Henry Lives

So there's this guy, Neil Vogler. He commented on this blog some years ago, and I responded. And thusly was formed one of those vague, weird, quasi-social interactions that make the internet seem so very much like a branch of the netherworld.

And Neil, may the good lord love him, had an idea.

He thought it would be cute to respond to National Novel Writing Month (interesting how that was the subject of my last post, mmm?) by releasing a series...

No.  A slew, a flood, a deluge of short-short fiction.

I, myself, am not prone to behavior that might produce positive results,  so I backed away as soon as he presented the idea to me.

I haven't introduced you to Neil yet. From the intercontinental distance, Neil, here are the folks, thus far. Folks, Neil.

So Neil decided that it would be cute to present a series of short-short stories during NaNoMoNaBliBooGoo or whatever it is. And Neil is...

I hate to say it, but this was a terrier versus labrador situation. Terrier always wins. Neil bugged me, and bugged me, and bugged me. I said, "Oh, no no no, my sweet. No, no, no, my child."

Did I say 'terrier?'

So I broke down and said, okay. Ten stories. Flash fiction, ten stories during NaNoMaHoGaLuLieLo or whatever.

(Do I seem a little toasted? By the deadlines, I've been roasted.)

And then the son-of-a-bitch comes in and tells me he's found a publisher.

So now I have a deadline, and as is my wont, I whipped out three stories that should have proven discouraging.

I must have blown it, because December House decided to pick us up.

And all of a sudden, I was writing twenty -- no, twenty-one -- no, twenty-three stories for an anthology series featuring not only the dearly beloved Neil but also P.T. Dilloway, who bears very little responsibility for my actions.

I came into this tentatively, and now I'm fully engaged. If you read what Neil says, he makes a point of stating that this isn't throwaway material, that we're all really doing what we can.

He's right.

Look, I'm a devotee of book culture. I am trying to get into the book world. I want to bring profits to the people who maintain our culture, such as it is.

But when people express a strong interest in my work, and extend themselves to support it, well.

Well.

Check it out.

Henry is coming soon.

Hey, NaNoMo, Are You Sure You Know What You're Doing?

Please note: These are the grumpy words of a grumpy man.

(By 'grumpy' I mean 'operating a vocabulary while

suffering from a seasonal mood disorder.')

My ill-humor, pessimism, defensiveness, and elitist peevishness should not in any way reflect upon the good-will extended to National Novel Writing Month and its participants by the Flash Fiction Fest, its publisher, and the other contributors, who regard you all with great admiration and personal fondness which they would prefer you do not awkwardly mistake for sexual attraction.

National Novel Writing Month is part of a renaissance of folk art. I have to love that. Digital media has made traditionally expensive and arcane creative tasks accessible to anyone with a computer and some patience, and the internet has made it easy for people to share their efforts with one another.

Think of the world of culture as a pyramid. Right now, the base is getting broader. I think that's a good thing.

But my personal concern is with the top few feet of the pyramid. I'm not talking about fame, I'm talking about my kind of art. I'm talking about the use of extraordinary levels of craft to communicate a deeply felt and considered reaction to life in order to kindle strong and complex reactions in an audience.

That is my ambition.

If your ambition is to get a .doc file with fifty-thousand words in it by the end of November, you and I might not have a lot to talk about. And our interests are at odds.

Right now, there is an intentional corporate-driven agenda to devalue the written word. To turn the art of writing into a loss-leader used by businesses as a means of selling e-book readers. Prices for books are being set at bargain rates, and there is a class of reader being nurtured that buys for bulk rather than quality. And National Novel Writing Month...

"What are you reading?" I ask the missus.

She looks up from her iPad, and says, "This book, it's so stupid."

"How stupid is it?" I ask, and she reads me a hilariously sloppy casserole made out of half-baked cliches held together by cheese.

"Why are you reading that?" I ask.

"It only cost ninety-nine cents," she answers, and I hear the faint chime that accompanies the death of all I hold dear in culture.

These shitty novels were written during National Novel Writing Month. The base is getting broader.

