Vinnie the Vole

A wave

2012-01-13T19:16:00.000-06:00

of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls' tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: "Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

-James Joyce, The Dead

The Damnation of Memory is now available for the Kindle

2012-01-05T00:47:00.000-06:00

And for all of you hip cats that enjoy reading books digitally, especially on those nifty new Kindles, The Damnation of Memory is now available for approximately the cost of a good protein bar. Advantage: no brown rice syrup aftertaste.

The Damnation of Memory is Here!

2011-12-14T21:47:00.001-06:00

I just got my first copies of The Damnation of Memory today.

Many of you know that this book has been an unusually long time in the making. In fact, I actually finished this one before I even started working on Life After Sleep, which came out earlier this year. I finished the first draft of Damnation and sent it to Paul in late 2008, before I was made an editor at Silverthought, which to give you a sense of scope was a few weeks before Barack Obama was elected. And it's been in post-production since then, delayed at various points due to life in general and creative rethinking; the book just needing that much time to fully mature under what seemed like a never-ending series of revisions and rewrites.

But all that's over, and it's finally here, and I couldn't be happier about it. This book has been my co-pilot of sorts for the last three years, with the manuscript accompanying me during events both good and bad. I remember taking it with me on a weekend trip with the O'Malleys when John was very young, and working on it late into the night, falling asleep on the couch in the big rented weekend home so I wouldn't keep anyone else awake. I remember taking it with me on several long train trips from Chicago to New York, typing scenes that took place in the very same northeast corridor that I was watching the sun come up over. I had this book with me, either in my thoughts or on a glowing laptop screen, as I traveled to visit my grandmother Laura Thompson when she became progressively more and more ill with cancer, and again when I rode the train home that final time after she passed. Some of that loss is there, on those pages. A lot of it, actually, and other sorts of loss, and grief, and anger, and resolve, and wonder at how easy it is to lose perspective in this upside-down world we live in. It's not an emotionally easy book for me, in other words, but it's here now, for happier or sadder, and every bleary-eyed re-read of it at 3AM on my chilly, unheated front porch has finally added up to this stack of books on my desk, wrapped in a gorgeous painting by Deborah Lader titled "Flying".

I've once again really had a resoundingly positive experience with the editing process. I know writers who say they just flat out hate editing their work; that it's a part of the birth of a book that they don't look forward to at all, and I couldn't disagree more. As long as I've been fiddling with it, changing phrases here and inflections there, I'm certain today that it didn't take the full shape I wanted it to until right at the end of all of this work. Maybe that's too egotistical of a way to phrase that... I should say that by the end of the editing process, I started to surprise myself that I had written this, which is always the point where I know that a project like this is finally close to done, and where I can only give humble thanks to the people who helped me along the way, in this case in particular my editor Paul and the cover artist Deborah Lader, but more generally to my wife and family as well because I absolutely couldn't have done it without them.

So even though we haven't had the official release party for it yet, it's available to buy now through Amazon.com, Silverthought.com, and will soon be available at several bookstores in Chicago. If you're a Kindle reader, there will likely be an eBook version coming soon as well.

Four Stories, by John

2011-11-04T23:25:00.002-05:00

Do I have a story for you

My son came home today from his pre-school with an unusual assignment: for homework he was to sit down with us and write a story that he would then use in class to make a book. John is somewhat aware of what I do and the fact that in addition to "fixing people's backs" (massage therapy) that I also write books. So he was thrilled when I asked him if I could share his stories on my webpage with my friends. Here we go:

Story #1: The Lion's Life

First there was a lion king, then the baby grew in the mommy's belly. Now, then a pigeon walked by and then the pigeon took the baby and the mom was so mad. Then the shuttles came down and then the aliens killed the baby but the pigeon killed the aliens. He broke the aliens with his beak and the baby lion was saved. And then the tools came by and told the baby lion they can share their friends. And Handy Manny told the baby lion he can stay if he wants. And that's the story of the Lion's Life. The End.

One of father's vintage
Go-Bots.

Story #2: The Heart Loved the Stick

First there was two friends, a Heart and a Stick. Before long, they married each other and turned big. But the bad guys surrounded them but the Autobots came and told the bad guys, so now you know what they do. Someone tells someone and they tell. And maybe they will all discover that you can't make up a story if it's real or fake. And that's how they got married. But you can't do anything without your friend. The End. By John.

Story #3: The Red Crayon and the Blue Crayon

There was two friends, a blue crayon and a red crayon. Then an orange crayon came by and he put one spell on both crayons. Then they were iced. The good guys came by and broke the evil spell. The rocket ship zoomed and killed the bad guy for good. Then the Bakugans came and saved every one of them. And that's the story of the red crayon and the blue crayon.

Evil Autobot?

Story #4: 3,2,1... Go! The Pencil Killed the Evil Autobot by John. Illustrator: Daddy. The one who reads it: John Kangly Stanger (no idea: ed)

Deep deep deep down in the sea lived an octopus and her baby octopus. Then a crayon and a pencil came down and married in the water. But the octopus and her babies did not let those guys marry in the water. So they let out a crew of sharks to throw them away. But the sharks ate them up accidentally. Then they turned into octopus babies and they dived right back into the water. Then the evil Autobot came down and took over the whole water city. And that's the story of the pencil and the crayon. By John. True story.

You talk a good game, Mark, but just exactly what's been taking up all of your time?

2011-10-30T19:06:00.003-05:00

So yeah, here I am a good, I don't know, several months after having posted anything substantive on here and I'm still inexplicably getting hundreds of hits per day on this site. Which, I've gotta say, does make me feel a little guilty. And of course I never wanted this site to devolve into a series of long-winded excuses of why I don't have time to post here, but this time I actually do have some good ones.

The last year has meant enormous upheaval in my work life. I was working part-time at two different practices six days a week for almost an entire year before I left the one in Mount Prospect and went to work full-time in August for the practice in Lincoln Park. This was a good move for me, but it's always stressful to switch jobs and my boss from the Mount Prospect practice always treated me like family instead of just a mere employee, so I was sad to see her move to California.

Nevertheless, my new practice in the city is very fun, very busy, and I work with some terrific new folks who, similarly to my old boss, really "get" good patient care and go the extra mile to make sure that our patients get the most out of their treatment with us. So that's reassuring and I feel confident that I'm in the right place for this phase of my career. If my schedule is anything to go by (usually booked solid after only three months of being there full-time), I fit right in.

DePaul's quad

Also, importantly, this new practice of mine happens to be located only about three blocks from DePaul University, where I've been accepted into the Masters program in Writing & Publishing, which I started last month and am already nearly through the Autumn quarter of. DePaul goes by quarters instead of semesters, and though I dare not question their math, there are apparently only three quarters per calendar year. No judgment here, just saying.

Your SEO meta-tags are
poorly conceived, father.

I'm learning all sorts of fun, rad stuff in the Writing & Publishing curriculum, including a lot I didn't know about web design, effective writing for the web, SEO, and other technical things for my class on digital publishing. You'd think by looking to the right-hand bar here and noticing that I've had this blog now for a whopping thirteen years that there wouldn't be all that much you could teach me about writing for the web. And you'd be wrong. There are a ton of fascinating web-use studies and style guides emerging that really make a lot of sense when sitting down to put thoughts on something as simple as a blog, and I'm slowly becoming a convert to their logic.

So if you're in grad school full-time and working full-time, why haven't you had time to blog? you ask. It can't be all that hard to carve a few minutes out of every week to post clever or creatively-phrased thoughts about your life on this little online diary, right? Right?

Yeah, well I've also been doing a shitload of writing, including four new short stories (one of which was already published in CClaP's anthology American Wasteland: bleak tales of the future on the tenth anniversary of 9/11) and two new guest blog posts at Patrick Wensink's We Who Are About To Die and Robert Duffer's Experiments in Manhood, I'm working on a collaborative project that's still in the early phases so I won't go into it further yet, AND finally at long last my latest novel The Damnation of Memory will be released within the next few weeks.

This is a robot dressed as a
caveman. No caption needed.

I've been trying to get out to reading events on a semi-regular basis as my punishing schedule allows, and since I last posted I was able to attend the annual Chicago Tribune Printer's Row Lit Fest, Poetry Magazine's Printer's Ball, a Quickies! (run by my fellow Chicago writer Lindsay Hunter), as many Orange Alerts as I could get to, the CCLaP Multi-Release Party (Life After Sleep was one of the books), and the release party at Quimby's for American Wasteland where I read with Delphine Pontvieux and Larry Santoro. Quimby's, if you don't know, is probably the coolest bookstore I've ever been in in my life, and aside from shelves and shelves of some of the most legit indie fiction out there, it's just packed to the rafters with random junk/treasure like a life-sized pair of mannequin she-devils and a robot dressed like a caveman. I mentioned to my friend and author Katherine Scott Nelson that I if I ever manage to obtain a full-on Man Cave, I want it to look like Quimby's.

My Crane technique will defeat
your Dragon technique.

And of course that's just the formal stuff. I haven't even mentioned yet that my son John is getting HUGE, and, unbelievably enough, will be starting Kindergarten in ten short months. Even though he was a December baby, and therefore gets almost an entire extra year before starting formal school, that still seems lightning fast to me somehow. It was like he was two and a half for about a decade and then suddenly he's going to be asking me for the keys to my car. I'm only partly joking about this, he did actually ask me a month or two back how old he would have to be before he could drive a car.

Him: Dad, when can I drive a car?
Me: When you're sixteen.
Him: I'm four.
Me: I know.
Him: Will you teach me?
Me: Sure.
Him: Can I drive your car?
Me: Uhhh...

So not fucking around...

John has also discovered just in the last month or so a budding love for video games. That's right, that earth-shaking rumble you felt a few weeks ago wasn't another sub-oceanic mega-quake, it was the confluence of interests between two equally devoted fans of pirates, spacemen, ninjas, knights, and pretty much anything that carries a sword or laser pistol. Add this to his (and my) affection for LEGOs, and you get LEGO Universe, a kid-friendly MMORPG with characters made out of... you guessed it. I was sure it would take John at least a while before he could master the controls and dexterity necessary to move and shoot and jump in a totally 3D environment. I mean, we had Frogger in the arcade when I was four and a half and THAT was hard. He sat next to me for about a week before trying it himself and now he patiently assures me: "I've got this, Dad." Here's Ruckus Sam, our main character.

Too pimp?

My beloved Volvo S60 turbo finally gave up the ghost. Or, more precisely, was threatening to cost me several thousand dollars to repair during a time when several thousand dollars is several thousand dollars more than I have to spend on a ten year old car, so I traded it in for a sensible, responsible daddy car, which weirdly was only available in the package I wanted in white with black tinted windows. I wasn't sure I was a Hyundai guy at first, and I really wasn't sure I could pull off something quite so pimp-looking as a white car with dark tint, but I've come to love my new ride and it has all sorts of nifty little things that weren't available when I bought the Volvo, like full Bluetooth compatibility with my phone, which means in addition to podcasts and streaming radio, I can now take calls from you on my cell while driving to and from work and school at all hours of the day and not simultaneously crash my car trying to get the combination of wires and adapters just right. So call me. I'll probably answer. I've got to tell you, as well, after having bought premium gas for a turbo engine for almost six years, the pump is a hell of a lot less painful now when I'm filling up.

Lego Boba Fett
stares at you icily.

Let's see, what else? I've updated the look of all of my pages so they sort of match each other now. www.markrbrand.com, www.vinniethevole.com, and www.breakfastwiththeauthor.com all now have vaguely similar aesthetics, and they're all cross-linked for maximum surf-age. Hope you get a chance to check them all out because with this digital publishing class I'm taking I've rededicated myself somewhat to keeping all of them current and updated.

That's about it, I guess. More posts coming soon.

It's October, I haven't updated in months, and my apology is a pile of awesome music

2011-10-23T01:42:00.000-05:00

So feast your ears on these:

This song is just terrific. First heard it during the end credits of the first episode of season 3 of HBO's Hung. Such a great anthem for recovering from this shitty economy. I work, and so do you.

It's like if tween-aged Kate Nash and Grace Potter had a sleepover and their crazy college-student older cousin stopped in with a handle of whiskey and full orchestra.

I heard this one on Pandora a few weeks ago and hunted for days to find it on here. I didn't even know what it was until I heard the last line "everything looks perfect from far away". There are many, many versions of this on YouTube, but this cover by Iron & Wine was the raw-est and captures the alternate meaning of the song so well.

This song will rip your heart out and feed it to baby ducks. Johnny Cash did a cover of it that just leaps down your throat, but the original, if you can stomach how slow and emotionally brutal it is, is the better version.

When I purchased my new car following the untimely death of my Volvo, I unknowingly also got an active subscription to XM Satellite radio. I happened to be surfing on the "Jam_ON" station and heard this little gem. I had never heard of this band, but this is a fun song at high volume.

This is one of those songs that I hated initially and it somehow grew on me during a breakneck race to get to school on time one Monday evening, weaving in and out of Chicago traffic. Put this song on loud, roll down the windows, and floor it.

In case you were wondering where to be on August 10th...

2011-07-22T08:52:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to say that my reading is going to stand up all that well alongside these other literary behemoths, but I'm not NOT going to say it either. That's right, Ben Tanzer, I just called you a behemoth.

Full details here.

Oryx and Crake & The Year of the Flood

2011-07-03T03:07:00.000-05:00

Even for someone who reads as much as I do, three or four novels per month for pleasure and again as many for work with Silverthought, and countless short stories and non-fiction on top of that, there once in a while will come along something that feels less like a gentle nudge and more like being hit by a freight train. The last time one of these literary sledgehammers hit me was when I picked up Cormack McCarthy's The Road, and put it down finished five or six hours later after having forgotten that the world existed. That was, I think, 2006-ish, and five years later it's happened again. The book this time? Margaret Atwood's 2003 spec-fi masterpiece Oryx and Crake.

This was one of those experiences that my friends and I talk about from time to time where we pick something up once, twice, maybe half a dozen times, and just can't get into it, and then somehow the right confluence of attitude, time, and circumstance hits us and the piece finally connects. I had taken out Oryx and Crake from the library several times, read the first chapter, put it down, and returned it because I just hadn't felt the need to pick it back up before the due date. This time, though, determined to get through it just to say I'd done it, I instead got the audiobook from the library and listened to it while I was driving back and forth to work. I can say now, a week later after having devoured it and its companion novel The Year of the Flood, that virtually the only flaw of Oryx and Crake is the fact that that first chapter doesn't grab harder. Because, and I do not exaggerate, the remainder of the book was one of the half dozen most superb pieces of sci-fi/speculative fiction I've ever read. Game-changing-ly superb. Like when I read Orwell's 1984 or Jack London's The Iron Heel, I had that old familiar feeling that this was one of those books that would forever influence my work from that point forward.

Where to even start with these books? Well, I guess the best place would be to describe what they are, for those who don't know. The storyline is one of eco-terrorism, global pandemic, capitalism-gone-totatitarianism, and finally the end of the world and what comes after, told from the point of view of half a dozen characters including the two young men who are central to the plot, their common friends, lovers, family members, and associated supporting characters. Oryx and Crake is primarily about the two men, Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake) and their lifelong friendship that evolves from having grown up in the same corporate-controlled utopian compound. Both brilliant, both slightly outcasts, they end up weaving in and out of each other's lives through high school and college until they're both employed by mega-corporations themselves. Though their lives diverge, they remain friends until the end of the world, of which the actual event is the story's revelation/climax. Their shared intellectualism in the face of a world that seems bent on simply chugging ahead with the wasteful, soulless, destructive, image-obsessed status quo binds them together, as does their love for a mysterious girl named Oryx.

The Year of the Flood is a companion novel set in the same geographic region during the same timeframe as Oryx and Crake, but is told from the point of view of several of the supporting characters from the first novel, including some of Snowman and Crake's girlfriends, their underground resistance friends, and various other notable personalities only hinted at in Oryx and Crake. Of the two, Oryx and Crake is so flatly brilliant that it's my decided favorite, but The Year of the Flood was also excellent and in particular the ending was beautifully done. Without giving anything away, I will say that if you read Oryx and Crake, you've not really read the ending until you finish The Year of the Flood as well. With the two books, Atwood creates this marvelous double-crescendo ending sequence that turns what seems at the end of Oryx and Crake to be a Lord of the Flies-style non-ending into the pause before a more robust, fitting, and epic finale.

There's just so much to like about these books. The science, the biology and anthropology alone, must have taken Atwood years to synthesize into the concepts and plot line she weaves here. The setting is fresh and interesting and manages to jump off the page, and Atwood's characterization, which was always good but has come light-years since The Handmaid's Tale, is as good in Oryx and Crake as I've seen from her. And of course the format is just about as innovative as it gets. A double story rather than a series or a trilogy, which is the regular yawning usual and something I haven't seen since Greg Bear's Hammer of God/Anvil of Stars companionate novels, and even better, concurrent ones that have highly woven plot lines and manage to create an ending that's endlessly more deft and satisfying than the typical, functional three-act structure. My brain is already working on ways to incorporate the spirit of this playfulness into some of my own work. Screw with structure, twist the conventional into something better, something cleverer, something that gets more to what you want to say...

I've had a few days to digest these books and give them some thought and I've settled on the fact that what really sets them apart from most of the post-apocalyptic fiction I've read is that even though the characters feel in very present, real peril at all times, the books ultimately are about how good friends are for the soul, and how they can make something unbearable bearable, and how even if the silly nonsense that we call "the world" fell apart, as long as there were humans left to make friends with, we'd more or less ok. That's not, of course, the plot of the story, but these books leave you with this distinct impression.

Although the year isn't over yet, and I've got some terrific books on my reading list at the moment such as Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren, Larry Niven's Ringworld, and Neal Stephenson's Anathem, all of which have garnered high praise from people I respect, I'm going to call this the year of Oryx and Crake & The Year of the Flood. It's been about five years since I've read anything so haltingly brilliant and that beckoned so directly at my own work, and it would be a tall order to match that any time soon.

Daddy's: a review

2011-07-03T01:57:00.001-05:00

One of my best purchases at Printer's Row Lit Fest this year was a copy of Lindsay Hunter's book Daddy's, which I've been meaning to get my hands on for a while. Those familiar with Chicago's literary scene, particularly the many local reading series events, will know Lindsay by her phenomenal, riveting reads. Often funny, loud, irreverent, sweaty rants of pure awesomeness, her short stories start like the sweet tang of spicy Buffalo sauce and then burn the living hell out of your guts on the way down.

I'm ashamed now, because of how good the book ended up being, that I was skeptical at first if her printed work was going to be as good in my quiet living room chair as it was being howled at me through a microphone in a bar by Lindsay herself, but I'm here to assure all of you doubters that not only is Daddy's every bit the authentic experience in book form, but several of the stories here which I've not heard her read live quickly became some of my favorite work of hers. Also, happily, the cadence of the words on the page was such that while I was reading them I was able at times to easily conjure her voice in my head using phrases like:

And then there was that day we had a dinner for you because you were leaving and I had the lady in town make you a five-layer fudge cake with a crushed potato chip layer, and on the top in script she wrote Food Luck instead of Good Luck, and I didn't say anything when I picked it up because Food Luck was goddamned right, you know?

And no, I didn't have to hunt for that, I just literally opened the book to a random page and copied the first sentence. That's how Lindsay this book is, and really, let's be honest, for this book to BE Lindsay Hunter, all those riotously hilarious and still sorta-spooky turns of phrase, all that hellacious southern swagger, is all we really want or need.

But hey, since you asked, it's also by our friends at Featherproof, who turned it into a tacklebox that's opened horizontally and read like a folded letter instead of a book, and full of their usual earmarks of "we realize there's a human being on the other end of this book that likes to be entertained in more than just one way"-ishness, including such small but welcome touches as unobtrusive but oddly eye-catching illustrations and fine details that you'll notice obliquely but which have editors and book designers like me drooling (a particularly nice title page, and clever, innovative layout throughout).

The verdict: Hunter loaded for bear, Featherproof weaving their book-voodoo, and me left wondering if I wouldn't like flash fiction a hell of a lot more if it were all this good. If you like to read books out loud, this might be an early Christmas present to give yourself. My favorite story of the whole thing? Marie Noe Talks to You About Her Kids gave me goosebumps. Not metaphorical emoticon internet goosebumps, I'm talking it turned the flesh of my arms into gravel.

Check it out here: http://www.featherproof.com/Mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=272&Itemid=41

Bigother

2011-06-10T19:46:00.001-05:00

And the hits just keep on coming! My interview regarding all things Life After Sleep, Breakfast With the Author, Damnation of Memory, sci-fi, Chicago and much more. Because I'm verbose like that. Special thanks to Davis Schneiderman and the rest of the Bigother staff for this one.

Davis Schneiderman: Describe where the idea for Sleep emerged from, if you can…
Mark Brand: I first started piecing together Life After Sleep in 2007, shortly after the birth of my son. I was working 50+ hours a week in a medical office and was sleeping only 3-4 hours per night. As all new fathers do, I eventually came to accept that this is typical life with a new baby at home, but at the time it felt to me like I was the lone astronaut on a rocket to Planet Insanity. I had also always wanted to write something that pulled in some of my knowledge of medicine and the hospital/clinical environment, but I hadn’t really come across an idea I liked enough to make that happen.
By chance, I stumbled across an article in Discover magazine called “How to sleep 4 hours per night.” The article made mention vaguely of TMS technology and the potential side effect it has of putting people straight into REM sleep. My first thought was THAT’s what I want for Father’s Day, and my second thought was this would make an awesome short story.

(Click below for the entire interview)

http://bigother.com/2011/06/10/the-big-other-interview-253-mark-brand-3/

markrbrand.com launched!

2011-06-01T21:10:00.000-05:00

Oh, and as if I didn't already have enough happening this week, I also launched my long-overdue author website http://www.markrbrand.com, which has the most current information about my books, writing, appearances, Breakfast With the Author, and other links. I'll still be updating http://www.vinniethevole.com, but the new site, in addition to being some pretty snazzy eye-candy, will give you all of the pertinent links in one easy location without having to go digging through the blog archives. Surf on over and check it out!

Breakfast With the Author, Episode 4

2011-05-31T20:56:00.000-05:00

Episode 4 is live! My guests this time around were none other than the founding fathers (sadly minus founding mother Becci Noblit Goodall) of Silverthought Press. Executive Editor Paul Hughes, Associate Editor Russell Lutz, Staff cover designer Len Nicholas, and myself, at our very first on-location Breakfast With the Author shoot. Jumbo's Diner, Gouverneur, NY.

Breakfast With the Author, Episode 4 from Mark Brand on Vimeo.

ALSO: For your viewing pleasure, Breakfast With the Author is now available on iTunes for the low-low price of FREE!! View it on the go with your iPad, iPhone or video-capable iPod. Click here to subscribe: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/breakfast-with-the-author/id435872153

Life After Sleep in Time Out Chicago

2011-05-31T20:46:00.000-05:00

Life After Sleep got a very nice write-up over the weekend in Time Out Chicago in a very cool article about the increasing presence of digital books in the reading landscape. A big thanks to their Books section editor Jonathan Messinger.

Life After Sleep reviewed at ReadAllDay.org

2011-05-31T19:50:00.000-05:00

A huge thank you to Nina Sankovitch, who gave Life After Sleep a very warm review over at http://www.readallday.org.

In Life After Sleep, a fascinating and very funny science fiction novella about an invention that allows human beings to thrive on very little sleep, author Mark Brand explores the essence of our innately contradictory nature: no matter how much we humans beings have, we always want more, and no matter how potentially good something is for us, we can turn that good thing into a burden of stress and expectation. Click here to continue...

The Golden Age

2011-05-02T00:29:00.000-05:00

It seems like forever since I've written a blog post just for the sake of writing one. At a quick glance it hasn't really been forever, just a little over ten months. Which is sort of forever when you're the parent of a young child, but that's what I want to talk about right now.

To give you a little background, in case you've been living under a rock, I published my new book Life After Sleep on March 7th. If the title alone doesn't give it away, this is a book about what happens when people have a dysfunctional relationship with work and sleep, which I've generally had for the last five years or so at various intervals and particularly intensely for the last six months. Without getting too much into it, this last six months has seen the confluence of several different events in my life: my wife finishing the last grueling slog of her Master's degree in counseling, me being offered a position at a second practice which, while a godsend in terms of cash flow at a crucial turning point in our lives, means I've been obliged to work six days and sometimes 50-60 hours per week, and the completion of two projects I've been working on since roughly 2008, the first of which was Life After Sleep, and the second of which is The Damnation of Memory, still in the works.

On it's own, any one of these three factors could spell chaos for my general well-being, and add to this the fact that my son turned four during this time, which as any parent can tell you is a fascinating and delicate transition period from toddlerhood to kid-dom, and which I wanted to be as mentally and emotionally present for as possible.

Enter my life, after sleep.

I'm not 100% sure since I didn't keep close count, but I'm willing to hazard a guess that from October 2010 to March 2011, I might have gone to bed before 1:00 AM half a dozen times at most. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do what I needed to do to make all of this happen. My commutes are usually about an hour each way, six times per week, and this continues up until today, though I'm currently trying to puzzle out how to reduce this back to something resembling sane. I haven't taken a break in months or an honest-to-God vacation in years. Anyway, long story short, I got the first book done, completed what turned out to be a very intense post-production phase and release, and, even though tax season decided to take a giant shit on my head and hand me a $500 tax bill instead of the $3,000 tax return I was anticipating-hence killing my release-party funds, it's all progressing quite well so far.

As an experiment, I decided that for the month of April, with most of my obligations to the first book handled, I was going to try and be in bed no later than midnight, every single night. I recognized the fact that this was going to essentially kill most of my free time for the entire month, but it was getting to the point where I was just basically exhausted every minute of the night and day, and the stress was starting to unravel me a little. So no matter what I was doing, no matter how important it was or what might get forgotten, it was lights-out by 12:00.

Hoo-boy did that make a difference. I could take up a whole blog post just talking about the little physical differences of sleeping more, but you probably already know these. I'm calmer, steadier on my feet, more mentally focused, and less prone to random panic-attack type feelings during the day that are really just glucose-cravings and adrenal-gland exhaustion masquerading as stress. I started dreaming again, vividly, and it was almost unnerving. I realized that for months at a time I didn't dream, and I certainly didn't remember them if I did. Now I dream almost every night, and sometimes even just when I nap.

Oh, and I nap now. Or at least I did today. Even when I felt like I had more to do, endlessly more, ALWAYS more. I took a nap instead. Not because I felt like I needed it like the weary Mark a month ago needed it, but because I knew how it would make me feel afterward. The dozing, the dreaming, the feel of sunlight in my face from the bedroom window. It was glorious. And when I woke up, I realized that there were at long last no more fires to put out.

This got me thinking about how much John has changed in the last six months, too. For the parents of a two or three year old, telling them that things would get so much better, and that it would happen so quickly, would seem cruelly implausible. And yet it happened. Within not even six months but maybe even just one or two, John has almost completely left the willful, whiny, indignant, barbarian part of toddlerhood behind and just... evolved. Where previously things like rules or conversation or structure would infuriate him, he now effortlessly navigates them and seeks them out. Where he finds himself lost, he asks for help, when he's bored or upset he masters himself and his emotions and seeks out the right ways to get engaged again. He's happy, and friendly, and helpful, and very deeply sweet-hearted. An enormous leap forward from the peace-demolishing caveman animus that he was a year ago. I've seen it happen in him, and even now I think that if you'd have told me that it would happen when he was three, I wouldn't have believed it. Not that fast. Not that much. But it did, and from one parent to another if you are one, it's awesome.

