It’s January 4th, which might make it too late to write one of those year-in-review posts, but I will try anyway.  I’ve been insanely busy getting ParagraphLine.com going, and you should be reading that, too.  But I thought I’d take a second to make a humblebrag list of what I got done 2013.

First, I finished my book Thunderbird.  This took me longer than I thought, and it was a really mixed bag for me emotionally.  I initially thought I would get another publisher to do the book, and then I chickened out and did it myself, and then the double-whammy of inevitable post-partum depression and trying to publicize and sell the thing just completely gutted me.  This happens with every book, and I think it gets worse each time.  I wish I could just throw the stuff over the transom and let someone else sell it and then find a way to not pay attention at all to the reviews and sales numbers.  I think my new year’s resolution should be to not care about this shit and just keep writing, but it’s hard to write in a vacuum and not ever get any feedback or praise for what you’re creating.  So yeah, a big chunk of 2013 was spent wondering why I ever stopped stamp collecting back in grade school.

One thing that kept me somewhat sane was working on this book called Atmospheres.  Starting back last spring, I would sit down and turn off everything and start up the Sleep album Dopesmoker and listen to it all the way through every day and just brain dump, with the goal of making all of these short, disconnected pieces with no plot, just 500 words a day of descriptions of destruction and despair. I had (and have) no idea how this would play out, but by the fall, the book got up to about 120,000 words.  I’ve been trying to edit it back down, and I still have no idea what to do with it, because it reads like Naked Lunch but without editing.  And as the race to the bottom with self-publishing continues and people only want the same perfect three-act cookie-cutter detective book on their Kindle, it’s hard to put out there something that I can’t even describe or pitch, even if it is some of my best writing ever.

In November, I started another book, which remains untitled, but it was an attempt at writing an extremely plotted story.  I spent probably a month just taking notes and writing outlines, and then wrote the first third of it, which was absolutely brutal, because it’s not bizarro or absurdist or anything like that, and it’s much more long-form than I’m used to writing.  It’s like G.G. Allin trying to write a serious opera in Italian.  I got the first third of it written, something like 60,000 words, and I’m letting it ferment, because it had some serious act 2 issues I need to figure out before I proceed.  I like the idea of the book, although if I stuck to the current pace, it would end up being about a quarter-million words, and then I’d have to deal with the usual cocksuckers that gave me unending shit about my first book being “too long.”  Books are as long as they are long.  Nobody complains about paintings being “too big.”

I had five stories published elsewhere in 2013:

• “Bearded Women Shitting On Glass Tables Is Sort Of My Thing” at Horror, Sleaze, and Trash (2013)
• “Vehicular Handjobs and Pirate Hooks” at Horror, Sleaze, and Trash (2013)
• “Sleep Has No Master” at New Graffiti (2013)
• “The Lycanthropic Air Conditioning Folly” in Tall Tales with Short Cocks Volume 3 (2013)
• “The Long John Silver Vinegar Douche Abortion Attempt” at The Strange Edge(2013)

Big thanks to all of the editors that ran that stuff for me. I also had a long-form interview over at The Lit Pub that is worth reading.  I met Joseph Owens through that, and really enjoyed our talk over there.

I guess I also did a hardcover of Rumored to Exist mostly because I wanted one for my own library.  I don’t think anyone else bought one, but that’s fine.

I stopped keeping track of reviews in other publications, because at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, I feel like the review “industry” just went sideways.  There aren’t many good review sites anymore, and I sent a ton of books out for review and in many cases never heard back.  The Lit Pub did run a good review of Thunderbird, and I’ve seen some decent reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, but it’s become almost impossible for me to find places to get my books reviewed, and of course I blame myself for not giving up on this shit and turning out formulaic YA Vampire erotica novels or whatever the hell.

