, I will remind everyone that our youngest, the beloved bino, was all of about ten months old. He is now 22 months old and we are counting down to his big birthday. But at ten months old he was still unweaned, and thus not sleeping through the night, but plenty active during the day, which made free time and free mental space such rare commodities they took on nigh-mythical proportions. What I wanted, in my idealized pop culture consuming plan, was to kick off my lifetime retrospective of stuff I’d been meaning to get around to with one of the biggest, most glaring omissions in my personal catalog: The Godfather Part II.

I know, I know. It’s just one of those things. Specifically, it’s one of those movies that I never watched as a kid and never even tried to catch up with until my wife and I were dating. We actually watched Part I together, and put in and started playing the disc for Part II, but that was during the phase of our courtship where she was often on call as an ambulatory horse vet and our viewing was interrupted by a late night emergency farm visit and we never managed to get back to it after that; the incomplete go at it made us gunshy, I suppose, and we were determined to not even try until we knew that we could make it all the way through in one sitting.

Of course, it’s a three and a half hour epic, so absolute confidence in having that much time to devote to it was in short supply. Like, never. A couple years later we were married and both working a lot, and a couple years after that we were parents, and we have basically been responsible for the care, feeding and rearing of at least one small baby or toddler at any given time ever since. Around New Year’s I was somehow flush with the contact high of people making resolutions to undertake vast projects and achieve personal goals, and I thought, well how hard could it be to set aside an evening to watch Part II with my wife? We’ll do it on a weekend.

Or not. It became apparent that our household schedule was incompatible with evening viewings of massive movies, however canonically important. And really, I would hate for this to sound like I’m lamenting my crushed cinephile dreams all because my wife wouldn’t agree to an in-home date night. It’s hardly her fault that she has spent most of the last six-plus (maybe seven, going back to the first pregnancy) years literally so exhausted that getting through any single day is a small victory. I’ve tried to do what I can to support and help her, but the demands of motherhood take their toll. And I know that movies are an absolutely inessential hobby of mine, one I get really wrapped up in and het up about sometimes, but Not All That Important. Still, it is important to me to see The Godfather: part II someday, and it is equally important that I watch it with my wife, so I will just continue to leave it be until such time as it becomes feasible, however long that takes.

I moved along through my list, though, and started watching some other movies from 1975 and 1976, and reading some books from 1977 and 1978 and 1979. And I started outlining some blog posts about those books and movies, too, not quite straight reviews but something more reflective of how they fit into their particular moment in history, and where I was in my life at that moment, and how I had missed them the first time around, and why it mattered to me that I go back and check them out however belatedly. Of course, this approach had a couple of glaring weaknesses at the outset, in that the first half-dozen or so were going to be very similar. For how the works fit into their time, I wouldn’t really be able to give a first-hand account, because at age 1 or 2 or 3 I was barely cognizant. Which also proved a pretty boilerplate reason for the early entries’ absence from my experience at the time. Why didn’t I see this classic movie when it came out? Because I wasn’t even old enough for Sesame Street at the time, basically.

So I pretty quickly abandoned the retrospective-themed review posts, but I kept working my way down the list I had compiled of movies and books and comics and such. Another disappointment I ran into was that despite soliciting input from a bunch of friends about hidden gems I might have missed, I got very little response back. I was hoping the project could be at least somewhat collaborative, but outside influence proved minimal, which made the whole thing seem a little sad and solipsistic. That’s not necessarily a fatal flaw for a blog, of course (or rather, for the reader it might be, but not for the blogger), but it was a bummer all the same.

I soldiered on, but I didn’t move directly from one year’s representative work to the next’s to the next. I kept up, in my usual intermittent way, with the 1001 Movies Blog Club (which, fyi, has been on a bit of hiatus of its own since early December, but hopefully will be back soon) and I indulged in Summer Movies on a Train, as always, not to mention my first ever Halloween Countdown, which did not serendipitously overlap with the retrospective in any helpful way. Plus by mid-year I had published a story that got me thinking about writing more and publishing more, and sometimes that writing (or at least revising with paper and red pen) spilled over onto my train commute, taking a bite out of reading and movie watching time. Napping on the train accounted for more. And I had allotted myself about a week for each of the 40 works I was going to consume, but sometimes a good sized book takes longer than 10 commutes to plow through. Sometimes the mail cycle for Netflix rentals takes longer, too. The schedule just slipped and slipped, well past my birthday, and at some point I realized I was barely going to finish the doorstop novel from 1999, which I started in early November, by Christmas.

So in the end, I covered about 25 or 26 years of pop culture last year, from 1975 to 2000. (You’ve noticed by now, no doubt, that I’m being coy about what all those books and movies were, and that’s because I suppose I’ll run through them all with some quick reaction thoughts at some point, but that’s fodder for another post some other day.) I now have 15 years to go, and I do in fact plan on going through those works as well, though I’ve been on a bit of a break since the holidays. So perhaps this will ultimately be remembered as Life in Two Years? The years on either side of turning 40, leading up and following after.

Maybe? Clearly I haven’t been as diligent about blogging regularly this year as I have been in year’s past, so I don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver. At this point let’s just call it a strong possibility, and we shall see what comes of it.

Happy Havoc-days

So as this year draws to a close (or gets gradually nearer to doing so, at least; we must be oddly ahead of schedule in our household holiday preparations this year because I can't shake the feeling that Christmas Day is, like, this Friday) I wanted to take a moment to address a few disparate things that really do tie together. By way of picking a single entry point (and not burying the lede), I'll start off with an announcement: the publication this week of the crazy-go-nuts PulpWork Christmas Special 2014!

Inordinately devoted readers of the blog may recognize PulpWork Press as the publishers who brought the world the series of How the West Was Weird anthologies, volumes 2 and 3 of which contain, among other fantastic works, a story apiece written by me. And, much as that close association makes me an admitteedly biased fan of PulpWork anyway, such that I'd happily shill for their annual extravaganza of Christmas-themed adventure yarns, I am pleased and proud to admit that yet another one of my story efforts is part of the Christmas Special 2014 collection, as well. Pick one up as the perfect stocking stuffer for the weird loved ones in your life, you know, the ones who would dig the idea of Santa Claus as a seasonal demon-hunter and know what the heck a wendigo is.

So, to recap, How the West Was Weird v.3 was published this summer (approximately; the e-book edition was available in May and the paperback in August) and right about the time that it was going through layout finalization I resolved to get a bit more serious about my own fiction writing. I get a certain thrill out of seeing my own name in print and I've enjoyed the ride with the HTWWW series enough to seek to replicate it as much as possible in the future. One avenue that seemed like a no-brainer was the PulpWork Christmas Special, since I already had an in with the editor and many of the other authors. So it's gratifying to see that come to fruition this week, too. But it doesn't completely scratch the itch.