And a dozen other things have started to all go right at once. Beth will be finished with her school in less than a month, and despite some harrowing financial twists and turns (on top of the obvious life-altering hatefulness of this bullshit economy) we got through it without falling into the traps and bad times that have fallen on so many other unsupported families. We were strong enough to do it almost completely on our own, and that's something powerful enough that I'm not ashamed to admit I'm very proud of. And the books are coming along, I've started tentatively exercising again, which feels wonderful and awful all at once, but will eventually spell better well-being, and we found a babysitting service that doesn't charge $20 an hour, and John is big enough to do things like go to movies and play board games and things that engage Beth and I beyond simply our ability to dutifully cater to his every need. Soon there will be no more late-night classes, no more inconvenient and uber-expensive unpaid internship, and most importantly, less stress on her. No more fluctuations of money that necessitate me planning months ahead for nail-biting financial acrobatics. Just normalcy on a hundred different fronts, and after the last four years, normalcy seems like a memory of some sunny room somewhere.

And for the first time today, when I woke up from a long nap, the kind of nap it felt for almost four years like I'd never be able to take again, I realized that even with this shitbag economy and even with the goofy work schedule and miles and miles of work ahead of me, that the last four years weren't the tone of the rest of my life. They were just a transition, and one that I needed to have more faith would pass in its own time. I think now in retrospect that it's so easy when you finally take in the enormity of being a parent, and all of the bottom-line responsibility and accountability that this entails, that you just get used to acting all the time like you know everything. Because to your child, you DO know everything, and if yours is as perceptive and strong-spirited as mine, anything less than total confidence will get picked apart in an instant. And yet, after years of trying to get up every day and be the general of your own tiny, mutinous army, you can wake up in a sunbeam in your bed and realize that you didn't know everything, and that this is a good thing, because you thought all that was ahead was a great big sea of suck, and you were wrong.

And maybe what's next IS the golden age.

The Universe in Miniature in Miniature: a review

2011-04-10T19:53:00.000-05:00

As is usually the case with me, I’m woefully behind on my reading list, but I did want to take a minute today to say a few things about Patrick Somerville’s latest book, a story-cycle-ish collection titled The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. I say “story-cycle-ish” because despite being a very easy book to pick up and enjoy, it does to some extent defy description and categorization.

There was a lot of hype surrounding the release of this book, and since I’m a little bit of a loner/oddball in the Chicago literary world (because I write mostly science fiction) I was very excited to not only get my hands on something put out by the excellent Featherproof Press, something by Somerville, who got strong recommendations from several other writers I respect, but let’s face it, I was excited to dig into some hometown sci-fi.

Well, I finally finished it after slogging through a very busy few months of post-production on a longer project I’ve been working on and I’m happy to report the book was great in a few key ways. First of all, and I want to just get this out of the way right off the bat because this is huge: Somerville’s grasp of naturalistic dialogue is of the sort that makes other writers just turn off their computers at night and go to sleep rather than try to compete. In a book that was, at least on paper, a sort of low-intensity hybrid of Douglas Coupland and Douglas Adams, which flashed from stories smart and poignant (“Easy Love”, “The Wildlife Biologist”), to icily vivid (“No Sun”), to crisp and hurried (“The Cop”), to funny and unhurried (“Hair University”), to conceptual (“The Abacus”), and even to puzzlingly incoherent (“Pangea”), the inconsistency was beaten back by the strength of his dialogue, which I can only describe as jealousy-inducing.

Just one example of many:

“I don’t want a bunch of flowers that have a special meaning.”

“Ah.”

“They say a red rose is this, a white rose is that.”

“White rose means happy love.”

“Well fuck that.”

At first I thought I might write a little cheat-sheet type guide to the stories I liked the best (“No Sun”, “Easy Love,” “The Wildlife Biologist”, “Hair University”, and “People Like Me”), but the more I thought about that, the more I figured my own personal preference for certain tones and story constructions would intrude. Which would be inappropriate because there’s really something here for everyone. There’s flash fiction, long-form narrative, meta-narrative, many different POV characters, vivid, atmospheric stories, insular, claustrophobic stories, conceptual pieces both playing with words and images (some very sharp illustrations grace a couple of the stories, which in a world of sameness is a welcome reprieve), and enough variety of tone and setting that if you can’t find something to like about this book, you just aren’t really trying.

It’s also worth noting that this is a very physically attractive book as well. I declined the invitation to make the cut-out mobile of the universe suggested by the cover, but the cheeky cleverness of such a thing was underscored by the obvious care with which the book was designed and laid out. Despite my general dislike for the hacksaw-style uneven pages that it sported, it was clear that no expense was spared to make this the sort of book that people who like books would find their hands just involuntarily gravitating towards if spotted on a desktop or shelf. Also, having been a child of the late 70’s and early 80’s and a beneficiary/victim of it’s aesthetic, I completely loved the wrap-around wallpaper-like cover art.

The final verdict: A beautifully produced book that unselfconsciously oozes quality, definitely heavier on the “literary” end of literary science fiction, to the point where when you finish it you might find yourself wondering if it’s even supposed to be science fiction, and handled with considerable skill by Somerville. Worth reading especially to check out the stories I listed above and to see how consistently good science fiction dialogue can and should be.

You Can Make Him Like You: a not-at-all-biased review

2011-04-10T14:55:00.000-05:00

I’m just going to say this right away and get it over with: Ben and I are friends. So you knew this review was going to be just an enormous pile of me gushing and talking about how clever a writer he is and how great and naturalistic his dialogue is and how I can never get enough of the references to 80’s and indie culture, and how fearless he is with confronting uncomfortable topics head-on, or how this is the best thing I think he’s done so far, or maybe even how truly excellent a human being he is, and how much I, a person with my own relatively well-developed sense of it, envy the confidence he radiates at all times both in person and particularly in his written work. And you’d be right, as far as that went. And so in order to try and do something unexpected, I’m not going to talk about any of that here and instead I’ll let you experience it for yourself with You Can Make Him Like You, because you’re going to buy this book. How do I know this? Because statistically speaking half of you are men, and of those half, a good chunk of you are, or are planning to be, fathers. And here is what’s important to know:

You Can Make Him Like You is the very best book about fatherhood I’ve ever come across. I don’t comb the shelves for books about fatherhood, granted, but I’ve read a few, most of which are all hat and no cattle. Which is to say they bullshit you endlessly, and perpetuate the sort of ignorance that makes becoming a father one of those things that still, even in 2011, can be at times a hemming-hawing nightmare of anxiety, wildly inaccurate expectations, and chilly isolation. My favorite up to this point was Robert Bly’s Iron John, which I recommend to all of my friends who are parents of boys, particularly the dads. You Can Make Him Like You, is not solely about fatherhood but rather more accurately about the process of becoming a father, and the craziness that inevitably ensues around you during this time. Our time, as it happens, because this is a contemporary story and showcases its own difficulties and specifics unique to us, but with enough circumspection to give it just the right tint of timelessness.

The best way to describe the book, without ruining it for you, is to say it’s like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret or Then Again, Maybe I Won’t for new dads. Or one of those other Judy Blume books that you discovered right about the time you started to get acne and notice members of the opposite sex, and books like that made you think holy shit, someone else did go through this before, and they lived to tell about it, and not only are they telling about it, they’re telling the TRUTH about it, which is even more crucial. I kept thinking as I was reading it: this should be required reading for new dads, no, expectant dads… no, all men…

I was reminded as I saw someone else post an excellent review of it, of a night about a year ago when I went to the release party for Slut Lullabies and Stations West by Gina Frangello and Allison Amend, and Allison took the mic and guaranteed the audience that they would like Slut Lullabies. I’m paraphrasing, but her words were “I’m so confident you’ll like this that if you don’t like it I will buy your copy back from you.” That is how I feel about You Can Make Him Like You. You will buy this book, because it’s awesome, not because you need me to tell you to, but you will not want to toss it when you’re done with it. In fact, I’m already thinking of half a dozen men, one or two of whom are expecting their first children, who I want to give this book to, but they’re not getting mine.

Also, as a final and partly unrelated footnote, it isn’t necessary to know about the Hold Steady or their songs “You Can Make Him Like You” and “Stay Positive”, but I’ll be damned if you won’t want to download them after reading this book. Which makes me think that the Hold Steady maybe needs to show him some love and come to Chicago and play at a reading. Maybe. I’m just saying.

Ripped from the Headlines

2011-04-10T09:46:00.000-05:00

Q: What's better than writing a book ripped from the headlines? A: Writing a book and then having the headlines hit about a month after it gets released.

The plot of my new book Life After Sleep is apparently already happening. This article from Thursday's Wall Street Journal talks about people trying to cheat their sleep cycles in order to get more done, leaving them chronically sleep-deprived and the scientists who are studying them to see how to make it possible for everyone. Special thanks to eagle-eyed Jason Fisk for catching this one. Amazingly, the article directly quotes a hospital administrator, a computer programmer, a doctor, and references people who "work in social media". If they had put an Iraq war vet in there somehow, it would literally be the cast of Life After Sleep.

Best quote from the whole thing: "If I went to bed earlier, I'd feel like half my life was missing."

Oh do tell, WSJ, do tell.

Read the entire article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910.html

Life After Sleep on Chicago Subtext

2011-04-04T12:18:00.000-05:00

Life After Sleep received some very kind love last week from Jason Behrends at Chicago Subtext. Click here for the full review:

Chicago Subtext

Upcoming events

2011-03-27T20:42:00.000-05:00

There are several very exciting things in the works for Life After Sleep in the near future, a couple of which I can let you in on right now:

I was thrilled to be invited for the first time to Centuries & Sleuths bookstore in Forest Park, IL for Daddy-Cool: An Author Book Signing and Discussion, alongside my fellow Chicago authors Ben Tanzer and Victor David Giron. I anticipate talking quite a bit about Life After Sleep and the fatherhood portions thereof, and I will have copies of Thank You, Death Robot and Red Ivy Afternoon on hand to sign and sell.

Here's the info:

Daddy-Cool: An Author Signing and Discussion

March 30th 2011, 7:00 PM

Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore

7419 W. Madison

Forest Park, IL 60130

Also, I'm returning to the stage at The Whistler in Logan Square for the Orange Alert reading series, invited by the very awesome Jason Behrends and joined by Brandon Will, Heather Palmer and Cassandra Troyan. As always the Orange Alert reading series is held on the third Sunday of every month at 6:00 PM at the Whistler.

Orange Alert Reading Series

feat. Brandon Will, Cassandra Troyan, Healther Palmer and Mark R. Brand

April 17th 2011, 6:00 PM

The Whistler

2421 N. Milwaukee

Chicago, IL 60647

If you're in the Chicago area on either of these dates, come and hang out. I can't speak for myself here, but I know for a fact that there will be some stellar readings happening with the other folks at these events, particularly that handsome devil Ben Tanzer, and his new book You Can Make Him Like You, which is taunting me from the top of my reading list, and which I'll have a review of as soon as I finish Patrick Somerville's The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.

life after Life After Sleep

2011-03-27T19:30:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been three weeks now since Life After Sleep dropped, and the reaction has been very warm so far. A few kind words were said by both Ben Tanzer and Jason Fisk at their respective blogs This Blog Will Change Your Life and Jason's Blog, and the book was recently given a very kind shout-out and feature by the Daily S-Press. Also check out my editor Jason Pettus's essay "Why I Signed Life After Sleep: an Apologia", which does an excellent job of encapsulating our goal with making the book.

And while you're at it, I did a very fun half-hour CCLaP podcast with Jason as well where we talk all sorts of fun sci-fi stuff including books, technology, the healthcare industry, and awesomely bad 70's cinema.

I've had the pleasure of a number of people showing me the book on their nifty iPads and Kindles, which I was thrilled about, and if any of you have a Nook, I'd love to see what it looks like on those devices, too.

Links:
This Blog Will Change Your Life (Ben Tanzer)
Jason's Blog (Jason Fisk)
The Daily S-Press
The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

And of course, click HERE to download and read the book yourself!

There is Life After Sleep

2011-03-07T13:38:00.001-06:00

I'm thrilled to announce the release of my first long-format work in over 5 years, the novella Life After Sleep, published today by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

Available now on your Kindles, iPads, iPhones, Sony Readers, Nooks, Crannies, Beepers, Jeepers, Flim-Flams, Whiz-Bangers, and whatever else you kids are reading books on these days. Also available as a good ol' fashioned printable PDF in either American letter or European A4 sizes, though if at all possible I would highly recommend checking out the MOBI or EPUB versions on your digital readers because this book was designed by none other than the stellar Jason Pettus, and the man can put together one hell of an eBook. Trust me on this. To that effect, be sure to also check out my fellow CCLaP authors Ben Tanzer and Sally Weigel and their books Repetition Patterns, 99 Problems, and Too Young to Fall Asleep, respectively. Awesome, awesome reads.

I was thrilled (and humbled) to have the chance to work with Jason and our team of very generous and gentle proofreaders, and to see this project evolve into something I'm enormously proud of and that I sincerely hope you enjoy.

Point your browser here to read more, and for how to get your very own high-tech digital copy. Next up: flying cars. We can hope, right?

http://www.cclapcenter.com
http://www.cclapcenter.com/lifeaftersleep

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

2011-03-05T19:25:00.000-06:00

And I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
(Robert Frost)

Sleep is so last year.

2011-02-25T20:05:00.000-06:00

Life After Sleep is coming

2011-02-22T21:16:00.000-06:00

2011-02-15T22:15:00.001-06:00

"Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history — which is no doubt true — but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now." -Hunter S. Thompson, October 16, 2001

Breakfast WIth the Author Episode 3 is online!

2011-02-01T08:57:00.000-06:00

This month's guests: Lawrence Santoro and Davis Schneiderman.

Breakfast With the Author, Episode 3 from Mark Brand on Vimeo.

Drain, a review.

2011-01-04T23:27:00.000-06:00

The first thing I thought when I started reading Davis Schneiderman’s experimental sci-fi novel Drain was that it was one of the most original things I’ve read in quite a while. The second thought I had was gee, I wonder if I should send his editor at Northwestern University Press some flowers and a get-well soon card in hopes for a speedy recovery from the stroke that this manuscript must have given her. This absolute beast of a novel has been the center of my reading list and consciousness for long enough now that I’m thrilled to finally be able to sit down at the end of it and write down a few thoughts about it.

Just as quick background, Drain is the story of what happens when Lake Michigan suddenly dries up. Three groups vie for influence and control in the sudden vast space that is created and dubbed the Wildland-Urban Interface: The Quadrilateral Corporation, a slick group of semi-soulless, high-tech, Stepford Wives-types who take the names of past US Presidents and plan to remake the lake bed into a sort of hellish hybrid of gated Florida condominiums and Henry Ford communities. The Blackout Angels, a group of psychonaut revolutionary-outlaws who seek to undermine order wherever it may be found, and who have the power to possess the bodies of others but at the book’s outset cannot control and don’t really very well understand this power. And finally the Worm-worshipping Maneuverian Cultists, who at the time of the book’s narration are little more than a viciously trodden-upon piece of scenery or background, whose spiritual leader Fulcrum Maneuvers is long dead and whose Lake-drinking World Worm, Umma-Segnus has never returned to validate their existence.

The story follows several characters and their comings and goings through the eyes of the two main POV characters: Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui of the Quadrilateral Corporation and his Blackout Angels counterpart Dial-Up Networking as they struggle often on opposite sides of an ill-defined conflict with each other. On Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui’s side (if there are such a thing as sides, which is also unclear and fluid throughout much of the book) is Bush-Bush Bush, his Quadrilateral-assigned sidekick, Woodrow Wilson Panaflex, an investor who speaks in air quotes and comes along to keep an eye on things, and Dr. Zebediah Dooger, the current head of Quadrilateral. Dial-Up Networking begins the story with a posse of droog-like hooligans named None, Nothing, and Number and eventually teams up with Neutron Janey a flashy young woman whose past is later revealed in one of the book’s several plot twists. As the book progresses we learn bits and pieces of the story, including some of its background with the occasional thrilling revelation that makes two dozen unclear plot points suddenly click into place at once. Only toward the end do we get a clearer picture of the followers of Fulcrum Maneuvers; who they were, what they believed and why. As the book hurtles (or sometimes slouches wounded and bleeding) toward a conclusion, we try to piece together what exactly happened to Lake Michigan, if the World Worm and the recurring motifs of the three islands actually exist, and what it all (or at least some of it) means.

Though many things happen to the main characters of the book that advance the present storyline, it’s safe to say that much of the book’s body is concerned with fleshing out and giving slowly-meted detail to this central conceit. In the final chapters the lines between characters and times and places blur considerably and Schneiderman ramps up the metafictional elements to give us a finale that somehow manages to straddle nearly the entire convoluted plotline despite large chunks of the book being cryptic to the point of near-unintelligibility. Drain revels maniacally in metaphor like a ten-week old kitten with a hay-bale of catnip and it’s full of colorful characters that leap like Bob Dylan song lyrics off of the page (try saying Doctor Zebediah Dooger to yourself ten times; okay, now try to stop saying it). The degree to which it is a visual and experiential rather than a literal book cannot be overstated. In fact, only a small portion of it has really anything at all to do with the main plot or storyline, and the remaining three quarters or so is expression, digression, or misdirection in approximately equal measure. The tangents veer off uncontrollably at first, overwhelm you with their density, and then only later begin to coalesce into something that resembles even the most tenuously reliable narration. The result is a book that feels absolutely enormous in scope, and is just what the doctor ordered to relieve us of the commonness of much formulaic, genre post-apocalyptic fiction. If there are tropes or clichés here to be found, they are hidden deeply beneath the page and conjured more by the limits of our capacity to imagine a so-appointed story without them.

Here’s the thing, though: Drain is not precisely an unreadable book, but it’s possibly the closest thing to unreadable I’ve ever successfully read. This is not a criticism. I’m admittedly not much of a poetry reader, and suspect if I were I might have found the book a bit more accessible. That said, it’s important to note that I am a writer and editor and I am in the habit of spending large amounts of time reading material that I would not necessarily seek out for enjoyment. I kept returning to the thought over and over again as I read it that as an editor I would have no idea where to even start with this. It is metalinguistic metafiction at its most brutally indulgent. I say it with love, but I do not exaggerate when I say it took every ounce of resolve I could muster to make it to the end of this book. To be clear, though, this is because Drain is possibly one of the most legitimately challenging texts I’ve ever read. It spit in the face of my understanding of structure, particularly with regards to science fiction, and it tested the outermost threshold of my normally-desensitized literary palate. It challenged my willingness to focus on a deluge of images so vast and meandering that it started to overload my senses and dull my ability to discern plot from subplot, image point from image counterpoint. Coming from someone who has conditioned himself to burn efficiently through his reading list and can typically finish a thousand-page epic sci-fi novel in two or three days, it took me nearly two straight months to finish the 250 page Drain.

It is an absolutely assailing text that way, mercilessly exhausting to the very final page, and in view of the obvious quality of its construction I can only conclude that this was as equally meticulous and planned. I got the sense after two hundred pages that the manuscript was carefully calculated slyly to be easy to put down. It screamed seductively at me to just turn back, and abandon hope all ye who enter here. And this was a relentless and pervasive sensation, as if Schneiderman knew that I was still hanging in there, still waiting for moments of revelation, for it all to suddenly start making sense, and he wanted to play out that game to the bitter end with this book; as self-aware a book as ever there was, and one unafraid to playfully trample the fourth wall and screw with the reader directly. There are moments of thrilling coherence from time to time, but in the end the greatest reward of Drain is simply to survive it.

I found Drain a beautifully-conceived, highly-intelligent, and wildly experimental book in the very best sense of each of those adjectives. I cannot recommend this book to everyone due to its sheer maddening, deliberate impenetrability, but it is flat-out brilliant in places and profoundly original. If you decide, however, to try to tackle it and you stumble back later with swollen eyes and a perpetual headache that Advil won’t touch, babbling names like ‘Signor Clickermink Lispsmut’, you can't say I didn't warn you.

CCLaP's second event of the year

2010-11-10T20:39:00.000-06:00

Last time around was a blast, and I'm very much looking forward to this one, where I don't have to read and will therefore be probably considerably more relaxed. Hope to see you there!

Breakfast WIth The Author, Episode 1

2010-10-03T07:37:00.000-05:00

Episode 1 is here! In the premiere of Breakfast With The Author, I talk to fellow Chicago authors Ben Tanzer and Jason Fisk over bacon and eggs with toast. Enjoy!

Breakfast With the Author, Episode 1 from Mark Brand on Vimeo.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life

2010-09-21T23:32:00.001-05:00

Had a great time Sunday night at Orange Alert, wherein I was apparently the first sci-fi author to be invited on This Podcast Will Change Your Life. Many thanks to Ben Tanzer, who was gracious enough to spend some time listening to me yammer on about books, publishing, and why I think sci-fi is entering a new golden era. Classic TPWCYL hijinks ensued, of course, including much discussion of the flagship of my wardrobe which Ben dubs the 'sci-fi jacket'*, a random rat who crashed the back porch of the Whistler by scurrying under the fence on the patio, and me shamelessly talking out of school about any number of things. Here's some links to the people, places, books, and topics we discussed.

The Sci-Fi Jacket (Photo is from 2005).
Davis Schneiderman
The Whistler (a fun hangout and nice place, random rat excursions nonwithstanding)
Speculative Fiction
The Iron Heel
and more.

Click here to listen to the podcast, or right click and choose "save as" to download.

Also was able to hang out with several of my literature friends that night including Jason Behrends, Brandon Will, Kathleen Rooney and Martin Seay, and in addition to Davis Schneiderman I also met Adam Golaski, both very pleasant and interesting authors I hope to run into again.

New Music

2010-09-21T22:31:00.000-05:00

Actually, it's old music. I'm in a retro mood lately.

Ben Tanzer's 99 Problems

2010-08-24T08:56:00.000-05:00

I think arguably one of the most difficult feats a writer can attempt, something less like patient, careful craft and more akin to sword swallowing or juggling chainsaws, is trying to cogently describe the experience of fatherhood.

It isn’t just that the vocabulary doesn’t exist (it doesn’t), that maternal sentiment tends to dominate the dramatic discourse (it does) or that narratives of fatherhood tend toward a skewed, lop-sided cliché of the absent, abusive, or at best emotionally-distant and enigmatic father (they do). It’s all of these things together, and more. It’s the fact that good fatherhood doesn’t sell. And I don’t just mean in the money sense. It doesn’t sell itself to a reader as reality. No one wants to listen to a man complain about the grinding, thankless nature of responsible fatherhood. Where’s the drama? Where’s the action? Who cares if dad is bored to distraction or is subtly dissatisfied with life in general for years that stretch to decades? Who gives him a second thought if dad can’t sleep because he’s worried about the future? Angst by itself is so twenty years ago. Unless dad is hitting, raping, abandoning, emotionally-scarring, creatively-suppressing, stubbornly socially anachronistic, or betraying the protagonist’s modern compassionate values (or occasionally sacrificing his life in a quaint gesture to prove that he is worthy to be a father to begin with) readers would just as soon put a cardboard cutout in the family photo and get to the good stuff about mom and her struggles against a world that’s terribly unfair to women and children.

Responsible fatherhood doesn’t make for cinematic, set-piece narrative construction or tidy three-act novel progression. It doesn’t make you keep turning the pages to see what’s going to happen next. In fact, if it was written as accurately as it can be, a story about real fatherhood might make a reader wonder if they even want to continue reading. You can see the difficulty of selling this, let alone writing it.

And with this paradox comes the realization of how the pioneers of race and gender equality of the 50’s and 60’s must have felt. Few things have been as disappointing to me in my adult life as seeing so few positive fictional fatherhood role models reflected back at me culturally, when I know for a fact that I and dozens of my male friends struggle silently every day to live that life and walk in those shoes. The Good Dad. Everyone knows one, but unless he dies tragically at a young age or snaps and climbs a clock tower with a rifle hardly anyone takes notice of him. He is a static and uninteresting fixture unless and until he transforms into The Bad Dad. A father character that takes even the smallest step towards a life not defined by utter debasing sublimation to the betterment of the family has just bought a ticket on the slippery slope that leads toward that same bullpen of negative father stereotype clichés. Unless you look back 30 years or more, that’s virtually the only widespread character arc in modern fiction for fatherhood.

This is perhaps not without reason. The non-pathological 21st Century American Father might well be the most difficult, uncompelling character archetype to fictionalize. You can see them standing off to the sides of playgrounds watching their toddlers, in the kitchen washing the dishes after dinner, and double-parked in front of the pre-school in the bus lane at 7:30AM, hoping they can make it to work on time and that they didn’t forget junior’s sunblock, sun hat, change of clothes, diapers, wipes, nuks, lovies, water bottle, formula, and the order form for picture day which won’t actually happen for a month but needs to be paid in full ahead of time. What on earth is this guy doing? Besides being a dull, uninspired doormat, that is. If he’s not a secretly a CIA agent or serial killer, and is instead exactly what he appears to be, how is a writer supposed to build a story around that? Beta-males and metrosexuals had their cringe-inducing heyday in popular culture, but let’s face it: the emasculated American male is also becoming clichéd as croc shoes on nurses.

As a reader, though, I care about that guy. I care about what he thinks when he has to pull himself out of bed in the morning. I care about what he does to escape the tedium. I care about what makes him put one foot in front of the other and keep going. I care about how he sleeps at night. I care because that guy reflects something a lot closer to what I am than most fictionalized fathers.

And Ben Tanzer cares about that guy, too. Tanzer’s new book, 99 Problems, is ostensibly the culmination of a lengthy exercise in exploring the crossover dynamics between running and writing, but it’s also much, much more. It bears note as well that this book was released by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, using the same payment-optional downloadable e-book format used for Repetition Patterns. This is quickly becoming a popular book format and CCLaP has gotten it as close to perfection as anyone at this point. 99 Problems is a pleasure to read, and not without some thanks to this innovative platform.

In 99 Problems, he gets past the jittery, panicky, claustrophobia of new fatherhood he touched on in his earlier book Repetition Patterns, and settles into the figurative long-haul. How does a man stay a man when he is pulled like living taffy in the opposing directions that fatherhood takes him? Tanzer's narration would have you believe that creative and physical self-realization are only as far away as a pair of running shoes, but the broader implication is the more important concept. The book dwells on the nuts and bolts of running and writing, but as astute readers have noted there are deeper themes at work. One of these is the impact aging has on the psyche of men, the other is the slave’s game responsible fathers play of finding ways to cast off the yoke for a day, an hour, or even just five minutes. The game of finding a way to fly without ever leaving the chains.

And this is where Tanzer shines. He shows you the chains, and makes you want the narrator to fly. Most writers I know, with a few notable exceptions, take the easy way out. Why confront this ugly, uncompelling, unpopular, slightly-depressing truth? What does it serve? Are we supposed to feel bad for dad because he chose to be a father? Women and children aren't "chains" in the literal sense, even if you can sort of see his point. There are a hundred reasons not to write responsible fathers into fiction, and most of the time I let other authors off the hook when they keep their heads down and decide not to stir that hornet's nest. The ones who do face the reality head-on, though, earn my immediate and lasting respect. Admiration and pity are muddy emotions to pair with each other, but that’s exactly what this sort of narrative demands. Today’s Good Dad is an object of both. Beneath this is the place inside a real man where the static builds between how life is, how life should be, and the synapse of human nature that the creative sparks fly across. 99 Problems is that spark; nuanced, unpretentious, and without fear.