And the peak is getting shorter. Literature is in decline. That's another mean-spirited essay, and I think I already wrote it.

Here's the thing. It is entirely possible to write a decent novel in a month.

But you have to know how to write in the first place. And writing a novel as though it were a marathon race is a terrible way to learn technical skills, and it will very likely cause you to develop bad, lazy habits out of desperate need.

If you want to have written a novel, don't let me get you down, go on and fart that son-of-a-bitch out and throw it up on Amazon for a buck along with all the other grunions. It's fun, you'll get something out of it, who's it going to hurt, never mind that you're breaking my fucking HEART with your COCKAMAMIE BULLSHIT. Anything you're going to do right, you're going to do right accidentally rather than developing any kind of solid skill-set --

Sorry, sorry. Give me a second here.

Anyway, if you just want to be able to say you did NaNoMo, go for it. But if you want to write well, sitting down and cranking out a mass of words with no prior planning is something you should do if you have trouble motivating yourself, or if you want to explore automatic writing. There can be a real magic that sets in after you've burned through all your cliches and assumptions and raw material starts pouring out.

Otherwise. If you want to learn to write well, with control, range, and power, start with short pieces.

The most difficult part of a novel is conceiving of it as a whole, and this is how most failed novels fail. But when you write in the short form, you can understand what you are doing as you work. The ability to master long form works is of necessity built up as any other strength.

Essays are the best starting point. The essence of clear writing is the ability to state your thoughts, and the first challenge a writer faces is that of understanding their own thoughts well enough to convey them. The essay is the essential form for this purpose, and is one of the most powerful mental exercises you can do. The ability to convey an opinion, describe a physical action, scientific principal, or state of mind is an ability that transfers directly to fiction.

Poetry and lyrics are both important for the development of style. Poetry requires a precise use of words beyond that demanded by prose. May I suggest that when one is capable of great feats, it is possible to perform lesser feats in a more impressive fashion than would otherwise be possible. (Humor is very closely related to poetry in its requirements for perfection in timing and word-choice, and both humorists and poets are subject to strange and unpleasant fixations on language. It's a professional hazard.)

Lyrics teach rhythm, allowing the writer to call on the power of everything from music to the beat of the heart. And unlike prose, lyrics and verse poetry are treated by the brain as music -- and if you write a line that sticks in people's heads, that they quote out loud days or even years after they've read it? You have written something the reader's brain instinctively regarded as music.

Short fiction is both easier and harder than the novel. For most writers, a period of apprenticeship in short fiction is necessary before enough skills have been gained to write a solid novel. There are exceptions, but until you've written a really successful piece of fiction -- by which I mean something that works, that lives on the page -- it strikes me as daffy to invest yourself in a novel. (Again, assuming that learning to write well is your central concern.)

You can hold a short story in your head. You can write flash fiction in hours, tweet fiction in minutes – and the sense of understanding the whole thing, of controlling your work, is something a novel will only give you after skull-bursting labor.

You can re-write a short story until it works without using up decades of your life, which is a real danger with an out-of-control novel. These days I can get a decent piece of fiction done on the first or second draft most of the time, but a lot of my early stories went through twelve or fifteen drafts. Aim for that kind of perfection with a novel, and watch the years roll by.

You have time to experiment. To try technical tricks that would be intolerable at length, to attempt to duplicate the effects of your favored writers without looking like a ripoff, to write a story that’s the exact opposite of what you usually write, to try your hand at erotica or mythopoics or action-adventure or avant-garde formalism – anything.

Short form writing is the gymnasium and laboratory of good writers. Hacking out a novel in a month is a vacation for hack wannabes -- or, rather, tourists in the land of art. Tourists who litter, and don't bother to learn anything about the locals.

You make up your own mind how you want to go.

Litcrawl and the Social Animal

Laszlo takes point through the redwoods. Not shown: used toilet paper, trails being destroyed by mountainbiking assholes who scream threats as they pedal away, and the hideous idiot stoner hut some knit-cap ninnies made out of sticks. A female mountain lion has been known to slope through this territory, though, so I can dream.

