Taking Stock, Taking Action

I'm still here. Sorry for the break. Here's what's been going on.

It took me nearly ten years, but I finally finished the novel for submission. Then I finished the sixth Swill.

And then I stopped.

After the first few days, it started feeling a little crummy. When I complained to those close to me -- the missus, my dad, my counselor, and so on -- they said I needed the rest. Not to worry about it.

Okay.

But then a week or so ago, I found myself frightened of my emails. "Huh," I said, and took stock of myself and realized I had a fairly serious dose of clinical depression going on.

I went to my counselor, and said, "I've got the clinicals again."

She said, "But you're doing so well," and I reeled off some symptoms, and she said, "Holy smokes, those are the clinicals, all right. Time to take this seriously."

See, I've improved my self-care -- eating, sleeping, getting my way, and so on -- to the point where I'm no longer experiencing the more dramatic phases of my mental illnesses. But it turns out that not quivering with the strain of refraining from self-destruction isn't the same thing as mental health. It's not entirely different, I grant you. But something needs to give.

So. How to bust a depression.

First off, get back into the habit of activity. I did a draft of an essay yesterday and sent it to the Homework Club. First rule is that I have a draft of an essay with each of my writer's groups each week. This isn't a full-time writing load by my standards, but it'll get me a book in less than a year. And these will also be done as podcasts --- there is a chance that I'll be able to do these in video format, fingers crossed.

It's time to get back into blogging, I'm doing this blog post now, and I've got a few ideas for changing things up here. It's time to start trying to do more posts of general interest, something that might grow my audience.

This afternoon or tomorrow morning I'll steel my nerve and start answering my emails. I have begun neatening up the house and my studio -- lack of control over my environment is a symptom, yes, but it is also something that can be corrected.

Then I can start tackling the immediate projects on my plate -- lessons for a friend who wants writing instruction, short fiction for another friend who has a project in the works, marketing the novel, and putting together a portfolio so I can market an art show based on my work for Swill.

I also need to do pro-quality websites for both myself and Swill, and begin presenting Swill to the literary establishment. I mean, we're part of the literary establishment. It's just that hardly anyone knows. I need to apply to some of the classier writing colonies, get a little shine on the resume.

And I need to learn something, and meet new people, so I'm going to either join or start a critique and support group -- like my writer's groups -- for cartooning. I've looked, thought, and consulted, and it's time for me to get to grips with the graphic novel.

Somewhere in there, the depression will either start to lift or cease to matter. Damn, though, this one was sneaky. If my email hadn't suddenly cramped up on me I might have just gone gliding along, going deeper and deeper and never noticing until the pressure finally crushed my skull. Whee!

So next post? Something good, no more of this self-indulgent drivel.

Swill 6 Is Here!

Swill 5 came out in December of 2010. Swill 6 is finally done. Why so late? I'm the problem, I've always been the problem, and I'll always be the problem. If you've been following the blog, you know the soap-opera, and if you haven't? My life is a fucking soap opera! For Christ's sake, it's a miracle I'm not dead or locked up. On the other hand, in all modesty, when I was apologizing to Rob the other evening, he said, "Well, it is a fucking work of art."

On the cover, we have a much-beloved and very kind blurb from Joe Loya, and on the back we've got the mandatory Rob Pierce short-short (or 'flash fiction,' as the youngsters call it). This one is a bit more pointed and wistful than his usual mal humor...

Rob put my story Primitive first. It's very much in my Shirley Jackson/Saki/John Collier mode, and it deals with my relationship with my mother in a fairly direct fashion. While I wish I'd written it yesterday instead of two years or so ago, it's still one of my stronger short works. I'll stand by this one.

William J. Fedigan's Catholic Prayers is too short to describe, operating on the boundary between flash fiction and poetry. There are times I worry we publish so many Catholic writers as to give the impression we're at war with the church.

Failure To Commit by Shawna Yang Ryan sets addiction, faith, and sex on an ungodly freeway collision. Ms. Ryan's novel Water Ghosts is a moody look at a slice of California history I should have been taught in school, and what -- really -- is she doing here? Doesn't she know better?