Check it out here: http://www.cclapcenter.com/99problems/ and though it is available for download free if you so choose, don't be afraid to pay for it if you want to support the author and publisher and what they're trying to do. The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography is putting out some of the best e-books in the business right now, and they're as good as anything I've seen elsewhere.

The Damnation of Memory gets some love from the Orange Alert Podcast

2010-08-06T10:50:00.003-05:00

Click below to hear a new excerpt from The Damnation of Memory which I read at the July:

A very special thank you to Jason Behrends for inviting me to be a part of the Orange Alert reading series. For those who don't know, the reading series is held at the Whistler on the third Sunday of every month at 6:00 pm. It's always a good time and he gets some very talented writers to listen to and interact with.

Be sure to listen to Gabe Durham's excerpts in this podcast from Fun Camp, which are hands down some of the funniest stuff I've heard in a long time. Also, do check out the past podcasts in the archive, it's become my current favorite source to find out about new music and literature.

The cat's out of the bag

2010-08-01T18:58:00.001-05:00

Well, this week we finally announced much of the stuff I've been working on lately over at Silverthought Press. You can read the entire announcement here, but I'll give you the short version and a few other insider tidbits.

1) Of course the biggest news from this announcement is the episodic video podcast that Silverthought will be producing called Breakfast With the Author. The first episode of the show is already complete and ready to go and it will be revealed with the site re-launch in August. The premise of the show is I have two authors come to my home and I personally cook them breakfast, after which we sit and eat and talk shop about writing, publishing, literature, and life in general. The show is completely unscripted and uncensored, and gossip and hijinks are encouraged. Preview audience reaction to the first episode has so far been universally positive, so we're very excited to bring this to our writers and fans as well as utilize it as a bridge between Silverthought Press and the rest of the independent literary world.

The indie lit world is thriving nationwide right now, despite a sluggish economy, and it continues to thrive on a spirit of cooperation and collaboration that's really quite extraordinary. One thing I've seen over the past two years in the indie literature world is that the very best authors, editors, publishers, and critics tend to promote this interconnectedness with events, podcasts, festivals, readings, parties, and workshops that include cross-genre and cross-platform artists and creative people. In that these have been enormously successful when paired with people willing to put their own ego aside and work for the good of the creative community, this is the direction I most wanted to help Silverthought Press move towards when Paul announced that he was promoting me to full editor. I think you'll love Breakfast With the Author. The first episode is 25 minutes long and will premiere very soon, so stay tuned.

2) Silverthought Press is moving to a new and improved submissions framework, which will streamline the process and make it easier than ever for us (meaning Paul the Executive Editor, myself, and the other Associate Editors) to read and respond to submissions. Our vision for this going forward is to respond to each and every submission and efficiently provide each submitter with substantive comments and read confirmation. We are still working out the nuts and bolts of this, but it's looking very positive at this point.

3) We are offering a new set of resources on the forum for our established authors. The Author Resource board will consist of helpful tools (articles, how-to's, and possibly mailing lists) for our established print authors to market and promote their books. This is already in place and will be available soon.

4) The 2010 release schedule includes a book called Human Sister by Jim Bainbridge. It's been largely radio silence so far on Human Sister, but I can report that I participated in one of the final edits of the book and it's truly incredible. We see a lot of great work submitted to us, but Paul and I agreed that this manuscript was one of the best we've ever seen. It's just stellar on many, many levels. It's highly original, whip smart, and readable as all get out. It may very well be the sleeper speculative fiction hit of 2010, and I highly recommend checking it out when it arrives.

5) I'm also happy to announce that we've successfully secured artwork for the cover of The Damnation of Memory (my upcoming novel) by a very talented core member of the Chicago artistic community. Deborah Lader, founder and director of the Chicago Printmaker Collaborative and one third of the terrific folk-fusion band Sons of the Never Wrong, will be the cover artist for the book. I'm a huge fan of the Collaborative's vision and scope, and of Deborah's work in particular, and though we're not quite ready to reveal the cover image itself, I'm convinced there couldn't have been a better image to wrap the story in. A very special thank you to Deborah for working with us on this one, and I can't wait to show it off.

So that's what I've been working on for the last few weeks, in addition to doing some writing and editing of my own work. I've got some pictures from the Orange Alert reading series that I did last month with Jason Fisk, Joseph G. Peterson, and Goldie Goldbloom, and I had a very fun time with Amy Guth, Leah Jones, and Jason Fisk at the Printer's Ball on Friday night. Pictures and video links will be forthcoming when I return from Wisconsin.

Oh, right: in other news I'm in Wisconsin! My mother and father-in-law are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary this weekend and the entire family is in Elkhart Lake, WI for the weekend and part of next week. So far the weather has been beautiful and the hotel is lovely, but of course the best part is just spending lots of good fun times with the family! More on this, and pictures probably, on my Facebook profile.

Oh, Internet

2010-07-23T21:04:00.000-05:00

If you only knew what I was up to.

Yes, I realize I still owe you the third part, the conclusion, of my man-cave adventure. Yes, I realize I've not consistently posted on Thursdays. Yes, I realize I'm waffling. But I'm not. I swear. Good things are afoot. Just things I can't really completely talk about yet because they haven't solidified sufficiently. Exciting things. Book things. Writing things. Editing things. Other things.

For now you'll just have to put up with my vagueness and hope and trust that eventually I'll lay it on you, and it'll have been worth the wait. I did want to take a moment and say thanks to Jason Behrends for inviting me to read at the Whistler for his Orange Alert reading series. I read a portion of The Damnation of Memory that got a very positive reaction which I found touchingly affirming. Thank you to everyone who came out, especially my wife Beth, who has to sometimes move the earth a little bit to extract herself from her own chaotic pile of stresses and tasks in order to spend time seeing what it is I do. I was happy to have you there.

I promise the secrets will unfold. Stay tuned.

Slut Lullabies, a review

2010-07-23T20:57:00.000-05:00

Smart, funny, and haltingly good. "How to Marry a WASP" and "What You See" are easily two of the best short stories I've read in the last ten years, and I read a lot of short fiction. Never, ever once, does Frangello take the easy postmodern "men-are-evil" third-wave feminist line in any of these stories, and yet they all teem with the sorts of prickly moral ambiguity that is always ready-made bait for such thematic undertones. That sort of thing, the mean, intellectual laziness of it, no matter how talented a writer is, always makes my heart sink. I've read a few other authors that have written work that danced around the edges of this, but never as consistently and as well as Slut Lullabies. It's like strawberry ice cream after eating two decades of nothing but vanilla, and as a guy that had to come of age in the middle of possibly the worst time in cultural history to be a young man, work like this is very hopeful and exciting to me. No one will be happier than I am to see the postmodern, deconstructionist nonsense that passed for social theory ten years ago finally get retired, and when it happens it's going to be because of people like Gina that are thinking in color instead of just black and white. I can see how a book like this would be positioned as funny, "thinking girl's" literature, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it didn't resonate with "thinking men" as well, and I plan to recommend it to as many of them as I can. There are parts of this book for just about everyone, and yet I came away from it still feeling weeks later like I had read something special that spoke very specifically to my interests and sensibility. A grand slam for Frangello and the sort of piece that any author would love to have written.

New music

2010-07-10T18:44:00.000-05:00

Playlist updated with some new tunes for the hot summer. Just started listening to the Black Keys and I'm feeling like this is another classic example of a band that pretty much everyone on earth already knows about but me. Just the same, they rock. Can't quite bring myself to take down Lisa Hannigan yet. Also discovered Boyce Avenue, who are slightly boy-band-ish but have a fun gimmick of recording soulful accoustic versions of awful recent pop songs like "Umbrella" and "Bleeding in Love". It does give you a different perspective on the songs, and I always dig that.

What To Wear During an Orange Alert? Reading series

2010-07-09T23:06:00.000-05:00

I will be reading at the Orange Alert reading series on Sunday, July 18th at 6:00 PM at the Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee Ave in Chicago's Logan Square. Orange Alert's Jason Behrends does a fantastic job with this reading series and I was honored to be invited to read. Also reading are Goldie Goldbloom, Joseph G. Peterson, and fellow Chicago writer Jason Fisk. It's a very cool venue and the company last time was terrific afterward, so if you're available that night and want to hear some great readings and hang out with some authors afterward, I encourage you to stop by.

Oh, and by the way: I'll be reading from my upcoming novel The Damnation of Memory, slated for release in a few short months from Silverthought Press.

Red Ivy Afternoon gets some love from This Blog Will Change Your Life

2010-07-09T20:54:00.001-05:00

...just enough thrills and violence to make for a wholly enjoyable, and yet just different enough read to know you've encountered a book where the author is trying to do something a step removed from what we usually read, yet still create a world you can embrace.

Read the entire post here:
http://bentanzer.blogspot.com/2010/07/this-book-will-change-your-life-red-ivy.html

I miss you already, Grandma

2010-07-06T09:10:00.000-05:00

EVANS MILLS, N.Y. — Laura Louise Baker Thompson, 77, of 8130 Schell Ave., passed away Saturday, July 3, at the Samaritan Keep Home, Watertown, where she had been a resident for about two months while battling cancer.

Born Feb. 2, 1933, in Copenhagen, the daughter of Milton and Mary Smith Baker, she was the youngest of four children. Her siblings were Leon Durham, Jessie Jones, and Robert Baker.

She was married to the love of her life, Robert James Thompson, on July 4, 1949, in Dexter. The couple lived in several areas of New York State due to her husband’s career as an operating engineer and mechanic on many construction sites.They settled in Calcium in 1963 where they enjoyed a very happy marriage until Bob passed away suddenly on May 3, 1982. She remained a widow for the remainder of her life.

She attended Watertown High School and was an honor student. She also graduated from Chrishelle’s School of Cosmetology, and opened Laura’s Beauty Salon, adjacent to her home in Calcium in 1970 which remained in business for almost 40 years. Many of her customers became cherished, lifelong friends.

Mrs. Thompson loved her family and loved to be around people. She enjoyed food and cooking, and was known for making outstanding pies. Laura was very artistic, loved painting, making jewelry, crocheting, and was an avid crafter.

She was a musician from childhood who played piano and organ, by ear and without the benefit of reading music. She used her musical talents to entertain and to provide music for many Jefferson County civic groups. In her teen years, she was a member of a Country and Western band with family members and friends.

She was a seventh degree member of Pine Grove Grange, a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, Amaranth, Home Bureau, The North Side Improvement League, and was the President of the Resident’s Association of Milltown Housing.

Surviving are a son and his wife, Robert and Ruth Thompson, Mountain Home, Ark.; a daughter and her husband, Robin and Mark Brand, Indian Lake; a son, Randy Thompson and his partner Cheri Geller, Syracuse; a grandson, Mark Robert Brand and his wife Beth of Evanston, Illinois' a granddaughter, Brooke Ruzycky and her husband Walter, Evans Mills; a granddaughter, Tracy Berner and her husband Ben of Fulton; great-grandsons Allesandro and Kaden Berner , John Brand, and Gabriel Ruzycky; a brother Robert Baker and his wife Helen, Black River, and a large extended family of sister and brothers-in- law, and many nieces and nephews and great nieces and nephews and many, many friends. Two of her nieces were like daughters to her; Trudy Felt and her husband Morris of Depauville, and her niece Terra House and her partner Dani Reed of Three Mile Bay.

Johnson Funeral Home, Dexter, has been entrusted with arrangements.

The calling hours are 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, July 7. The funeral service will be held 11 a.m. Thursday, July 8, at Calcium Community Church, Route 342, Calcium. Burial will be in Sanford Corners Cemetery, Calcium. A reception for the family and friends will be held at the church following the burial.

Donations in Laura’s name may be made to the Calcium Community Church, Calcium, New York 13616 and the Evans Mills Ambulance Squad, Noble Street, Evans Mills, NY 13637.

The family wishes to thank the staff of the Samaritan Keep Home for the loving care Laura received, and to her many family members and friends who supported her through her long battle with cancer.

Delay

2010-06-27T15:17:00.000-05:00

Dear Internet,

Please excuse the interruption in my promised weekly blog updates for the week of June 24th. I have been very busy writing but sadly none of it is quite ready to be posted publicly yet. Some of this work pertains to my upcoming novel The Damnation of Memory, which I have just secured really tremendous cover art for by a well-known Chicago artist whose name I will be shamelessly dropping at every opportunity once the cover design is finished and ready to debut. Other projects include an essay about the impetus behind the novel and my adventures with grappling with the underlying themes of it. Also a lengthy literary analysis of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash that I wrote as part of my application to Northwestern University's Creative Writing MFA program and will be posted here as soon as I get the results of my application in a month or two. Finally, I have the conclusion of the Man Cave series on deck, and it awaits some photo goodness from the solution my wife and I came to. Since this work is still in progress, however, this will have to wait a bit.

So here I am, in limbo, with all this rich creative stuff happening and nothing to share with you, right? How lame, Mark.

Well, I do have two things to share with you, and those things are Ben Tanzer's short story "More Than Anything" and Jason Fisk's short story "Do Not Recuscitate", both available online for your reading pleasure. Some pretty introspective stuff, alternately cerebral and almost lyrical at times, both of these stories are very much worth your time.

More soon.

Repetition Patterns, a review

2010-06-20T12:52:00.001-05:00

Maybe it's because I came of age in the 80's and the imagery of Repetition Patterns is right there in full-color for me, maybe it's because I'm also a young father with a son who teaches me more about real living in any given ten minutes than I learned in the entirety of my life up to his arrival, maybe it's just because Ben Tanzer is a hell of a nice guy, but for me, this book was one of the best things I've read so far this year.

To start with, I will admit that I read relatively few books like this. I am a writer myself and my work is largely speculative and somewhat futuristic so I read a LOT of speculative fiction and this leaves me with little enough time to read other mainstream or genre fiction. I take recommendations though, from people I trust, and I do try to read the work of my contemporaries in the Chicago literary scene because they're great people and they're generally producing interesting, relevant work.

That said, I found myself making a list as I was reading Repetition Patterns of all of the people I wanted to put it into the hands of to read. Happily, and I'll get to this in a minute, the distribution method of this book is very conducive to word-of-mouth. Anyway, for every father I know of young children, and every couple I know who grew up when I did and has seen the world change the way Tanzer and I have, I thought "this person really needs to read this book." Technically, it's like buscuits and gravy; understated, rich, and satisfying. The metaphorical subtext is present enough to color the whole thing beautifully the way some great indie films manage to do. You read it and you can't exactly put your finger on it, but you need little encouragement to devour it. Writing about my generation, the generation neither firmly Gen X nor Millenials but rather something more like "Garbage Pail Kids" where our first movie at the movie theater wasn't Star Wars but rather E.T. or The Return of the Jedi, is nothing new, but I've rarely seen it done this well, and usually when it was it was in the form of a screenplay.

When contemplating the skill needed to write something meaningful about this generation, you have to wonder if all of the cliches don't just instantly bog down the story before it can get off the ground. Culturally, our generation is such a mishmash of corporate marketing and kitsch mixed with genuine emotion and weird moments of spontaneous "things that happened", that making sense of it in any cohesive way is something that would require confidence on the order of Chuck Norris at a kindergarten introductory karate class.

Repetition Patterns has a palpable flavor of metaphor in it, but never does this seem heavy-handed or trite, and Tanzer's recognizeable characters shine through it vividly. I say "recognizeable" because there's more than a hint of northern New York in the book as well, which being from there I particularly appreciated. Another thing I loved about the book that others have mentioned is the small-town flavor of it. Tanzer does a terrific job of making the book very readable even if one has little or no experience with small towns, but if you do, you'll find yourself thinking about the one in your own personal past almost immediately. Inclusion of nostalgic memories + small town flavor = instant, bittersweet literary homesickness. There are living people in this book, which is probably the highest thing that I can think to say of a piece of contemporary fiction. Regardless, Repetition Patterns would have been a great piece of fiction on its own even had it not been for the terrific way it was produced and released.

I should clarify that I read the ebook version of this story, which I bought at CCLaP's main page and paid $5.00 for. This in itself bears mention because I normally hate reading ebooks and though I have read a few and I tolerate them because of their free-ness, this is the first one I've ever paid for. I couldn't have picked a better first electronic purchase. Tanzer and CCLaP Editor Jason Pettus seem to have found a combination that not only got past my dislike of the medium, but made me feel very willing to plunk down some cash in the future for more of the same if produced similarly. Most of the time I feel like publishers tack on a "digital" version of their books as an afterthought, but Repetition Patterns was the first one I've seen that was honed to ebook perfection with the medium directly in mind.The book is slim at 40-ish digital full-sized PDF pages, but my sense of size was quickly lost when reading it on the Stanza iPhone player and rendered completely irrelevant once I realized that at this length it was MEANT to be comfortably read as an ebook. It was like getting a nod from some considerate and understanding architect who, knowing that your butt was going to be in them, made the benches in his modernistic museum convex instead of hard and flat. Comfortable and inviting is a big shift for me when it comes to digitally-presented literature, so I gave the book a lot of credit for that, too.

Read it, and don't be afraid to buy it instead of just getting it for free, it's 100% worth it. The only thing about Repetition Patterns I found myself still wanting was a place for it on my bookshelf alongside my other favorites, but hey, it's the 21st century right? Maybe my new bookshelf will be a virtual one or something.

Available at http://www.cclapcenter.com/patterns

A Man Cave of One’s Own, Part II: Where there's a will

2010-06-20T01:36:00.000-05:00

So I’ve had a surprising amount of comments about my man-cave post from a couple of weeks back, and I’m happy to say that the responses were universally good. Far from the “suck it up and quit whining” replies I was in slight fear of, I instead got some good encouragement from other bloggers and other men my age who live in even more cramped quarters with sometimes more than one child. These guys provided me some much-needed solidarity in my hunt to find a solution to the man-cave dilemma.

As it turns out, my hunt was over almost before it started, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I wanted to take this post to show you some of the ideas I found with regards to carving out a space for oneself in a small, shared living area.

First, and most obvious, is to convert a room of your house, a basement, or a garage into a sort of separate sanctuary. This would be the most ideal situation because it doesn’t take you too far from home base and doesn’t require much additional expense. To help you with the conversion, there are a variety of websites that offer furniture and ideas specifically tailored to the task. Some of these are predictable theme caves, while my own personal preference would be more like a Winslow Homer study. Lots of wood and leather. Oh well, this idea got tossed out for me straightaway because I have neither a basement, spare room, nor a garage.

Plan B is to rent a small space somewhere else. This is at once tricky and deceptively affordable, even in Evanston. Tricky because you’re leaving most of your prized possessions unwatched for large chunks of time, which I always shy away from doing because I feel like it invites vandalism or theft, especially in a communal or remote location. A storage locker would be an affordable storage solution, but a man-cave is about far more than just storage, so we need something that can at least hold the majority of our gear AND one or two people. In Evanston, there was a studio apartment for rent for $690.00 a month. This sounds horrifically prohibitive for those of us who have children who handle most of our surplus income management, but if you’re able to pay off a car, for example, you could cut the effective cost down into the $300 range, which is not horrible for a space meant for habitation. This was a 650 sq foot apartment with hardwood floors and an included kitchenette and bath. This is about as good as a man-cave would ever need to be in my opinion. If you can’t fit all of your stuff into 650 square feet, you need to sell some of your stuff.

But what about us regular guys? The ones who have a hundred bucks a month of extra spending money to ourselves (maybe)? I found a listing also in Evanston to rent an artist’s studio space, 200 square feet, for $145 a month. This I thought was very reasonable as well. It loses a lot in the downgrade, including the bathroom, but it did have a sink and electricity and lights so it has a slight immediate advantage over something like a finished basement. Disadvantages are, like I mentioned above, a somewhat communal building space with who-knows-what for locks and security. Just the same, if you wanted a space to do something like darkroom photography it would be pretty excellent. I’m a writer, so I don’t need a ton of space or bells and whistles, I just need somewhere comfortable away from too many distractions where I can sink into some writing for an hour or two. I’m imagining an artist’s space would be loud-ish, but that’s why God gave us earphones.

But alas, what about us guys that can’t even justify $145 a month to keep our sanity and personal sanctity? There are some other solutions for mobile, virtual, or micro-man-caves that I explored as well. The first idea I found, which I thought was actually pretty savvy, was to take photos of your prized possessions and make a laptop wallpaper collage out of them. I actually did this and I was surprised to note that it DID make me feel like wherever I was using my laptop got a little more comfortable. Just the images right there for your eyes to glance over inadvertently, images of you and the things that make you feel at home, had an effect. Another interesting, but slightly expensive idea I couldn’t explore was to purchase an old-style rolltop desk with a lock. This way when you step away from your desk you can just pull the cover down and lock it and you’ve got instant exclusivity and security from the curious hands of your children or the just-put-this-mail-anywhere carelessness of grown up family members. I do love different types of desk, but my home desk is pretty much perfect for me. It’s an enormous slab of mahogany with deep drawers and a wide leg space. I’d sooner leave the apartment and move away entirely than give up my desk. Finally, for the truly strapped, I found a neat little iPhone app on iTunes for $1.99 that lets you walk through a 3D virtual art gallery and on the walls of the gallery are the photos you’ve got stored in the phone’s memory.

So there’s some ideas to get you started. If you’re completely stuck and have no money to spend, I do strongly encourage you to try the laptop wallpaper trick. Even if it’s just for an instant every day, you can see the things you cherish. It makes them seem real, as opposed to just an inconstant memory or an unpleasant contemplation when you remember that these things are stuffed in a basement somewhere.

Tune in next week for the story of how I decided to tackle the man-cave issue, and how my wife became a surprising ally in my hunt.

New Playlist

2010-06-16T23:38:00.002-05:00

Because I was feeling a little mellower. And because the world needs more Lisa Hannigan.

Peek-a-boo with a baby beluga whale

2010-06-16T23:10:00.000-05:00

This is the video I've been telling everyone about. I was at the Shedd two weekends ago and we're members so I was the first person in the underwater viewing gallery and a little baby beluga played peek-a-boo with me for 4-5 thrilling minutes. I got about a minute or so of it on video but this went on for what seemed like forever. There was a little section over on the far right hand corner of the tank where it was backlit pretty brightly by the stairwell and some stupid starfish exhibit that made it difficult to take a video in the tank. I think the lighting let the whale look in at ... See Moreme, though, because I was the only one in there at the time and he stayed right in front of me for several minutes and responded with little flips of his head and tail when I reached out to touch the glass. It was one of those moments that just never happens at a place like this and I thought to myself if I didn't take a video of it no one would believe it happened.

Printer's Row Festival 2010 Recap!

2010-06-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

Printer’s Row was a blast this year with quite a bit of fun to be had despite the now-traditional lousy weather and precipitation. Here’s a recap with loads of clicky/linky goodness:

I arrived around 2 and immediately ran into Amy Guth and Tiffany Tate who had just left the Young and Restless panel that Amy had moderated, and the three of us made our way to Flacos Tacos for what turned out to be a very tasty lunch. If there’s something that goes better with lit fests than pork tacos and Sangria, I’m not sure what it is. After this, we split up for a while and I perused the multi-block book fair and visited the tables of several friends and my personal festival favorites. I stopped by and said hi to Terry Gant at the Third Coast Comics table, who had on display a variety of awesome graphic novels that I wish I’d had more time to look at. Of all the various genres of fiction I read, I regret most my coming late to the graphic novel medium and I wish I knew more about them. It’s been lingering at the middle third of my to-do list for years and now that the Evanston Library has a decent collection of them I’m going to have to take the plunge.

From there, I visited the table for Old Towne Books and Tea. Based in Oswego, IL, they are an indie-friendly bookstore recommended to me by my friend and fellow Chicago author Larry Santoro, who I sadly missed due to getting there just a bit too late in the afternoon. I did also manage to briefly say hi Susie T from the Book Cellar at their table. All I can say about the Book Cellar is that it must be hard to be so beloved by virtually every Chicago author I know, including me.

By this time it was approaching 5pm and it had rained more than once and several booths and tables had decided to pack it in for the day. Also narrowly missed was my friend Gina Frangello founder of Other Voices books and author of the book I’m reading right now titled Slut Lullabies. Jason Pettus, founder of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography had to make the tough call to cancel the CCLaP social event that was scheduled for the late afternoon due to the fact that it had now started to rain in earnest and the main fair festivities were starting to wrap up quite literally under sheets of plastic to keep the books dry.

Instead of going to the CCLaP event, I went with plan B: shopping for cheap used books. Last year I visited the Open Books booksale and took home as many books as I could fit into my laptop bag. This year I smartened up and brought some grocery bags with me to carry my loot in the form of several books I had been meaning to add to my collection for a number of months and had waited for this festival specifically to buy them. Why wait, you ask? Well, for starters, they had literally every book on my list, and the most I paid for any one book was $5. Some were $3, and a couple of them only $2. It’s a reader’s and book collector’s paradise and worth waiting for if you need to buy more than just a couple of titles.

So in my search I hit the Open Books tent and the Chicago Tribune tent, who between them had everything I was looking for. I picked up copies of Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Snow Crash, which I recently finished reading and wrote a pretty extensive critique of that I’ll be posting here at some point in the future. I had read a library copy but wanted one for myself. I also picked up Stephenson’s latest book Anathem, which was one of the only titles last year to get a perfect 10 score from Jason Pettus at CCLaP in his reviews. I’m looking forward to digging into that one. I got copies of Barbara Erenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Robert Bly’s Iron John since I named my son partly after the title character and every copy that I’ve owned of it I’ve loaned to people and they’ve never returned them. So now I have it in hardcover. Again. I grabbed Douglas Coupeland’s Generation X, the book from which the phrase originates and which from reading the first chapter seems as brilliant as it is unusual so far, and Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby, which I read a while ago from the library and rivaled anything else he wrote in sheer creativity. Here’s hoping if they make a film about this one they won’t utterly ruin it (I’m looking at YOU Choke). Also, hilariously, I had a copy of Like Water for Chocolate hurled at me some time later at Reading Under the Influence during the audience participation phase of the readings where I correctly identified Ernest Hemingway as the author of Old Man and the Sea. Hooray for flying literature!

My last stop on the shopping binge was at the Out of Print Clothing table, where I bought this awesome T-Shirt. There were many, many great book-related items at this store but once I spotted it I only had eyes (and enough disposable cash) for this one. Given that the aesthetic of Bradbury’s classic was one of the chief influences of the aesthetic of my first novel Red Ivy Afternoon, you can imagine my unabashed geeking out over it. In other news, I wore it today and it’s very soft and high-quality. I highly recommend you check out their store at http://www.outofprintclothing.com/.

Among the fun moments of the day was the point at which the vendors and publishers who had prepped their tents and tables with plastic dropcovers started unfurling them. You’d think it would be a claustrophobic experience to be in a roughly 16x16 foot tent covered with plastic on all sides in the waning afternoon light, but it actually made for sort of a unique throwback-type, we’re-all-in-this-together-and-isn’t-this-fun? Experience. I snapped these pics while I and some other undaunted lit-loving browsers kept shopping and exploring to our heart’s content even when many of the vendors were starting to pull up their anchors for the night.

So with a bag full of delicious merch I headed for (or rather “ducked into to escape the worsening rain”) Bar Louie next to Dearborn Station for a few beers and some Buffalo wings while I waited for the rain to slacken off. I checked out my new books and wrote some emails to various people I was attempting to meet up with later and in the process discovered that the band Augustana was playing for free at the main stage in less than an hour. Happily, by about 6:15, the skies started to clear up and the Lit After Dark portion of the night got started. I wandered over to the main stage and caught the last three or four songs of the opening band’s set. The headliners, Augustana, played an acoustic set that included their hit “Boston” which I had previously downloaded and enjoyed a year or so ago, but they had the show somewhat stolen from them by their opener band, the relatively unknown Kirkland, who were a surprisingly lively, entertaining high-energy six-piece rock band with a frontman/frontwoman combination that made for a great sound. Kirkland closed out their set with an up-tempo backbeat-enhanced perfectly-sung cover of Four Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” I liked them so much in fact, that I bought Kirkland’s CD on the spot which is something I almost never do at concerts. Definitely someone to check out of if they’re playing near you.