I can dream.

So, did I fail to pursue the honorable course?

Was the individual in question a nine-year-old kid, a very small adult dressed in a stained green T-shirt and sweatpants, or a hallucination?

Were they drunk, or developmentally disabled, or severely depressed? Or did they have that desperate expression because were they in trouble?

Did they touch my ass, and if so, were they after the ass, or were they after the wallet?

Why did...

Okay, I read at the San Francisco Litquake's Litcrawl last Saturday. And I've had a hard time figuring out how to write about it. The evening was a weird one for me. Many good parts, many confusing parts. And at least one part has had me troubled.

Anyway.

The piece I wrote for the event has proven to be both the most difficult and the most useful piece of writing I've ever done. It confronts my relationship with violence, beginning in childhood and continuing right up to about a month ago. There is little judgment in it, just a recitation of events.

It is on the heavy side. An abused child, I was abusive in my early teens. I do fall into the category of people with a capacity for real violence. But that capacity has allowed me to move confidently and non-violently through threatening situations.

And writing through it in a straightforward, undecorated fashion allowed me to come to terms with what I am. I am not a warrior because I do not wage war. I am not a fighter because I do not fight. But I have chosen to take a heroic stance in life, to place my body at the disposal of the general good and my sense of honor. And so far as anything can be trusted, I can trust in my judgment to do what's right and I can trust others not to fuck with me when I get a certain way.

That feels so much better than being a fucking Jack Abbott-style human time bomb, which was a concern for a while there.

So getting ready to perform this work in front of what I'd convinced myself would be a breakthrough audience -- I'd get seen! I'd be known! San Francisco! Agents! Editors! Bright lights! -- I got myself into a a fairly agitated state by the time the evening rolled around.

Thankfully, the missus had volunteered to get me to the show on time. I didn't have to worry about getting there when the show started. We'd leave Berkeley at six-thirty and get to the Mission in San Francisco by seven, no problem.

This is nuts. REALLY nuts. "Why can't I just walk through walls? They're just a bunch of molecules!" nuts. A nervous non-driver, late that afternoon I had a wave of panic, looked up Litcrawl, and found that they specifically stated that driving to Litcrawl was NOT A THING THAT CAN BE DONE.

The missus is no longer to be made responsible for my transportation. It is all on me now, even if it means I have to start the previous day and fucking walk. I am not going through this again.

If you don't know me, you've never seen me sweat. If you do know me, you have. I sweat like an athletic pig, streams of human gravy pour from me as though my pores were tiny taps. This is what happened when I realized I was going to be taking public transportation at the last possible minute. Any screw-up and I would go from professionally late, where I look like a jerk, to actually late, where I am a jerk.

I was lucky. After sprinting from the BART station, I showed up just as the reading started.

None of my folks were there -- but it turned out that it didn't really matter. Enough people knew me and were glad to see me that I felt part of the scene even though I was on my own. That was good. That was very good. I'd particularly like to thank Justine Clifford (I'm not sure what link Justine might appreciate), Paul Corman-Roberts, Michael Layne Heath, and new-met Pearce Hansen for making me feel welcome.

The venue was tiny, dimly lit, no mic, and crowded. I had to go outside during the other readings, which irked me, because everyone was knocking it out.

Joe Clifford fixed my little red wagon by making me go second. This is what happens to late people, and this is what they deserve.

Now, one of my minor fantasies has been getting a wireless mic so I can roam while I read. Get right down into the audience and really scare the hell out of them.

Well, because of the size of the venue, I was right in the middle of the audience. I had to control my motions and gestures to keep from actually coming into physical contact with people. I was dripping with sweat, still full of juice from the fast walk, and because my piece was a little long (I always keep the length that Joe approves, but this time he'd approved a long piece), I felt obliged to read a little more quickly than usual because of the time constraints. To compensate, I enunciated as clearly as possible, working hard on the short declarative sentences, and trying consciously to fill the space with my voice.

