As I’ve said before, if I’m not updating here, it means I’m busy writing on a real project. And I have been picking at something for a little while, and making okay progress. I’m still at the beginning though, and too scared to jinx it to mention anything about it. The best explanation to this phase of the writing would have to do with the metaphor about swimming across a mile-wide lake. If you swim out a hundred feet, it’s pretty easy to turn back and swim another hundred feet and then go home. If you swim out a thousand feet, it takes some work to quit and go home. If you’re out three or four thousand feet, you might as well just finish. I need to get down a solid layer of wordcount on this before I even make any decisions on what stays and what goes and how the plot will unfold. I have become the king of false starts in the last few years, and I really need to stick with this one and keep it going, until it’s to a length where I figure I can’t put it down and quit anymore. When Summer Rain was a bad first draft and I gave it up to work on my second book, I eventually had to come back to it and start the next draft, because I invested 80,000 words into it.

(That’s probably not a great metaphor, because I can’t swim.)

Speaking of Summer Rain, I got the hardcover, and it is pretty amazing. I love that it’s done with a color jacket and the actual book has gold lettering on a cloth binding. Very classy. I know nobody else will give a shit to buy one, but I’m glad to have it on the shelf, with the others.

And speaking of buying books, Loompanics is going out of business! For those not in the know, they are (were) the big one-stop catalog for all of your paranormal, fake ID, lockpicking, drug, sex, and spying book needs, many of which you can’t find in stores. They used to put out a great zine-like catalog, and I could just read the catalog itself for hours, poring over all of the strange books they sold. They were located in the Pacific Northwest (Port Townsend, WA - a bit north of Seattle) and I first got their catalog from a zine show or the book fair or something about ten years ago. They’re the kind of store where I would put in a mega-order for a half-dozen book every once in a while when a bonus or tax check came in. Anyway, they are closing shop, and are running a 50% off all stock sale. I placed my order, and I hope I get at least some of it before everything runs out.

I’m still reading as much as I can, as I work on this new book. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk is currently going - the original version, not the new-and-(un)improved IG Press version which will come out in the future.

Okay, back to work…

I’m back. I was going to write a whole story, but then I remembered what a waste of time that is. And yes, about half of the pictures are blurry - this camera I bought last year is a total piece of shit and simply will not focus correctly when you are in a situation any lower light than, say, the surface of the sun.

There’s not much more of an update than that, especially since we got in late last night and everything is still in a state of confusion and still-packededness. I also have a huge stack of books that arrived while I was gone, and I want to read all of them. I also have two seasons of Seinfeld on DVD that won’t even get their shrinkwrap cracked until mid-June. And dinner’s on the way. So I best get to it…

Here’s a quick halftime report of the Vegas trip, thanks to the wonder of in-room ethernet. We’re staying at the Bellagio, which is pretty damn awesome. (See also Ocean’s 11, the remake version with Clooney and Pitt, although we don’t have the ultra-suite shown in the film.) Our suite looks east aka toward the strip, and every time the fountains go off, we see them launch water in the air. Luckily, the room’s got the blackout drapes, and they’re even operated via remote control motors with buttons by the nightstand.

Things have been good and we’ve mostly ate too much and gambled only a touch. We have a car, so we went out to the Liberace museum, which was pretty interesting, especially the cars. Today we went to the Atomic Test museum, which is not a giant hole in the ground, but rather a big new museum a few miles off the strip, which houses a ton of memorabilia about the testing done out at NTS back in the day. Unfortunately, no photography at either, but I have a lot of other good snapshots to upload when I get back.

Food has included the Bouchon, Thomas Keller’s restaurant at the Venetian (pretty damn good, but I’m finding I don’t like French food as much as I probably should); the buffet at the new Wynn casino (pretty much the best you could imagine); the breakfast at Denny’s (I can’t really stomach it anymore); lunch at In-n-Out (one of the best burgers out there, but the fries aren’t a+ material, even if fresh); another lunch at Pink Taco (despite the name, one of my favorite Amerimexican places); a late-night dinner at the Bellagio cafe (excellent); and room service breakfast at the hotel (the best $17 breakfast burrito you can find).

And I finally rode the monorail! Somewhat useless, but very nice. Also drove south to a huge outlet mall in the middle of nowhere, and did a lot of other wandering. None of our other co-vacationers are here until tomorrow night, and then the fun begins. Me and Bill turn 35 on Friday, and there are no plans yet, but we’ll see what happens.

Everything is under construction here, BTW. Every crappy strip mall that sold phone cards and junk t-shirts is getting bulldozed for a new condo development. The look of Vegas will be very weird in a couple of years. For now, it’s all about the home-builder’s convention, and every masonry contractor in middle america is here with their wife and/or girlfriend for the weekend. Nifty.

Still jetlagged, so even though the watch says 11, the mind says 2 AM, and I must collapse.

It’s Monday, but it’s a bank holiday, and I have the day off, so life is good. And in about two hours, we will get in a car for LGA and fly west to Las Vegas for a week, and I will again celebrate my birthday (Friday, the 20th) in the land of gambling, no open container laws, and all-you-can eat buffets. I actually don’t know where we’re staying, and it is a complete surprise that will be revealed to me when we actually drive up to the hotel for check-in. So that should be interesting.