It was during the Augustana set that I managed to meet up with my new friends Ben Tanzer and Jason Fisk, whom I had met two weeks ago at the CCLaP live event at the OpShop that I participated in, and my niece Katy and her friend Hannah, both hip, smart recent graduates of New Trier high school who are budding creative writers and were interested in the lit scene and wanted to see what it was all about. The five of us then adjourned to the Lit Garden to watch a special installment of Reading Under the Influence, the reading series normally held on the first Wednesday night of every month at Sheffield’s, and one of my favorite recurring literary events in the city. Voted Chicago’s top reading series and held in one of the best bars in America according to Esquire magazine, RUI is always a good time. Last night in particular was a treat because all four of RUI’s regular members, Jesse Jordan, Amy Guth, Robert Duffer and Julia Borcherts were in attendance and treated us to readings. Many fun trivia questions ensued, as usual, and books were tossed high and low to those who knew the answers, including Michael Crichton’s novel Sphere which caused a minor scrum/riot of people trying to snatch it out of the air like a wedding bouquet.

Ok, I made that part up.

After RUI was concluded, I spotted Deb Lewis who had moderated a panel last year that I sat on at the Pilcrow Lit Fest about writing sexuality, and had been very kind to me last year by introducing me to several other authors who are now friends of mine. It’s always a pleasure to run into her and you can catch her at 2nd Story (see website for upcoming dates), yet another great Chicago reading series.

At this point, Ben, Jason, Katy, Hannah, and I were invited to the impromptu after-reading drinks at Kasey’s Tavern nearby where I got the chance to kick back with lots of the aforementioned authors as well as Brandon Will, staffer of the Book Cellar, J. Adams Oaks (whom I had never met but seen at a reading once and was glad to get the chance to finally talk to), and Bill Adee from the Chicago Tribune, who aside from being one of those rare individuals who seems to effortlessly make you feel like the world is full of interesting things to talk about is just a heck of a nice guy in general. We also encountered the largest dog I've ever seen, a Great Dane that was amazingly not yet a year old.

Though I had a great time at the festival last year, overall I’d have to say there was a palpable jump in quality from last year to this year at Printer’s Row, due in no small part to the melding of some of last year’s events at the Pilcrow Lit Fest into the festivities of Lit After Dark. As much as I loved the festival this year, the very best part of it was of course the little informal gathering at the end and I was inwardly thrilled to be included. There has been much talk this year of Chicago being the new “Capital of independent publishing”, and though my perspective on such things is probably too narrow to offer any definitive verdict, I will say that Chicago last night felt like the capital of a friendly, welcoming, and warmly-inclusive community of writers, editors, and publishers. If indeed the future of books rests on their shoulders, whether indie, mainstream, traditional, or digital, I can assure you the future looks very refreshingly bright even in this awful economy and even in the rain.

CCLaP's Urban Decay/Urban Renewal

2010-05-29T12:51:00.002-05:00

The event last night was a blast! I was honored to be invited to read part of The Damnation of Memory for the CCLaP's first live event, and the show's producer, Jason Pettus, has a real gift for putting together a group of writers. The five of us clicked immediately and much fun was had by all. It's a huge treat for me to get such a warm reception like that from authors I respect. I highly encourage everyone to check out the websites of the four other participants, Ben Tanzer, Katherine Hodges, Jason Fisk and Sally Weigel. They're terrific people and their work is outstanding.

So the podcast from the event will be available early next week and anyone who is interested will be able to get their first sneak peek at a segment from The Damnation of Memory. Awkwardly, I had a ticklish/sore throat all week and it reared its ugly head, causing me to cough and hack a few times during the reading, but all in all I think it went well. I'll post a link here for the podcast once it's up, and I think there'll be a text link as well.

A big thanks to Jason Pettus and the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography for the invite!

Author sites below

Ben Tanzer: http://bentanzer.blogspot.com/

Sally Weigel: http://www.cclapcenter.com/asleep/

Jason Fisk: http://www.jasonfisk.com/

Katherine Hodges (aka Katherine of Chicago): http://cityofdestiny.blogspot.com/

Chicago Center for Literature and Photography: http://www.cclapcenter.com/

Also, this event ended up getting some significant press from Gaper’s Block, Chicagoist.com, Time Out Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow blog network.

Gaper’s Block: http://www.gapersblock.com/slowdown/archives/literary/

Chicagoist.com: http://chicagoist.com/2010/05/28/we_like_literary_events_that.php

Time Out Chicago: http://chicago.timeout.com/events/books/343177/4497621/urban-decay-urban-renewal

Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow blog network: http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/chicago-subtext/2010/05/cclaps-first-literary-event.html

Some Site Updates and What the Hell is This?

2010-05-29T01:05:00.000-05:00

I'm sure no one has noticed this, but I've been updating the nuts and bolts of this page including a new link at the top of the page in the menu bar with a link to the story of the origins of the name "Vinnie the Vole", which is a web handle I've been using since early college. Also, I've added some new links to blogs I love on the right hand side of the crawl, including some great ones run by friends of mine. I had to recategorize a few of them and push them beneath the playlist.com player so that people can still switch the music easily. Just the same I highly encourage you to check them out, there's some great ones.

Googling "Vinnie the Vole" is always good for some laughs, but I haven't done it in probably a year and when I Googled it today, one of the first hits was for an absolutely hilarious Java-based web-game called "Vinnie Vole's Existential Nightmare." Click on it, scratch your head wondering what exactly it all means, and then have the joke hit you about two minutes later. No idea who the creator of this is or why they'd use that particular name, but it's pretty funny (link below):

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/rossyboyfilm/953582

A Man Cave of One's Own

2010-05-27T14:46:00.001-05:00

You know, it’s not easy being a dad. You’ve heard all the reasons why a million times so I won’t go into them, but it’s not. There’s money and discipline and education and long hours and keeping your little bear cub safe and fed and thriving and growing, all with them more or less fighting you every inch of the way. If there’s ever an opportunity for them to make things easy on you, you can rest assured they won’t, and they’re so busy growing up that they neither notice nor care if dad is tired, tense, frazzled, and aging alarmingly fast. Maybe I’m just talking about myself here. In any case, at the end of the day I have to say I like being a father. There are many, many redeeming aspects of it that make the effort worthwhile. Older guys no longer give me a hard time because I’m part of their club now, and I have a little buddy to play swordfighting with! How sweet is that? I own more LEGOs now than all of the collections of my friends put together when I was a kid and I regularly get to watch cartoons with zero intellectual guilt. Beyond even the classic, oft-retreaded emotionally enriching and maturing value of parenthood, there is plenty of vindicating catharsis involved.

But there is one thing I still don’t have. There’s one thing that eludes me and makes me feel like fatherhood will forever be stones in my shoes and sand in my underpants. The thing my life is missing is a Man cave.

Some of my friends have them, and I know this because I see their wives bragging online about the homes they’ve bought and they describe the house’s layout. I look for words like “rec room” or “finished basement” or “attached garage” and I can barely restrain myself from a fist-pump in solidarity with the lucky husband who just scored himself a genuine Man cave. Rec room, my ass, I think. You just don’t want your friends to know your husband owns anything besides 400 thread count sheets, Waterford crystal, and an XXL Baby Bjorn. “Rec room” conjures images of a clean, bright modernistic space with a treadmill or comfy, tasteful sectional sofa with end tables. I’d bet money that those rooms instead contain golf bags, comic books, board games, vinyl record collections, high-end stereos and huge TVs, concert posters, guns and hunting/fishing gear, and sci-fi memorabilia. They say “rec room” because they’re mortified that their friends might discover an actual man lived there.

I know, I know, how contrite, right? How utterly typical of the whipped, 21st Century metrosexual dude. That American culture has fallen on times that find men (with a lower case “m”) scrambling to wall off one little cubby-sized warren of space in his entire dwelling in which to display, enjoy, or even just store all of the things he owns. The implications are usually sneered at by women, who will be the first to tell you that (1) men’s cherished belongings are tacky, trivial, esoteric wastes of space, time and money and (2) are tolerated only inasmuch as they are stored far from sight where they don’t need to be seen, understood, validated, or heaven forbid appreciated.

And yet suggest for an instant that the woman in a relationship live for any length of time immersed in the trappings of masculine decorative sensibility, with perhaps only a single room in the house in which to cram all of their delicate, pointless furniture that can’t be properly sat on or their knick-knacks that do nothing but collect dust and break if you look at them sideways, and you’ll find yourself (at best) on the other end of a stern, huffy argument about your maturity and (at worst) staring at the door that just slammed as she walked out on your selfish, inconsiderate ass. Because one thing’s certain when it comes to the nuts and bolts of homecraft: selfishness and inconsiderate behavior is a one-way street, guys. In the way that most men feel like they were born to be lions, kings of whatever they could conquer, I firmly believe that most women feel that they were born to make homes. I’m not suggesting women were born to be homemakers in the classic sense of the word, in the “chained to the stove” sense. I mean it is in their DNA to be able to effectively organize and maintain a living space that is accommodating to them. I do not say this as a put-down. I do not have any empirical proof of this either, just anecdotal evidence. Their attitude toward it could not even properly be called entitlement, because that would suggest they did not have the utter, inborn right to craft our home and theirs in their own image. Women have no interest in even debating our right to have equal say in the decoration or adornment of our living space. They’ve earned it, as far as they’re concerned. It’s not selfishness or being inconsiderate if it’s your birthright, and a birthright to them it most certainly is.

So without making judgments about how other men live their lives, and without resorting to the kinds of polar-thinking that would lead us to the eventualities I just described, I wanted to take this Thursday’s blog slot to declare that I want a fucking Man cave. Yes, I realize as a rational, thinking man, that there are plenty of men who do not have Man caves at all. I also understand that there are an approximately equal number of men whose entire dwelling could be considered a large and elaborate Man cave. I pity the former and I envy the latter, but my heart’s modest desire is to be part of the middle of that bell curve. I can understand that the economics and practical systems of modern life don’t easily afford the sort of Hugh Hefner-esque man-centric luxury living that makes me practically drool just thinking about, but I also firmly believe that to live in a home in which virtually no space at all is devoted to you (also read: masculinity) is an unhealthy hardship beyond tolerance.

And I’m not quite at that point. I’m not quite a cipher from a dystopian novel where everything I own is communal and privacy and selfhood has ceased to exist. But for all of you lucky bastards out there with a basement or a garage or a second bedroom which you have control over, bemoaning your bachelor pad days, I want to tell you that life does get considerably worse from where you are.

I live in a 900 square foot condo. Small, even by urban standards, for raising a child in. We have a basement storage area that is unfinished and communal with locking wooden storage enclosures, and a single parking spot in a communal parking lot. We have two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a combination living room/dining room that’s really just one large room, a single bathroom, and a front sun room that is enclosed but not heated. The sun-room is windows on all four walls ceiling to floor. Of this space, the portions that belong to me are as follows:

I share half of a dresser with my wife, and I have a small free-standing armoire that belongs just to me to store my clothes and guitars in. I share roughly half of one bookshelf in the sun-room. I share the basement storage unit with Beth, in which is a large locking plastic tough-bin to store a variety of relics from my youth, alongside four or five plastic Tupperware bins full of books, DVD’s, video games, and CD’s that are kept in there as well. I have my laptop bag, and I have my car. And that’s it.

The living room and dining room are communal, which is parent-ese for “belongs to the hordes of hundreds of small plastic action figures and toys that won’t fit in his bedroom.” I did manage to buy a leather chair and ottoman for the living room when we replaced the couch, but any space where you have to shovel the Duplo blocks and stuffed animals and empty sippy cups off of in order to sit down cannot, in my book, be properly called mine. There is some debate in our house about whom the sun-room “belongs” to. Originally, it was going to be the new “office” that Beth and I would share when John was born and we moved our “office” out of the second bedroom. However, the sun-room is too small to comfortably fit two desks into, so we’ve downsized our individual footprints into one shared desk with a shared desktop computer on it.

When John was small, this room was the only room off-limits to him because it had a door that could be closed to keep wandering little hands away from the cables and power outlets necessary for computer equipment. But now his house-devouring manifest destiny has started to creep into it as well. The bottom shelf has his books on it and there are toys stored along one wall by the outside windows to get them out from underfoot in the living room. My wife uses the room for her work and school tasks and it’s the only computer she has access to in our house so whenever she needs one she’s in that space. Still, the case could be made that the sun-room is “my” room, by virtue of the fact that it’s far enough away from the television that John doesn’t generally like to play in there and that it’s my default place to go park myself because there usually aren’t toys or piles of laundry in the chair or on the desktop itself. Still, inasmuch as many of my belongings are stored in and on the desk itself and I keep it largely clean and free of clutter not directly belonging to me, neither the room nor the desk are really exclusively mine.

So my point behind saying all of this is that I’m not utterly without space for myself, but I lack any meaningful space to call mine. I’m 31 years old, smack dab in the middle of a lengthy, successful medical career. I own a dwelling in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the Chicago area, with the taxes and inflated costs of living scars to prove it, and I can claim perhaps all of 20-30 square feet of space in the whole world as my own.

Just to put that in perspective, an average prison cell is 6 by 8 feet, or 48 square feet total, and is shared by two prisoners, which puts each prisoner’s personal square footage at about 24 square feet. The difference is that the hypothetical prisoner we’re talking about has all twenty four of those square feet all in one place, whereas my personal square footage is spread out over slivers of four different rooms.

So even if you take the obvious hyperbole out of that, and ratchet down the faux-drama in my voice, that still leaves me on the bottom end of the bell curve, envying guys with a windowless utility shed full of the things I have to either throw away or make disappear into a dank dungeon-like storage area in watertight bins so all of my belongings don’t just rot out from under me.

There was a great scene that pretty much describes the way I feel in a movie called Juno a couple of years back. The film, if you haven’t seen it, involves a pregnant teen preparing to give her baby up to adoption to a thirty-something married couple. Their house is a beautiful two-story Victorian style home in a suburban neighborhood and the couple seems outwardly happy with it, but later in the film when the girl, Juno, is spending more time with the husband, he shows her a basement storage room full of all of his belongings and Juno quips “Wow, she gave you a whole room in your own house? Pretty short leash she’s keeping you on.” This room contains everything from stereo equipment to a music collection to posters, comic books, guitars, and other various memorabilia from his childhood. The message that the film’s writer, Diablo Cody, was trying to convey is very clear: this is what married men are reduced to. Not only do they not get to be the primary decider of how and with what a home is decorated, but they’re expected to be quiet and happy with packing their most treasured loot from youth into a hidden, uncomfortable space that, if they’re lucky, is basically a glorified closet. The husband later leaves the wife, admitting to himself in a predictable but oddly understandable twist that he is not ready to be a father, despite being 35 years old. I feel this guy’s pain. After all, if parenthood is the difficult exercise in self-annihilation that everyone agrees it is, and he’s already been relegated to a closet in his own home, then can you blame the guy for rethinking himself?

It’s the nuance of this scene that made this film work so well for me. It’s one of the most honest portrayals of modern marriage and family domestic life I’ve ever seen. And it’s uncomfortable and polarizing (women almost uniformly seethe at the attitude that the husband displays, citing a sort of epidemic of perpetual teenager-hood as the cause rather than the inherent unfairness of the husband’s living situation) precisely because it’s so honest. It also goes much further toward understanding of the dynamic than most similar stories do. Whereas it’s endlessly easy for women to be sarcastic and condescending toward masculinity, and virtually taboo for men to do the same thing to women, it’s sobering in the extreme to look at a problem like this for what it really is: a sharp and painful inequality. Most women born after 1950 have been taught their entire lives that inequality is a one-way street that forever dumps unfairness into their laps, and really for the last two decades, even according to some of the more vocal feminist thinkers, this has not been true. Inequality is very much a two-way exchange, and in Juno, Diablo Cody made it clear that she understands this subtlety. The statement this scene makes about life is that nothing breeds resentment and disappointment faster than crushed individuality and radically unmet expectation, and that goes for men, too.

So let’s just say for the sake of argument that you’ve kept up with me through this whole explanation of why I want a Man cave and you understand and agree with the underlying social dynamic at play, and you agree that it’s reasonable to expect that I have at least some space in my own home that’s mine. Your very next question is likely to be: what exactly do you have that’s so fucking important that it needs its own room? I’ve seen the dusty old book collection and the box full of guitar parts, and the juvenile 80’s memorabilia, and your high school diploma and audio equipment I don’t recognize and the rolled up old posters from concerts you went to in college, but what’s so special about that crap?

Even after the purges necessitated by living in a miniscule condo for so long, and the guilty episodes where I let my wife talk me into throwing away things I bitterly regret throwing away now, I still have managed to hold onto a pretty significant number of belongings that I just couldn’t bear to part with. Not a ridiculous, Hoarders sort of level of garbage, but quite a bit of cool, eclectic, esoteric stuff that I love dearly and just doesn’t mesh well with children or in a home decorated the way ours is. For example, I have a pretty great set of decorative samurai swords on a lacquered stand. For a number of years this was a mainstay of my home workspace because I liked the way they looked and they felt like something a guy like me should have in his office. I can understand perfectly that these needed to be packed safely away until my son is out of the house at the very least. The problem is that the same could be said of virtually every possession I own.

In the basement is my old stereo, including a 440 watt amplifier and a pair of heavy old-school three-phase stereo speakers with 12” woofer cones in a gorgeous pair of hand-made, closed-back, wooden speaker cabinets. They have tweed faces and they’re glorious, and not only are they currently collecting dust, they’re sitting on a pair of 4x4 wooden blocks to keep them far enough off the floor that the spring melt-off doesn’t damage them. Like draping the coffin of a beloved friend, they are covered with a drop-cloth made of an old, original Return of the Jedi blanket that I had when I was five and can’t bear to part with. I can understand that these speakers were a bit of a liability with a child running around given that they have wires to tangle with and high-voltage outputs on the back that you’d not want a child to get into. But really, I feel like them being in the basement has more to do with the fact that my wife hates them (perhaps “hates them” is the wrong choice of words when describing my belongings, “is willfully ignorant of the awesomeness of them” is more accurate) and that they were taking up valuable floor space that could otherwise be used for, you guessed it: more of John’s toys.

Once upon a time, I had at least two entire shelves of hardcover and paperback books in my office. These are now in plastic bins in my basement because we didn’t have room for them in the sun-room when we moved the office out there. Ok, fine, perfectly understandable. Yet, later on, when John got a bit older I started mentioning to my wife that we’d eventually get them back out and find some shelf space for them and I got stonewalled again. “Um… where would we put them?” she asked. Fair enough. “We could split them up or buy some new low bookshelf so they could fit under the windowsill on the inside of the sun-room.” “We can’t really afford that, and they probably wouldn’t fit very well” my wife retorted. Ok, I thought. “Well, if we were to get a house someday, I’d love to have some space for them.” “For what, those dusty old paperbacks? All they are is paperbacks. And you know I’m allergic to dust.”

Can you see where this is going? The focus went from it being a practical concern forcing a temporary change that eventually became a permanent, irrevocable change due to factors completely different than what prompted it to begin with. This is the sort of way that my wife’s inborn homecraft instinct kicked in and systematically kicked me out of my own house. Pretty sly, no? It didn’t happen all at once, that would have felt like an all-out assault, but true love and oppression are both subtle. I have to give her credit, she stuck with it for almost ten years now and it has undeniably paid off.

The same thing happened to a number of framed photographs I had, my CD and DVD collection, my guitars… Some of my clothing has simply disappeared or I’ve discovered it later torn up in the rag pile and used as cleaning cloths. If you want to have an utterly emasculating experience sometime, let your wife nag you into voluntarily throwing away something you like simply because if you don’t you know the nagging will never end. It started to become sort of a protective measure of mine to quietly remove something I didn’t want summarily thrown away and put it in a bin in the basement where it remained innocuous enough to escape her. After a while I found myself grateful that I had any possessions at all that were “nice” enough to be included in the main living area of our house. And by “main living area” I mean, “not in bins in the unfinished, unheated basement”.

So here I am four years after the D-Day invasion of my son, who is admittedly a very cool kid and even thank God likes most of the things I like, and I’m feeling like I’m almost not even an owner of the place where I sleep every night. We’re getting ready to refinance our mortgage and no one is more surprised to see my name on the title than me. Wait a minute, I thought, that? That isn’t my house. That’s Beth and John’s house and I’m just visiting. If I picked up everything I owned in my house that wasn’t communal property or Beth’s and moved it onto the lawn, the interior of the house would look almost unchanged save for a few empty shelves and drawers. If Beth did the same thing, the house would look completely abandoned except for a few pieces of mutually-purchased furniture and the television.

All right, all right, now I’m just whining. I don’t want to be that douchebag from Juno who left his wife because he couldn’t manage to plant the flag of masculinity in his own home. That would seem like a humiliating defeat. Plus, my wife is awesome! She’s pretty and highly intelligent and sexy and she takes terrific care of my son. She knows quality things when she sees them, she has even better taste in music and movies than I do, and she largely puts up with my irritating habits like spending two hours writing a blog post. But neither do I want to go into the basement with a flashlight and a broom to brush cobwebs away every time I want to retrieve a mothballed book or see some inconsequential object that I love. I didn’t sign up to be an 18-year extended guest in my own home, I signed up to be a Dad, with a capital D, and Dads have Stuff with a capital S. Time to put my money where my domestic sociopolitics are. You’ve stuck with me so far through the what, when, why, and how, but now I want to ask you to take one more step with me. This is the first step toward something greater. In the same way I committed myself to this little blog and rededicated a small portion of my life toward getting it done and not just thinking about it anymore, I want to make a second commitment to myself: I want to keep the lovely home I have with my little tribe, but today is the day that I start to rededicate a small portion of it to myself.

Today, I begin my quest for a Man cave.

A little late spring music

2010-05-21T22:16:00.000-05:00

Just updated my player to what I've been listening to lately. It's been a weirdly good/difficult spring, but it wouldn't be spring without a fresh playlist. Crank it up. Roll down your windows. Whatever. It's the 21st century and individuality is king.

"Crown on the Ground" by Sleigh Bells
"1,2,3,4" by Plain White T's
"Lose Some Time" by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
"Look at Me" by Kari Noble
"Catch me if you can" by Outasight
"Gypsy" by Shakira
"At Seventeen" by Janis Ian
"Night Moves" by Bob Seger

The Fifth Grade Taco Incident, and How I'm Not Still Bitter About It After All These Years

2010-05-20T23:01:00.001-05:00

I was pondering what to write for my weekly update, since I sort of waffled last week and I was working on my new novel this week and didn’t take time to prepare for my Thursday promised blog update. I couldn’t settle on where to go with it, so I did what anyone would do: I went and made some tacos. They were delicious. When I was unpacking the taco “kit” however, I paused for a moment to consider the little cardboard roll in the middle of the first shell. They put this there to keep the inside of the plastic shrink-wrap dry and to keep the first taco shell from collapsing, causing an unstoppable calamitous cascade of broken-shell tragedy.

When I was in middle school (I’m thinking around fifth grade so that would put my age at what, ten? Eleven?), I went to the cafeteria for lunch. To my delight it was taco day. This was cause for no small amount of joy, since taco day came between sometimes weeks and weeks of crap lunches. You know what I’m talking about: the awful pizza with a flotilla of cheese globs adrift on a too-thick piece of soggy bread covered in half-molten canned tomato paste. The sloppy Joes made of meat that smelled ok but had an inordinate amount of gristle or the occasional tooth-grating bone fragment in it. The fish-patties that had a disturbing gelatinous center which was either a product of the fact that they weren’t cooked correctly or they were so poorly produced that once they were breaded the quality control workers washed their hands of them. But taco day was glorious. There was only one way to make tacos, and they were nearly impossible to fuck up. Not impossible. Just nearly impossible. There were a few times that the meat from the stomach-turning “steakums” (a perversion of a Philly cheese steak sandwich) or “ribwiches” (shudder, I won’t go into it, but think mechanically-separated pork) was recycled and stuffed into taco shells, but we won’t talk about that because the memory is too painful.

Well on this particular day I had stood in the painfully long and slow line along with the rest of my class and finally received my taco. You’d only get one, but they were glorious. There was cheese on them (the same bulk shredded mix of cheddar and mozzarella that was used to make the pizzas on pizza day, which was twice a week because they were dirt cheap to make), and they even had little packets of some form of generic taco sauce. It wasn’t luxurious, there were no tomatoes or salsa or sour cream or lettuce, but it beat the living hell out of virtually any other lunch served there. Like I said, it’s nearly impossible to fuck up tacos.

So I sat down and went about the business of putting the sauce on my taco. The smell of over-cooked ground beef wafted to my nostrils and I was transported to a land of drooling lust for the lunch I was about to devour. Again, I had waited for quite a long time if you counted the fact that I left home at 7AM each morning and then was forced to sit through not only five hours of classes with no food or snacks but also a maddening fifteen minute lunch-line wherein I could watch and smell the other students whose lunchtimes were slightly earlier already seated around me eating their lunches.

So I took a bite of this long-waited-for taco and I immediately could tell something wasn’t right. I reluctantly unhinged my jaw from the half-bitten thing and pulled out something from within the meat in the barrel of the taco shell. You guessed it. It was the fucking cardboard roll for the first shell. Not just ignored and accidentally left in the shell, but cooked into the meat, garnished with cheese, and served to me. It sort of disintegrated in my mouth in a way I would revisit a decade or so later the first time I ever tried to smoke a too-old cigar that hadn’t been properly humidified. I pulled it out and raised my hand. A teacher came over and asked me what I needed. I showed them the cardboard roll and asked them what this meant. At the time I had no idea what this cardboard thingie in my food could possibly be. A prize of some sort? A practical joke? The teacher frowned and told me I should take it up to the lunch lady and ask her. Not the cashier, but the lady actually serving the food.

So I did, of course. I wanted to know how and why my particular taco had been snatched from my jaws by this weird intrusive doohickey that was most certainly NOT a taco ingredient. So I took my grumbling belly and the half-chewed cardboard roll up to the lunch counter and waited patiently for several dozen students from the class that was in line to get through the cashier and out so I could get close enough to ask. She looked at me, and I can remember what she looked like but not her expression, and asked what I wanted. I showed her the roll and explained that I had found it in my taco and I was wondering what it was. She took it from me as if I had handed her a turd and scowled at it. After an instant she shrugged and tossed it into the trashcan.

“I don’t know.” She said.

“Can I have another one?” I asked.

She pointed to the empty steel tray under the baking brightness of the warming lamp. It was empty but for a few dry, crispy fragments of taco shell.

“They’re all gone,” she said, matter of factly, yelling a little bit over the sound of scouring sprayers in the back of the kitchen washing dishes. She turned and left me standing there speechless.

She was not sorry.

It was not something I was cognizant of at the time, but I remember this now as one of the first times I realized that the people who were left in charge of us (meaning adolescents in general, when I was one) could really sometimes not give Shit One about us. How could such a heartless creature turn me away on taco day? This wasn’t just some other run-of-the-mill calendar day, this was the day that I suffered through steakums, budget pizza, and grade D-but-edible hamburger in order to finally enjoy. I had earned this goddamned taco and it was an affront to the core of my being to screw me out of it the way they had.