Thus I've done a lot of writing in the past, say, eight months. A lot of bearing down on ideas, not just rolling them around idly in the back of my head when I'm bored but actually engaging with them, eyes on screen and fingers on keyboard, until they're written out in their entirety. Some of them I've gone back and polished up and made into something vaguely audience-worthy, and I've submitted those stories to other potential publishers. I've gotten some curt and dismissive rejections, and some encouraging close-but-fell-just-short rejections, and one acceptance which should be officially available and linkable right before Christmas (to which of course I will devote yet another post when everything comes together). The additional anthology credit is cool, and the nice thing about all the rejections is that I can take another pass at those stories and try again submitting them somewhere else. Fortunately I'm not trying to make a living at this (at the moment), so it's fairly non-stressful, more like amusing myself trying to make a tricky basketball shot at the hoop in my driveway, sometimes frustrating and very occasionally satisfying. It costs me nothing but time.

Also, in the course of researching markets where my stories might find homes, I've come across a few open calls for stories on specific themes that have tickled my fancy, and I've reached out to those publishers (two separate ones on different occasions) with pitches for the anthologies, and gotten positive responses. So that accounts for another story that's currently in the editing process which should see the light of day some time in 2015, and one I'm still in the middle of writing which would also, hopefully, come out next year. That feels like a pretty good head start on making sure this is an ongoing thing, that I have as much work published in 2015 under my name as 2014, if not more.

So that's thread number one, hyping up the new collection, and thread number two, reporting on my increased fiction output and the continuing efforts to get as much of it in print as possible. And that also brings us to thread number three, which is the lackadaisical content upkeep around these blogparts of late. Presumably you can determine for yourself how all of these things are connected: original stories accumulating in my cloud storage account on the rise, regular posts on my blog in decline. I managed to keep things fairly balanced in the summer, and my outsized excitement for Halloween yielded a bumper of posts in October, but I've slacked off since then, blog-wise. Now you know a big reason why! I'm not saying that now that I've named the problem I can make it go away; there're only so many hours in a day, and I've done the best I can with them. And I will continue along those same lines, but if a week happens to go by with no new posts, it might be because I'm trying to push yet another story across the finish line, or I'm spending a lot of free time corresponding with an editor, or something like that.

Way, way back when I started this blog, one of motivators was the simple fact that I wasn't writing much of anything and felt the need to keep exercising those mental muscles regularly. It took a little longer than I expected, but I'm starting to see some itty-bitty hints of payoff. It's kind of like buying a treadmill because you hope to someday hike up Kilimanjaro; at some point you're going to have to get off the practice machine and actually get on the mountain. But that doesn't mean you throw away the treadmill, especially if it's still perfectly functional. It just means it might get a little dusty now and then.

SMOAT Double-Features #1!!! (The Searchers/The Hidden Fortress)

Summer is well underway and you know what that means: the return of SMOAT (Summer Movies on a Train), wherein I work my way through the blockbusters, exploitation flicks, and other cinematic brain candy that has been accumulating on my Netflix queue. When I looked at the movies I had tossed on the to-watch list I realized I had so many to choose from that I would barely make a dent if I limited myself to one movie per week. So, as is my wont, I started organizing the flicks as best I could into pairs, based on thematic similarities, general categories, release years (or at least release decades) &c., so I could watch them in back-to-back twosomes. If all goes according to plan I should be able to post a twofer review every week. So let the summer of double features begin!

My first installment actually came into its final form by accident. I decided that before I embarking on my annual catch-up on popcorn entertainment I would just cross off one more of the big canonical classics: John Ford's The Searchers. Not only is that movie on the 1001 Master List, it's on the Sight & Sound poll, and in the top ten of that elite ranking as well. Plus it's considered a masterpiece of the western genre, and given my recent far-ranging surveys of all things cowboy, from the archetypal to the unusual (my obsession with Stephen King's Gunslinger, and my enjoyment of this movie, and this one, and this one, not to mention my own contributions to How the West Was Weird, still available for Kindle!) I knew I'd have to get around to it sooner or later. So why not make that happen, and do my cinephile homework before blowing off the summer.

So I was watching The Searchers and (spoilers for a movie that came out in 1956 and really this is just part of the set-up everybody knows about who's even heard of the movie) get to the part where Ethan and Martin return to the Edwards homestead only to find the family's house and the outbuildings aflame, as the Comanche have already come and laid waste and gone. And the framing of the shot, and the streaming columns of black smoke, immediately triggered two words in my mind: STAR WARS.

Have you guys heard about the annotated Star Wars video that made the rounds on teh interwebs last month? I haven't gotten around to watching it myself, I confess (because I can't take two hours of streaming video on the train, mostly). But basically some guy took the entire running length of Star Wars and intercut it with clips from earlier movies which were heavy influences and inspirations for George Lucas. When I noticed the parallels between that moment in The Searchers and the scene in Star Wars where Luke gets back to the Lars moisture farm and finds it burning after the Stormtroopers have attacked, I wondered if the annotated Star Wars video included that particular homage. Which of course it did, and in fact when I went to check that one section of the video I discovered that the Searchers references actually start a scene or two earlier (The Searchers is cut into the Star Wars video at 43:44, if you're curious), where Obi-wan Kenobi's analysis of who attacked the jawas using what telltale methods and for what purpose is lifted from Ethan's almost identical recognition of a Comanche spear and deduction of where the Comanche will attack next.

OK, all well and good with the Star Wars connection, and unsurprising really since The Searchers has a reputation as one of the most widely influential films of all time. What was a little more surprising to me was the fact that The Searchers is a bit underwhelming if you go into it expecting a transcendent film. Parts of it are great, and parts of it are ... less so. One could go down just about every category of filmmaking and find one element in each category in The Searchers which was good, and another which fell short. John Wayne delivers an excellent performance as Ethan Edwards, as does Ward Bond as the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton. The rest of the acting in the movie is middling at best, stiff and stilted. (I wonder sometimes if we as a modern culture have a sense of people who lived a hundred or more years ago as being overly formal and unexpressive because we watch period pieces made by old Hollywood studios and mistake the wooden-faced acting as historical authenticity.) Some of the cinematography is breathtaking, particularly the exteriors, mostly due to the inherent grandeur of Monument Valley.

But those shots only serve to make the soundstage-bound setpieces look all the more fake and cheesy. A major component of the overarching plot is Martin's love life, but Martin is pretty much written as a clueless doofus, so the impulse to care what happens to him is minimized. There are parts of the movie which are genuinely, intentionally funny, and other parts which are unintentionally funny, and still more that are intended to be funny but fall flat. Case in point, when Martin accidentally marries a young Native American girl when he thinks he's merely trading goods with her father. As culturally insensitive as that may be, the fact that it is revealed to be a minor mishap resolved by the young bride being killed shortly thereafter, clearing the way once again for Martin's major romantic subplot, is fairly horrifying.