A quick aside. This is the thing that gets to me. When Rob and I started out, we had no idea what we were doing. And now, seven years and six issues later, we manage to attract a lot of 'real' writers, writers that publish professionally. I'm a nut with a bad back, and Rob is a family man who works at a copy store. We are not going to be paying for stories any time soon, much as we wish we could. So how is it we get good stories from good writers?

I think two things come into play. One -- we are fucking old-fashioned. We edit, and we print, and we do so in a way calculated to make the writer feel as if they have been attended to. Or beaten like a government mule, but in a refreshing way. The other is that we operate in a zone that allows us to print things that just wouldn't fit in anywhere else -- and sometimes even the best of families can produce a two-headed baby. We love those two-headed babies.


Still, how does being broke, picky, late, and having an inordinate fondness for the fictional equivalent of two-headed babies lead to something beginning to resemble credibility? I find the process confusing.


Anyway.

The Dog Shit House by Charity Ankrum was a pain in the ass to acquire. Charity is my sister, and she's probably the funniest writer I know of, on a line-by-line basis. "This shit is like Mark Leyner meets Jack Handey!" I'd rave, and she'd swirl her wine, look into the distance. "Yes, I know. So derivative." And she'd never do anything with her writing, and I'd scream. After nagging and nagging and nagging, I finally got this out of her. I wanted funny, and instead I got a harrowing revelation that my family is even more white trash than I'd thought, and it covers the same territory as my story with less artifice. God damn it. Put this story over one eye and Primitive over the other, and you can see a Richmond childhood.

Junior on the Lam by Don Jennings is another short shot, and this bad boy rains on its own parade with a little more media savvy than absolutely needed.

A Long Road by Craig Hartglass stubbornly, persistently refuses to do the obvious thing. Stories within stories and not so much an ending as a drifting downstream into the distance...

Okay, what I said up there about two-headed babies? How about a story concerning a Zoroastrian disco racquetball coach? I, Racquetball Coach by Keith Rutledge and illustrated by Robin Eagleton -- who is the first artist aside from myself to have work in Swill, and I hope he appreciates my giving him two whole pages -- is exactly the kind of thing that Swill exists to publish. It is really good, and completely fucked in the head. It is my special favorite. A twenty-first century Walter Mitty who insists on living his fantasies, protagonist Carl Henshaw's generically-scriptural voice and sincerity provide a dizzy, squirmy, hilarious read, and the illustrations give it the perfect Saturday Evening Post-Punk vibe.

Rob Pierce's As Good A Cop is sparse, brief, and more absent than present -- in the negative space/jazz sense, by which I mean you have to read outside the story if you're going to read the story.

Rob had sent me two stories -- "One of these is a shoe-in, and one I just want you to read." And one of the stories had been submitted by a friend of mine. Thankfully, Giant Spider In My Garage by George R. Galuschak was the shoe-in. If you have ever spent a lonely Sunday afternoon watching old black-and-white monster movies and gotten that feeling, then this story talks your language. George, by the way, is great. One time when a group of writers was talking about how much they liked George (this seems to happen a lot), I said, "George is like a houseplant or a fish tank," and got looks ranging from puzzlement to irritation. I said, "If he's in a room, it's a nicer room," and everyone nodded, and said, "Oh, yeah, I get it. Yeah. That makes sense."

Like I always say, the trick to making nepotism work is knowing the right people.

Fool Circle by Steve Young hits a particular Swill sweet spot -- the cleverly constructed gutter-level noir, the kind of story that's like riding a Wild Mouse that goes straight down into concrete.

Finally, Max Dunbar's They Walk Among Us.A panoptic view of a very specific, very real British dystopia. Nicely written with a strong local voice, wonderfully flexible viewpoints, and a solid moral underpinning. This is another of my favorites

And the six print series The Wet Season marks a real step forward for my imaginary landscape work. The new technique is producing the most satisfying results I've gotten so far, with an almost painterly quality that I'm quite proud of. Of course, I'm already wondering how I'm going to top it next time... For a second-rate artist, I have a good time.