I did a little bit of travel, but it’s never enough.  Got out to New York once for work, LA twice for short visits, went to Reno for Thanksgiving, got in a long weekend in Monterey, spent a week and change in Maui, and did the trail of tears visit to Indiana and Wisconsin for the holidays.  I liked Maui, and really miss LA.  I’ve determined there’s no way I could ever afford to live in New York again, although it’s nice to visit for three or four days on someone else’s dime.  I’ve had a strange nostalgia for my place in Astoria, being holed up there during winters, with the Eraserhead-sounding radiators and hoarder collection of DVDs and video games.  But then I remember I hated it there, and I never really got any writing done.  And I recently found an old video tape of this “tour” I did of my house in 2003, specifically so I’d remember it ten years later, and it absolutely horrified me.  I’m no zen minimalist, but I had some serious mental health problems back then to stock my tiny apartment with so much shit.  I watched that and immediately packed up four bags of books and videos to take to Goodwill.

My computer ended up in the shop on a recall issue, but I got the motherboard replaced, and I’m still milking the 2010 model for as long as possible before I have to upgrade.  I did upgrade both my phone and iPad.  I otherwise spent my gear obsession energy on the bass, buying a new five string and then building a new four string.  I think my playing slightly progressed over the year, but it’s still an ongoing thing.

Had a death flu at the start of the year, but otherwise physical health has been okay.  I started going to Weight Watchers meetings again, and went from 189 to 171 over the course of the year.  My ideal weight is between 170 and 175, so I’ll take it. My mental health was somewhat fucked all year, as was my sleep, and I don’t want to get into that except to say it’s getting better.

My only goals for 2014 are to write more, read more, and not care about the past and the stuff I really shouldn’t be caring about.  I also have this goal to see more people this year, and if you’re in the bay area, you should ping me and we should hang out.

With that, I should get back to actually writing. Hope your 2013 was decent.

I always get disoriented when I fly open-jawed and land in an airport that’s different than the one I left from.  I don’t remember the last time I did it, but last night I landed in SFO a week and a half after departing from OAK, and it really fucked me up.  I walked down the concourse with this strong unconscious feeling that nothing was right.  I mean, I spent the whole flight sitting next to this bald dude with a handlebar mustache, black leather boots, and a crushed velvet suit jacket in a bright shade of burgundy, who read The Fountainhead in that sort of “look at what I’m reading” pose, and I really wanted to just say “okay, we get it, dude” but I didn’t.  It took me a lot of time to get used to being in the wrong airport and mentally figure out that I was on a different mass of land with a different drive in front of me, but the 50 degree temperature difference really negated that.

I haven’t been back in Indiana in two years, and I always hesitate to write about the experience, because I don’t want to piss off the people who call it home, or make it sound like I’m ungrateful for them taking time out to see this asshole who flew out from California that won’t stop bitching about a lack of vegetables and heat.  But it always puts the zap on me to see stuff back there.  I think this visit, I spent less time in a nostalgia black hole, and avoided a lot of old haunts, although it wasn’t entirely intentional.  Both the night of Christmas Eve and Christmas itself, I headed back to my hotel semi-early, and had thoughts of driving around University Park mall, maybe finding an old place to eat, and doing some serious people-watching.  And, of course, both times I was an idiot and didn’t realize that they closed damn near everything early, and I ended up back at the hotel eating candy bars for dinner.

I got a chance to meet up with fellow writer Steve Lowe, which was cool, because our Venn diagrams of South Bend-dom probably briefly touched decades ago and we didn’t realize it.  This leads me to my new year’s resolution (yes, another one of those posts): I really don’t know half of you people out there, and I never see the other half of you.  I need to make more of an effort to see people in the next year.  So if you’re in the bay area, please ping me, and I will do likewise.  I don’t care if we haven’t met before - we should grab a cup of coffee or hit a book store or whatever.  I need to do something with my life besides clicking the Like button on facebook posts.

So, saw the family.  Suffered through the cold.  Ate a lot of garbage, but only gained about a pound.  Almost hit a deer.  Didn’t write, which I wanted to do and of course I didn’t, so what the fuck.  I left Indiana a day earlier than I thought, due to a scheduling issue, and drove up to Wisconsin, then drove down to Chicago the next day to hang out with John Sheppard.  We went to this weird diner that was all classic diner food but vegan, built up out of various soy products, which was actually pretty damn good.  We got to hang for a bit, and scheme about our next big project, which is always awesome.

Speaking of, next project - you should go over to Paragraph Line and bookmark that shit.  We’ll be posting daily (we hope) dispatches, fiction, news, and other distractions.