I turned around, dejectedly, and slumped back to my seat, eating whatever canned fruit had come in the little waxed-paper cups and drinking my disappointing half-carton of skim milk (if you had a later lunch period, which it seemed like I always did, all the chocolate and whole milk would be gone). The meat was full of fibers of cooked flimsy cardboard, but I think I might have tried to eat the remaining now-cold shell of the taco before the lunch period was over and we had to move along to whatever was next.

So the whole point of this (there was a point, wasn’t there?) is that I was getting ready to make tacos tonight for my family and I opened the taco kit box and saw the shells with the cardboard roll and like a slap in the face suddenly I was in fifth grade again and sitting dejectedly over my ruined taco. Could there be such a thing as taco remorse? Unresolved taco angst? Because I definitely still felt something there, in the pit of my stomach. Maybe some small part of me pines for the taco that wasn’t to be. But it wasn’t the fact that some careless cafeteria worker had BAKED A CARDBOARD PIECE OF PACKAGING MATERIAL into a child’s food that bothered me. Oh no, I was thinking something else:

That lying bitch, I thought to myself. She had more tacos in there somewhere.

A few exciting things are happening

2010-05-13T22:29:00.000-05:00

I'm going to take a break from the long-ish weekly updates and just share some of the neato stuff that's happening in my life in the coming couple of weeks.

To start with, my collection of robot-related short stories that I compiled and edited last year has won a silver medal in the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards. I'm thrilled that Thank You, Death Robot has gotten the nod because thirteen authors and our cover designer stood by me and my vision for the better part of three years to complete it. I'm sure I tested their patience and wore out their sense of humor toward it somewhere around year three, but all of the best parts of this book are a tribute to their willingness to persevere with me. I'm humbled and very grateful that this book which meant so much to them, and to me, has been recognized.

Next up is my first reading event of the year, at the Op Shop on May 28th at 8PM in Hyde Park for the first live literary event put on by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (http://www.cclapcenter.com/). I was honored to be invited and I'm looking forward to reading and rubbing elbows with some of my other Chicago writing peers that include the excellent Sally Weigel, Ben Tanzer, Jason Fisk and Katherine Hodges. Hope to see you there and special thanks to Jason Pettus for thinking of me for it. It's going to be at a very cool venue in Hyde Park that I'm excited to check out. For more details, click the CCLaP link above. I realize I've kept the details of my upcoming novel The Damnation of Memory under wraps for most of its development, but as a special treat I plan on reading a section of it for this event. If you're not able to make it to the actual event, you can watch it back later on CCLaP's online podcast.

I'm also looking forward to attending the May 26th book release party for Gina Frangello's new book Slut Lullabies. I've had the pleasure of meeting Gina a number of times at Chicago literary events and she and I sat together on a panel last year at the Pilcrow Lit Fest on writing sexuality. She is co-hosting the event with Allison Amend who is simultaneously releasing her book Stations West. The guest list includes, among a host of cool Chicago people, my friend Deborah Lader from the Chicago Printmaker Collaborative whose CPC has been home-base for my father-in-law's printmaking art for quite some time. Deborah is also one third of my favorite folk fusion band Sons of the Never Wrong.

Finally, life is pretty solid here in Casa Brand. Little John (no relation to the Robin Hood character) has moved up into the full-day 3's pre-school class. This brings with it a host of new toys, new rules, a slightly different routine, some great new teachers, and all sorts of massively fun pre-school mayhem. There's dirt! There's running under sprinklers! There's using the toilet instead of a diaper and getting used to wearing underpants! There's using fun new phrases like "two more minutes?" and "that's stupid!" The adventures seem limitless. Dad managed to download and tweak a nifty iPhone app called 'Hipstamatic" that he heard about from his friend Amy Guth at the Tribune while hanging out after Reading Under the Influence at Sheffield's last Wednesday night, and some truly great photos followed our wonderful day at the beach.

PS: check out how cute Beth looks! She won't say it herself but after several months of hard work she's recently back to wearing her pre-baby skinny clothes and she looks smoking hot. So proud of you baby!

The lost stories

2010-05-06T13:09:00.001-05:00

Every writer has a file full of these somewhere. Stories they started and never finished, or started and finished only to realize at the end that the idea was so half-cooked, so lame, that it wouldn't be a good representation of their talent or creativity. I was reorganizing my computer documents the other day and I happened across the sub-folder that contained the old ".txt" files of some of my earliest writing, all the way back to the very early 90's. Talk about a walk down memory lane. It was like finding a box full of old toys or photographs, but instead it was old ideas. None of them anything I'd plan to pin a career on, or even probably develop futher, ever, but mine just the same. I found when I dragged these out that each othem carried some temporal significance to me and like photographs they help me remember how I was thinking and where I was in life when I wrote them. So, for this week's entry, I want to share them with you. Most of them are too embarrassing even to this day to post online, but I'll give you the general gist. If you're a writer, especially an aspiring one, I hope you can see a little of yourself here too in these lost, unfinished, and ultimately abandoned stories.

Pre-High School/1990-ish

Title: Untitled
The Story: A three-page scene from what I envisioned as a longer story involving a private detective, a shady, rich, eccentric gangster, and the girl caught between them. This consisted of pretty much just a single scene of prose where the detective is visiting the mansion of the rich gangster (not sure if he even had a name, since I’ve long ago lost the actual pages of text and I’m just recalling this from memory), and meets the girl, who is practicing competitive diving from a private high-dive-style diving board. She is nervous about talking to him and indicates that the gangster is keeping her there against her will.
Age: I guess about eleven, though I turned twelve later that year. Hard to remember exactly how old I was.
Inspiration: Films like Dick Tracy and adolescent hormones, no doubt, in addition to books like Harold Robbins’ Descent from Xanadu, that I used to sneak peeks at from my parents’ collection when I was starting to get bored of what then passed for young adult books.
Significance: The first piece of prose more than a page long that I have any memory of writing.
Chances of it ever being dragged out and finished: None, since I don’t even have the original paper I wrote it on.

Title: The Doomboys
The story: Two chapters of a story about armored, robotically-enhanced super-soldiers. Hypothesized Saddam Hussain’s return to power and eventual assassination by US forces. Written on an old, obsolete (even at the time) 386 Windows 3.1 IBM computer. Hilarious premise, worse dialogue.
Age: Twelve.
Inspiration: The first Gulf War, Iron Man comics, every bad early 90’s action film ever made.
Significance: This was the first story I attempted where I was trying to predict what the future would be like. It contained things like whip-like non-lethal riot weapons and extensive computerized telecommunications between soldiers. I remembered everyone that I told about it laughing that Saddam Hussein would ever regain power in the Middle East, so it may also have been the first time I realized I could predict things in fiction that might eventually come true after a fashion.
Chance of it ever being dragged out and finished: Nonexistent.

I wrote several short stories during the 1993-94 school year during which I was a freshman in high school, again still on that old IBM 386.

Title: The Lincoln County Incident
The story: A completed short story about a high school student whose girlfriend is raped and beaten and later dies from her injuries. The student then plots an elaborate revenge that includes he and three of his friends taking the teacher responsible for the attack hostage in their school and broadcasting his execution by electrocution over the high school television public access station. This was, of course, pre-Columbine, so it didn’t get the same scrutiny it would today. Of course, probably only three or four people ever read it.
Age: Thirteen
Inspiration: High school drama and revenge-fantasy films like School Ties and The Crow from the early 90’s.
Significance: The first story I remember writing that wasn’t dreadfully, embarrassingly derivative of something I’d seen on TV, or having taken scenes directly from other books or movies.
Chances of it ever being published: Zero. It’s a groaner to read, though not horrible for a very young teenager.

Title: Impossible
The story: A short two-person, one act play, during which two high school age students have lengthy separate internal monologues about their attraction for each other, eventually culminating in only one moment of actual dialogue where they meet and sparks fly.
Age: Thirteen
Inspiration: Reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time, meeting my first high-school girlfriend.
Significance: None, really, aside from being my first experiment in narrative dialogue.
Chances of it ever being published: Never. I’m blushing just thinking about it.

Title: Spooked
The Story: A first-person narrative of a man who has gone on a desperate gambling-debt-fueled robbing and killing spree being slowly closed in on by the law. This was only 1200 words long and focused largely on the man’s growing paranoia.
Age: Thirteen
Inspiration: At this point I had started to read Stephen King extensively and I loved how his characters slowly went insane. This was my first shot at writing a character like that.
Significance: None.
Chances of it ever being published: None.

Title: Seti
The Story: A spaceship carrying a rescue team to a distant colony arrives and finds that the computer controlling the automated mechanisms of the outpost seems to have become possessed by Satan and murdered the colony’s inhabitants in colorful ways.
Age: Thirteen
Inspiration: Bad sci-fi films, and some good sci-fi films. Can’t remember how Satan came into it.
Significance: Second completed short story that had a beginning, middle, and end that followed a discernable narrative format. It was awful, but I remember finishing this story gave me some confidence.
Chances of it ever being published: None.

Title: The Line
The Story: Can’t even properly be called a story; more like a scene in a story that was never written. The designated hitman of a high-school gang sneaks up behind a football player during a game and, at the moment the crowd is distracted by a touchdown, shoots him with a pistol silenced by a bottle of Mountain Dew.
Age: Thirteen
Inspiration: Football star envy, maybe? No idea.
Significance: None.
Chances of it ever being finished: None.

Title: The Slammer
The Story: In the future (2003 Hah!), a hacker falls victim to a sting operation bent on enforcing new, draconian anti-computer-crime laws. He is sent to a special prison where inmates are summarily killed for small transgressions and coerced in certain circumstances to fight each other to the death. Our protagonist, who has a cipher instead of a name, makes a daring getaway with implausible martial arts and balletic gunplay.
Age: Thirteen
Inspiration: Not sure. There was a stretch where I read a couple of prison-riot drama novels so maybe that.
Significance: One of the first of a handful of original stories that wasn’t totally derivative, and long-ish as well at 3,600 words.
Chances of it ever being published: None.

Early High School 1994-1995

During this time I became friends with a young man named Paul Hughes, whom I had known several years before but lost touch with. Read his hand-written first draft of Enemy in spiral notebooks and he read some of my stories in a stapled booklet I made. He encouraged me to continue writing and I told him Enemy was one of the best things I’d ever read. Enemy would go on to be published in 2000 and win the Editor’s Choice award at GreatUnpublished.com. It’s sequels, An End and Broken would win and be nominated for Independent publishing awards, respectively.

Title: “Moon 247”
The Story: A space-faring sci-fi action-er that used a back-and-forth Tom Clancy-style perspective shift to tell the story of an extended space battle between starships (The Republic Starship Wyvern and “Blackjack Gunship #77”, giggle) from several different points of view. Sort of like a submarine naval thriller in space. The story culminates with one mildly creative scene where both spaceships crash spectacularly and the crews bail out in time to parachute to the ground, where the battle resumes on foot. Dialogue is nearly all of the militaristic question-and-answer type. At 6,100 words, though, there was at least some story there.
Age: Fourteen
Inspiration: The Hunt for Red October, and early 90’s military techno-thrillers like Larry Bond’s Red Phoenix and Vortex.
Significance: The longest thing I’d written at that point. Hilariously, 6100 words is about 22 pages in Courier New font.
Chances of it ever being published: None.

Title: One Slight Error.
Story: This was the first time I attempted a true novel-length work. The plot was that the first manned Mars lander returned to Earth carrying a number of soil and rock samples, among which were curious microscopic photosynthetic lichen that could exist in the Martian atmosphere. Due to the radically different climate, the lichen’s metabolism was sped up considerably in Earth’s atmosphere and a tiny sample was lost in a plane crash in the ocean and began to grow exponentially until it formed a gigantic semi-sentient plant creature. At the end of what’s written, the plant started to emerge and creep up onto land and destroy everything in its path. All of this, for some reason, takes place hilariously among the backdrop of a second major Cuban political revolution. The original draft stands at about 10,000 words, and is just side-splitting bad.
Age: Sixteen
Inspiration: The Blob and other “unstoppable alien invasion” type sci-fi stories and movies.
Significance: The first time I was able to write anything of significant length, even though it remains unfinished and the plot had spiraled off into nonsense by about the middle of what I wrote. Also included the same multiple-narrative POV style as the techno-thrillers I was devouring at this time.
Chances of it ever being finished: Slim. It’s not a terrible idea, but it would need to be completely re-written from the very beginning just using the original idea and all-new context. Probably will never happen. I’ve got too many other good ideas on deck that need some eventual attention.

Late High School 1996-1997

For a time, I became somewhat disillusioned with my writing ability. I hadn’t managed to make much of One Slight Error, and I was starting to read beyond simple paperbacks now and get into real literature. I was finding myself woefully intimidated both by my lack of skill and my lack of what I felt were legitimate and original ideas. I only wrote one story this year that I still have, and it was in play format. It would become possibly the point where I decided I was going to keep trying anyway, and fight for as much originality and legitimacy as possible with my writing. The dialogue is awful and hilarious of course, but this is the first point I wrote something that didn’t just feel like a poor second-rate derivative of another, better work.

Title: The Soldier
The Story: A three-act play centering on a young woman who is heavily addicted to heroin and becomes part of the entourage of a dangerous drug gang in order to support her habit, as well as prostituting herself. During a police raid on the residence that the gang members use for their hideout, Rosa (the woman) escapes with the help of a mysterious man. She wakes from the pain of withdrawal several days later in the apartment of a friend wearing a necklace with a small silver toy soldier on it. She returns to the gang via another member named Vega, who is more vicious and brutal even than her former boyfriend, and immediately returns to shooting heroin. When Vega and his friends attempt to gang-rape an incapacitated Rosa, the man from the first scene returns and fights them off, this time taking her with him.

Rosa awakens again in an unfamiliar place, this time in the apartment of the man, who calls himself Hazard. Hazard tells her that he has been silently watching and protecting her for some time, and after the initial uncertainty and awkwardness the two of them fall in love. Hazard is a huge and physically imposing man who is also somewhat disfigured due to childhood abuse at the hands of a religious fundamentalist father. He explains that in a rage he murdered and crucified his own father on the cross that dominated their living room wall, and as a symbolic penance has chosen to atone for this by helping Rosa get off of drugs and reclaim her life.

Some time later, after Rosa has completely kicked her addiction and several scenes of she and Hazard trying to live a normal life, members of the former gang happen to run into her on the street and start to harass her. Hazard steps in to stop them but this time the gang is ready for him. They drag Rosa into an alley and make her watch while they shoot Hazard. They stuff her into a car and drive away.

The final scene begins with Vega, Gino, and the others opening up the trunk to once more rape and possibly kill Rosa, but this time she pushes open the trunk lid and stuns one of the gang members long enough to get his gun away from him. There is a shoot-out and Rosa manages to kill the others, including standing over Vega much the way he did to Hazard and delivering a fatal shot.

In an epilogue to the play, a young boy with the same colored eyes as Hazard is seen walking down the halls of an elementary school and looking at a necklace with a silver soldier on it. Behind him, the blackened shadows of Hazard and Rosa look on as a narrator reads the description that Rosa died some time later of complications from HIV.
Age: Seventeen
Inspiration: This was about the time when I started to get away from pop-fiction and discovered magical realism literature. This sort of story was legion in early graphic novels, and though I don’t write anything like this these days it was enormously appealing to me as a teenager.
Significance: Though I am still somewhat embarrassed by the quality of it, this did appear for a time on my webpage in college for people to read, and it was the first thing I ever felt comfortable sharing with a larger audience than just myself or my close friends.
Chances of it ever being published: None, but interesting as a turning point in my early writing career.

Early College 1997-1998

My first year in college I wrote very little up until nearly the end of the school year. Shortly before finals week began, I wrote the first three chapters of a novel titled The Blue East that would remain unfinished but is (at over 70,000 words), to date, still the longest thing I’ve ever written. It was perhaps half finished when I abandoned it, and I did so not because I disliked the story or my writing, but because the plot had become so convoluted and ponderous that going further would have necessitated re-writing huge swathes of the beginning to conform to where I eventually steered the plot. Today the prospect of rewriting a novel isn't as daunting but in the end, I ran out of ideas and lost a clear direction for where I wanted the story to go. So still it sits. This was a project that I worked on for a number of years, and the most recent updating done to it occurred in January 2001 where chapters of it became part of the original stories published on the fledgling Silverthought.com. At the time, The Blue East, Paul Hughes’ An End (IPPY Award Winner) and Carl Rafala’s Red Dust and Dreams presented serially as they were written, were the site’s only content.

Title: The Blue East
The Story: In a distant future, a near-miss by a comet called Dante glancing off of Earth’s atmosphere ravages the planet’s geology, dragging away a significant portion of the Ozone and atmospheric layers that protect the Earth from the killing cosmic UV rays. The sun has become death to the inhabitants of the world, and society has broken down into pre-industrial, chaotic, anarchy. A city in the American Midwest is walled in castle-style and kept safe from the predations of roving packs of cannibalistic mutant humans called Peregrines.

The protagonist, Milo, is the second in command of the city’s loose army/security force called the Daens. His father, the Captain, explains using an old globe that once there was a place where water would stretch away to the horizon. If they could reach this place, they might be able to avoid the effects of another generation of living in the poisonous desert that the Midwest has become. Milo’s common-law wife is named Elimande. They decide to put together an expedition East to see the “blue land” themselves, and they gas up an ancient Jeep and take what weapons they have that still work. As they prepare, however, the Peregrines mount a massive attack on the city. Milo and his driver Henry escape from the city, but not before the Peregrines destroy the city and kill both the Captain and Elimande.

Devilled by guilt, Milo and Henry bitterly cross the barren Midwest and Milo recalls how he met and wooed Eli in earlier times before the Peregrines came to power and wiped out the neighboring sister city she was from. Along the way, they meet another woman named Sophie who joins them and she and Henry are immediately attracted to each other. Sophie is later wounded in an attack by flying Peregrines who have mutated to grow wings, and they take her to an unfamiliar gated, walled city to try to find help for her. Instead of help, the city guards incapacitate and disarm them and throw them all, including the wounded Sophie, into a jail cell. Milo has hidden a pair of sharpened steel knives in the soles of his boots and he and Henry use these to kill a guard and escape.

As they run, their escape is assisted by the simultaneous attack of a Peregrine war band on the city, and they stumble out through a sewer tunnel with the injured and possibly-dying Sophie strung between them. In order to draw their pursuers off, they split up. Henry takes Sophie through the sewer system and Milo tries for a separate gate, drawing as much attention as possible. A gun-battle ensues in which Milo commandeers an ancient rusty machinegun and unleashes it on the city guards and Peregrines alike. Eventually he manages to escape in the chaos that follows. Henry and Sophie are not followed, but Sophie’s condition begins to rapidly worsen.

At this point, the main narrative splits into two separate parallel storylines. Milo is pursued out of the city by a pack of Peregrines leading mutant hunting dogs and a huge, apparently friendly, mutant steps in to help, slaughtering them all easily. The Mutant’s name is Vagnar, and Milo learns that he is of a strain of mutants that have adapted to the killing rays of the sun and can survive them. Vagnar takes Milo to his people’s fortress high in the trees of the gradually-thickening eastern forests.

Henry and Sophie are met by a mysterious and unusual-looking woman named Selyth, who is of a separate race of mutants that have developed technology to keep themselves safe from the sun. Their skin is such a pale white that it nearly glows, and they appear such that Henry calls them Angels. Selyth quickly hides them in strange invisible tent-like structures that the Angels use for shelter, and heals Sophie’s wound. While Sophie is unconscious and healing in the next tent, Selyth steals into Henry’s tent and seduces him.

The two then later meet each other in parallel trips East to find a place where they believe the Peregrines may be holding prisoners from their conquests of the Midwestern cities. The Aeiri (Angels), however, hate Vagnar’s barbarians, and the humans find themselves in furious negotiation to keep one from wiping the other out. An uneasy truce is made, and the band continues East.

The final two chapters that were written concern the last leg of the journey before they reached the Peregrine stronghold in permanently-ice-covered Canada. Chapter 11 has them traversing the Great Lakes (which have frozen completely solid due to the climate shift), but walking through cavernous tunnels in the ice. They walk through the actual lake and see in the light of their torches the wreckages of old ships, and of mutant monsters that formed in the brief years before the lakes froze solid. Immediately after emerging from the lake, they discover an old communications bunker from before the Char which houses the remains of a detachment of military personnel including a man named Niles Nazereth.

At this point, it is revealed that during the years preceding the Char, mankind was well aware that the comet would strike the Earth and used virtually every resource still remaining on the planet to build a pair of giant spacecraft called Arks to escape with. Nazereth, a disgruntled divorcee whose ex-wife took a place on the Ark without him, uses his military clearance to gain access to the bunker, which houses the targeting system for an orbital laser battery designed to knock solid objects out of the sky before they impact Earth. Since the comet Dante is not solid, this battery is useless. Instead, Nazereth trains the weapon on the Arks and shoots them down, killing all aboard, only hours before the Comet impacts the earth and glances off, causing the Char.

I have some outline material that remains for the group encountering the terrifying leader of the Peregrines, Onelannor, but it is sketchy and there are plot holes in the story large enough to put my foot through. (Fun fact: I did re-use the name “Onelannor” later in my early POD published middle-grades novel The Prince and The Pitchman.)
Age: Eighteen when I began, twenty-two when I abandoned it.
Inspiration: Loads of classic sci-fi. By this point in my life, I had started to delve into some of the best sci-fi from the 1960’s and 70’s, both film and books, and they inspired it heavily. I had also started to favor dystopian, apocalyptic fiction by then, and knew I wanted to write something like that.
Significance: Enormous. This was the first time I could see a story evolve into something original, of appropriate length to be considered a viable novel, and with at least the chance of being finished. Though The Blue East will likely never be completed and published, Niles Nazereth was the subject of two further short stories, both originally meant as back-story for The Blue East. “The Reading of the Riot Act” and “Ballerina” were eventually published in Carl Rafala’s collection Alien Light, and became my first print publishing credits.
Chances of it ever being finished/published: Slim to none. Again, not because I didn't like it as much as I've just already got a whole bunch of other ideas, most of them a bit more creatively mature, that are waiting for me to make stories out of.

Middle College (Fiction Classes) 1999

I wrote a number of short stories this year for fun and for the advanced techniques of fiction class that I took with visiting guest author Elizabeth Stuckey French. Most that I still have are under 750 words and are just writing exercises, but three stood out. The first was a full-length short story about astronauts stuck in a space-shuttle that’s slowly decompressing into the vacuum, sadly I lost the original draft of this story and the file on my computer was corrupted. I don't even have a more detailed synopsis or hard copy I can reference. The second one was a peculiar little non-sci-fi piece, and the third was a completed short story called The Crying Dragon submitted as a semester-long project.

Title: Hot Tin Roof

The Story: A 1,300 word story told in the Second Person about a man who takes his work-related aggression out on his family and eventually loses them.
Age: Twenty
Inspiration: The story was an exercise that was supposed to contain the first line “I met him on the stairs.”
Significance: This was the first story I remember receiving significant positive feedback about from my peers and my instructor for the course. It was a big boost for my enthusiasm for writing.
Chance of it ever being published: Slim to none. Too short, too obscure, and too amateurish, but not bad at all to read all these years later.

Title: The Crying Dragon
The Story: A dragon named Isaac is holed up in his mountainside lair one day, recovering from a sickness that makes him sneeze like a sick puppy, and a knight named Sir Gabriel wanders into his chamber. The dragon initially suspects the man has come here to kill him, and so easily disarms the knight. Questioning him briefly before planning to barbecue him with a blast of flame breath, Isaac learns that the knight has come to slay him in order to obtain his tears, which he hopes to use to bring his beloved Lady Victoria back from the dead. He goes on to say that his lady was ambushed and slain by poachers and he was forced to watch. The injustice of it makes Isaac upset but, having killed many humans in his life already, Isaac is unable to shed a tear for the knight. Sir Gabriel, realizing he cannot win and not wanting to continue on living without Victoria, snatches up his sword and stabs himself in the heart, dying instantly. This bothers Isaac even more, but still no tears. Isaac scoops the knight up and takes him down the mountain to the kingdom there where the knight came from. As he approaches, he notices that a funeral procession for Lady Victoria is in progress, and he flies down to the middle of the town square where the stunned humans are preparing for her funeral. The King, terrified but indignant and beside himself with grief over the Lady Victoria, snatches Sir Gabriel's body from Isaac and accuses him of murdering Sir Gabriel. Isaac tries to protest, but he can see in the eyes of the people he has terrified and wronged for so many years that they don't believe him. Very upset now, Isaac finally does begin to cry, and the tears that fall on the bodies of Sir Gabriel and Lady Victoria bring them back to life. The people of the kingdom welcome Isaac in an uneasy truce, and the dragon wonders idly at the end of the story how this will affect his image among the other dragons. Eventually, he decides he doesn't care.
Age: Twenty.
Inspiration: I think at the time I was reading quite a lot of short fiction and learning how authors I admired managed to work compact and layered themes and plots into something only five or ten thousand words long. This added to the fact that I've always been something of a high-fantasy fan as well.
Significance: I remember getting quite a lot of positive feedback about this story from other writers in my class and the instructor. Ego boosts are sort of the whole point to classes like these, but still. One of the first handful of things I wrote that didn't feel derivative, uncreative, undercooked, or incomplete.
Chances of ever seeing it published: Fairly ok, actually, depending on which venues would publish such a story.

Late College (DyingDays) 2000-2001

During this time, I began posting short fiction and serial fiction on DyingDays.com, a site which I co-founded with Paul Hughes. DyingDays.com wasn’t a fiction site, per se, but did feature initially some creative work and eventually a large wealth of fascinating proto-blog-ish material from a wide variety of creative people who would eventually form part of the bedrock of Silverthought.com and a modest sliver of the first generation of modern indie authors and bloggers.

Title: Ticka-Ticka-Ticka
The Story: A man is trying to work on his typewriter in his den, all the while his wife and mother-in-law are noisily disregarding his passionate pursuit of finishing his opus. As they continually intrude on his space and his thoughts, he eventually decides that his work is the most important thing to him. The final line involves him calmly getting up from his desk, opening the drawer, taking out a pistol and two bullets.
Age: Twenty-one
Inspiration: This was sort of my response to the Tarantino-ish/O. Henry style noir-twist fiction that was popular at the time and which I liked and felt comfortable with.
Significance: My first fiction piece posted online in a busy website.
Chances of it ever being published: None. Like most of these, even though it was fine at the time and even modestly creative for me at the time, it feels hopelessly amateurish to me in retrospect.

Title: The Ninja and the Pizza
The Story: A very short story that runs just over 1,000 words involving a ninja sent to retrieve a pizza. He is intercepted and killed by a second ninja in the process.
Age: Twenty-one, and apparently enjoying it.
Inspiration: Late-night pizza cravings my senior year during all-nighters to finish my homework.
Significance: None, though there is a fun tie-in: I wrote this without the benefit of having read Neal Stephenson’s enormously popular Snow Crash, in which the main character is a ninja pizza delivery guy.
Chances of it ever being published: God, I hope not even after I’m dead.