The sweat ran down onto the manuscript as I read. The people closest to me must have gotten a few drops. It was kind of rock-star-ish, and by the time I was done, I'd settled into my public persona.

The public persona is something I'm having a hard time getting used to. I have found that I do have a capacity to function in noisy, crowded, social environments as long as I have a strong sense of my own significance. (Not importance, just a positive sensation of actual existence.) But it feels very much like being a different person.

I took an acting class a few months back, and have been meaning to write about it. It was just four sessions, but it was fairly mind-bending for me. The type of acting taught in class was focused on social intuition and flexibility of response. These are two areas of massive deficit for me. So acting was a big, serious thing.

And now when I'm in social situations, I have a new level of comfort and grace. Which is good. But it comes at a cost. I normally think hard about everything I say and do, and the majority of my actions are reasoned responses. In order to cope with the overwhelming quantities of information presented to me in conventional social situations, I have to abandon any real depth of thought and concern for others and just go on instinct, just respond flexibly and intuitively to a situation that feels like swimming in rough surf.

Well, I like swimming in rough surf. It's fun. I'm finding great pleasure in the social world now that I feel truly part of mankind...

... but I an't the guy I think I am. The 'identity Sean' is a compulsive analyzer, someone who can't cope with a situation until it has been dissected and the dissection used as the basis for a series of instructive illustrations. 'Social Sean' is a very nice guy in a hearty, good-natured 'hail fellow, well-met' kind of way. But I don't know the son of a bitch well enough to trust him.

Here's an example.

After I read, I stepped into the bar so I could go around to the outside of the building and try and listen to the other readers. I stopped for a second to weigh my desire for a drink against the difficulty of getting one in a crowded bar.

That was when I felt a hand on my ass. I get one every year or two, and have gotten past being freaked out by the experience. I didn't like this one. It had a quality that combined exploration with deniability, it was a sneaky hand. So I turned to confront the owner; at the very least, I'd bad-vibe them.

The person behind me looked like a nine-year-old boy, with a deeply miserable and stupid expression on their face. Dirty, disheveled, and honestly? There was something unwholesome about the way they looked at me. They wanted something.

I looked for a parent and saw no-one.

And my flexible, intuitive reaction? "You're hallucinating, and if you interact with this kid you will be acting like a CRAZY PERSON right after discussing the close control you keep over your homicidal impulses. Bad impression, dude. A very bad impression to make."

So I blinked, nodded, and moved on.

And later that night, while walking and talking with Michael Layne Heath, I saw that person walking next to me, looking up at me with that pleading expression. And again, I refused to believe in them. Normal Sean would at least have said something, confirmed reality, tried to get an idea of what was going on.

But Social Sean just said, "I cannot even understand this, and I have shit to do." I smiled, nodded, made eye contact, and when there was no response other than the pleading gaze? I turned back to Michael.

So.

There is a pretty good chance that the small person was a hallucination.

But I don't think they were. I think I was copping out because I couldn't get a grip on the situation.

On the other hand, the small person could have done something other than (possibly) groping my ass and staring at me with mute wishes.

If it was a kid who needed help, I failed.

If it was a hallucination, I played it off properly.

If it was a small adult, well. That's a little iffy. People who don't have conventional appearances have a hard time making casual social contacts, and if that was the case here? I was supporting the loathsome norm -- or maybe I was politely brushing off an unwanted and uninvited physical contact.

I've got no way of double-checking this, no way to find out what the story is. I just have to live with the mystery.

I wound up taking off early. Not because I felt uncomfortable, but because I felt comfortable and I was having a good time, and my behavior was not entirely under my conscious control. I wonder how much I can trust this Social Sean guy. He means well, but he's pretty shallow, and he might get me in trouble some day.

The Next Big Thing (or Thanks for the Memeries)

Here's something for another damned project I can't talk about... It's noir, though.  Believe it or not.

My pal Miranda Suri has tagged me for a meme -- it's called The Next Big Thing, and it's all about people's works in progress.

I wish I could discuss my Big Secret Thrilling Adventure here, but that's still under wraps. But this is a pretty thrilling adventure in itself -- this is something that's changing my life.