Probably the aspect of The Searchers which has aged the worst is the racism. White European actors in redface playing Native Americans are always going to be problematic, as is casting an entire ethnic group as the villains with no nuance and no shades of gray. Ostensibly the story is about how one man hates the Comanche so much that he devotes years of his life to hunting for the niece (asterisk, see below) that was kidnapped by them, without ever denying that he is out for bloody revenge on the Comanche for slaughtering his niece's family just as much as he is seeking her safe return. It all culminates in Ethan being forced to decide if he will kill his own niece for having inevitably gone native with the tribe, or if he will "forgive" her and take her home regardless. There's something of an interesting story to tell there about vengeance and victimization and the lines a man will cross, but notice there's no third possibility of letting little Debbie stay with the Comanche, or any consideration of the Comanche as anything other than evil and wrong for defending their ancestral home from expansionist settlers. Only the white girl's life matters, as the Comanche kill like wild animals and are slaughtered the same way.

So, again, as a time capsule of the unenlightened attitudes of a (mostly) bygone era, The Searchers is worth preserving. And if you can swallow all the tropes of the western, including Native Americans being given no respect or definition beyond serving as wild antagonists along the lines of, say, the Tusken Raiders of Tatooine, then it's not a bad western, at that. Certainly it's a pretty one, at times a funny one, and particularly in the climax an emotionally driven one. But I'm not entirely convinced it's a top echelon all-time history-of-all-movies world-beater.

(Asterisk: so I found out via some research that there's a theory that Debbie is actually Ethan's daughter, not his niece, as the product of an illicit affair between Ethan and his brother's wife. I admit I find this subtext fits pretty well with the text of the movie as it plays out, with certain clues reinforcing it and nothing really contradicting it or needing to be handwaved away. It does make the kill-or-forgive conundrum that much more visceral. And I'm impressed that a director would include something like that in a movie in the mid-50's and not explicitly nod at it in any way, demonstrating a certain subtlety and restraint I don't really give many filmmakers from that era credit for.)

My original plan was to start my double features by watching Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, which every geek worth his Cheetos-dust knows is a big precursor to Star Wars, and then move on to the volume 1 dvd of Cartoon Network's Clone Wars ongoing series as the back half. (That dvd has been gathering dust on my shelf since my sister very thoughtfully got it for me for Christmas years ago, and I simply have never found time to start watching it. As per usual, mostly I blame Smallville.) However, once I tumbled to the fact that The Searchers was a Star Wars influence as well, The Hidden Fortress became the back half of my Star Wars Forerunners double feature.

As I say, it's fairly common knowledge that a lot of Star Wars comes from Hidden Fortress: two hapless peasant servants who don't really belong on an epic adventure (R2D2 and C3PO in the former; Tahei and Matashichi in the latter), a princess who simultaneously needs to eb rescued and also kicks a lot of ass on her own (Leia Organa; Yuki Akizuki), and a warrior general traveling incognito (Ben Kenobi; Makabe Rokurōta). But before we go any further down that road, can I just point out one other amazing connection to my childhood I was previously unaware of? OK, so in some later line-ups of the Superfriends cartoon there was a character called Samurai, only he didn't look anything like a samurai. A samurai has the big bulky armor and the crazy helmet, and the Samurai hanging around the Hall of Justice dressed like this:

I didn't get that at all as a kid, or even as an adult, until I watched The Hidden Fortress, where Rokurōta (played by the legendary Toshiro Mifune) is referred to as a famous samurai and basically looks exactly like Samurai from Superfriends. Mifune's a little swarthier, and the film's in black and white, but nonetheless: same hair, same beard, same outfit. (No whirlwind powers, though, alas.)

Anyway, back to the film itself. There are several Kurosawa films on the 1001 Master List, but Hidden Fortress is not one of them. And it's not that hard to see why. It's long, it's meandering, it comes across like a children's adventure story or fairy tale (not coincidentally, much like Star Wars, at that). It's a perfectly serviceable movie, and entertaining; I'm honestly not sure if Kurosawa was capable of making a truly bad movie. It's just not mandatory viewing.

Parts of it arguably rise to the compulsory level, though. Specifically, there's a scene where Rokurōta challenges the enemy commander to a duel. The commander agrees and allows Rokurōta to choose a spear from among all of the assembled soldiers in the garrison. This leads to a long wordless sequence wherein Rokurōta walks around the inside of a circle of men, taking a spear, testing it, finding it wanting, giving it back, over and over. The tension for the duel slowly builds. Ultimately there's an overhead shot of the ring of soldiers and Rokurōta in the middle. He starts taking bigger test swings with the spear. Every time he does, the entire ring of soldiers reacts as one, and backs up a little more, expanding the battlefield. This scene is phenomenal. Watching it I felt not unlike this adolescent Onion op-ed author, discovering Bruce Lee for the first time.

So for aficionados of badassdom, Hidden Fortress merits a strong recommendation. much the same way aficionados of westerns owe it to themselves to take in The Searchers. Everything in the arts and pop culture builds on everything before it, and those two are both large pillars in the firmament. Star Wars barely scratches the surface of testaments to that.

Other people's weirds

As promised, here are the links for grabbing electronic copies of How the West Was Weird v.3:

Smashwords

Amazon

If you happen to enjoy stories of cowboys or monsters, or even better mash-ups of those two, then it's hard to beat the entertainment value you would presumably derive from the e-book. And for less than five bucks! (he shilled baldfacedly)

I have yet to read through the entirety of the newly released anthology myself; despite having access to the early galleys, I figured there was a chance some of my fellow authors might make significant corrections to their stories, so I opted to wait for the final published versions for my initial reading experience. Still, I wanted to do something more than just promote the book with marketplace hyperlinks on the occasion of its release, so I decided to reach back to the previous volume in the series. Oddly enough, I never wrote anything close to a proper review of v.2 back when it came out, probably because of the sheer scope of the book, twenty stories encompassing a surprising amount of diversity within the microgenre niche of weird western. A more manageable endeavor would be to focus on one tale (or two or three) out of the whole bunch. Clearly my favorite story in volume 2 is my own, but if I had to pick a first-among-my-peers, the honor would go to ...

"They Call Him Pat" by Ian Taylor.

And it was tough narrowing that down. I flipped through the book again to refresh my memories of all my fellow contributors' stories, and a fairly strong top three solidified in my mind. "Mr. Brass and the Devil's Teeth" by Josh Reynolds is a very good yarn, my main quibble with it being that it feels a trifle overstuffed. Mr. Brass is a steampunk robot who happens to be employed as a Pinkerton. That in and of itself seems like a solid hook for a weird west story (a genre which, by its very nature, lends itself to being conceptually overstuffed since it involves both period pieces set over a century in the past and chock full of cowboy tropes plus whatever added speculative element(s) qualifies as the weird part) but then the Devil's Teeth in question turn out to be magic bullets which cause the men they strike to turn into werewolves, and then on top of that Reynolds throws in Frank and Jesse James and their gang, too. In further defense of Reynolds's approach, he has written something like 10 different "Mr. Brass" stories over the years for various publications, so I can at least understand feeling the need to raise the stakes with every outing, and if that means piling on the monsters as well as the historical legends, so be it.