Title: The Rationalizations of Elwin Pitchpocket
The Story: This was originally written as a multi-part serial story for Dyingdays and released as it was written. It’s a 5,000 word short story about a nerdy young corporate pen-pusher named Elwin and his neighbors and their daughter, the Hanrattys. The hyper-confident and aggressive high-school age daughter, Darlene, flirts with Elwin a bit and then bluntly propositions him, but with the caveat that she is HIV positive. Elwin is indecisive and more than a little terrified and unable to decide, and she continues to taunt and entice him. The story ends with her coming over to his apartment only to find that he is gone, abruptly moving. It is never stated, but implied, that he did so because he knew the temptation would eventually have been too great for him.
Age: Twenty-two
Inspiration: There was a whole rash of this sort of drama in the late 90’s and early 00’s where films and books started adult-izing teenagers and treating them not as fumbling, comical adventurers (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ferris Beuller's Day Off) but as savvy, powerful young people whose mere inexperience, rather than their completely inappropriate attitudes, were what got them into trouble. I guess this was about the time I saw American Beauty, Fear, The Crush, Cruel Intentions, and in particular Larry Clark’s Kids, which hammered home the AIDS and HIV terror that was ground into my generation from almost the time we could read.
Significance: I remember feeling vaguely like I was trying to comment on what it would take for the media and our culture to snap out of our growing and unhealthy obsession with teenagers. This was right around the time of Columbine and the rise in MWWS (Missing White Woman Syndrome) where the media started an absolute uproar over kidnappings and murders of young white women like Chandra Levy while simultaneously glossing over important world-altering political events like the WTO "Battle in Seattle" and the A20 protests in Quebec.
Chances it will ever be published: None. Though I’ve gotten good feedback on it, it’s a very unoriginal, thematically dated piece and doesn’t stand up well a decade later.

Summer after College 2001

By this point I had started posting most of my work on Silverthought.com, where the stories I haven't mentioned from this stretch of time still reside in the archives. The only really "lost" story that I wrote up to then was a short story I wrote in a notebook while on my lunchbreaks working at Xerox in the summer of 2001, just before 9/11. I think it was eventually posted at DyingDays.com and it was the subject of a short-lived eBook experiment with Flagstone Publishing before that outfit became defunct. It's the last completed story of this type that sits in the folder of my old stories and ideas. I have a new folder of current ideas, chapters, treatments, and even several half-finished subsequent novels that I'm in the process of working my way through, but those are still quite viable in my mind, and I want them to be a surprise if and when they make it to completion in whatever format is most appropriate for them.

Title: Bunnygirl

The Story: Benny, a seventh grader, is sitting in a darkened classroom watching “West Side Story” for his music class. He is bored and thinks the movie is lame so his mind wanders. When the bell rings, he gets up to go out to the school busses and go home. He lines up at the door and on his way out he sees a pretty girl in what looks like a bunny costume, out of the corner of his eye. He turns and she disappears around the corner of the brick building. Stepping out of the bus line, he follows her only to have her once again duck behind another edge of the building and out of sight. He reaches the spot where she disappeared and finds a single bunny slipper at the opening of an exhaust vent in the exterior wall of the school. He looks into the vent and sees her further in, hiding, and smiling at him. She turns and vanishes down the vent pipe, and he climbs in to follow her. Stumbling around in the pipe, she grabs his neck and shoulders and gives him a thrilling kiss. He chases her around bends and turns into the darkness, all the while finding his way by following a trail of discarded scraps of fur and from the costume. Eventually, in the pitch dark, he discovers a piece of it that feels like the main leotard portion of the costume and he realizes she’s naked and running ahead of him through the vents. He starts to feel some apprehension about being there and starts to get the feeling that something very wrong is happening. As he turns the next corner, he realizes the light is completely gone, and all he can hear is the girl’s voice whispering to him. “Psst!” She says. He doesn’t respond, trying to figure it out. “Psst!” she repeats. At this moment, he wakes up from his daydream, startled, still at his desk and still watching “West Side Story”, and inadvertently staring at the girl, who is sitting next to him in his class. “Are you looking at my chest?” she whispers loudly, prompting laughter from his other classmates. He slinks down in his seat and looks away embarrassed.
Age: Twenty-two
Inspiration: I don't think at the time I was going for a Lewis Carrol tie-in, I think it had more to do with me thinking about boredom and daydreaming and the sorts of fantastical stuff that happens when your mind wanders. I can't remember if there was anything else specifically influential to this piece.
Significance: As I mentioned above, this was the first piece of mine that was made into an eBook and one of the first pieces I can remember feeling represented me as a maturing author with something to say and the skill to say it. Of course, now that I look back at it there are huge chunks of it that need to be rewritten to reflect my now thirtysomething narrative voice, but it's still a viable, entertaining little story.
Chances of seeing it published: Fairly good, depending on the venue and pending some revision.

Another time

2010-04-30T22:10:00.000-05:00

I was driving to work this morning and it seemed to strike me suddenly when I was listening to some old music that my generation, not just my generation but my specific age cohort (the one that graduated college in May of 2001) was the very last group of young people to pass the final hurdle to adulthood in a pre-9/11 world. I was listening to some of the music from that summer and it came back to me what a vibrant and interesting time it was. Right before the attacks the whole world was a vastly different place in a thousand ways, most of which are better than what we've got now. A few things were worse. There was no Facebook or iPhones and wireless broadband internet was still a difficult, clunky proposition. But it's becoming more and more clear to me as I get older that virtually everyone younger than me has little or no memory of a pre-9/11 world.

For them, the adult world has always been a place of limited opportunity and from the time they entered the workforce it's been a hellishly competitive, uncertain place. They don't remember walking into a job interview and not even bothering to ask about benefits because even small companies would have retirement funds, paid time off, and some form of available medical benefits rolled into their hiring package. They don't remember when your ability to rent an apartment, your automobile insurance, and a hundred other things weren't tied to your credit rating, which was fine, by the way, because credit cards only offered you a $2000 maximum and had interest rates under 10%. They don't remember when gas-guzzling SUV's were just a douche-y status symbol that had hypothetical, far-future environmental consequences instead of being a very-immediate genuine economic liability because, though it's still not cool to own them if you don't need them, fuel then in some parts of the country cost $0.97 a gallon. They've never known, and probably never will know, the freedom that cheap, economical air travel brought. They've never known what it was like to board an airplane without having to take their shoes off and face down a Nazi-ish TSA squad rifling through their bags.

Bush had taken office then, but had only been there for about a year and a half. Not really enough time to fuck things up too badly yet and he was still largely riding on the wave of Clinton's administration. We all were more or less puzzled by the bizarre election that had put him there, but since at the time he and Gore were so similarly positioned, not too offensive, not too different, both a little younger and implicitly hipper than George HW and Ronald Regan had been, that most of us who had the vote for the first time in our lives just shrugged our shoulders and voted for whomever we thought would be more fun to get drunk with.

But the kids, the young people that came after us, they don't remember any of this the way we do. They don't remember our glib expectation that the government would forever be certain to follow the constitution and even though the faces might change the ideas wouldn't. The Clinton era had seen a liberalization of the media to reverse the uptight conservative Moral Majority nonsense of the early 80's. Movies and music from the mid to late 90's entered a phase unequalled since the cultural revolution of the 1960's. They wouldn't remember when shows like MTV's "Sifl and Olly", a hilarious, incomprehensible show which was unapologetically just something to stare at when you were stoned at 2 AM, could get a greenlight.

Free speech was catapulted into the twenty first century on the back of a wild-west Internet, which (if you could get access to it, which wasn't the easiest thing in the world at the time) offered virtually limitless avenues for expression and idea sharing. People younger than our cohort wouldn't remember Napster, the first Napster where you could find MP3's of virtually every song ever recorded, downloadable for free. For months universities banned it during the week not because it was illegal, but because it threatened to slow down the networks so severely that regular school business was curtailed.

If course, that's back before universities had completely sold out to corporate America as well. When the first students started getting hassled by the RIAA, the schools actually went to bat for the students and their rights. I have a sinking feeling that, despite the advantage of ten years of history to improve on the quality of their educations, college students today can't even imagine their school having their back like that.

It really hit me when I thought about it for a while how different that time was. You could see it and feel it in everything from the movies and music of those years to the attitudes everyone had in their day-to-day lives. I wonder if in thirty years people will talk about the late 90's the way they sometimes talk about the late 60's. A time of humanistic confusion antecedent to a time of dreary, sober reckoning.

Stephen Hawkings has it all wrong

2010-04-27T09:39:00.000-05:00

My wife mentioned this to me yesterday, hip as she is, several hours before the interconnected sci-fi community I'm part of caught onto it. I had a while to think about it and I've gotta say I disagree with the general concensus that he's right.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe Hawkings isn't being imaginative enough. There's not much water or oxygen in the universe, but there's tons of carbon and nitrogen and solar rays from a billion stars. Why isn't it just as likely that we'll meet aliens who are photosynthetic or whose metabolism requires a constant influx of nitrogen? They could drink our sewage and lick the sweat off of our bodies! Ok, ok, I'm being gross now, but think of it: they're basically living plant organisms because that's pretty much all that can exist on a place that's not-Earth, and they come from a planet full of useless, choking oxygen and they're starting to look for places that gaseous carbon dioxide is present in abundance. Whammo! Suddenly no more global warming on Earth. They can just slowly siphon off the excess carbon dioxide from our planet and replace it with all that waste oxygen they produce. They could move here and mingle with us in our cities, their photosynthetic respiration would slash the smog and air pollution numbers down to their pre-industrial levels. It would be like a rain forest within a city, cleaning and gradually scrubbing the air. Who cares if they get sick from the sulphur and mercury and lead and other toxins we dump into the air? If they could metabolize carbon monoxide somehow, we could pipe the exhausts of our cars into pressurized tanks and sell the waste-exhaust to them for a few bucks! Or maybe not sell it to them, maybe trade it to them in exchange for the cures to cancer and the common cold and for the schematics to cold-fusion, faster-than-light travel and female Viagra. I'm telling you, Hawkings, you've got it all wrong man; it's just as likely that these aliens could be our friends!

What if (stay with me here), what if because their world is so polluted with oxygen that they've stopped singing and they don't allow open flames on their home planet? They sit around all day in a silent, uninteresting stupor where all their food is raw and they can barely get enough energy built up to have a conversation. Their last-ditch effort to find a planet capable of sustaining their species finds Earth.

Holy smokes is right.

They'd forget all about their ray guns and interstellar warships the first time they set foot on our CO2-rich planet where their life-giving smog pours out of every smokestack and industrial cooling tower. What's junk food to us would be like vitamins for them. They'd flock to McDonalds for their charred, carbon-rich, trans-fatty hydrogenated deliciousness. Imagine such an alien getting their first earful of rock and roll music and their first bong hit. Carbon dioxide and cannibanol, mana from heaven. A typical college rock concert would be like going to church for them, and they'd worship the band Phish as living gods. They'd reveal that an advanced scouting team made up of Jimi Hendrix, KISS and Marilyn Manson had been sent to Earth decades ago to determine that we wouldn't immediately try to blast them out of the sky. They'd usher in a new era of music and share their starship technology with us so we could put a Taco Bell and a Starbucks and one of those grimy bodega-style gas stations where the attendant is behind a sheet of bullet-proof plexiglass on the planets circling Alpha Centauri.

They could teach the plants on Earth how to talk and after the roars of "STOP CLEAR CUTTING US, YOU ASSHOLES!" settled down, we'd have a whole population of sentient beings on earth that we could converse with and learn from and tax and charge college tuition to and marginalize and exploit.

You need to lighten up, Hawkings. How could our civilization encountering aliens possibly go wrong?

Things not to say to your massage therapist. Part III: Taking your clothes off.

2010-04-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

(Today's entry is Part III in my series describing an insider's view of a medical office and how to make your experience as painless and simple as possible. Check out Part I and Part II for more. As I mentioned before I want to include a disclaimer: Please note- The opinions I'm expressing here are my own and not those of my past, present, or future employers. This is meant purely for entertainment, doesn't constitute official or licensed-though I do have two licenses-medical advice, and isn't a reflection of any official business policy I've ever had, spoken or unspoken. That said, I will be as flatly honest with you as possible.)

Whether you're getting under the sheets for a massage or dropping your trousers for the old turn-your-head-and-cough routine or getting your annual pelvic exam or showing your doctor a rash in a hard-to-see place or even just putting on one of those paper gowns that makes you feel more naked than when you're actually naked, chances are at some point in your life you'll need to take your clothes off at the doctor's office.

Relax.

Don't panic.

I get asked all the time if it's awkward to have strangers take their clothes off around me. It's not really easy to answer because there are lots of different sorts of nudity I experience in my day-to-day job, and they are not all equivalent. In general, no it's not awkward at all. In a sense, the people I work with aren't even strangers. If you liken me to a car mechanic, it'd be like saying Toyotas were "strangers". I may not know everything about you, but I've got a chart full of basic demographic info I can glance at for clues, and the chances you have a problem or a condition or a physical piece of anatomy I've never seen before are slim to none. I've been at the work of healing people in one form or another for almost fifteen years and I think as far as nakedness goes, I've seen pretty much all there is to see at least two or three times. But this isn't about ME, it's about YOU, and this is all new to you. In fact, the idea of getting naked in a doctor's office is often petrifying to many people.

There are a few things to keep in mind when doing so that will make your experience a lot easier. I'll get to the "do's and don'ts" in a bit, but I think we should discuss for a moment the environment you're putting your naked body into. First of all, virtually every medical worker with more than a year or two of experience, from attending physicians right down to the lowliest nurse assistant or patient tech, has seen hundreds of naked people. Hundreds. I'm not exaggerating. Up close, and in full real-life HD. It's not as scandalous as it sounds. Of those hundreds, most of them were either very young children or elderly people, because those are the groups that get the most medical attention. In between, however, you can be guaranteed that any experienced professional medical person has seen every size, shape, age, sex, and condition of human body there is at least a half a dozen times, and while your naked body might seem pretty darned unique and special to you when you're home looking in the mirror, it's really nothing new to us.

And I have more good news: in this context, it doesn't matter one bit if you're obese or trim, tall or short, attractive or not. We will not judge you in the slightest for having the body you have. Yes, for real. It's trained into us from almost the moment we set foot in whatever training programs we went through to do our jobs, and it's reinforced by our work environment. We feel no different around your attractive or unattractive body than a car mechanic feels around a Jaguar and a Datsun. They're just different, and for the most part they work (or don't work) just like every other body does. The Datsun owner's money is just as good as the Jaguar owner's and it's our job to fix them, and to do the most professional job we can doing it no matter which sort of car comes in. When was the last time your car mechanic made you feel either especially good or bad about the type of car you own? This means there's a certain level of expectation you should feel perfectly comfortable having, and other expectations that you might as well just leave at the door because they're either impossible to meet, meaningless, or both.

That said, there are a few things you can do to make absolutely certain that you and your body will become the stuff of water cooler or break room legend, and not in a good way. I'll let you in on these, too, so you can steer clear.  In the spirit of my last, post, I'll frame this advice and explanation in the context of what's appropriate and what's inappropriate. We'll start with the appropriate first.

Let's say you have a rash on your groin. Not making any judgements here about anyone, but just for a place to start, let's say you have a rash there. We've all had this, right? When we were children at the very least. Feel free to substitute whatever problem you want here as long as it theoretically involves taking your clothes off in front of a medical professional. Here's a few helpful hints just as guidelines, with the most important one first: You do not need to take all of your clothes off unless specifically directed to do so!

This seems like an intuitive concept, except you wouldn't believe the number of times I've handed someone a pair of paper shorts to check their knee incisions or given them a gown to look at their shoulder or told them to go ahead and climb under the sheets for a massage and I come back in the room greeted by a completely naked patient. People mistakenly strip down completely for things like X-rays and shots in the arm all the time. When I hand people gowns, I always include some specific instructions about how to put them on and how many clothes need to come off. I don't say this just to hear my voice rattle off of the inside of my skull.

So, if you're taking notes, there's the first "inappropriate" flag. If you're unclear about how naked you need to be for a certain procedure or treatment, just ask.  Medical people get these questions all day long. Being ultra-confident and going buck-wild commando on us will probably not ruffle our feathers much at that moment, but you can believe once the moment is over you'll be thought of as a bit of a wingnut.

In most cases pants only or shirt only is perfectly fine and unless you have a problem directly concerning your genitals, you can keep your bra/underwear on. Exceptions to this include some forms of complete physicals, emergency room visits, and dermatology visits where they're checking your entire body for lumps/bumps. In these cases, you will be told that you need to disrobe completely and you should get a gown. The doctor generally will leave the room while you take your clothes off. Here's the second "inappropriate" flag, and this one has to do with your medical/massage staff. If they ask you to disrobe completely and (1) don't leave the room while you do it or (2) don't give you a robe or gown to cover up with, you should ask them why. State laws vary, but professional standards really don't. If your doctor, clinical staffer, or massage therapist asks you to disrobe and stays nearby watching, this should be a red flag for you. I'm not talking about taking a shoulder out of a bra strap or shrugging your pants down low enough so they can get to your lower back. I'm talking about getting completely naked, because like I mentioned above there are only a few cases where this is ever necessary and when it is you should be able to do it in private and replace your clothes with something like a gown to keep you comfortable.

A massage is something a bit trickier than an exam because the rules are a little different. When you're getting a massage, you're generally welcome to take off whichever clothes you feel comfortable taking off. Since it's usually your dime, it's your prerogative. All medical people eventually reach a level of comfort with handling bodies in one way or another, and massage therapists get the master course. We learn how to move and manipulate people's bodies in virtually every way you can imagine while simultaneously keeping you feeling comfortable and modest. We are trained to work on people fully clothed, fully unclothed, and people in every state of dress between. We are trained to use strategic towel and sheet placement so that we more or less only expose which part of the body we're working on. Therefore even if you decide to get completely unclothed to get a massage, it's important that you do, in fact, climb under the sheets before the massage therapist comes back into the room. Again, I say this as if I'm talking to a ten year old, but you'd be amazed how some people get this mixed up when it's their first time. In fact, here's a fun insider massage therapy tip: if it's your first massage and you're nervous or you don't want it to be distracting and ruin your relaxation, just wear a pair of shorts and (if you're a woman) a workout tank top or sports bra. This way you can be assured everything that needs to stay covered stays covered and you can just focus on getting worked on. Once you're comfortable with the person that's working on you, go for the real deal the next time.

I want to stress that it's relatively unlikely you'll offend your massage therapist or doctor even if you get something mixed up and pull a "hello, I'm completely naked". So if this was you, don't worry. These sorts of understandable mix-ups are just par for the course and we usually shrug them off and forget them. There are a few things that will offend them, however, and they are: (1) refusing to correct your error and (2) having very bad personal hygene.

The second one is just aggravating because no one wants to touch someone who obviously hasn't bathed in days or wears oppressive scented cosmetic products. I've been a shower everyday man since I was a kid, but I'm well aware that many of you are not. You're robust! You shower right before you go to bed at night and then not again for three or four days because your bed is clean, right? Wrong. There is no hiding it. Even if you have a really, really strong cologne or aftershave or perfume. Just. Take. A. Shower. Hot water and soap. It's not rocket science. This also counts for after you workout and you're getting a massage. Hit the showers first, please, even if it makes you a minute or two late for getting on the table. If you want to live like that the other 364 days of the year that's your business, but if you're going to be in an eight by nine foot room with us for an hour we'd appreciate it if we could breathe freely.

The first problem, refusing to put clothes on when directed to by your doctor, is a bit more serious. It's something I haven't come across except for the overconfident folks or Euro-types that insist it's easier to just take their shirts off and be "modern" about it instead of fussing with paper shorts or a gown. This is perfectly understandable, but half the time we give you the gown for lots of other practical reasons than just to keep a barrier of cloth between you and us. Gowns can keep you warm in cold exam rooms, keeping a barrier between your wounds/suture lines and the floor/furniture, and they can maintain a communal modesty when you walk down the hall to go to the washroom. Just because you're ok with nakedness and generally so are we doesn't mean the entire world is.

When I was in orthopedics I would occasionally get first-generation foreigners that would completely disrobe upon entering the exam room just because that's how it's done in the Soverign Nation of Wherever. This is an honest mistake and they brushed me off matter-of-factly when I tried to insist on them using the gowns. In a medical environment, this is usually not a big deal and most doctors will be sensitive about cultural differences except for maybe a roll of their eyes at their nurse, but you should know that in some cases in order to recieve massage you MUST be covered to a certain extent. This is a law and there's no way the therapist can or should bend the rules for you. Even if you're perfectly comfortable being bottomless or (for women) topless in a massage and rolling over without a towel, it's actually illegal for the massage therapist to continue the massage if you do. So keep that in mind, and don't push their professional boundaries.

In a similar vein, it's also not appropriate to wear suggestive or inappropriate clothing in a doctor's office. So that means your plunging necklines, bikini tops, shorts with no underwear beneath (this means you, too, guys), protruding thongs coming out of your jeans, etc, should be left at home.  No matter how attractive you are (or think you are), remember you're still just at best a Jaguar in a car repair garage. It's not a place for showing off so save it for the club or whatever. In addition to being fashion trainwrecks, it makes everyone around you including the doctors, nurses, staff, and other patients uncomfortable and ultimately also falls into the general behavioral category of "not being a douchebag".

Now that all the heavy theory is out of the way, here's seven things to not even worry about:

-I didn't shave my legs!
No one looks, or cares. In fact, we wouldn't even notice if you didn't point it out.

-I need to hide my bra/underwear in my purse!
Again, if you feel embarrassed about your skivvies, feel free to stash them somewhere, but it's not necessary. No one looks, or cares.

-I have loads of body hair!
So do medical people and everyone else on earth. Not a problem.

-I haven't brushed my teeth!
Only an issue if you've got pathologically bad breath. In fact, it's 1000 times more likely that your doctor or massage therapist is more concerned about his or her breath than you are about yours.

-I farted!
A little awkward, maybe, but only for you. It happens to us all the time and it's no big deal. Just press on and it'll be forgotten a minute later.

-I accidentally got an erection!
More awkward than farting, but not the end of the world. When men lie on their backs, their bladders sink down and directly apply pressure to their prostate. It's involuntary and though a first year twentysomething massage therapist might get slightly flustered by it, a real professional will realize you're probably mortified and just ignore it. If you want to avoid the possibility of this happening inadvertantly during a massage or medical exam, be sure to empty your bladder before beginning. If it becomes a recurring problem, you'll most likely get politely referred out or our schedule will become suddenly too full for us to see you again. Ever.

-I have bad acne on my back/shoulders, athlete's foot, warts, or severe dandruff!
This actually a good doctor or massage therapist should pick up on and may suggest you see a dermatologist or aesthetician. This is a medical issue all its own and derserves some attention, if only to make you more comfortable. Nothing to be embarrassed about, but perhaps cause for concern nonetheless. Don't be embarrassed if your doc brings it up, they're just trying to help and a lot of people genuinely don't know how to go about fixing things like this.

That's about all I can think of at the moment from my own experiences that's relevant to your next trip to the doctor's office, so I'll wrap this segment up with a funny little side-statistic that might cheer you up: In fifteen years, I've only met a few people that were completely melt-down neurotic about taking their clothes off around medical professionals and chances are you fall into the category with most of the rest: where it's something slightly awkward that you want to do right but there doesn't seem a "cool" way to do it. Don't worry, there isn't a "cool" way. I've tried to outline the background subtexts going on as well as I could, but if you still leave feeling a little sheepish, take heart. For every person I've met that was visibly afraid to disrobe for their doctor, I've met fifty who were absolutely mortified to take off their shoes and socks so a doctor could examine their feet. People are much, much more nervous in general about their feet than they are about any other part of their body. I have yet to figure out why, but I could almost write an entire article on the awkwardness I've experienced trying to talk, cajole, and coax people into taking off their socks and shoes.

That's it for this week. More soon!

Damnation update

2010-04-18T02:50:00.000-05:00

Working on the most recent revision of The Damnation of Memory, my new novel, and I've completed the first third of the manuscript. This is thrilling because for months and months I've been trying to come up with a scene that would fit between two other scenes and I finally wrote it tonight! I began it last night around 2AM and I just finished it tonight at 2:48 AM. This is a book meant to be written in the middle of the night, apparently. This was one of those parts of writing a book where I knew I was going to just have to wait around like some schmoe at a bus stop for the inspiration to finally arrive so I could finish it the right way. If you try to push through parts of a good story like that, you'll just end up with shit, so I waited it out. It was worth the wait!

Things not to say to your massage therapist. Part II: Appropriateness

2010-04-15T15:47:00.000-05:00

This June will mark my fifteenth year in the medical field, and I've managed to collect a pretty sizeable trove of stories (some inspirational, some cautionary) regarding medicine in general. Many of you may remember this post from back when I worked at Peak Performance about how to act when you're getting worked on by your massage therapist. Since it's one of my old favorites, I figured I'd start a semi-regular column on the subject.

Today I'd like to say a few words about appropriateness when visiting your doctor's office. I've worked in musculoskeletal medicine for my entire career, but the same concepts hold true across disciplines. So let's just jump right into it. Please note: The opinions I'm expressing here are my own and not those of my past, present, or future employers. This is meant purely for entertainment, and isn't a reflection of any official business policy I've ever had, spoken or unspoken, though I will be as flatly honest with you as possible.

So let's start by going through a typical office visit and what's appropriate for each stage.

Scheduling:
Appropriate: Asking "how much time should I leave myself for the appointment?"
Not Appropriate: Asking "how long will I have to wait?"

The Logic: Doctors and their staffs have little control over their daily schedule once it's underway. They can occasionally bring things to a screeching halt or they can speed it up (usually by skipping their lunchbreaks or walking around with a full bladder for a few hours), but in general there's not much they can do once the day starts. It's fine to want to know how long your appointment will take, but please understand that this is, at best, a rough estimate. You're just as likely to be in and out almost immediately as you are to be stuck running behind. Every day is different and there are always unforeseen problems. If you ask how much time you should leave for your appointment, the receptionist should be able to calculate in their head the amount of time it will take you to get settled, get paperwork filled out, wait, see the doctor, and check out, and give you an estimate that will approximate the entire visit length. If instead you ask how long it will take to see the doctor it (1) makes you sound like you have better things to do than seeing a doctor for your excruciating pain. You don't. Plus if you wouldn't waste your time getting yourself well, why should your doctor? It also (2) doesn't take into account extra time spent doing administrative things, scheduling follow-ups, or if the doctor decides to spend extra time with YOU, which they often will during their first appointments. A receptionist should be able to tell you these things immediately. Which leads me to the next part...

Reception Desk
Appropriate: Schmoozing, bantering, and having fun at the front desk.
Not Appropriate: Being a douchebag to the receptionist.

The Logic: The reception desk actually has a surprising amount of control over the day-to-day operation of a medical office, and their job is one of boredom and tedium punctuated by putting out the fires of pissed-off people either in the waiting room or in the actual office. While I would strongly advise against flirting openly with front desk staff (who in addition to their experience are in truth often chosen for their attractiveness and social aptitude), it is perfectly OK to show them pictures of your kids or chat about American Idol or tell them about the Marathon you think you're going to try this Spring. In fact, virtually any conversation about food, vacations, or pop culture is a welcome break from being shouted at and/or taking care of an endless stream of brain-numbing administrative tasks. If you can talk to the receptionist about something other than their job, they're much more likely to give you extra consideration when you need an emergency visit or a last-minute reschedule. We also are only human. We love funny jokes, videos, cartoons, etc. Keep it clean though. If it wouldn't appear in a newspaper or magazine, don't bring it into a doctor's office. We occasionally tell off-color jokes or watch videos of people lighting their farts, too, but it's indescribeably awkward if it comes from a patient.