And if it sounds interesting to you, you can get a taste of it this Saturday, when I perform at Litquake's Litcrawl in San Francisco. Check it out, and come on down.

(If you want a sample of what might be in store for you, here are two of my previous performances.)

So, Oafboy, what's the next big thing?

Ten Questions for the Next Big Thing

1. What is the title of your Work in Progress?

Bone Chips.

2. Where did the idea for the book come from?

A number of currents in my life intersected. My novel, Ghost Rock, originally had a lot of autobiographical material in it that got cut, and there were a couple of sections that seemed to stand on their own. I wound up getting in contact with a writer I admire, John Shirley, about a blog post I'd made, and the end result was my attendance at a couple of readings in which he participated. Plain and simple, I wanted to be on the stage instead of in the audience. A local writer I've worked with, Allison Landa, performed at a local reading series called Lip Service West that specializes in edgy memoir. I submitted one of the deleted chapters from my novel, and it went over fairly well. And I found out that I love performing.

I have a friend who is going to take videos of me performing these pieces, and I'll release them on the net, then compile them into a DVD. We've begun work on this already.

This book is going to be a collection of these short pieces, edited to form a cohesive narrative.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Nick Mamatas called it misery porn, and said that it's unusual to see a guy writing it. Which is interesting, since it's specifically masculine. I think of it as confessional memoir.

The missus calls it autobiographical horror, and she's actually closest to the truth.

4. Which actors would you chose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What the hell kind of question is that to ask someone about a memoir?

Okay, a young Brendan Frasier. The missus had a thing for him back in the day, and it could work out for me.

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?

A man struggling with alienation and mental illness resulting from childhood abuse and neglect connects to others and heals himself through art.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It is intended to be professionally published, and I'm feeling some hubris over here. (Knock wood to propitiate the gods; just kidding, fellas.)

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft?

How long is it going to take, not how long did it take. It depends. It could take years if I dribble it out just as fast as I can get performance gigs, it could take months if someone started signing checks. I'm thinking a year or two until I've got a solid wad of manuscript, but I've got a good start already.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?

Spalding Gray's Sex and Death to the Age 14 would be the best fit for structure. I'm not thinking of any voices that really resemble mine -- there's a sort of brutal erudition (I kind of hate myself now, and am ending this sentence).

9. Who, or what, inspired you to write this novel?

A couple of years ago, I was hospitalized for a stress-related medical condition. In the wake of that drama, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, among other things. One of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorganized personal story. PTSD sufferers don't have a clear narrative about themselves and their lives.

In my case, I tend to maintain ambiguous views about myself and the events of my life, and to turn those ambiguities over and over in my mind, compulsively. I try and find every possible misstep I've made, everything I could have done better or should have seen differently.

And this made it impossible for me to write memoir in a really substantial fashion. It was all fluff and vagueness and 'what the hell are you saying, here, anyway?'

While I am struggling to remember things accurately and tell the truth to the absolute limit of my ability, veracity is not the goal. The goal is to choose a personal narrative, a simple declarative story about who I am and where I came from, and then forget about it and move on. It's already working. Since I've started the project, I've grown a lot more comfortable in my skin, and the people around me notice it.

A lot of people write from their trauma. I think there's a point where you're just reinforcing old patterns. I'm writing this stuff out as form of catharsis, so I can go on to write about other things. I want to be able to write from a place of contentment, or even joy.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I have experienced race, class, culture, and gender in a fashion alien to that of most white guys. Growing up in a matriarchal family of working class intellectuals, in a community where the population was mostly black and latino has given me a view of life in the US that seems upside-down and inside-out to a lot of people.

Include the link of who tagged you, and an explanation for who you have tagged.

I repeat, it was Miranda Suri who tagged me.

And when I went to think of people to tag, they fell into two classes. People Miranda already asked, and people who would have every right to kill me if I tried to add any more labors to their current burden.

Then I remembered my new crew at December House!

Neil Vogler!

P.T. Dilloway!

What the hell are you guys up to, anyway?