So.

One of the things I did this last year was to investigate the current literary scene. Well, Swill does not look shabby in comparison. I'm not going to go into it any more than that, but Swill is a legitimate contender, and Rob and I have begun discussing means by which we can further the cause of Swill.

Expect... Well, expect the obvious. Facebook page, new website, T-shirt...

And a surprise or two.

Swill lives, walks, and conquers!

Seeking Engagement

And this is the last of the illustrations for Swill. I'll be done with the damned thing tonight or tomorrow. I think this is distinctly better-looking than last issue. My experiments with the art bore mixed results -- only two of the pieces, including the cover, are in vector format. It was the size of my computer that was the issue. I could have done it with more RAM. Detailed art got strange when Illustrator autotraced it, and that could have been addressed by using a higher level of resolution and blah blah blah. I'm bushed.

It was cool. I'd finished all the other pieces, and I just told the missus, "I'm heading out to get a composition. I won't be back without it." For some reason, I was convinced that I'd find my shot at the West Oakland BART station. I went there and started looking around, nothing, nothing, nothing, and bam. Problem solved. I saw how the tracks went, the way the energy just sucked right to that one spot in the picture, and I knew how everything went together. After that it was just labor.

I cannot believe how hard it's been to get this job done. Part of it has been the nature of the last stretch of time -- between the last issue and this one my life has been a non-stop fucking drama. The ulcer, the crazy, the hospitals and pills and all that happy crap, the upward rebound... and on top of that, I've written and revised a novel, and, again, blah blah blah. If you read the blog, you know the score. My health and finances are appalling, and everything else is gold.

The real source of the blockage I've been experiencing has been a combination of over-ripe projects finally coming due, a feeling that this is a major turning point in my life, and a lack of engagement with the world. I had to stop attending school due to my financial situation, and listen.

As someone who's disabled and conventionally unemployable, from time to time, I run across people who are jealous of me. People whose idea of a wonderful life is to be divested of their responsibilities. The worst? Family guys. Fathers. They view the idea of settling in on the couch in front of the TV to be absolutely entrancing.

My life would kill them.

Inactivity is a killer. It kills people. Makes them stop breathing, is what I mean.

The couch is a killer. The TV is a killer.

I have chronic pain, PTSD, OCD, fetal alcohol syndrome, and mixed-state bipolar syndrome. And I'm certain that I could get myself a prescription for something that would make TV bearable, especially if I drank as well.

I don't want the couch. I don't want the TV. I lost my back, and I have been sitting in my room for the last decade working like a son of a bitch because I want a job.

I want to have people who expect things from me, and from whom I can expect things. I want contact. I want deadlines and paychecks and a sense that my efforts are having an effect on the world.

I sit in my room and I work. I need that solitude. But connection is the payoff.

The novel is going out into the world. I'll be looking for galleries for the Swill show. Swill itself is due for a boost. The performance work is gathering momentum.

It's just a matter of holding on and staying functional during this in-between time. Staying on the clock and off the couch.

Trying to stay engaged.

Out Of The Egg

So these two designs need to be rendered, and then I'm down to one illustration and Swill's ready. I'm going to be out looking for that last composition to day.

The fun part of this process is doing the grayscale renderings. The images in my head look completely different than these designs. Detail lost and gained, the use of limited tone to suggest atmospheric perspective, different areas of light and dark -- these only suggest the final illustrations.

Some time in my thirties, I began developing a bad postural habit. I have a tendency to hold my neck bent so that my head is thrust forward. This has caused a bit of spinal degeneration, and it isn't a particularly becoming habit. But over the past couple of years, my posture has been changing. An improvement in my opinion of myself has been accompanied by a tendency to hold my head up, and the shift in posture adds an element of feedback -- my body feels prouder.

Of course, this change has been accompanied by initially-frightening experiences of numbness, prickling, and shooting pains in my arms and hands. Thanks a lot, body. Cute metaphor.