Another standout in volume 2 is "Storms of Blood and Snow" by Derrick Ferguson. It's a blend of western and fantasy chronicling an adventure of Sebastian Red, gunslinger swordsman and fighter of supernatural evils. Sebastian Red is another recurring character, within the How the West Was Weird series, at least, and he bears more than a little resemblance to Roland Deschain from Stephen King's Dark Tower cycle (a similarity which Ferguson swears is coincidental, as he's never read the Dark Tower, and for what it's worth, I believe him) so of course it's right up my alley. And despite being a short story, Ferguson manages to give the whole tale a feeling of epic depth, like it's a glimpse into an incredibly detailed organic world. It probably is, at that.

But Taylor's story is my favorite of them all, partly because it's really a very simple story about Pat, a lone alien (in the classic hairless, big-head, big-black-eyes, technologically-advanced-civilization mold) who tries to make a go of it as a homesteader out west. And there's very little if any time spent dwelling on how Pat got to Earth or what the scientific principles underpinning his amazing devices may be. The narration of the story has a kind of bemused tone throughout, as if the disembodied voice telling the story is trying to convey that yes, Pat doesn't look like or act like anybody else in the valley, but that's beside the point so please stop gawking at his gray skin and pay attention to what happened next. And what ends up happening is very much in the mold of a dark fairy tale, or a classic episode of The Twilight Zone, and I am absolutely a sucker for those kind of stories. So Taylor rises to the top of the heap for me.

Who will have the distinction of writing my favorite story in volume 3? It could be Derrick Ferguson, or it could be Ian Taylor, both of whom have once again contributed to the anthology this time around. Or it could be someone else! I will probably start reading the new book this evening, and once I've finished and had time to properly judge, I will post the results. Stay tuned!

Yeeeee-haw

I just got the official word that the cover art for How the West Was Weird v.3 is clear for public unveiling. Far be it for me to let the sagebrush grow under my feet:

The e-book version of the anthology officially goes on sale on Monday, and I will post links to places you can pick it up then (spoiler: one of them is Amazon). (UPDATE: The other is Smashwords)

Unfortunately there's been a slight delay in the process of assembling the physical book, so the dead-tree version won't be hitting the streets until July. But hey, I personally guarantee it will be worth the wait!

Brown liquor

How the West Was Weird v. 3 should be available soon, with an electronic release this month and paperback release next month. I will post official dates and links and all whenever that’s all settled, but I wanted to reflect on something related to my story from the anthology. Rest assured, those of you eagerly awaiting the publication, that the details I’m going to give away herein don’t really qualify as spoilers.

As part of my protagonist’s backstory I included a flashback to her hitting rock bottom, which involved drinking alone in a saloon and ultimately getting thrown out. This being a tale of the old (albeit weird) west, I didn’t see any need to reinvent the wheel, and so I put a bottle of whiskey in front of the cowgirl as her rotgut of choice. It was one of those details that simply seemed to suggest itself as perfectly logical, and into the mix it went, after I did a modicum of research to namedrop a brand of whiskey that wouldn’t be anachronistic to the story.

I’ve been alluding to my upswing in creative productivity recently, and about a week ago I finished revising another story and submitted it for consideration for another small press anthology. (I should hear the yea or nay on that by the end of this month.) Once I had sent it off to the publisher, and there was no longer any point in fiddling with the details of it, I was able to consider the new story as a whole a little more rationally, and I noticed a couple of things:

1. It had a lot in common with the weird west story in terms of narrative structure, by which I mean both tales have a character on an adventure who suffers a darkest-before-the-dawn kind of setback, which gives the story a chance to pause and go back and fill in some of the character’s origins, and then ultimately return to the present action for the uplifting triumph. Adventure-setback-triumph is about as classic (read: basic) as it gets in terms of the hero’s journey, and so I hardly think it’s the worst thing in the world to repeat those beats in broad terms in more than one tale. It might very well be inevitable. Using the setback moment as a flashback opportunity is a bit less intrinsic to the formula, but obviously I find that it works out really well (and that was confirmed for me by some of the people I shared drafts of each story with) so I can accept that duplication as well.

2. But if one were to start really combing through the side-by-side comparison, one might notice that both flashbacks involve the respective protagonists hitting rock bottom and facing some kind of crisis of faith at a life crossroads. They also both involve drinking. Specifically, they both involve drinking whiskey.

It will no doubt sound like I protest too much if I swear up and down that this only occurred to me well after the fact, exactly as I’ve claimed, but it’s the truth. The only evidence I can offer is roundabout: if I had noticed, and it wasn’t too late to change the second story, I probably would have. But if the second story winds up disseminated out into the world as I submitted it, it will prove my point. Without a conscious plan, I’ve been betrayed by my own proclivities. When life gets rough, there’s nothing a generous pour of the lively water won’t cure, or at least dull the pain of. Actually, that would be one of the proto-proclivities of a much younger me, who was single and childless (much like the characters in my stories). Nowadays there’s frequently beer and wine on the shopping list but the hard stuff comes out only on special occasions. I’m pretty sure the last time I had a cocktail with whiskey in it was back in October at my cousin’s wedding, and as far as seriously getting down with an unmixed bourbon on the rocks, that has to go back to before the little guy was born. As usual, this all falls under the broad heading Life Is Change, And That’s OK.

Clearly, though, I forged a deep and possibly lifelong emotional bond with whiskey that has far outlasted the actual habit of consuming it regularly, and I like what it signifies and what it conveys enough to refer to it in fiction again and again. And again? At this point I feel like I might as well take the accidental coincidence of two and run with it, make it my thing, try to work a mention of whiskey into every tale I tell from here on out. I’m currently playing around with a couple of horror story ideas, one of which takes place at a Halloween party and another of which takes place at a nightclub, places where it would not be a stretch in the slightest to incorporate a shot or two of bourbon. I’m also working on a sci-fi pulp about space gladiators, which presents a bit more of a challenge. I suppose it depends which ones I finish and/or manage to find audiences for first (or at all), to see if the running joke continues on an unbroken streak.

Staying in touch

Everybody is fine, at least by defining "fine" as a wide range of conditions between "terrible" and "amazing". In brief:

- The baby was diagnosed on Tuesday with his first-ever ear infection. He dodged the bullet for quite a while, aided immeasurably by having an at-home sitter rather than being exposed to the biohazard incubator that is the daycare center, but give the dubious otological genetic legacy my wife and I have apparently founded, it really was inevitable. The good news is he likes the antibiotics just fine and doesn't engage in any physically violent protests when we make the twice-daily ministrations. He's going to be all right. He's also basically an official toddler now, stomping around on two feet at will, although he still crawls a fair amount (and also walks on his knees sometimes, though I can't imagine that lasting too much longer).
- The little girl is in good health and has proven to be exactly as stubborn and willful at three years old as she was at almost-three (and every other stage of her life). My wife and I were kind of hoping that, post-birthday, we could use some well-deployed you're-a-big-girl-now's to bring her around to our way of thinking on a few of our quotidian power struggles, but ... not so much. That's just life with a pre-schooler (and an Aries, at that) and I know that, but still, ask me in person how my daughter is these days and I will likely respond with a bit of a drawn out sigh, "She's fiiiine."
- The little guy, also hale and hearty, just went back to school this Tuesday after a week and a day of official Spring Break. We're in the final two months of the school year now, and our expectations are pretty low. The transition to a real, fulltime classroom was difficult for the little guy, in ways that caught us all of guard, and getting off on the wrong foot by having his initial teacher reassigned a few weeks into the year and shunting him into a different established set of kids, most of whom are older than him anyway at ages when small chronological gaps can contain huge developmental differences ... the long and the short of it is that we basically wrote kindergarten off, and now we're running out the clock. First grade will be a clean slate, and better in many ways, because it just has to be. Meanwhile, I anticipate that the little guy will throw himself into full-throated enjoyment of his first ever summer vacation in equal and opposite proportion to his ambivalence about Grade Zero. So that at least will be fun.
- And just to bring things full-circle, my wife is hanging in there despite the most severe seasonal allergies I've ever seen her have to endure. Today she expressed suspicion that, in addition to the pollen-induced respiratory freakout she's been saddled with 24/7 for the past two weeks, she might also have a touch of the same ear infection the baby is harboring. I deemed that suspicion valid and worth investigating, so hopefully she'll be able to get in to see a doctor sooner than later.