(Oh -- and yesterday I ate

1 strawberry Ensure

A couple of gulps of almond milk and an apple off the tree

Two hot dogs (Nathan's Famous) on spouted wheat bread and a mixed green salad

A couple of gulps of almond milk and another apple

A slice of salami, a slice of cheddar cheese, five crackers, and two celery sticks.

Sprouted wheat toast, homemade black beans, two fried eggs and salsa verde on a bed of mixed greens. I ate two-thirds and gave the rest to the dogs because I was too full.

I ate like a responsible person. I hated it.)

Appetite

Over the past couple of years, I've learned that I actually do have some specific deficits that cause me problems. One of the worst and most persistent is a lack of appetite.  I've recently written a piece on my relationship with violence (I'll be reading it at the Litquake Litcrawl next week in San Francisco. Please come!), and it brought home to me my disconnection from my body.

Lately my eating habits have been thrown off, and I started drinking again. Not getting shitfaced, but solitary drinking is bad, period. And I'd been doing so well, for so long.

I looked at it, and realized I've been delaying eating until I'm uncomfortable, then drinking to get an appetite. Keep in mind that my back pain plays into this -- if I followed doctors orders, I'd be a Vicodin addict. But this is the behavior that triggered the vomiting that eventually caused my ulcer a couple of years back, and I'm doing it again.

And it's exactly what my mom would have done.

Mom's been on my mind. The anniversary of her death was last week. When we found out she was going, it was because her neighbor called me and told me someone needed to come put my mother in the hospital. When we found her, she weighed less than eighty pounds.

She had piles of Gourmet magazines all over the house, and two outbuildings full of shelves full of cookbooks.

My mother hated eating, threw up more than anyone I've ever known, never weighed more than a hundred pounds unless she was pregnant. And I'm just like her in a lot of ways.

The missus recently pointed out to me that as an adult, unless I have a woman taking care of me, my weight drifts down to about a hundred and forty-five pounds. For someone my height, that's painfully, visibly underweight. Since my injury, my weight went from a low of one-forty-five to a high of two-fifty-five. Right now, I'm going about two-oh-five, but these days I dip below two hundred during times of stress.

Since my ulcer, I've been eating a lot of processed food. It costs a lot, and it can't possibly be good for me, but the convenience has meant the difference between me eating, and me not eating.

What threw me off? Stress, and the missus has started making herself salads for lunch instead of having me make her vegetables. As a result, I'm no longer tied to a specific lunch time, and she's in the kitchen when I'd be cooking and it just throws everything off. Once I started skipping lunches, I started skipping breakfast as well, which means that I couldn't be bothered to open a bottle of the Ensure I keep at my workstation.

It's nine in the morning, I've been up since seven, my stomach is twitchy. I haven't peed and I haven't had my Ensure. This is exactly what I'm talking about. I'll be back in a moment.

Leak taken, and a strawberry Ensure has been cracked. (Strawberry Ensure has a flavor best described as 'uncanny,' and I won't be having more once this is gone.) But this is the kind of thing I face. If I hadn't been writing on the subject now, I would have blandly sat here until I was in danger of peeing my pants. That is the level of motivation I require. And if the result of not going to the bathroom was injury rather than embarrassment? I'd only pee when things became unbearable.

That is pathological.

I was talking to my counselor about this. One of the main focuses of my therapy has been improving my self-esteem, and I had decided that I was ready to start working toward loving myself, "Look, it's really hard to take care of a human being," I said. "You just can't do the job unless you love the person you're taking care of. It's an indispensable motivation."

When I engage in self-destructive behavior, it hurts the people around me in a much more direct fashion than I'd imagined. Now that I'm starting to take this in, I find my concern for others mandates concern for myself.

So I need to find a way to crack this nut. I need to be able to feed myself, and I especially need to be able to feed myself when I travel.

Thankfully, I am in a better position to hack this than I was a year ago. I've learned a few tricks.