It's been an interesting few days. I've done a reading and attended others, sent the novel out to Tor Books and a fistful of interested parties --

by the way.

IF YOU'RE A PAL OR COHORT AND YOU WANT TO LOOK AT THE NOVEL, FEEL FREE TO SEND ME A REQUEST. THERE WILL BE NO BOOK REPORT REQUIRED, AND YOU AREN'T OBLIGATED TO FINISH IT.

Anyway, on with the story. I sent the novel out, I participated in a video shoot publicizing Lip Service West (I've been meaning to blog about their extensive collection of videos -- here are the folks with whom I've appeared), and I was invited to participate in what looks to be an entertaining spite reading. Time to come up with five hundred words of horror from my life! That should be easy.

And get this -- the missus tracked down a bargain class in film acting. It starts tonight. It actually looks credible. I'll tell you more later.

Life does feel different now that the novel is out in the world. "It feels weird," I told the missus. "I could get hit by a car now, and my business would still keep going. I feel immortal in a yard-sale kind of way." It's not perfect, it's got at least one major going-over to go. But.

I've never had a graduation, never had a wedding, never had any of the big ceremonies that state to a person and their society that they have come of age. And my process of maturation has been much more complex and difficult than that faced by many people, and it's nowhere near done.

But there's a mediaeval concept that's weighed me down for years, and I've finally got the weight off of me. It used to be that the arts were taught through a system of apprenticeship, and that's where we get our word 'masterpiece.' A person's masterpiece is not their finest creation, or a work of enduring cultural significance.

It is, rather, the work that marks the change in status from journeyman to master -- from an advanced student to a practitioner.

I now have a body of work in the visual arts that is ready to take to market, and I have a novel that is in the market, and I am beginning to get a reputation for my performance work. My masterpieces are behind me.

I am now a working artist. I ain't getting paid yet, but now I'm in a position to change that. And I'm working on it.

My blog and online presence are going to undergo a sea change in the near future. I'll be focusing my creative energies on creating web-friendly work intended to garner me an audience rather than friends. If my audience turns out to be anywhere near as good as my friends, I'm set.

But folks? I'll be taking classes here and there for the rest of my life, because learning is one of the central pillars of my life. But I'm not a student anymore.

I'm different than I was even a couple of months ago. I feel confident and self-contained in crowds and social situations. Quentin Crisp once wrote, "Artists are a bunch of hooligans unable to live on their fair share of attention," and damn if that is not the case with me -- but if I conduct myself properly, I get the undue attention I so desperately crave. I'm known. I have a reputation and it's growing, and this makes me feel more real, more solid. Sooner or later I'll really have a sense of self-worth and I won't need that nonsense, but until then I'll be able to earn enough of it to get me by.

I'm involved in the world, engaged. In the short run I'm still more isolated than I'd like, but I am not alone. I'm part of a number of communities, and I'm valued. I'm engaged. And if I keep going, soon I'll be engaged in my own business the way I used to engage myself in work or school.

I never imagined myself making this statement in a way that wasn't essentially self-deprecating. But here it is.

I feel like a man. And I like it.

Ghost Rock Is Ready

The orange cards in the middle of the heap? Yeah, that's the plot for the second volume -- I've already written three drafts of that, the last readable if unacceptable, and the third volume has had a solid outline for years now. So if there's interest, the rest of the series is ready to roll.  It's been this first one that's been such a bastard...

So, later today I'll be sending out some .doc attachments, including one to the offices of Tor Books.

Ghost Rock is ready to present to the professional world.

Or, to put it another way, it's time for me to crack open the cozy little egg I've been living in for so long.

The last three days have been amazing. I've lived the damned novel. And that's the crucial element. It had to have real life for me. Until I could put my hands on it and feel the muscles jump, it was not ready. I'll do a post on the full history of the project some time next week, probably, but here's my feelings at the moment.

I had no way of knowing if this was ever going to be ready, but here it is. Finally.