Me? I am also fine. My allergies are present and accounted for, as usual, but I've been living with them so long I hardly notice unless directly questioned about them. The job landscape has not changed in any direction along any axis; if it does, I will announce it immediately. I feel like the month between the baby's first birthday celebration in mid-March and the little girl's third in mid-April was a bit of a gauntlet, and it may have left me feeling a touch burnt out. Not in an awful ashes-in-my-mouht kind of way, just in an exhausted please-don't-expect-much-effort fashion. I haven't had the mental energy to gather up the portable dvd player and its peripherals in the morning, ergo no movies watched lately. I read a mildly interesting non-fiction book about the persistence of modern conspiracy theories (from the protocols of the Elders of Zion to birthers and 9/11 truthers) and a Batman compilation, but there were numerous days lately where the only things I did on the train were surf the web on my smartphone and take catnaps. I've established previously that little to no pop culture consumption = little to no subject matter for blog posts, and that remains true enough.

And although I have a weird reflexive self-directed-eyerolling reaction to the following, I'll go ahead and put it out there: I've been writing a lot lately, just not here on the blog. There was a time, in the murky primordial epochs of this weblog, when I told myself (truthfully) that I was starting the project not only as an outlet for talking about the things that only I want to talk about, but as an outlet for the act of writing itself, something which I have always claimed is fairly important to me but which I have not always faithfully practiced. At the very least, I told myself, the blog would be good for discipline, a way to force myself to write every day, to keep the creative muscles from atrophying. And then there was a time, somewhere in the mid-to-well-established phase, when I realized that all of the effort I was expending on the blog was almost certainly diverting energy from other potential projects. All well and good to embark on a practice regimen, but what's the point of constant practice of a skill that never gets put to its intended use? I chose to avoid that rhetorical question for as long as possible. But lately it's been impossible to ignore.

I mentioned a couple months ago that I had written a story for How the West Was Weird volume 3, and in fact last night I was e-mailed a galley copy of the book for proofreading. Hopefully pretty soon the cover art for the anthology will be finalized and I'll be allowed to display and promote it. But since turning in that tale I've found myself itching to crank out more and more fiction. Coincidentally, early last month friend o' the blog Harvey Jerkwater approached me with a proposition in which we'd both write some original, marketable fiction and keep each other honest about actually finishing on a set timetable instead of letting it slide into a nebulous maybe-someday state of unbeing. I agreed, and I've been working on that project pretty steadily ever since, but during the brainstorming days of said project I found myself coming up with more ideas than I expected, for a multitude of stories, and I figured rather than let them go to waste I might start fleshing them out as well.

A nifty non-problem to have, obviously, but there are only so many hours in the day, and whereas my days used to consist of showing up for work, doing the relatively few things that were asked of me there, and spending a lot of the rest of my cubicle-bound day blogging, now I find myself coming to work, staying on top of my tasks, and spending a lot of the rest of my time writing or revising some crazy sci-fi or fantasy story or another. It's been gratifying, there's no denying that, but it has pushed the blogging right off the to-do list. And it's not as though I have thousands of followers, or throngs of worried readers posting comments on my last post inquiring after my whereabouts and/or well-being, but I still manage to feel a little guilty for neglecting the blog all the same. Hence this explanation, which I hasten to point out does not include any "but things should get back to normal soon!" bromides. Maybe this is the new normal, maybe I'll only post a couple times a week or a few times a month, for as long as I can keep riding the momentum for fiction-writing that I've been accumulating of late. As I've said towards the end of many a post, more times than I can count, only time will tell!

Seriously, though, if nothing else whenever if ever I manage to get any of this new crop of stories published anywhere, of course I'll crow about here. So there's that!

Weirding out again

I grumped out pretty hard yesterday (somebodygotacaseofthemondays) so let's shift gears altogether today and talk about some genuinely good news of positive developments for me. I recently made some purposefully vague comments about personal projects which I was not yet comfortable elaborating upon in detail, but I am happy to report that as of today I can lift the veil of semi-secrecy: the big project is the third (and, sadly, probably final) volume of How the West Was Weird, and my personal involvement consists of a short story which I submitted for inclusion in the anthology. I found out over this past weekend that my story was accepted and will see print sometime this spring. Which makes me pretty happy!

Thrilled.

For those of you who may be new to the proceedings around here, some background: when volume two of How the West Was Weird came out, back in 2011, I was a contributor to the anthology, which kind of happened in a strangely roundabout way. Basically I was approached out of the blue by the editor of the anthology, because he was looking for additional pieces to fill out the second volume and we had a mutual friend who mentioned I might want to write something, and it so happened that I had written a little vignette years earlier which was definitely weird and approximately western-set, plus had been sitting on my hard drive with no particular purpose. So everything serendipitously came together to everyone's benefit.

Some time after I announced here on the blog that I had a story appearing in How the West Was Weird v.2 (and after I had shamelessly promoted the book with links to purchase it on Amazon) the anthology actually hit the streets and I got my contributor copy and I read the whole thing cover-to-cover. (I don't know if it goes without saying or not that I would do just that, but in case it needs saying, I suppose I am the kind of person who would always be curious about what all of my co-contributors came up with.) The reading experience was positive overall from a pure entertainment perspective, but somewhat frustrating on another level. The vast majority of the other stories in the book were straightforward pulp adventures, and I am not saying that in any kind of disparaging way. I love pulp adventures. I love big, loud, fun, plot-heavy stories; I love other kinds of stories, too, there's a time and a place for everything, but stories with larger-than-life heroes and ever-escalating stakes are a particularly enduring pleasure of mine. And yet, the story I had written that happened to put me in the right place at the right time to effortlessly slide into the How the West Was Weird series was not exactly that kind of story. It was written in an intentionally off-kilter style and its pulpier elements were at least somewhat subverted. Overall I'm sure it struck the editor as a good fit because it added a different note of flavor to the overall anthology, but I found myself jealous of the contributors who had contributed the meat and potatoes that I was theoretically spicing up. And thus I vowed that when (and if) there was a volume three, I would set myself to the task of writing a story that was undeniably straight from the heart of the weird western genre, a lot more in keeping with the ostensible theme and thus more of a main course entertainment.