Here's one. I need some sense of outside contact in order to make this change, so I'm going to keep a food diary on the blog. So:

10/08/12

A vanilla Orgain nutritional drink.
A bottle of strawberry soda.
A bowl of beans with a couple of slices of bread.

That looks fucking awful, doesn't it? No wonder I feel shitty. Hopefully, today will be better.

The goal? Three small meals and three snacks a day and no eating three hours before bed is recommended for ulcers. Given my sleeping schedule, I'll cheat a little on that last one. No more processed crap, no more sodas. Just eat like a fucking grownup for the first time in my life.

One day at a time, isn't that what they say?

My New Publisher

Here's one of the big pieces of news I've been holding onto. Do not panic, oaf supporters, I am still diligently pursuing traditional routes of publication.

But, yeah, I am now proud to be a December House writer. Wait a minute, they've upgraded me. I'm an author now! I am now proud to be a December house author. And how I got to be a December House author is a perfect example of the ruling principle of my life: every day is backwards day.

Let's get a little perspective here.

When I started studying writing, there was one type of e-book available, the electronic Bible. E-readers were a prediction, and not a convincing one -- the monitor issue was a long way from being solved.

Then the Kindle hit, and things changed. For better or worse -- I hear good arguments for better, I have good arguments for worse -- e-publication is now part of the publication world, a strange kingdom to itself.

I should say -- the last time I had an argument on e-books? I argued against, my new friend argued for, and we were standing in a bookstore that I had patronized since I was a teenager. The bookstore was closing. This is the world I'm entering as a writer.

Given the relative ease and affordability of the process, an lot of writers have gone to self-published e-books as a major part of their careers, including my pals Samuel T. Crown and Barbara J. Webb. Since I either have or have access to the full range of skills necessary to produce a finished publication, this tempts me.

But I don't trust the world of e-publication. I once had a career as an internet animation writer, and it evaporated overnight when the dotcom crash hit. But I started getting curious. People were claiming they had careers doing this stuff. And then there's the whole, "It's only cowardice that prevents self-publication," argument.

Yeah, cowardice and an interest in bookstore sales and critical recognition. Like it or not, e-publications are at a distance from recognition by the literary community. Right now, I'm seeing bookstores going down, and a digital literary culture forming around the concept of writing fast crap for bargain hunters with specialized tastes, kind of like porno. It's pretty depressing.

And exciting. It is a frontier... and it isn't going away any time soon. The market is real. The market is here.

So while I was sweltering during the last throes of Ghost Rock, I would fantasize about writing fast crap and throwing it out there, pulp-style, just to see what would happen.

The project I had in mind was inspired by some of my favorite books from childhood passing into the public domain, and by my rock alter-ego, Dethro Jethro Peckerwood.

The book was going to be called A Princess of Yuggoth, and it was going to be a white-trash extravaganza meshing A Princess of Mars with The Whisperer in the Darkness. It would open with Dethro Jethro explaining to some Fungi why we no longer call that creepy piece of space trash Yuggoth a planet, and the probable climax would be when Jethro actually gets to grips with Dejah Thoris, to discover, during an act of oral sex, that egg-laying mammals are monotremes.

It was going to be filthy.

Write it in one shot, don't even do spellcheck. Not only would I be doing e-publication, I'd be doing culture of appropriation. Hitting up all my taboos.

Of course, I chickened out. The last thing I want to do is make myself less interesting to the Big Six publishers, and self-publishing willfully incompetent trash seemed a little off.

Then Neil started bugging me. You know Neil Vogler? Writer and musician? An internet pal of mine. Neil had a brilliant plan, which also involved writer P.T. Dilloway. Neil's brilliant plan was appealing to me because it was a perfect example of my leading principle. He found a major event, and figured out how to do the opposite of the approved behavior in order to get attention. (Every day is backwards day.) Neil's brilliant plan involved me doing some writing, and I said no.

A few times.

Neil is both persuasive and tenacious, and if you're willing to work at it, you can pretty much get me to do anything. And one of the reasons I have friends is because they get me into trouble. So I agreed to a semi-commitment. I'd do some, but not all. Just a taste.