It's absolutely not ever OK to give your receptionist a hard time. Yes, I have worked with some collossal assholes that represented an office from behind the front desk, and I've experienced some appaling behavior from them as a patient myself, so I know they exist and it seems sometimes even as if they're pervasive. The person to tell this to is your doctor, and no one else. Smile, and deal with them, and then tell your doctor exactly what you think of them. The doctors in private practice are ultimately the ones in control, and believe me, they are VERY concerned about how their practices are being represented by their staff. While truly great receptionists are rare and coveted by both doctors and patients, lousy receptionists are legion, and can be replaced easily in a week. And they often are. This is doubly true if your receptionist is good at what they do. Tell your doctor this, too, and the fast-track to easy medical experiences awaits you. Which leads nicely to the next point...

What do doctors/clinical staff like?
Appropriate: Food, small thoughtful gifts, compliments, and referrals
Not Appropriate: Large or expensive gifts, invitations

The Logic: Let's say you've got your appointment scheduled and managed to meet a doctor that you really like. You dig their credentials, their office is convenient, their front desk staff seems professional and this doctor communicates with you in a way that makes you feel very seen and heard. In short, you like this doctor and you want to stick with them. You want your experiences with them to continue being as painless as possible, perhaps you even want to bypass some of the scheduling wait-times or waiting-room boredom that pervades their office. This is perfectly understandable. Many (not all, but many) great doctors like this have hideous wait times both to see them and to wait for them in their waiting room. This is misery, we know, and we absolutely do NOT want you associating our office with misery because for 99% of medicine early treatment is dependent on you coming in sooner rather than later. You coming in sooner is dependent on our office not being a hateful pain in the ass to come into. So you're patient and you understand that sometimes a long wait can't be helped, but what can you do to speed things up? Be friendly, of course, and make yourself somewhat special to your doctor! We're people too, and we try hard not to play favorites, but we do inevitibly have patients that are special to us. People we like immediately, or who make us glad that we chose the career we did. Those patients get the medical equivalent of a business-class flight upgrade. The waits are a bit shorter, the rules can be bent ever so slightly for them. So how do you become one of those patients? The answer is as close as your nearest Panera bread store or Einstein's Bagels.

Medical people have a variety of interests, but none quite so consistent as golf and food. We fucking LOVE golf and food. Some of us like music and nice pens, too. So let me break this down for you:

You go to a doctor to have them help heal your (insert nasty persistent problem here) and they treat you well and give you a cure that helps immediately. You feel like they've done you a solid service and you're going back for a follow up or to have them look at something else and you want to show them that "hey, I'm not just a nobody, I'm a happy customer and I think you're doing a good job, and by the way can I please have an appointment this month instead of next season?" When you go in for your next appointment (NOT the first appointment), take them a bag of bagels from Einstein's with some cream cheese. It's like $10, but you will never be able to buy with cash the sort of goodwill that bagels can get you. Here's the kicker: don't give it to the doctor, give it to the front desk and tell the doctor that you gave it to them to share. This is a no-lose situation. The front desk will never refuse this. If your doctor doesn't want bagels, they'll just let the front desk have them and it's still a good showing on your part that you took a minute to think about them as human beings, which they very much are.

If your doctor does something particularly special for you (saves your life, cures some bitchy-miserable disease you have), it's also appropriate to give them a small gift. Remember, though, the key here is thoughtful, not expensive. Doctors and most clinical people have everything they need, and it's foolish to think that you could buy them something they couldn't buy themselves (except lunch, lol, because that's often the hardest thing to get during a busy day). It's just the thoughtfulness they appreciate. Hence, a nice small box of golf balls for a doctor that enjoys golf is appropriate. Golf clubs are not appropriate. The same is true of food to a lesser extent. Bringing them bagels for breakfast or a pizza for lunch is absolutely perfect, but inviting them out for lunch is not appropriate. It's not that we don't want to go out with you or that under different circumstances we'd refuse, but our jobs force us to keep a certain personal distance from you when it comes to socializing.

A lot of doctors and medical people are into music and a $10 iTunes gift card is a great, great gift. That's a great one because if you give it to a doctor and they're not into music, they can easily re-gift it to their staff. You cannot go wrong with pens. Every clinical person likes pens, and we go through them constantly. Go to Things Remembered and have their name (including the M.D. or whatever their suffix is) engraved on a $10 stainless steel pen. Virtually every doctor and medical person I know has at least one of these and it's like a medal of honor for them. They get lost and stolen sometimes but then other times I see them in the pockets of clinical people who say they've had them for decades. If they say "you didn't have to do that.", just say "ah, it's nothing, I insist." Suddenly, you've gone from "another pleasant patient that comprises 80% of my patient base" to the person that pinned that particular medal of honor to their lab coat.

Medical people love this, and there's a damned good reason why. Virtually everyone else with only a few exceptions in today's service economy can expect some sort of gratuity tacked on to the cost of their services. Except the people who work the hardest for you, like doctors. Those folks are just supposed to get by without it, because supposedly their lives are all Gucci and Polo and lunches at the golf club and it's understood you're grateful, right? Wrong. Buy them some bagels and make sure they know you're grateful. You never know, if the office is chaotic that day, those bagels may be all that doctor gets to eat that entire morning.

Let's say for a second though, that you don't have an extra ten bucks or you didn't think ahead of time to get something. This is also perfectly fine because two of the most potent gifts you can give doctors and clinical staff are totally free. Compliments, and referrals. Compliments are music to the ears of both doctors and staff, and if you want to REALLY get on the good side of a receptionist, tell the doctor they work with how much you liked their office or their front desk staff. The only thing that circulates around an office faster than a complaint is a compliment. Don't be self-conscious. Just do it. We didn't get into this career to have people bitch at us for thirty years every day. We got into it to help people and because it's pretty gangster to heal people that are in bad or desperate shape. Compliments make us remember why put up with people bleeding/vomiting on us or calling us at 2 AM the rest of the time.

Finally, referrals are the ultimate compliment. Sending someone you know or love to a doctor is the highest compliment you can pay them. You're so confident that they're good that you want everyone to know about it. This actually can change a doctor's life. Going to Yelp.com and leaving them a glowing review or talking about them at a party or sending them even just one patient is the lifeblood of their practice, and referred patients are a thousand times easier to work with than people just off the street. A loved one or friend that you've sent them comes in already knowing that they're competent and ready to help, and any goodwill your doctor has toward you will extend to them. This is an incredibly powerful thing you can do for a doctor and it's the sort of thing medical people do for each other when there's a significant mutual respect. No doctor will ignore or misinterpret this as anything but a very high compliment.

So we've got that, right? Small gifts, food, compliments and referrals are perfect. Expensive or large/awkward gifts are a no-no and invitations are awkward and inappropriate. Wow, now you're a high-roller and you can call the office and they know you by your voice alone and you don't have to wait three months to get in and if there's an opening the receptionist will actually CALL you instead of just saying they will. How about that? All's going well until...

The Bill
Appropriate: Asking a coder/biller for a detailed explanation of your bill after your appointment is over.
Not Appropriate: Calling or directly asking your doctor about your bill.

The Logic: Remember in the film The Matrix when the characters were stuck staring at a screen with cascading flourescent green coding on it. "What's that?" Neo asked, "The Matrix," the other shrugged. The doctors that perform your healthcare have something like that going on in their heads at any given time. A long string of combinations of drugs and symptoms that looks like the most complex NYSE stock ticker ever invented. They're thinking about four or five things at once for most of their workday, and generally none of them involve your finances. Unless the practice you go to consists of just a single doctor and no support staff at all, they're not going to know the answers you want. Coding, billing, and collections are the part of medicine that everyone, including the people who do it, loathes. This is a job that's usually either given to the front-desk staff to slog through or a support person called a Coder or Biller. A Coder/Biller is the person you want to talk to, if one exists, because they can tell you in very fine detail how the process works. Yes, it's incredibly confusing, even for them, and there are times when the best they'll be able to give you are estimates of what you'll owe. Nonetheless, it's the Billers/Coders you want, not the doctors, and only AFTER your appointment. Unless they suggest it, don't try to spend your waiting room time talking to the billers. It's sort of a dick move and chances are there's someone already talking to them right that moment. If you tell them you're going to talk to them after the appointment they'll have time to finish whatever they're doing and pull up your account so they can go through it themselves before you start grilling them.

All right, that's it for today. More next week!

Upgrades

2010-04-15T06:24:00.000-05:00

Well, I've managed to finally sort my wonky main page out, including getting my profile picture working again and adding some nifty quick links to the top bar just beneath the title to check out my books and short stories as well as a new About Me page that replaces the horribly self-indulgent one that used to be there. Ok, so it's still a little self-indulgent... The books page also has a helpful function where if you click on the picture it takes you directly to the Amazon.com page for each title, saving you the trouble of looking them up.

More to come.

New music

2010-04-13T13:31:00.003-05:00

It's been a few months, I figured it was time for some new tunes. Here's what I'm listening to now:

"Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys
"Apologies" by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
"Messages" by Xavier Rudd
"Keepsake" by State Radio
"Knock 'Em Out" by Lily Allen
"Romeo and Juliet" by The Killers (Dire Straits cover)
"Midnight Special" by Creedence Clearwater Revival
"Thinking of You" by Katy Perry (yes, I realize this one's still on here from last time, it's just good)

And here I've meant to keep up

2010-04-11T20:39:00.002-05:00

It’s been something like four days I’ve been trying to find a moment to sit down and write this entry, and try as I did I just couldn’t bring myself to fight off the rest of my life to bring it to you. Some things are just more important, and that’s all there is to it. Just the same, it’s been literally months since I’ve updated and I’ve been giving some significant thought to what I wanted to do with this page. I’m currently about 37,000 feet above Pennsylvania and barreling toward Chicago from a weekend trip to upstate NY to visit my grandmother and attend my cousin Ryan’s wedding and since they still don’t have broadband aboard planes (despite it costing $300 for a ticket and involving more security procedures than entry into the Pentagon) I’ve discovered that I’m myself a captive audience and in the perfect frame of mind to make a decision about where I want to go from here.

Some of the better bloggers I know commit themselves to updating their page once a week on a specific day, and that sounded like a great idea. I have most Thursdays off and it would be a perfect opportunity to catch up with writing my own blog along with a host of other responsibilities. The execution of it, however, just seemed inordinately difficult this week. Thursday I literally fell asleep at the keyboard trying to type this and it just didn’t work out. I usually update my status on Facebook every day or every other day and I think for a time (especially now that I have a nifty iPhone and can do it from anywhere) that I used Facebook as a sort of substitute for the writing fix I usually get from keeping this blog. At the end of last year, however, I found that the process I usually go through of searching through my back posts to see how far I’ve come just wasn’t the same. In an internet landscape currently dominated by the Twitter mentality, I felt this odd sort of emptiness that I was trying to reconstruct the last six months of my life in the form of incongruous faux-witty, three-line quips. There’s a place in my psyche, I think, for short-form remembrances, but at heart the process of blogging has always been one of narrative for me, and there’s just no narrative in that short format.

So.

Back I come, to this. Diary-keeping. Blogging. Whatever you want to call it. It’s story-telling after a fashion, and because I’m quite certain that only a handful of my 400+ Facebook friends will even bother to read this it’s story-telling with myself as the primary audience. And I’m OK with that. I think that after some consideration that the reason I didn’t just shit-can this site is because it’s hard to do. Like I mentioned earlier, when I get myself set to write something down here, it’s almost as though life itself bends around my in order to get in the way. But that’s the very value of it. It’s difficult. It requires consternation and sacrifice. In the end, having a coherent narrative of my life has always been the goal of this page, and this it continues to be. In one form or another I’ve kept an intermittent long-form diary for almost twenty years, and I wasn’t about to just give up on that, especially since so much of my life these days feels like a disorienting blur.

Here is my promise to those small few of you who still read this: I will update this page every Thursday for six months without fail. Come hell, or high water. And that includes the promise to myself as well.

But now, onto more pertinent things. I spent the weekend in Watertown, visiting my mother’s mother, whose health is failing. I saw her approximately a month ago when I took the train to NY to visit. As many of you know, this has been extraordinarily difficult for me since for virtually my entire life she has been a guardian-angel-type presence for me. Which is not to say I qualitatively love her any more than anyone else in my family but that instead she was a person that she has gone thousands of extra miles for me and made me feel loved in a special, additional way. I’m sure you all know what this means. Even in the most loving and drama-free of families there are always those special bonds. My niece Katy has one with my nephew Charley, my niece Lucy with my son John. They are the kindred souls within families for which understanding and mutual affection are as natural as breathing. This is the sort of relationship I have with my grandmother Laura. She has been a fixture of virtually every important event of my entire life, even after I’ve spent the last decade living halfway across the country. Despite any other hardship or inconvenience it might cause me, I invariably take the time to visit her even if it’s just for an hour if I’m in that part of New York. I’ve received a Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s, and Easter card from this woman every year of my entire life, without fail, even into adulthood and right up to this current Easter.

She is quite ill now, and the idea that possibly before this time next year her phone calls and photos and holiday cards will fall silent forever has been a devastating reality check for me. Living as far as I do from the Brand family in NY, I feel constantly as though I’m living two lives. Like the protagonist of a bad sci-fi channel time-travel movie, I occasionally get into a plane like I’m doing now and warp from one to the other, only to once again experience the same halting culture-shock I did the first time I moved away or set foot in Chicago. Once I become comfortable again with Chicago being “home base”, I take a trip back to NNY and the process of wrapping my head around it begins all over again. Chicago offers the lifestyle I want, replete with professional and personal successes of every variety. Intellectual fulfillment, opportunity to burn, entertainment to fit my tastes, and most importantly, the Chicago branch of my own new little Brand tribe. Northern New York offers the people I miss most, though, and are completely irreplaceable even in a gigantic city full of virtually every convenience (for a price) you could imagine. This means my extended family, but not only them. I have friends there still, as well. Friends. That legendary class of human being that once held a prominent place in my life and have been hunted nearly to extinction by geographic distance, responsibility, and increasingly by the awful low-grade poverty imposed on my generation by the clash of expectation versus available resources.

All of these things have been sharply present in my mind for these past four weeks as I prepare to face the day when my grandmother is gone. The little kid in me whom she had such endless love and patience for in a thousand ways I’ll probably never even know about is steeling himself for the loss of his lifelong guardian angel, but the adult in me is facing an even more intimidating thought looming just out of the frame: No matter how much of a fixture a person seems they may be in your life, they are not ultimately immortal. And this also goes for a large number of other people I love dearly who seem also not to get any younger year by distant year.

Meanwhile I’m not getting any younger either, and I’m starting to feel a little bit like Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings must have felt. I’m forever showing up either just in time or at random intervals in the lives of people I love with always something pressing and important that I need to accomplish, then I vanish off to deal with something else in the other part of the story that’s happening halfway around the world. I’ve often had a thought when reading those books: how different this story would have gone if Gandalf could have just focused on helping Frodo and Sam take the ring or preparing the defense of Helm’s Deep, instead of shuttling like a badminton birdie across all of Middle Earth putting out fires. I feel like when I go back to Chicago or off to New York, I leave the people in each of these respective lives behind, scratching their heads as if to say “well that’s nice, now what?”

Despite the difficult and sometimes bluntly pointless nature of life in the Northern New York region in general, I do not judge my cousins in the least when they move away from it and move back a few months or years later. As much as I’ve said myself to a number of them “if you want to bring yourself the success you want, you’ve got to get out of this town”, I am just as vulnerable to the crushing home-sickness that it brings when we’ve been away long enough to realize how special it was to grow up in a large, loving family in a small town. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to talk to them about it, particularly the ones who have left and returned, and gotten a sense that I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I do.

As I sit here on this little commuter plane it occurred to me that ten years ago, before 9/11, I could have almost hoped for a life where I could have come to NY for a weekend virtually any weekend I wanted if I was so inclined. Wages were sufficient for most jobs I was qualified for. Homes were affordable, at least to rent, and the airfare for the last trip I took from Florida to Chicago to visit Beth when we first met was $79 on ATA round-trip. Now it’s such an ever-fucking hassle to travel anywhere for any length of time by virtually any means that I find myself scheduling trips from one place to the other around binges of caffeine, comfort food, and doses of Advil for the headaches it gives me. I haven’t for a moment stopped loving being in both places, but I’ve come to loathe the shifts between and how miserable they are in almost every way.

I don't have much more to say on the subject at the moment, and I do realize that this leaves off the blog on a down note, but hey: I promised to update it, I never said it would always be fun.

Aaaaaaand we're back!

2010-01-23T21:24:00.003-06:00

After a hateful little virus somehow made its way into my FTP folder and prompted a full, admin-level quarantine of my domain name, I've finally managed to sort it out enough to get my main page back up and working. It's been nearly four weeks since my last update, which isn't something I had planned but it couldn't be helped. In that time I've watched quite a few films and TV shows, in particular Showtime's "The Tudors" which I thoroughly enjoyed and can't wait for the final season of, and Benecio Del Toro as Che Guevara in "Che", which was long but still very different from your average war film and far more artistically done. I still haven't seen "Avatar", and yes, I'm starting to feel like that guy who has his head in the sand and refuses to do something trendy because it has been over-hyped. I've had a chance twice to go during the day on Thursdays when I was home from work but I've always decided against it. The first time the weather was crap and the second time I just decided I didn't want to go by myself, which kind of kills the buzz of movies for me sometimes. I saw "The Road" by myself, which was good, but I'm ready for a fun, popcorn and coke movie experience and it wasn't in the cards.

On a related note, popcorn and coke are not in the cards in general for me because I've been dieting now for two and a half months and I've lost nearly 21 pounds. I'm not exactly back in my skinny clothes (or scrubs), but I'm getting there. It's just as painful as the first time I did it, but this time without the benefit of several hours of video games or a roaring new novel to distract me. I've been slowly working my way through the third edit of the new novel I'm writing, but it hasn't been quite distracting enough to take my mind off of how fungry I am more or less constantly.

I did discover an awesome series of cartoons on YouTube called "Tales of Mere Existence" that I thought I'd share with you.

More to come as soon as I get this site completely put back together.

My New Year's Resolutions

2009-12-31T15:34:00.003-06:00

My friend and fellow Chicago author Amy Guth published her New Year's Resolutions on her blog about a week ago and it got me wondering if I had any. I posted on Facebook that I wanted to lose another 40 pounds and learn how to solve Rubik's cube. I'm happy to say I've already got one of those down, I'll have to think up some more.

The Decade From Hell?

2009-12-31T14:31:00.006-06:00

Something that surprised me a bit when I was surfing Facebook earlier in the week was how universally awful everyone thought the year 2009 was. I agreed reflexively, immediately thinking of my grandmother's cancer diagnosis and the five months I spend laid off searching for jobs in a dismal, insulting employment market while the threat of a mortgage foreclosure on our overpriced condo loomed over my head. But there was a deeper crappiness to this year as well. Something that affected all of us regardless of our individual experiences. A slew of strange celebrity deaths danced through this year, reawakening our own consciousness of mortality. Another whackjob decided to try and blow up a plane, succeeding only (we can hope) in immolating his own genitals. Obama's grand ideas of reform for the health care system were taken apart brick by brick by a congress so bought-and-paid-for by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries that the most obvious no-brainer money-saving strategies for accomplishing what the legislation set out to do to begin with were the very first things to get tossed out with the bathwater. Single payor? Nah. Tort reform? Not even considered. It was at this point that most of the thinking world recognized the hands of powerful people with money pulling the strings of even our most beloved new president, the man on whom we pinned so much hope in 2008 and who even now struggles to disappoint us.

But I found myself wondering as I read all the Facebook posts about the general awfulness of 2009 why I didn't feel the same acute sense of dislike for it. I think it has more to do with this entire decade being such a colossal disappointment to my generation. Our first homes, bought not with equity but with hard-earned and hard-leveraged cash, declined in value by something like 30%. Our first near-decade of paying off our school loans only to see the balance not change after 100+ payments of $300 a month has given us a huge reality-slap in the face. We are never going to be out of debt. We have no choice but to fuel this endless march for more education, more credit, more debt leverage, just to live our lives. Even now, eight years after the fact, businesses continue to use 9/11 as an excuse to rate-hike and surcharge us to bleed us of what little income we do get to hold onto. Even the government gets in on the fun with "9/11" taxes added into our cell phone bills or airline tickets. Air travel, with its barebones service, baggage fees, and endless security hassles has become one of my last choices in transportation. And to top it off, the ticket prices have inflated 300% in less than ten years. On the bright side, the 300% gasoline inflation insures that we'll be worried less about whether we can fly to see our friends and families and more about whether we'll be able to afford driving to work.

After 9/11, Hunter S. Thompson wrote that "the decade that's coming will make the last one seem like a wild party for rich kids". He was eerily right about that. One thing I did notice, however, was how hard everyone seemed willing to party this year around the holidays. Work and family parties included copious amounts of food, alcohol, and all-out merry-making. This, at least, did ring of something exciting perhaps just over the horizon and out of sight. If I can say a prayer at the start of this coming decade, it's in the hope that if the awful aughts were our generation's Great Recession, the twenty-teens (or whatever) are our generation's Roaring Twenties.

2009 wasn't a total bust however, and neither was this decade. In the past decade I earned a bachelor's degree, a massage therapy national certificate and license, a limited x-ray license, I moved away from NY to St. Petersburg and Chicago, both of which were fun cities to live in, I met and married my beautiful wife and we bought a home and had my son John. I owned two fun, sporty cars and visited my friend Jeramy in Seattle for our 30th, bacon-themed birthday party. I learned to cook and fell in love with lots of new types of food. I became a published author and this year specifically I made it my goal to connect to the larger literary community with great success due largely to meeting a couple of terrific new friends.

In 2009 alone, I finished Thank You, Death Robot (a project which had been on my plate since 2006), I learned to fly fish, I visited Mountain Home, Arkansas where my aunt and uncle live, fished and floated on the Hudson river with my father in the summer, lost 15 pounds, repaired my own bathtub, bought new leather living room furniture, Beth bought me an iPhone which I still can't put down, I discovered Korean food, and after being laid off found a job which I adore working for some of the nicest people I've ever met. And I spent the time I was laid off meeting a new cadre of literary friends from across the country at the Pilcrow and Printer's Row lit fests and the Printer's Ball. I sat on my first author panels and made a rebuilt book out of Red Ivy Afternoon. I wrote two more long works, one novel and one novella, and got approximately halfway through a third long story.

Christmas Carols

2009-11-19T08:04:00.005-06:00

So the Monday after my birthday (that's November 16th) the radio station we listen to in the lobby of our office switched to playing all Christmas music, all day.

Seriously? It's not even Thanksgiving yet. Last holiday season I was stuck listening to nothing but Christmas music for several weeks in my treatment room doing manual therapy all day and I came up with this post about how the lyrics of older Christmas songs imply some pretty hilarious things.

http://vinniethevole.blogspot.com/2008/12/holiday-music.html

So this year, instead of focusing on how much I want to deafen myself with an icepick so I don't have to hear one more droopy Bing Crosby croon, I decided I'd make my own list of favorite Christmas music. Of course they'll never play most of these, because whatever cruel person decided that Christmas starts SEVEN WEEKS early this year also has no intention of making it the least bit pleasant for us. We're quite doomed to hear only nasally Paul McCartney treacle and "Do They Know It's Christmas Time at All?" and that horrid new country one about the young kid who buys his dying mother new shoes for Christmas. When that one comes on, I pray for the sweet music of circular saws or jackhammers or screeching tires to get the sound of it out of my head.

But.

If you have iTunes and you want to listen to some pretty excellent Christmas-related music that won't make you want to smash your head against a wall till the pain stops, check out Mark's Favorite Christmas Music:

1) Imogen Heap, "Just for Now"
2) Vince Guraldi Trio "Linus and Lucy"
3) Dave Matthews Band "Christmas Song"
4) Dan Fogelberg "Same Old Lang Syne"
5) Sarah McLachlan "Song for a Winter's Night"
6) Cast of South Park "Christmas Time in Hell"
7) Jewel Kilcher and her mother Nedra "Rudolph" (A Capella)
8) Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan "Silent Night" (hidden track from the end of "O")

A new Dashboard Confessional album

2009-11-10T18:18:00.003-06:00

A new Dashboard Confessional album that doesn't suck? The HELL you say! "Alter the Ending" is the first thing since the dull "Dusk and Summer" that was worth buying. I actually picked up the whole album because every sample sounded like the old Dashboard I had nearly given up on

NaNoWriMo: day 8

2009-11-08T08:21:00.000-06:00

Beth bought me an iPhone for my birthday (holy smokes!), and I think we can safely say this poses a serious risk to me completing my novel. If anything, I have a little more inspiration since the novel is high-tech science fiction.

NaNaWriMo: Day 7

2009-11-07T12:51:00.003-06:00

Still 13,323 words. I'm re-reading my synopsis and notes so I can remember where the major plot changes were and how I wanted to handle them. These things always change as I write them. I might originally concieve of a character as something iconic and two-dimensional, and then as I write them I look for nuances to create a more three-dimensional character. My synopses are almost always sort of cartoonish and Michael Bay-ish. Simple and straightforward with flash and emotional punch. Then as I work through them, I tone down everything that seems cinematic and I look for ways to let real life shine into the story.

Listening to Tori Amos's "Dragon" still, and the new Creed, Joss Stone, and Swell Season. Joss's "Free Me" is infectious and Swell Season's "In These Arms" is surprisingly sweeter after the fourth or fifth listen. I'm still sort of deciding about the new Creed album. It's very recognizably Creed, and like one reviewer mentioned it seemes like Scott Staap has toned down his presence in the band considerably. While this may bode well for his ego and the continued existence of the band, I sort of dug his voice and intensity. Some people still compare them to Pearl Jam, but I think that's really unfair. Pearl Jam has had such a long, bizarre career arc that they're almost like Radiohead. I'd go see either of those bands, but only if I was assured they'd play something from the first third of their career. New Radiohead can be so painful it's almost atonal and Pearl Jam has drifted from catchy to almost unlistenable. This album from Creed has a lot of the early My Own Prison sound, but lacks any songs that really leap out the way "Higher" and "With Arms Wide Open" did. The new tunes "Rain" and "In Silence" are in the same zip code as their previous work, but much of the album is too driving and frenetic for my taste. That could change, however. At the very least, they're not watering down their sound, which so many of my favorites have tragically done (Dashboard Confessional comes immediately to mind). There's nothing I hate more than a band that takes a break for a while and then comes back with something so different than their original sound that it makes me feel worse than if they had just stopped making music altogether. I'm looking at you, Portishead and Dave Matthews.

So much for my head start

2009-11-06T23:08:00.003-06:00

I'm stalled at 13,323 words going into the weekend, and the goal for the people who started at zero is 15K works by the end of Monday. That caught up fast... On the bright side, this book is coming along as well as could be expected. I haven't yet hit any spots where I lost sight of what I wanted to do with the story, so that's always encouraging. As long as the ideas seem bright and not dim in my head, I can usually keep putting words on the page.

Just played Call of Duty 4 with my dad for what must have been the third or fourth time this week. I had forgotten how much I loved that game and it's considerably more fun when you're playing it with someone you actually know. Any other CoD4 fans out there? Gamertag is "vinniethevole".

NaNoWriMo: day 3

2009-11-03T09:37:00.003-06:00

Well, it's Tuesday and I'm getting set to work on my novel some more. I wasn't able to yesterday as Mondays are generally quite long days at work and my wife and I watched Dr. Drew and Tool Academy instead last night. I did, however, reread the 40-odd pages of the book I've got so far and I was struck by a couple of things.

1) The story reads a lot faster than I remember. This is curious, since it is literally chock full of real-life science concepts from quantum physics.