Since then I've re-read all of Stephen King's Dark Tower books about Roland Deschain the Last Gunslinger, and I've sat down to watch a lot more classic westerns like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, all of which certainly helped. And I've also started raising a little girl (my wife was pregnant with our daughter when the editor initially approached me about participating, and the little girl was a newborn when volume two was published), and that ended up influencing me more than anything else. Somewhere along the line I decided that even better than indulging in my love for pulpy pulse-pounding fantasy and all of its tropes (and cliches) would be carving out a little more new space in the playground for all the little girls out there. So I actually wrote the tale of a young, brave, resourceful cowgirl hunting down bad guys and taking on whatever the world throws at her. I really can't abide the thought of sharing my enthusiasm for adventure stories with all my kids as they grow up, and my sons having no shortage of heroic protagonists to look up to and emulate and identify with, and my daughter having the very limited choice between Wonder Woman and Princess Leia and ... that's about it. Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but not by all that much. And I'm not so full of myself as to think I can level the playing field singlehandedly, but it's always better to do something positive than do nothing. So, my something, coming soon!

I will continue to make use of the How the West Was Weird tag around here as the publication date for volume 3 draws nigh, including when the full table of contents is released and when the final cover art for the book is unveiled, and so on. (That image up above? Nothing really connected to the How the West Was Weird series, just a cool piece of comic book art in the appropriate vein.) My inclusion in the anthology this time around feels much less like a happy accident and much more like something I worked hard at and am commensurately proud of, so, you know, be forewarned that I will probably talk it up a lot.

Saturday Grab Bag on the Path of the Beam

Somehow I completely spaced out during my whole “how I kept the Gunslinger groove going in my mind while waiting to get the next Gunslinger volume” litany and forgot to mention one other piece of genre-bridging entertainment I turned to: How the West Was Weird. (Still available on Amazon!) It probably slipped slightly out of mind because I am ashamed to admit that the book has been out for like a year and I haven’t yet read every story in it. In my defense, I will acknowledge that the quality of the stories exhibits significant variance, shall we say. Couple that with the fact that one of the hurdles of completing any anthology of self-contained short stories is that it’s all too easy to set it aside for long periods of time between one tale and the next because there’s zero narrative momentum to carry you through the whole book, and so it goes. But yeah, I returned to it last week because, at the end of the day, “weird west” is exactly what the Dark Tower saga is, very much so at the outset for the first two or three books, arguably less so as it rambles along, but always essentially rooted there. At this point I’m very nearly done with book two and I’ve been dragging my feet about even ordering a copy of book three, so I’ll likely (finally!) finish HTWWW soon.

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Speaking of Dark Tower, I had forgotten how good The Drawing of the Three was. Going into the re-read, my recollection was that the first three or four books of the series were a bit disjointed and really showed the seams that resulted from stitching together some short stories from the 70’s into one novella and then writing a sequel novel six years after that and so on. I also remember being significantly disappointed when the bizarre other-worldliness of The Gunslinger, with its small hints of connection with the real contemporary world, gave way in the next book to significantly more focus on our world and much less development of Roland’s. To cite another (far more atrocious) example, in the 80’s they made a live-action He-Man movie and rather than setting the entire story on Eternia like the cartoon (and the toy line for that matter), it involved dimensional travel to Earth so that He-Man could meet some plucky American kids who would help save the universe from Skeletor and blah blah blah. I never saw the movie, and I understand it’s total drek, but I was put off from the start by that unnecessary grounding. It basically sends the message that the studio thinks the audience is stupid, that if a story is self-contained in a fantasy setting then no one watching will be able to relate to the protagonists or care about the stakes no matter how universal they may be at their core, but as long as you connect those techno-barbarians and cyber-necromancers with the lives of fictional people dwelling on the East Coast in the present then all is well. As if tons of self-contained fantasy including certain stone cold classics just doesn’t exist. Anyway, I was invested in Roland’s quest from the get-go and desperately curious to learn more about his world, so the hard right turn into assembling his posse of 20th century New Yorkers rubbed me the wrong way. Now, knowing how the whole story involves parallel worlds pretty intrinsically, I’m much more forgiving, and without that chip on my shoulder I enjoyed The Drawing of the Three tremendously.


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OK, at some point I’m going to talk about things other than The Dark Tower, I swear! But not today. One more thing, about a particular line that jumped out at me this time around. The second book starts out with Roland in a bad situation that gets a lot worse before it gets better, and as things are rapidly falling apart in ways which self-evidently must have dire consequences, he thinks to himself, twice, in his stoic interior monologue: I see serious problems ahead. Despite not having much natural faculty for it myself, I do enjoy a good understatement, but I think this one has particular resonance with me now for a couple of reasons. In the time since I first read The Drawing of the Three the Star Wars prequels have come out and I’ve re-watched the original movies many, many more times (funny enough this week’s HIMYM was about hat very thing) and, of course, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” is a recurring line of dialogue from those movies which has only gotten embedded deeper and deeper in my brain over time. But then again, it also echoes “Winter is coming” (or “Winter is coomin’” if you prefer, certainly I do) in its repeated doomsaying and that’s been much bandied about lately, as well.

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Application FAIL

Slate.com recently posted a notice that they were accepting applications for an in-house pop culture blogger, a fact which was brought to my attention by my lovely wife along with some overt encouragement to submit my resume. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and nothing but upside if I should happen to somehow hit the jackpot, right? Maybe, but although I seriously considered the notion I did not, in the end, pull the trigger. I think ultimately there were two big reasons for that.

First, the request as stated on the website was for a cover letter and resume and not, by way of contrast, a chipper note accompanying a blog link. I certainly could have provided the latter and done so as a lark, on the million-to-one shot at getting someone’s attention and proceeding from there but not really missing a beat if I never heard back. But the former case, the implicit seriousness and professionalism of a cover letter and resume? That was a lot harder to wrap my head around.

I haven’t had to shop my resume around since about 2007 or so, and obviously when I did it was to secure a job as a web database programmer. So I wouldn’t have needed to update my resume so much as create a completely new one from scratch that would be geared towards a gig as a writer/blogger. And aside from my English degree, an article I sold to a roleplaying game magazine back in 2006, and of course How the West Was Weird, what else would I even include on that alterna-C.V.? The fact is I don’t have all that much professional (or even volunteer) writing experience and thus a real, grown-up resume trying to make that case would be suspiciously thin on bullet points, and probably formatted in 44 point type. I briefly considered drafting a kind of gag resume that would include my precious few accomplishments and then pad out the rest with obvious jokes: turning everyday pop culture consumption into noteworthy achievements, making outrageous claims at imaginary honorifics, and so on. But then that seemed like a lot of effort for what would likely end up discarded unremarked upon by the designated resume-sorter as they looked for actual, viable candidates.