I took out pages and pages of waste. I have no idea how much new material I added, but there was quite a bit -- it's gone from 53,000 words to 59,000 words. This is a relief to me -- it's the difference between a tight, disciplined work, and are you sure that isn't a novella?

I am pleased with myself. I am proud. I managed to do what I intended; the question is whether or not people find it pleasing.

And that's kind of up for grabs. It is something, but is it something people like?

It's memoir, or self examination, or therapeutic writing. This deals with everything from mental illness to the mystical experience to art to alienation to...

It's an old-fashioned fairy tale, an action adventure yarn with a pulp feel and pace, a story that ends with a kiss and the promise of true love.

It is a visionary work -- I've explored some exotic states of consciousness and brought the results back for public use.

It is a subtly self-confessing metafiction -- but the character's awareness that they're fictional is handled so as not to destroy the pleasure of the immersive reader.

It is an examination of storytelling and the relationship between literature and life, and the sly academic mind will be able to discern references to works ranging from Beowulf to Gravity's Rainbow to Harry fucking Potter. Each major genre from science fiction to romance takes a turn on stage, while the stage itself is rooted in the literary traditions of the epic, viewed with skepticism.

It is an examination of the real experience of rock and roll -- the experience of listening to music and playing it, not that of drugging and stage diving.

Its most central themes are friendship and principal.

It is an examination of America from a semi-fresh perspective.

It is foam. It is almost not there. There is more negative space than positive shape in this novel -- crucial scenes are left entirely to the reader, hints and details and half-completed sketches are intended to allow the reader a vivid, personal experience -- this book won't read the same twice, because most of it is suggested in ways that demand intuitive elaboration.

It is an action-adventure novel where more words are spent on the consequences of fights than on fights -- our lead character spends a lot of time in emergency rooms or coping with grief.

And if I may be so bold, 59,000 words is short for a novel, but long for a poem. I have knocked my ass out to make sure that there are passages that make this book worth reading purely for the prose. I have tried to take the language of my time and render it in a form that contains lasting beauty.

These are big words, but you know what? I've worked hard. And I have never had this sense of solid, earned pride before. I'll tell you what. I like the damned thing. It's a little embarrassing in parts, there's a quality of naivete that sometimes borders on the juvenile, but that's me all over. I did what I set out to do, I did it with a great deal of technical proficiency, and if nobody else likes it, I will be bothered, but I'll blame their tastes and not the work.

Tell you what, though. I bet nearly a decade of my life that I could write a book that pleased both me and others. A book that would be really read.

This book is the means by which I intend to introduce myself to the world.

I wonder how the world is going to respond.

It's Time

The paper of the manuscript is soft as cloth -- the front and back pages almost drape. I've been sick for weeks. I think it's the manuscript that's doing it to me. I have people waiting for the next Swill, and in theory, I could finish it in four days, give or take. I've been there for weeks. Months, actually. To tell the truth.

I think it's the manuscript that's doing it to me.

Or, rather, it's what the manuscript means.

Working on this novel has shaped my life as much as any other single force in my recent life. I started it  eight? Nine years ago?

It hasn't been that it's taken me that long to write it. It's taken me that long to learn how to write it. I'm not going to go into the whole story now -- I'll do that when I'm done -- but so far, my efforts to write this book as well as it needs to be written?

I have spent money and shed blood. I've travelled more on my own behalf than I ever have in my life. I've met writers I respect and admire, including one of my Major Personal Writers. You could put together a very convincing anthology using the writers with whom I've consulted. I have made contact with a circle of up-and-coming writers who I greatly enjoy. I have had the kind of experiences that you aren't supposed to have, received very specifically the kind of reception new writers are told not to expect.

The two people closest to me in my life have both responded to reading the novel by growing measurably more respectful and appreciative of me; it is entirely reasonable to say that it's helped bring romance into my life. When I started the book, I had strong, if unstated, convictions that there was something immoral about self-esteem; now I'm attempting to cultivate self-love. This book has taught me about myself.