2) The dialogue isn't as bad as I thought it was. I often have more trouble with dialogue than any other part of a story, but this time it seemed at least smooth and unobtrusive to my mind.

I'm also going to confess to a certain amount of giddy excitement over this whole thing. I made a grocery store run this morning specifically to pick up the sorts of food I like to eat while I write, including of course my white cheddar cheese and orange juice. I also threw in some thick-cut bacon as well, for good measure. Add to that the short list of new iTunes songs I downloaded Sunday and I figure I almost cannot fail.

My first stab at NaNoWriMo

2009-11-01T20:56:00.004-06:00

I've stood by for a number of years now as friends and literature pals have attempted to complete NaNoWriMo. For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), is an annual contest-ish event where writers (some aspiring, some established) attempt to complete a marathon month of writing and crank out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

For new writers, this is a clear and tempting invitation to actually sit down with a pen or laptop and finally work through the novel they've been toying with or meaning to write. For more established writers, it's something different I've not quite yet fully grasped. Like a real marathon for seasoned runners, it's a test of proficiency in a skill that takes years to cultivate, and is often done in lonely solitude. For us, it's a chance to celebrate and brag along with our other writer friends and share the deeper experience of writing a novel with those who understand it.

This is no small task, however, even for a seasoned writer. To date, I've completed five novels, three of which are either published or are in the process of publication. They range wildly in the length of time needed to complete them. Everywhere from five intermittent years (Red Ivy Afternoon), to eighty-six exhausting, bleary-eyed days (The Damnation of Memory). Even with Damnation, however, those two and a half months were purely time spent writing. That doesn't take into account the amount of time spent beforehand gathering research including visiting locations, intervieweing topical experts, and planning the story arc. All told, the time to complete the first draft was more like four or five months, and believe me when I say that when I wrote it I was writing at minimum two to three hours each day and sometimes as many as eight or ten.

So you can imagine my intimidation at the idea of writing a novel of similar length, scope, and quality in less than half of my previous fastest time, where I was not only ready to write but nearly possessed by it.

There are a couple of things on my side, however. First, I have finished enough novels to know and anticipate the problems that will arise while putting the story together. This I hope will give me an edge. Also, I've decided to use NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to continue work on a novel that was already in progress. Yes, I realize this is somewhat like cheating, but this isn't just something I'm writing to say I wrote it; this is a novel that already exists in more or less finished form in my head and needs simply to be put on the page. In fact, I already have a nice 10,000 word head-start on it, in the form of a prologue and a few key scenes that are already written. Finally, as I still have Tuesdays and Thursdays to myself, as well as a quiet house while John is at school and Beth is at work, I have some ready-made writing time built into my schedule.

So here we go, friends, I'm giving it a shot this time. If any of you feel up to the challenge, go to http://www.nanowrimo.org/ and register. There's still time, it starts today.

You can find my author page on the NaNoWriMo homepage and follow along, or just stay tuned for my updates posted here. If I get creative, I might just rip off Amy Guth's idea from last year and podcast myself doing it. Good times.

Long Lost

2009-11-01T13:34:00.003-06:00

Well, it's been damn near forever since I updated my poor blog, but there you have it. As many of you know, I was laid off from my previous practice in May and spent the ensuing four and a half months in a long and involved job search where I applied for something like 150 jobs and interviewed for a sizeable chunk of them. As you might expect, I did find some practices I liked that were either unwilling or (sadly) unable to meet my salary requirements, but I eventually decided to broaden my search past just the immediate north shore and I almost immediately found Park Chiropractic in Mount Prospect. Mount Prospect, if you live in the city or the north shore, sounds like one of those hinterland-type suburbs, but I found happily that it takes less time to get there than into the city and the commute is considerably lighter.

The best part, however, is that my new practice is a nearly perfect fit for me. My range of skills make me something of a magic bullet for the right practice, but finding that practice wasn't easy. Dr. Park, my new boss, is an excellent doctor and she and I have very similar ideas about care quality (only the best) and office environment (flexible, team-oriented, and low drama). My new office is a beautifully well-appointed clinic on Prospect Ave in the heart of downtown Mount Prospect, and we have virtually every piece of theraputic equipment available for our patients to take advantage of. The practice is small enough that logistics and paperwork aren't overwhelming and we can focus our efforts 100% on the patients with few distractions, yet still large enough to be steadily busy and continually growing even in this economy. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

John is loving pre-school and has a fun little cadre of pals he eats breakfast with every morning. Though it has not yet become fully mainstream, the potty is now very much on his radar and he uses it as often as it is practical for him. H1N1 has made an appearance at his school, which is worrisome, but with their insistence on constant hand-washing and other precautions, I am relatively reassured that the spread of it and the regular flu will be at least slowed. The weather has been utter crap here for almost an entire month with rain and overcast skies nearly every day. Yesterday seems to have at least partially broken that up, however, as today the sky is clear and blue and beautiful.

Thank You, Death Robot is out and the initial impressions of those readers I've talked to have been very favorable. It took just short of four years to finish from initial talks to the book-in-hand, with delays and allowances for other projects I worked on in the meantime (including the birth of my son), but I think the overall quality of the end product justified the wait. Len's cover, in particular, has been a fan favorite.

I've updated my playlist as well with some new songs. The new Joss Stone album is terrific in general, and apparently Creed has a new album, too. I'll have to listen to it a bit more before I give you a final verdict on that. Tori Amos's "Dragon" I fell in love with after watching the YouTube video of the PS22 Choir singing it. Has anyone seen "Where the Wild Things Are" yet? I'm still dying to check it out. Maybe I'll make that my Tuesday project...

Interview from the Printer's Ball

2009-08-08T19:26:00.003-05:00

Here's a clip from the 2009 Printer's Ball at the Luddington Building, sponsored by Poetry Magazine. A good time was had by all, with the return of the terrific Literary Deathmatch reading series hosted by Todd Zuniga. Amy Guth (writer of Chicago Subtext) was on hand interviewing authors and attendees including yours truly and one of my new Chicago literary friends, Gina Frangello. Give it a look.

Mark R. Brand at Printers' Ball from Amy Guth on Vimeo.

In other news, either the camera adds a few pounds or I've apparently been hitting the tollhouse cookies a little too hard.

Thank You, Death Robot is here!!

2009-07-29T18:56:00.003-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that Thank You, Death Robot is finished and is now available for pre-order here: http://www.silverthought.com/tydr/

To everyone whose stories appear in it, thank you endlessly for your patience and your perseverance with this project. Every story in it is a winner and I'm thrilled with the final product. Special thanks to Len Nicholas for the terrific cover and to Vic Giannini for letting me use his title for the book.

Three Fallen Women: A review

2009-07-27T12:09:00.003-05:00

I recently read Amy Guth's novel Three Fallen Women, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on it with you. Amy is a fellow Chicago author, and the founder of the Pilcrow Lit Festival. Her Tribune blog on the Chicago Now network Chicago Subtext is rapidly becoming the place to go for the latest news on all things literary.

Three Fallen Women, to give you a bit of background, is a novel told in three parts with three interwoven and largely-unrelated storylines. It concerns the lives of three women, Helen, Carmen, and Frieda, whose lives are plagued with dissatisfaction for various, often self-victimizing reasons. These women all undergo a pivotal moment in their lives during the course of this book, with varying results. It's the sort of uncomplex plot canvas that an author like Alice Munro might use to paint an ultra-vivid, sometimes surreal picture of humanity on, and that's more or less where Guth takes it.

It would be a mistake to liken Three Fallen Women to Munro's style, however, because Guth brings a narrative voice rich with moments I might describe as a version of American Cockney. Generation X colloquialisms, as typical of the style often inside-joke-ish and sarcastic, color the narrative of Three Fallen Women throughout. As such, the book has a palpable "right now" feel that embraces its audience and challenges us to keep up with it, rather than the other way around. I would feel again and again while reading the book the recurring gratitude I always feel when it's clear an author assumes I'm intelligent enough to follow their logic instead of spoon-feeding it to me.

It avoids being formulaic due to Guth's clear sense of over-arching tone throughout, and reads very quickly despite being densely narrated and deliciously descriptive. The perspective shifts are not difficult to follow because the three main characters have unique enough narratives to easily tell apart. There does exist, however, a vague sense of commonality between the three leading ladies, that I think leads the reader only very subtly to the book's most present theme.

I spoke to Amy about Three Fallen Women a while back and I remember her telling me that the deeper meaning of the story was the refreshingly atypical idea that the three main characters live lives connected by the common theme of bad choices and failing to learn from mistakes. This is a decidedly fresh approach that I think flies in the face of possibly the greatest now-cliche critique of third wave feminism: the idea (espressed legendarily by Jack Nicholson in the film As Good As It Gets) that women feel little compunction to act in reasonable ways and are seldom held accountable for their choices.

Three Fallen Women is all about choices and accountability, though if I hadn't spoken to Guth about this, I might not have picked that out on the first read. The stories, compelling though they are, never come off as preachy or having a cohesive "point" to make. Though its organic structure might boast a valid claim to being a viable, smarter-than-average chick lit crossover title, Three Fallen Women succeds in being quite accessible to a male audience and in places (as Eric Spitznagel states in the liner notes) very genuinely touching in this respect. There is every inclination in the aftermath of the last fifty years of gender sociopolitics to identify the feminine almost as a distinct not-so-silent "character" in a book like this. Happily, Guth sidesteps this cliche and brings us instead a portrait of women that seems as honest and shameless as the language itself.

If you're looking for something smart, honest, and fresh, Three Fallen Women will not disappoint.

A month with no updates

2009-07-27T11:49:00.003-05:00

How the hell did that happen?

In there interim, quite a bit has gone on in my life, including two very exciting developments. First, of course, it the birth of my nephew Gabriel Aiden Ryzycky. My sister Brooke and her hubby Walter are the proud parents of a 5 pound 2 oz bundle of joy who despite being born more than a month early comes home today! Congratulations guys, and much love!

Also, my newest book, a collection of robot-related sci-fi stories titled Thank You, Death Robot, is finished and will be available for pre-ordering very shortly. I'll post an update for the link when it's ready. It was quite an adventure editing material that I didn't write (the book contains work by 13 great indie sci-fi writers), and I'm very pleased with the results. Stay tuned for more about this.

I submitted my new novella about child soldiers titled Loosed Till Dawn Are We for the So New Writer's Prize last week. I'm excited in particular about that one because it marks my first real departure from the sci-fi genre and it more than exceeded my hopes. My previous novel, a post-apocalyptic story titled The Damnation of Memory, is slated for release later this year, and I'm currently working on a fourth new book, untitled, about time travel. My newest sci-fi short story "The Warmother's Supper" was posted at Silverthought.com last month, and I'm proud to announce that my short non-fiction piece "Guerilla Reading", will appear in the upcoming collection Upstart Crows II: True Stories, published by Wide Array. Overall, this has been a season of unprecedented productivity for my writing, and I couldn't be happier about it.

The Chicago Brands have been enjoying the summertime, taking trips to the Morton Aboretum in Lombard, IL for an overnight, and to the beach this past weekend for some fun in the sun. John is already a pretty decent sandcastle builder and jumped fearlessly into Lake Michigan. Our new favorite toy around here is the N-Strike series of Nerf dart guns and we have several of them now. Granted, the purchase of the three-foot-long, magazine-fed, bolt action Nerf Longshot sniper rifle did give me pause to check the label. It said "For Ages Six and Up", and I thought, hell I'm thirty, we're good. Aside from sneaking up and ambushing Mommy with them, John is also developing a pretty good singing voice. I'll post some videos when I get a chance. John goes to his first day of pre-school on August 25th, which is just under a month away!

The greatest moment in the history of video games

2009-06-27T10:49:00.004-05:00

From Wizards, with Fred Savage. Also keep your eyes open for none other than Jenny Lewis, lead singer of Rilo Kiley and the female half of The Postal Service.

IFD

2009-06-21T13:17:00.003-05:00

So as you can see from my post last night, my Father's Day present was a way-cool trip to Lincoln Park for a delicious dinner at a killer Lebanese restaurant called Maza and then to the Elbo Room to see my favorite new Chicago band I Fight Dragons. They were terrific live we had a blast! Here's a YouTube clip of how they make their music, they're sort of vaguely Weezer-ish but with a slightly more fun and uptempo vibe and they use a pretty wide array of electronically-controlled MIDI synthesizers hooked to: Video game controllers.

Check it out.

Here's how the controllers work. Neat stuff. The guy playing drums and piano simultaneously with a Guitar Hero guitar and a Power Glove blows my mind a little.

At the Elbo Room with

2009-06-20T20:49:00.002-05:00

At the Elbo Room with "I Fight Dragons"! Happy Father's Day to me!

American Soma

2009-06-20T18:57:00.002-05:00

A dystopian literature-related internet quiz? How could I not?

(Note: Savannah Scholl Guz and I were on a panel together last month at the Pilcrow Lit Fest and I'm chomping at the bit to read this book.)

SSG: In American Soma, the title story imagines the mass drugging of the nation through popular foods, like pizza, coffee, and beer to assure the results of a presidential election. If you were in power and wanted to maintain it, what methods would you use?

MB: Two words: Video games. For the past four or five years, video games have outsold the box-office in annual sales. Everyone is playing video games, or near enough to everyone that you could reach a huge chunk of the population by exploiting things like content and product placement. True story; when Obama was running for election, I started seeing people in XBOX 360 Live games using "Barack" and "Obama" as their usernames. Video game commentary and political importance isn't here yet because we still think of it as a form of entertainment for children and juvenile men, but the reality is it's bigger than almost any other entertainment form and it's very cheap in comparison. Cheap=democratic, but cheap also virtually guarantees a widespread saturation of data. If someone could mold that...

SSG: In American Soma, there is a story called “The Fountain,” in which the dirty water of a dive bar toilet can make people younger. Considering injections of botulism toxins and painful chemical peels are now the accepted way to rejuvenate your appearance, would you reach into a scummy toilet in order to maintain your youth or regain it? And what's your unlikely fountain of youth?
MB: I have to say I probably would. And speaking as someone who once went on a grueling low-calorie diet and lost 84 pounds, I'm willing to turn my back on a variety of things I categorically love in order to try to shoot for an ideal that I'm not even sure I feel a genuine need to achieve. Why? In an information world, attractiveness is even more important than capital.

My idea of the fountain of youth? Stay the hell away from genetically-engineered food. If you are eating anything with hydrogenated corn oil or corn syrup in it (see also: everything) you are fucking up your body. The Amish eat dairy like it's going out of style, butter, cheese, milk, none of it pasteurized and none of it "reduced fat" and they remain some of the healthiest people you will ever see. The reason: they are outdoors every day and move around more than we do, and virtually none of their food chain is processed.

Imagine a world in which you could happily have all the butter/ice-cream/mashed potatoes/pasta/bread/etc, you could eat, and it would not make you obese. This exists in places where they don't put chemicals and unnatural additives in our food. Don't believe me? Go to Arcola, Il and have lunch at an Amish person's house. I've never seen so many carbs and fats on the same plate. It was too much food even for me, who has been known to pack away an entire pizza in a sitting. But every bit of it was organic and none of it from improperly-raised or treated livestock or genetically-engineered grains.

If you think you know some healthy, attractive people. go visit an Amish community. They positively glow with youth, and they have great skin, vibrant hair, strong upright posture, correct body-mass index, etc. And they eat steak and potatoes for BREAKFAST.

SSG: American Soma’s story “Postmodern Colonialism” is a not-so futuristic story that charts conquests achieved through capitalism (and sometimes, war). In host nations, protective compounds are created, in which American white collar employees are stationed and eventually cannot leave. Do you think this still lies in America ’s future? Or are we already there?

MB: It might, but I honestly hope it doesn't. Not because I really have a concept of what this sort of thing really means to the citizens of third world countries. I think it would be presumptuous of me to even prentend that I understand their point of view. I hope this never happens because the America I love is full of good people, and the system that does/might exist where Americans are unwelcome in other countries makes me feel a little heartsick. Entitled we might act, and enfranchised we certainly are, but under it all I know we're not such douchebags as all that. I like to fantasize that nearly any one person from any country who "hates" Americans could come to Chicago, spend a month here seeing what we're really like, and at least partially change their mind. It might be just a fantasy, but that's the America I live in, and the one that I try to protect and nurture.

SSG: American Soma is largely about a variety of personal or communal dystopias and imperfect worlds. By contrast, what three things comprise your idea of a utopia?

1) The abolishment of institutional punishment. I don't think governments should exist to incarcerate or execute people. I think people should be bound by the moral code of their individual communities and made to atone for transgressions in a palpable way. Locking someone up for fifteen years solves nothing. Serious breaches of the law should be punished by things like compulsory labor in charitable causes, compulsory participation in medical trials so we can improve our overall medical technology, compulsory relocation to rural areas or group living environments for community supervision. That sort of thing should exist for the small percentage of crimes that are not directly related to socioeconomic status. Which leads me to my next bullet point...

2) Socialism 2.0. Not communism, socialism. If the last year and a half have taught us anything useful about socioeconomics, it's that our version of capitalism does little or nothing to maintain the meritocracy and democracy that we cling to as its ideals. So we need to ask ourselves: why the death-grip on capitalism? Let it go, America. Much of what we do is already very socialistic in nature, let's toss out the rest of the stupid process and start fresh with a political structure consistent with the last century of human sociopolitical evolution. As we are now, we're still struggling with many of the same problems people in 1909 suffered from. I find that lack of progress telling.

3) Creativity encouraged, derivative entrepreneurialism scorned. There is a reason buzzards have no friends. They survive on eating the remains of other, more noble creatures. I think we as human beings need to start calling buzzards buzzards and focus on a world in which creativity reigns. Ultimately, those who create are the most valuable members of any society anyway. A culture is only as good as its best idea, and right now the people in this country who have ideas are like little mice under the sun waiting for the corporate birds of prey to swoop out of the sky and grab them. We cage people in the bars of expectation, partially because of capitalism, partially because of outmoded cultural taboos that have no real teeth anymore. In a digital world, where virtual experiences are quickly catching up with "real" experiences, why can we not have a world in which the concept of taboo melts away and gives rise to the creativity that the human race needs, and deserves? The concept of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) may be useful here.

Peace can be realized as a sort of comfort barrier to protect Group of People A from Group of People B via means of the digital world. After all, when I log onto Facebook only the people I like are there. Imagine a world where you could move to a community of people guaranteed to accept you for whatever it was you wanted to achieve in the world. In a more virtual world, you might even live in a "community" comprised of only people you get along with. Tired of listening to religious people? Unfriend them for a while until you change your mind or get bored. Abortion not your thing? In a more virtual world, you could demand that people who advocate abortion rights never, or nearly never, cross your path. You can tune out news of them the way you'd tune out a distasteful radio station or that one weirdo friend from college who you don't care to ever speak to again.

In "No Exit" Sartre demonstrated to us that Hell is "other people." If we want to ever reach Utopia, we need to realize that Heaven is also other people. Some other people.

And here we go:

2009-06-06T17:01:00.003-05:00

In case you missed it, here's the interview. Special thanks to Amy and her engineer Scott for making me feel at home in front of the camera. I'm normally a bag of nerves when it comes to public speaking, but this was totally fun!

Interview from Printer's Row Literary Festival

2009-06-06T07:43:00.004-05:00

Log in here to see me and other terrific Chicago authors like Gina Frangello, Jill Summers, Dave Reidy and James Kennedy get interviewed by one of my favorite Chicago people, Amy Guth.

Interview is at 2:00PM and it's live, baby!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chicago-tribune-printers-row-lit-fest

Stewie talking about how much Matthew McConaughy sucks.

2009-05-30T16:06:00.002-05:00

"You are just awful."

Hilarious skit about baby owls

2009-05-29T19:04:00.001-05:00

I heard this on the radio about a month ago on the way to work. Funny stuff.

Tori Amos sings with 5th graders

2009-05-29T18:24:00.002-05:00

In case there's any doubt how awesome Tori Amos is, if you haven't seen it check this out. The first video has her show up at the mall-show of a 5th grade chorus that sings some of her songs and listen in, crying halfway through.

The second video has her leading the chorus and singing with them herself. The band teacher asks if she'll sing something and she says "Can they sing with me?" If only every celebrity was that cool.

Pilcrow Lit Fest: The Aftermath

2009-05-25T20:12:00.004-05:00

I wanted to set aside a post just to talk about some of the terrific people I ran into at Pilcrow, because (1) putting them directly into the posts was going to make them very long and confusing and (2) I met a LOT of great people. Just as an aside, I didn't put any more photos in this post because there would have been too many to list. For loads of photos of the entire week of Pilcrow, check out the official site at http://www.pilcrolitfest.com/ and their flickr pool.

Again. like I mentioned in an earlier post, this is far from being an exhaustive list, but I thought I'd take a moment to give a shoutout to:

Savannah Scholl Guz, author of the upcoming American Soma, by So New Publishing. Savannah and I got to talk quite a bit about Big Brother, GPS marking, little-agro, The New Yinzer, reviewing reference texts, and dog barfing. We traded recommendations for movies and books, and speaking of recommendations: if you like dystopian social-minded fiction, you're going to love her new book.

Deb Lewis, who made the panel on writing sexuality very comfortable and effective and even went so far as to dig into the work of each author to really get to know us before we came out. Moderating panels is tough enough, but making first-time panelists feel comfortable, especially on a panel about sex writing, takes a really rare sensibility. Deb even introduced me to several of her friends later at Literary Deathmatch and helped me get my bearings about who was who, so a very special thanks to her.

Zach Dodson of Featherproof books, who took a few minutes while we were walking to our transportation to chat with me about their downloadable mini-books. I thought this was a terrific idea and he gave me a little bit of insight into why and how they make these happen. Zach is co-publisher of Featherproof and he moderated the informative book design panel.

Gina Frangello, author and founder of OV (Other Voices). Gina took a few minutes after our panel on writing sexuality to chat with me about her upcoming books and she shared with me that two of her books won Gold IPPY awards this year! Gina was delightful to talk to and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Lenny Kleinfeld and Ina Jaffe, who also stopped briefly after our panel on writing sexuality (of which Lenny was a contributor) and talked about wine and thriller-writing mayhem. Lenny has had some success recently in interesting wine venues in his book, as Shooters and Chasers has as a character an assassin who dreams of making a world-class Syrah. That's a notion I think we can all get behind.

Tim Hall, the moderator of our panel on social and political writing. Sometimes I think being cool and down to earth are like two opposite lines on a graph, but right at the point where those two lines connect is Tim Hall. He kept the social and political writing panel very relevant and interesting despite it being very early and despite me holding up everyone for an extra two minutes while I grabbed a beer. Check out his books here.

Gwenolyn Glover and David De Rosa, who I had the pleasure of chatting with several times over the course of the week and got to eat lunch with on Saturday. They, like me, are just getting connected to the Chicago lit scene, and we had some great conversation about learning how to put books together for the first time, graphics design, and cover design. One of the funniest conversations of the week goes to David, who suggested that if we were all serious about making some money at publishing, we'd all be writing teenage vampire romance serials right about now. This sentiment was echoed by Young Adult panel contributor Daniel Kraus, who says he reads 5-6 novels a week and approximately 70% of it is "vampire fucking".

I got to watch Literary Deathmatch with Suzy T. from the Book Cellar, who aside from being fun to chat with has the coolest business card I've ever seen (a little book!). I also had the pleasure of meeting and talking briefly with Joanna Beth Tweedy (The Yonder Side of Sass and Texas), Drew Ferguson (The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second), and Bobby Biedrzycki (Chicago's rad 2nd Story reading series). and Leah Jones's mom, Linda, who moderated the Young Adult panel.

I'm almost sure I've left a few people out, and if I did I apologize profusely. I have a stack of business cards, bookmarks, book cards, mini-books, mini-catalogs, pamphlets, and stickers to sort through, but most importantly I have a stack of new literary acquaintances that I can't wait to interact with some more.

And of course no account of Pilcrow would be complete without a very warm and heartfelt thanks to the people who invited me: Amy Guth and Leah Jones. It was very much my pleasure, guys, and I can't want to hang out with you again at the next rad Chicago literary event! Printer's Row, anyone? *nudge nudge*

Pilcrow Lit Fest: Finale

2009-05-24T11:22:00.003-05:00

To cap off the week-long Pilcrow Lit Fest, Amy and Leah organized an entire day, 9am to whenever the last person went home after midnight, of literary revelry. It's going to be hard to sum up all of the cool stuff that I got to see and do, so I'll save my impressions of specific cool people and things I saw for the next post and focus on the finale itself.

We kicked things off at 10:00 at Trader Todd's with the panel titled: "Social and Political writing". I was on this panel along with political blogger and Gaper's Block contributor Ramsin Canon, conservative humor writer Conor McCarthy, and dystopian fiction author Savannah Guz. The panel was moderated by author and political writer Tim Hall.

I remained at Trader Todd's for the panel on graphic novels, which turned out unexpectedly to be one of the better panels of the whole day, and included some very hip writer/artists of a genre I had never had a chance to interact with before. After that I went to the book design panel at Matilda's, moderated by the co-publisher and creative director of Featherproof Books, Zach Dodson. I made it back to Trader Todd's in time to eat lunch with local newcomers author Gwendolyn Glover and graphic artist David De Rosa. Gwen was part of the rowdy, lively Young Adult panel, where some hilarious conversation about the eye-rolling popularity of the Twilight Series and "vampire fucking books" was had. I also remained for the Queer As Words panel, moderated by Stacy Jill Jacobs.

Finally, to wrap up the discussions I participated in the panel about writing sexuality called "Stain the sheets", moderated by Deb R. Lewis and including Lenny Kleinfeld, Gina Frangello, Drew Ferguson, Joanna Beth Tweedy, Bobby Biedrzycki, and Lindsay Hunter. This was a very fun panel that drew from a large variety of writing types and backgrounds and covered a lot of the territory that I thought the audience came to see.

As if this weren't enough, the night finished off with a four-hour closing bash at the Viaduct Theater for the second installment of Literary Deathmatch Chicago and the Rebuilt Books auction to benefit Young Chicago Authors. The Viaduct was just exactly the sort of place you'd only find in the imaginations of trendy young authors and artists, and it was a terrific venue for the finale. Literary Deathmatch (again, if you've never seen it) is a sort of bracketed competition between four readers from different reading series. The readers are chosen at random and face off against one another. The winners are chosen by a panel of guest judges (all of whom were hysterically funny), but really the judging itself was rather moot. All four performances were top-of-their-game people doing pieces that were very, very entertaining, intense, and evocative. So secondary was the competition to the fun of it all that the winner of the night was chosen by a competition to see who could be the first to complete a simple long-division problem.

If it ever becomes available on YouTube, I would highly recommend looking up Jill Summers reading her piece about a student of hers handing in a term paper titled "How to be a Pimp."

Some of the best and funniest material of the night, however, came from the judges themselves who often went on riotous, random digressions, and the hosts, Amy, Leah and Todd Zuniga, who after a few drinks roared through the Rebuilt Books auction promising things like free copies of Opium magazine, $1.71 of his own cash, and phone messages from Amy Guth where she would call and cry on your answering machine if people would buy the rebuilt books for charity. At one point, they even climbed atop the bar in the lobby and hawked the auctioned items at the tops of their lungs. My rebuilt book went for $45, and I was so happy I gave the winning bidder a signed copy of the book so she could actually read one that wasn't shot and bleeding.

At the end of the day, a fifteen-hour non-stop literary tour-de-force, I finally came home and sorted through the stack of awesome cards, marketing materials, names, and notes I had collected.

Next Up: The Aftermath