I finished and submitted Dealer Wins, the Las Vegas book, last week. I’m waiting for a proof to approve, and apparently the USPS tried to deliver it yesterday to my office, but since nobody was there, they got a slip. Or maybe they didn’t, I’m trusting the USPS web site on this one. Anyway, I might or might not get to actually see it tomorrow. I’m pretty happy with how it looks in the PDF, and the pricing turned out about as good as I could have hoped. It will be available on the publisher’s site right away, and be on Amazon et al in like 6-8 weeks, or whatever. It’s kindof stupid because it will actually be $3 cheaper to order from the publisher, and I make like 40 cents more and it’s faster, but I’m guessing most people will wait until it is on Amazon.

This, like other books I have done, doesn’t really feel done at the end. It seems like finishing a book is a qualitative thing, and it’s more a matter of “I’ve looked at this 937 times and I’m sick of it” rather than “it’s end-to-end complete”. I mean, it’s not like building a brick wall where you can just say, “it’s this tall and this long and this thick and the cement is dry - it’s done.” When I send a book out, I always feel like there’s something missing, something I didn’t do with it. And usually, by the time I actually look at the finished product weeks or months later, I like it. So we’ll see.

I have no idea what I am doing next. I have a book of short stories about Bloomington that I want to finish, but I hate them all and I absolutely can’t motivate myself to work on that. I would like to write another book in the vein of Rumored to Exist, but I don’t even know where to start. I actually had a good start on one, and I guess the notes are okay, but it was a false start and I really need to think of something new.

I haven’t done much else this weekend. I did go to Best Buy with the intention of blowing several hundred dollars on CDs. I ran the gauntlet, going from A to Z twice, picking out everything I wanted, and I think I only ended up with like five things, and two of those were remasters of Queensryche albums that were very low on the “buy someday, but in no hurry” list. I mean, I even got a George Lynch solo album, I was grasping at straws so much. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood (which I was) or if Best Buy has no good music anymore (they don’t - but at least they are cheaper than Virgin) or if I simply don’t know what I want in music anymore. I still want to push to get the music collection above a thousand at some point. It’s roughly 75 away, and it’s getting there, but won’t happen by the end of the year or anything.

I’m bored. I’m tempted to go into Manhattan and shop for books or something, but I have a pile of books taller than me to read, and I should think more about this whole writing thing.

I have a blank emacs buffer open for the filename “cover-text.txt” that will become the back cover of Dealer Wins, the Vegas book. I can’t think of what to write. I’ll drink about nine more Cokes and then use whatever appears.

My temporary crown came off this morning when I was flossing, and fell behind the toilet. You’d think that, even with 97 minutes of rinsing with hot water and Listerine, I’d have serious germophobic fears about putting it back in my mouth, but I guess the sheer panic of popping the thing out and the anticipation of a metric fuckload of pain overrode all other senses. The pain didn’t happen, though. And it looks really weird with the thing off; there isn’t just a metal post, but rather what looks like a little, rounded-off tooth under it. I bought some Fixodent at the drug store and all is well. I also got a waterpic, which I might or might not use regularly. Maybe I will just fill it with Coke and use it to drink a steady stream while I’m sitting at the computer.

I am listening to The Fight Club Score by the Dust Brothers for the first time, and I really, really like it. I realize I’m like four years behind the curve, but this has to be the coolest background music ever. I don’t know anything about techno or the Dust Brothers or anything else, but I have a feeling this CD will be on during a lot of the writing of the next book.

I have decided that after this Vegas book goes out the door, I will seriously get on Zombie Fever, the tentative title of the next book. It will be, in a stylistic sense, a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and it will share some of the secondary characters, but it will be a new, start-to-finish fiction piece. I probably have about 20,000 words of notes and snippets, but I need to take a big step back and think through the whole thing again before I get started.

As far as media consumption, I finished reading John Sheppard’s Home is Where You Hang Yourself last night. It’s a pretty tight little book; at 136 pages, it seems like it’s a lot longer. Some of the short stories continue loose threads from his other books, but for many of them, he created new characters a lot different than the punk cast he’s used before. The stories aren’t all the beginning-middle-end typical MFA creative writing workshop format, and tend to spend more time building up characters rather than pushing people through the movements. I like that, at least that it makes you think a lot more about the people rather than the events. Anyway, it’s only $7.75 on Lulu, so check it out.

I also got through 3 of the 4 discs of the Star Wars trilogy. I haven’t watched Jedi yet, but I might do that this afternoon, just to see if Lucas admits that the Ewoks were simply a bad idea. He probably won’t. He’s given little time in the commentaries to mention the obvious about the special edition additions or the stormtrooper hitting his head or anything else. This is outweighed by him spending a ton of time talking about stuff I had no idea about. If you even vaguely like the original trilogy, you should immediately lay down the $42 on Amazon to get a copy of these. I know, everyone thinks there will be some big 6-movie set coming out later, but it’s worth it to buy this now, especially at the cheap price. I have mixed feelings that I spent $100 on the super-ultra boxed edition of the original films on VHS, but at least I can go back and see Greedo shoot first if I really want to.

Okay, I better get to those Ewoks. I was thinking of going into Manhattan and spending some cash, since the tooth debacle ended up being cheaper than I thought, but I have such a huge pile of DVDs to watch and work to do on this back cover, I guess I will stay here for a bit.