And speaking of effort and time, my second hesitation arose from the feeling that I wasn’t really qualified for the job. Not in terms of blogging chops, I know I can write every day and do so tolerably well. And not in terms of overall pop culture familiarity, because modern entertainment in all its wondrous forms is something I am passionately, perhaps overly, invested in. But basically in terms of on-top-of-it-ness. Because I’m not. On top of things.

I assume that a pop culture blogger would be expected to read new books when they are released, watch new tv shows the night they are broadcast, download new music the day it becomes available, and respond to those offerings in 750-word posts within a reasonably rapid turnaround time. And man oh man, I am not the guy for that job. This week I am reading a sci-fi novel published in 1976, and I plan on watching a blockbuster from 2008 on DVD on Friday (but no promises!). I love comics but I am deeply ambivalent about whether or not I am going to wander into a comics shop next month and buy any of the “New 52” titles as DC Comics relaunches their entire universe, or if instead I will just continue filling out my eclectic runs of 1980’s series I missed the first time around. And so on. You could say that this blog has a strong pop-culture influence to it, but you could also say with more specificity that the recurring theme is more along the lines of “holy crap check it out you guys somehow I was able, amidst the wrangling of two children under three and the upkeep of my old-as-I-am suburban home, to enjoy the following piece of decades-old entertainment which is somewhat related to one of my weirdly specific geeky interests!”


And that very much works for me, but it doesn’t seem like the perspective that a major online publication would really be recruiting for. So I didn’t throw my hat in the ring. Still and all, if the fine people at Slate stumble across my blog because I linked to them, and they like what they see here and want to talk about a paying contract for me to keep it going, that’s a conversation I’m totally willing to have.

Helping less fortunate kids

It’s August, so I’m allowed to talk about back-to-school stuff now, right? Maybe? What if it’s for a good cause?

Volunteers of America runs a program called Operation Backpack that turns donations into school supplies for needy children in homeless shelters, foster care, and other less than optimal circumstances. I’m not even going to try to be snarky or wry about that, that’s just some outstanding civic heroism right there.

So right now you can help out Operation Backpack and at the same time you can get your hands on an ebook version of How The West Was Weird Volume 2, and its predecessor volume (which doesn’t feature any stories by me but is still a good little anthology) and fifteen other ebooks, all for the low low price of $10, profits passed on to the charity.

CLICK HERE COME ON IT’S TEN BUCKS.

Thanks. I promise to be much more wry and altogether snarkier about inappropriate seasonal lead times when the stores bring out their Halloween stuff in about a week and a half.

Travelin' show

I’ve realized that I have a lot fewer craziness-of-commuting stories these days, and even fewer still that are worth even mentioning here on the blog. A week ago I experienced a moment of awestruck gratitude not to be on Interstate 66. I had left work early to pick up the kids on the little girl’s first day of daycare, and after getting off the VRE and getting in my car I heard a report on the news about the old Highway of Doom – apparently there was a truck fire involving a hay trailer, which of course was sited (a) on the westbound side I would have taken home from the Metro and (b) almost immediately west of the Metro which is where the traffic on 66 always snarls even on a good day. But as profound as the there-but-for-the-grace moment was at the time, it was quickly forgotten and thus hasn’t even come up until now.

But despite (or more accurately because of) the lack of drama associated with the easier and more direct train, I am enjoying my new mode of commuting, even though (as I mentioned previously) it does render my annual tradition of Beach Books on a Bus something of a misnomer. Still, semantics notwithstanding, the tradition must go on! Because basically I am the kind of person who does something twice and then becomes so co-dependently attached to perpetuating it some form of intervention may eventually be required.

(Before I plunge into my recent reading list, however, you know what makes for great summer reading? All the short stories (including mine!) in How the West Was Weird Volume 2! Now available at Amazon.com!)

I’m not sure whether or not BBB 2011 started with The Lost City of Z by David Grann. It’s a non-fiction book composed of equal parts academic research and investigative journalism, not the usual unapologetically trashy genre-ghetto fare which is BBB’s whole reason for being. But the main subject matter is drawn from the pulp-tastic era of exploration in the early 20th century, and evokes everything from Indiana Jones to The Lost World, so that has to count for something. It’s the kind of book I would read for fun at the beach, at any rate.

If that doesn’t qualify, then BBB indisputably got underway with the continuing sci-fi epic of Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah. My Little Bro is a big fan of the Dune books but up until this summer I had only ever read the eponymous first novel in the series, so if nothing else I was looking forward to being able to discuss the expanded world-building with him. I grabbed book two in paperback at the used book store for 35 cents and I can confidently say it was worth every penny! It’s so radically different from the first book that I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed it on its own merits. I also picked up the third book, Children of Dune, for 70 cents recently and may very well end up reading that before this summer is over.


Next up was Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, which was a paperback published in the early 90’s that made its way into my possession not long after but which somehow I was forever putting off reading. I believe I started it once, I don’t remember when, and it just didn’t grab me, so I always believed that reading it would be a chore and there was always something else more pressing to read first. I must have packed up and moved that book at least seven or eight times since graduating college. Now that I’ve finally conquered it, I’m not sure why I was so resistant to it all this time. The early, abortive attempt must have come at a strange time that limited my receptiveness to it, though again it’s hard to reconstruct what that would have been. The novel is a love letter to the pop entertainments of male childhood in the mid-20th century: comic books, rock and roll, baseball, monster movies, stop me of any of this sounds extremely familiar. And it’s done in a style which I’m just going to call American magical realism, and that part probably doesn’t sound familiar but my senior thesis for my English major was on American urban legends and I did a lot of research on the literature of magical realism throughout that project and it’s one of my nerdier obsessions, so yeah a story of pure unfettered geek-Americana where the protagonist at one point loses his dog but then wills the dog to keep living as a zombie dog until he realizes that’s no good for either of them and releases the dog to go be the pet of the ghost of a local boy who died in a fire … THIS IS ALL KINDS OF MY BAILIWICK. But, not to sound too ungrateful about such a custom-tailored thing existing, the book was just kind of all right. It did make me want to check out more McCammon, though, so that’s something.

You may also recall that I promised this year during BBB I would balance out the book-reading with a fair amount of SMOAT (summer movies on a train) but sadly I have even less to report on that front. I did finally watch The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! Which was something of an embarrassing gap because it’s such a geek shibboleth, but man, that movie is not very good. The follow-up to that was going to be Jaws, an even more egregious oversight in my lifelong film intake, but the DVD copy sent to me by Netflix was unwatchably jacked up and kept skipping and stuttering every few minutes. I’ve already sent it back and gotten a replacement, so hopefully the second attempt will fare better.

Now if this absurd triple-digit heatwave would blow out of town so that I’m not totally spent after my fifteen-minute walk to the train platform in the late afternoon, which reduces me to doing way more sleeping on the VRE in the evenings than reading or movie-watching, I’d appreciate it immensely.