The second journal book has already lost steam and been but aside for now. I still want to do it eventually, but I’m just not in the mood to slog through it right now. I’m trying instead to get back on another project I’ve been messing with for a year or two, which is basically a heavy metal version of John Sheppard’s book Small Town Punk (which is getting re-released on IG this year.) Maybe that isn’t a good comparison, but I want to write something about growing up in the late-eighties in Elkhart, Indiana, which was such a beat area where people could never escape and everyone was at the mercy of these huge manufacturing plants that paid okay money for menial labor, but basically killed you in the long-term. And because the whole thing revolved around the economy, and the economy was shit back then, you had mass layoffs and strikes and mandatory overtime and cutting corners on safety and everything else.

And as a 17-year-old kid, I didn’t fully appreciate that situation, but what I did see were the side effects. Kids with one parent who worked 60 hours a week at a trailer factory ended up becoming burnouts, and the people who had a daddy that was an executive vice president of some RV place had the rich lifestyle and basically lived like those executives at Enron who fucked everyone over. And the whole city looked like shit, except for the gated communities, and everyone latched onto whatever fad or abusable substance or religion would promise them a moment of feeling appreciated.

Of course, the book is not about that, but mostly about a kid trying to get laid, and listening to every Metallica album constantly. And it’s not autobiographical. I think I always said that Summer Rain was 80% true, and I think this book will be closer to 30-40%. Many of the main characters are composites, and will have to have big parts of their lives altered to fit the timeline and story. Part of that is that the book has to contain a certain amount of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and none of my friends back then were getting much of any of those, and I wasn’t either. Plus I’m finding it impossible to write about real people anymore without pissing someone off because I’m not 100% glowing about them. The characters need to be real people who fuck up and do stupid things, or it won’t be a good book, so I’m diving more into the fictional realm to do this. But the setting of Elkhart will be there, in full hilbilly glory.

Not much else is going on here. I got one of those Newertech drive enclosures for the Mac Mini and it’s pretty awesome. It looks just like the mac case and sits under there, and has Firewire and USB hubs on the back, plus a 160 GB drive inside. I haven’t had time to start filling it, but what’s also neat is that it has some stuff on it already, like shareware and a bunch of Apple commercials and episodes of The ScreenSavers in QuickTime.

I didn’t leave the house all weekend, which was neat. In fact, I don’t even think I put on shoes once, except to go downstairs and pick up laundry one time. We watched a lot of movies and basically sat around, since we’re going to be running around all week and eating too much and spending lots of cash. We watched a lot of movies, mostly. Meet The Fockers was okay, and The Ali G Show was absolutely hilarious. I also got an Amazon gift certificate and plowed through that last night, mostly ordering house books on wind energy and underground houses and stuff like that. I’ll have a whole pile of stuff waiting for me when we get back.

Okay, wish me luck!

First things first: A hardcover version of Summer Rain is now available from lulu.com. It’s the same size and same text as the second edition book I published with Lulu, but instead of perfectbound paperback, it’s bound in navy blue linen with gold foil spine printing and a full color jacket. It costs more ($25.99) and it will cost more to ship because it weighs more, but it’s a real hardcover book, and I’m very excited about that. Go to lulu.com/jkonrath to purchase it or any of my other books on Lulu. I don’t expect anyone to actually buy this, but I had the option, and I wanted one for my bookcase.

Speaking of which, I have decided to publish a second book of journals. I know nobody bought the first one when it came out, and maybe nobody will buy this one either. But I don’t really write books to make money, and I really wanted a new book on the Konrath shelf of the home library. So I pulled together all of the HTML from the 2000-2005 journals, threw it into FrameMaker, and started down the hellish path of trying to edit things together.

Most of the initial problems involve stripping off HTML for scripts and tops and bottoms of pages, and turning headings in HTML into headings in Frame, and all of that garbage. FrameMaker doesn’t have a smooth way to import HTML, believe it or not, and that makes a lot of work. It also totally fucks things up, like making individual lines into paragraphs, which require monumental amounts of repetitive labor in stripping things down and applying the right styles.

Once I got the text into the book, I had about 1200 pages. That’s not really accurate, because I still had scripts and markup and junk, and pages weren’t flowing right, and paragraphs were all fucked up. While formatting, I dropped a few entries that were either short, or repeats, or pasted in stories that I didn’t want in the book, or whatever else. By 9

or so last night, I had it down to 676 pages. This is still with a third of it still jagged and fucked up, and without even a first pass on actually dropping or combining or editing down some of the entries.

The basic idea though is to keep the book about this long. I don’t intend to chop everything down into a 180-page “best of”. One of the things about my journal is that it’s been around a long time, and there’s a lot of old entries back there. I think there are about a half-million words from 1997 to present, and it’s not all a bunch of timely and now useless info, like memes and political garbage, which would now be completely outdated. One thing that digging through the old entries has made me realize is that a lot of it is still very readable, and very interesting. Well, maybe not everyone would enjoy it, but I still find it entertaining to go back to old entries. And that’s why I want to make the book.

So that’s the current project. It doesn’t have a name, and it needs a lot of editing work, but it’s keeping me busy.