Part of that has been forcing me out into the world -- my performance work spun out of the novel, my artwork spun out of the novel, and my first professional publication came about as a direct result of my seeking aid on the novel. While the novel itself is unpublished, it is the force behind what public exposure I've received.

And it's given me an ulcer, put me in the hospital, got me placed on psychiatric medication. (If you're a 'just take the meds' type, let me tell you -- sometimes the docs have NO FUCKING IDEA what they're doing, and they do it irresponsibly on top of that. Sometimes it works that way.) I've been pushed to my limits in all directions.

It's time to get the fucker done. I'm not going to be able to function freely until it's out of my system. I honestly think Swill will get done faster if I do this first, and that goes for everything else in my life.

You aren't supposed to invest this much in a single work of art, especially one in a dying form going out into a chaotic market. But I needed to write it, and this is what it took.

So I'm going to start the last round of the line edits to day -- input from the manuscript, reading aloud, that stuff. Producing the final copy. I'm still sick, I've got lots of stuff I should be doing, but this is the thing to do now.

And the thing is? It's going to be a delight. I love this fussy part of the work, getting all the little details just so.

And then I'll be able to forget about it and get on with my goddamned life.

Reading On July 7

Click here to see the video of my second reading.

Click here to read the associated blog post.

Click here to see the video of my third reading.

Click here to read the associated blog post.

Click here to read what the East Bay Express said about the show.

I've been sitting on this for a while. I googled myself some time ago, and found that videos of me had been posted on Vimeo. Soo-prise! These will be posted, along with the performances of many other writers, to the Lip Service West website sometime soon, and that will be another post for another day. (Thanks to Joe and Justine Clifford, Idan Levin of the SPAD, and camera and sound man Donald Grant, who managed to compensate for my lack of mic skills. Sorry, Don, I couldn't find a link for you...)

I will be performing at the first Beast Crawl on July 7. I'll be at the Punchdown natural wine bar with the Lip Service West crew at 5:00. Depending on the nature of what goes before me, I'll either discuss my impulses toward violence or I'll make fun of a group of people unable to defend themselves against my slander. Either way, good times.

These memoir pieces have started to congeal into a new book. It's going to be called Bone Chips, for reasons perfectly plain to anyone who has seen the above videos. Yeah, once again, I'm my favorite subject. Like it or not, over the past few years, my writing has become a means of organizing and understanding myself more than anything else, and this particular work deals as directly as possible with my harsher experiences of life.

This is a very conscious decision. Writing uses up your past. In a way, by tackling the central issues in my life directly and briefly, I'm being creatively wasteful. Good. I do not want to treat my traumas and misfortunes as a hoard to be doted over, each glittering tear to be measured before it's taken to market. I've spent my entire life saying that I was steam-powered, and at my core was a boiling pot of hate. I'm using the hate up. I want to burn through it and get on to a new life. I need a better means of motivation, and I won't get one until the old one is used up.

So this is not 'the real Sean.' This is me telling the truth, and delivering my reality as directly as possible -- but it is a phase, a creative period, it does not represent all of my life, and it will pass. I'm doing a memoir not to be a memoirist but as a form of public therapy, and will go back to writing about fried baloney sandwiches and monster fights as soon as I can.

But until then, you should try and come see me read! Again, I'll be at the Punchdown wine bar at 2212 Broadway in Oakland, CA at 5:00 on July 7. I'll do my best to amuse -- as I said, you either get to hear about how useful Easy-Off Oven Cleaner is, or you get to hear me mock the handicapped. It's a win/win situation.

And for the record? Not to go into details, but the above videos have radically altered my perception of myself. I've been walking a little taller. If nothing else, any lingering doubts as to my masculinity are pretty much over. I've always entertained the idea that an all-Oaf planet would run like a clockwork dream, but no. I'd get on my nerves. I'd worry me. And sooner or later, the back of my head would grow so intolerably ugly as to mandate assault...

Thankfully, there's only one of me and I don't have to look at him unless I feel like it. It's a source of relief, I'm telling you.