In which I reveal far more about my personal creative process than anyone could possibly need to know

I find that the more I know and understand about the context of a thing, the more likely I am to enjoy it or at least appreciate it. That’s probably a universal thing, whether or not most people would be consciously aware (or dorkishly hyper-aware) of it, so I’ll go a step further and say I’m actually a fan of context just as an abstract concept. Which actually explains a lot about me as a pop-culture enthusiast in general. I’m a diehard devotee of the rock album as a meaningful entity that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. I’m intrigued by retrospectives that incorporate artist’s biographies. I’m an absolute sucker for any story that includes the metafictional device of a story-within-a-story, and the more blatant the parallels (e.g. repressive authority figure in framing story becomes despotic supernatural overlord in sub-story) the better. Modern superhero comics are all about the context of their own history, the geek holy grail of Continuity, and anyone who argues to the contrary is being to some degree disingenuous.

When I was in high school I was in a band, sort of, depending on how you define terms. Of course I was in the school band (marching and concert), that’s verifiable, but I’m talking about a garage rock band which is a little trickier to pin down. My best friend played the guitar and I enjoyed singing and could tolerably carry a tune, and my friend’s uncle had built a lo-fi home recording studio in the utility room in his basement, where my friend and I used to hang out a lot and goof around. Eventually we got a couple of other guys who were in the school band to jam with us in the studio; one was a drummer, and the other played sax (as did my guitar-playing friend, who was really the closest thing to a musical prodigy I had encountered at that point in my life) but was willing to be taught to play bass guitar because that was the gap in the traditional rockband lineup that needed filling. We whiled away many an afternoon blasting out bad basement covers of Led Zeppelin, Van Halen and Queensryche. We never had a gig, paying or otherwise, though one time we did invite some other school band cohorts over to listen to a couple of our more-practised tunes. There’s also, to my knowledge, no recorded evidence of this band’s existence, although I do have a cassette’s worth of songs performed just by my buddy and me on vocals and acoustic guitar.

Whether or not this qualifies as being in a band is largely irrelevant, really, because clearly either way this was a very minor and go-nowhere endeavor in the grand scheme of the world. In my mind, though, I was always daydreaming about fifty steps down the road. I didn’t seriously believe that our band would ever become anything real, but it was fun to fantasize about what would happen if it did. Which, in my mind, very much took the form of the retrospective, so I would sit in my French III class and doodle in my notebook and come up with our extensive back catalog as viewed from about the time we were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I brainstormed the names of albums and the cover art for them and the track listings, all of which would show a certain amount of evolution over the long haul. If I remember correctly, the band wouldn’t record its magnum opus rock opera until the third album or so, because the debut album would just be straight-ahead in-your-face grand entrance anthems and the second album would be totally whoa next-level mind-blowing, and THEN (and ONLY THEN) would the world be ready for the only possible way to top that, a combination of musical and storytelling genius which would make Tommy seem like Rock Around the Clock.


(The vast majority of the time when I recollect the insane hubris of being 16 years old I wince and cringe in horror, but I swear, sometimes I just miss the sheer audacity of it all.)

So times change and life goes on but some habits really die hard. Rocking and/or rolling hasn’t always been my most prominent creative outlet; neither has writing, either, but it’s arguably been essentially constant, always there even when overshadowed by something else. (Or you could argue that when it comes right down to it, penning the libretto to an imaginary heavy metal singspiel or running a densely backstoried roleplaying campaign, it’s all been writing all along.) And when I think about writing, I’m just as likely to think in those broad, pre-retrospective swoops as in specific, nuts-and-bolts story-constructing terms. I’ve lived out entire careers in my head involving various genres and conventional-wisdom-defying crossovers thereof. One of these days maybe I’ll even get around to actually writing something that could fit into one of those pre-fab contexts I so adore.

Or maybe I already have? The odd thing (ok, one of many, many odd things) is that once I acclimated myself to the notion of completely artificial contexts I found it liberating to leapfrog wildly around what would otherwise seem to be a one-way path. A normal artistic career would generally seem to start with the artist following in the footsteps of traditional masters, then maybe doing things that were more and more experimental, then possibly feeling like the envelope had been pushed far enough and going back to elemental basics. Ideally that entire arc is a journey of discovery but it’s somehow become weirdly predictable, and when you think of it that way it’s like having a map of short-cuts. Why not jump right into the experimental stuff, if that happens to strike your fancy?

Which brings us (surprise! This was all going somewhere!) to a few years ago when I decided I would try something slightly ambitious to jump-start my writing. I would crank out as many short stories as I possibly could (at least half a dozen but preferably more like a full dozen) and I would shop them around to as many magazines or websites or other publishing venues that actually pay for fiction submissions as I could possibly stand before the crush of rejections overwhelmed me. And like many a noble experiment, the actual results were both mixed and somewhere below expectations. I think I finished something like three stories, one of which was just awful (but at least got a long-simmering idea out of my head), one of which was decent and one of which was … weird. The weird one was the only one of the three that got any kind “wow” reaction from some (but by no means all) of the friends and loved ones I showed it to before trying to outright sell it. It didn’t get any bites in the publishing market, but neither did the semi-decent normal story (I don’t think I bothered even trying to shop around the wretched pump-priming effort). And then the whole experiment kind of stopped being something I actively devoted energy to.

Here’s the thing about the weird little third story, though: it’s a trifle. And deliberately so. Because of course in the midst of the writing experiment I was envisioning an anthology of short stories, all by me, most of which would be substantial and meaty, but of course any good anthology is going to have palate-cleansers and amuse-bouches and so forth to break up the heavier plates that are the real feature attractions of the feast. Logically you might focus first and foremost on those main dishes and then later go back and spice things up, but as I’ve presumably made clear by now I’m perfectly happy to pretend the big accomplishments are already done and work on the fun little counterpoints.

In the specific case of my weird little story, I thought about traditional narrative structures and what I consider The Big Divide between classical voice and tense (third-person and past, respectively) and modern voice and tense (first-person and present) and thought an interesting diversion would be to do neither of those and write a story in second-person future tense. Which is patently ridiculous, which of course made it that much more fun, above and beyond the genre-tastic premise itself which I came up with, which was also fun.

However I don’t want to give away what that premise is because I would much rather you read the story itself, which you can totally do because, long after my experiment crashed and burned, the story is about to be published. Granted, it’s as part of an anthology by various authors and not my own personal greatest hits, but it’s still pretty cool. How that came to pass is a long story in itself and I’ve probably rambled enough as it is (not to mention if I save the telling of it for another day I can plug the book again later, too) so please allow me to proudly present How the West Was Weird, Volume 2.


The book will be on sale to the general public on July 1, but as a contributor I have an inside track and I can hook you up with a sweet pre-order deal (which also gets you free shipping) by directing you to click this link right here. So order early and order often! Tell your friends, or any affable strangers who randomly profess to you a love of short fiction or cowboys in combination with horror, sci-fi and fantasy elements! Snag a whole case of copies, keep one and donate the rest to libraries, schools and prisons!

Yeah, ok, fine, I’m not very good with the hard sell and shameless self-promotion. But I had to put it out there, and if it moves even a single copy of the book that otherwise would have languished in the warehouse, that’d be pretty cool.