There is a period of time that happens at about four or five in the morning on a Friday night when my neigborhood is deathly silent. I usually wake up around then to stumble to the bathroom because I have a bad habit of drinking a few glasses of water right before bed, but I enjoy this stillness so much. It reminds me of when I lived in Indiana and slept in my bedroom in the basement, where it was pitch black with no windows, and no sound could get through the poured concrete walls. This hour is perfect because it’s after the teenage tough guys who yell at the top of their lungs at each other and throw beer bottles in the street have passed out, and before the career car-movers that shuffle vehicles to avoid the alternate-side parking rules wake up and start their work. For that small period of time though, I have complete silence, the kind of quiet I could only dream of. And then, an hour later, garbage collection starts, and it’s back to normal.

Round two of the dental trauma happened yesterday. I got a titanium post implanted in the remains of my root-canaled tooth, which now holds a temporary crown, and will later suppport a porcelain crown. It’s an evil-looking thing, inches long with a close resemblance to part of a Terminator robot. I didn’t think they could jam a piece that big into the tooth canal, but they did. It hurt like hell after I left, but as the cement dried, it got to the point where I could touch it with my tongue and not feel extreme pain. I’m eating a pop-tart now, and there are no problems. I think the worst part of it all (other than paying for it) is just the general fear of dental procedures. I feel like Rambo in that scene in First Blood where the cop is trying to shave him with a straight razor, and he’s having flashbacks of the ‘Cong torturing him. Every time I sit in a dentist’s chair, I expect the worst to happen, and my blood pressure instantly doubles. I think I need to find a guy that’s much more liberal with the nitrous.

That’s all. The Vegas book is almost done, BTW.

My tooth seems to be better, even though I bitched and moaned a bit about it on the livejournal yesterday. Saturday morning I went in to get a resin filling replaced and ended up instead getting an emergency root canal. It was actually part one of a root canal, and I have to go back in next Friday for the rest of it, and to get a post put in so I can get a crown made. This means that, depending on how much my insurance kicks in, you all are getting donations made to the Human Fund instead of Christmas presents this year. The worst part of a root canal is paying for it. I’m doing fine pain-wise and eating pretty much whatever I want with no problems whatsoever, but my stomach is tied in knots thinking how much I’m going to have to lay out to this guy for the work. I know he said the root canal is about $550, the post is about $250, and the crown is about $850, but the question is how much the insurance will screw me when it comes time to whip out the checkbook. It would be nice if I had to only pay like 30% or 40% of that out-of-pocket, but insurance is such a fucking scam these days, I’m sure they’re going to bend me over the counter on this one.

Now that I’m not spending my evenings dumping tube after tube of Anbesol into my jaw, I’m actually chipping away at the writing a bit. The Vegas book continues to progress. I am putting photos into the layout and fixing the little crap that didn’t transfer over right, like all of the straight quotes that need to be moved to smart quotes and whatever else. I was initially pretty bummed because I pulled in everything but the last little story, and the whole book was only 126 pages. I was really hoping that it would be closer to 160 or so. Granted, I do have the fonts Metal Cursed down to 9 or 10 point, and more pictures will break it up a little. But still, I want this thing to be a book and not a pamphlet. I’m about done with the last story, which was a last-second addition since the piece I wrote about shooting guns in Vegas turned out to be too lame to include. Anyway, still no word on when this will be done, but it’s getting there.

It’s almost turned into fall, but not quite. Fall is always my favorite season, and brings back a lot of strange memories of a lot of different eras in my life. I will be happy when it’s consistently light jacket weather and it’s the kind of weather that makes me want to hide under the covers in bed and read on a brisk Saturday morning, as opposed to “why is it so damn hot at the end of September?” kind of weather.

I am happy to announce that I have re-released my first book Summer Rain with a new printer, lulu.com.

Summer Rain is a book about a summer in a big college town in 1992. Here’s what the back cover says:

John Conner has lost his girlfriend, his job, a scholarship, and has been kicked out of college. Instead of retreating back to his parents’ basement and a life of mediocrity and factory labor, he decides to stay the summer in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana.On the lazy Indiana University campus, Conner explores the worlds of death metal, zines, no-budget radio, and slackerdom while trying to learn about women, deal with depression, and get his life back on course. While he works telemarketing jobs and hawks glowsticks as a street vendor in order to survive, he learns who his friends are in the strange mix of people left at the college for the summer. The atmospheric and descriptive narration weaves the hidden beauty of the Midwest and the crossroads of the early Nineties into a timeless story of the follies of youth.

Conner’s ramblings through the desolation of an empty campus parallel the meaningless jobs he must take to scrape by while he decides whether to remain sequestered in the relative comfort of college living or leap into an unstable world fueled only by his own creativity.

As for the new edition, it is the same text, but this time, I was able to do the layout myself, and I managed to shrink it from about 660 pages to about 480 pages without affecting readability. It gave me a chance to go through and fix some typos, and I got to redesign the cover so it didn’t look like a damn modern art masterpiece.

The big difference is that this version, aside from being lighter on your hands when you’re reading it, is also MUCH lighter on your pocketbook. The iUniverse edition was $29.95; now it is only $16.95. In order to get the price this low, I had to forego distribution through Ingram and an ISBN/UPC/EIN, so you can’t get it from Amazon or your local bookstore, but only online from lulu.com. (If you’re in town or you ask real nice, I can sell you one in person with real cash or paypal or whatever. And I trade, if you have a book out, too.)

Anyway, the lulu page is at www.lulu.com/jkonrath. They ain’t amazon and their prices on shipping aren’t the lowest, but they’ve improved them since last time, and they’re getting better. The quality of the book is the same, and the big thing is the lower price and the fact they didn’t have a trained sloth design the cover for me. While you’re at lulu, you might want to check out John Sheppard’s books at this page, as he is also rereleasing all of his books in the lower-cost format, and Small Town Punk makes a nice companion to Summer Rain, if you’re into that whole youthful angst thing.

Enough of the plugging, I am going to go do something I haven’t done in a long time and read someone else’s book, instead of mine.