Wafer-thin. Just messing around, no big deal, just keeping myself busy between drafts. Nothing to see here.

So I started thinking about what I could do, and I started to get a few ideas percolating, and then Neil went and sold the damned project to an e-publisher. December House, as it happens. And December House had a...

Let me put it this way. December House is not an amateur-night outfit. They are serious. They have real-world experience and tradition-busting approaches. They value the writer. I'll go further. This is the first contract I ever read that felt author-friendly. I might not like the ocean, but this is a hell of a boat. Getting in early with an ambitious crew is not a bad thing at all.

That kind of killed my casual, throwaway attitude. It is now incumbent on me to write a full sequence rather than the half-portion to which I had committed, and to write it well enough to bring credit to my name.

I, being who I am, figured this meant that I was endangering my relationship with the mainstream publishing world, that it might not be good for my reputation, that...

I've got a publisher! This is a career disaster!

(Every day is backwards day.)

Then I remembered my dreams for A Princess of Yuggoth,  And my curiosity about the e-market, which despite my preferences has been the dominant force in my writing career thus far. And all of a sudden, my situation stopped screaming faux pas and started murmuring, 'plausible deniability.'

I have no idea where this is going. But the fun has already justified the work. I love that I signed the contract before I even came up with the ideas for most of the stories. It totally pressed my 'Pro from Dover' buttons.

I will provide further details when the security clearance comes through.

Engagement

The main reason I haven't been posting much lately is that my life has grown very difficult to talk about. There is no brief description, and the details are all dramatic. Hinting at shit is odious, and telling all is impossible and disastrous.

I am not used to a life that's complicated enough so that you have to compartmentalize.

While there have been a lot of upheavals in my life recently, I have been more emotionally stable and genuinely happy in the last six months than at any other time in my life. I am developing a solid, positive image of myself, and my levels of self-care have improved dramatically...

But they've recently taken a dip. So right now, I'm trying to find ways of giving things a boost.
And blogging when I don't have a good post is something that's actually good for me in the long run.

Like it or not, this blog is as much a journal as anything else, and if I hold back on what I write because I'm afraid of looking like a wimp or a braggart or a sot or a lunatic or a regular old boring no-talent hump?

Then I won't know what mood I was in on that date, in that year. And I've found it tremendously helpful to be able to track myself through the blog. "Oh, I was in exactly the same miserable state for different reasons the last four years in a row. I'm just gonna be miserable for a while, and it's no big deal."

But for the record, most of this last long blank spot on my blog has been spent in giddy self-discovery. Between counseling, a wider experience of life, and seeing myself on video? It turns out all that crap people say about me is true. And I haven't been blogging because if you talk that stuff about yourself, it turns out you're an asshole.

I will say this.

I have been engaging with the world on the wrong terms. For someone like me to be shy, and reticent, and self-deprecating? It tends to come off as stuck-up. I have more of an impact on the people around me than I really understood, and if I'm going to live up to my own standards, I'm going to have to learn to be more friendly, social, and open.

The horror.

I am also facing a situation where on one hand, people are saying, "When you get rich," as though is a fated thing, and others are saying, "You know, the government earmarks money for people like you. There is no shame in going on disability!"

Well, actually, there is. The process has been made intentionally humiliating, and there are no shortage of people to give you attitude about not being a productive member of society.

So I am trying to introduce myself to the world as a legitimate figure of the arts, while worrying about whether or not I should apply for disability, whether I deserve it, whether I can get it, and whether or not putting myself through the process might actually damage me, delicate hothouse flower that I am.

What has been pointed out to me, is that the characteristics that can suit someone for a public, creative life can make them difficult to employ. That the two things are not contradictory.

And while that is going on... You know that scene in The Big Lebowski where Donnie gets a strike when he's bowling, and as he walks away from the lane, he grins and does this little hand thing and says, "I'm throwing rocks tonight!" That's what the writing feels like.

That's the thing. The art and the writing are great. But I'm a work in transition, and things have been rocky. So that's why I'm blogging to day.

Just trying to return to a state of engagement.