Anyway, it’s good to be home, and I have to unfuck a million things here, piles of half-unpacked things and gifts that need to find permanent homes, and whatnot.  I got some nice little things, but after every trip back to Indiana, I always want to go Fight Club on my shit and start donating everything.  I also feel a need to do the same thing digestion-wise, hence my current issue with probiotics.  At least I will get a lot of reading done in the next few days.

Ok.  2013 done.  2014 coming up.  Still writing 2012 on my checks.  Gotta go finish this book now.

I don’t even remember the last time I’ve updated this.  Every time I think about writing something here, I either can’t think of something cool and mind-bending and I think it’s stupid to go here and write “I went to Target today,” or I think of something cool and think it needs to go in a book and not here.  There’s no real middle ground.  So, let me tell you about my plans to go to Target today.

I went to Hawaii about a month ago, which was cool.  I also went to Reno last month, which wasn’t Hawaii.  There are pictures of both on flickr, although the Reno pictures are mostly of relatives, because I didn’t do much beyond that.  I did lose some money on a Godzilla slot machine, which I didn’t fully understand.  I also stayed in the hotel and wrote for about 17 seconds, and now I’m trying to catch up.

The whole time I was in Hawaii, I plotted out a book, and I started writing it in November.  I didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo, but I wrote 50,000 words in the first half of the month, so I would have won, but the book is far from done.  It is an attempt at writing a linear, plotted book that still has a lot of weirdness to it, and involves startups, UFO cults, alien abduction, and depression.  I ran into some serious Act 2 issues and decided to let it sit and simmer for a while.  Maybe I’ll figure it out over the holidays and get back on it in January.  It’s not “straight” fiction, but it’s long-form stuff, and I found it incredibly difficult to get back on that horse.  I’m not sure of the quality of what I got done last month, but I know if I stick to the length I had, it will end up being longer than Summer Rain, and I got unending shit from idiots about how that book was “too long” so I don’t know what will happen if I finish this.  And no, I wouldn’t split it into multiple books.

I am still working on this other book, which is sort of like Rumored but more chaotic and lacking a central story (or maybe it isn’t.)  I would like to finish it soon, but it’s been a slow war growing and editing this.  It’s above 60,000 words, but it makes most of Burroughs’ work look incredibly linear and structured, so it’s sort of chaos right now.  I really like some of the bits in it, though.  I wanted to finish this by the end of 2013, but that won’t happen.  Maybe I’ll get it done in early 2014, but there’s also the chance this thing will stew for another five years, like Rumored did.

I have a bunch of new hardware at the house.  I got a 4th-gen iPad right before we left for Hawaii, literally hours before the new iPad Air was announced.  I was upgrading from a first-gen, so that change was huge.  The retina screen and increase in processor speed is tremendous.  And the old iPad was stuck on iOS 5, and crashing constantly when it ran out of memory.  The new one runs iOS 7, and now I get all of the good new features that I didn’t have before.  (AirPlay mirroring is a big one - I can now zap Amazon Instant videos to the Apple TV in the living room.)  I also recently updated from the iPhone 4S to the new 5S, which is insanely fast, and has a slightly bigger screen, but is lighter and has more battery life.  It also has the fingerprint sensor, which sounds like a gimmick feature, but it actually works well and is insanely useful to unlock the phone.  I also swapped out the battery in my laptop, which is still doing fine but is now the weakest link.  I hope to keep it going for another year or two though, and the battery will help.

I sent out my first newsletter to my mailing list.  It included a coupon for a free book.  If you missed it, you should probably click here to subscribe.

I have a bunch of holiday travel coming up, and I will predict now that I’ll end up with a death flu by the end of December, so thanks in advance to whoever’s kid gives me that.

I think I am going to Target today, BTW.  I need Claritin, Coke Zero, and a crossbow.  I’ll probably be 2/3 on that.

I’m writing from the Maui airport, getting ready to board the big silver tube that shoots me across the Pacific and back to the land of wearing full-length pants and bitching about smog and seasonal depression. (And excuse the typos and formatting fuckups here - I’m typing on the extremely buggy Wordpress for iOS program, and actually writing this on an iPhone with an external keyboard, while old people in aloha shirts scream at flight attendants about not being able to bring 17 bags as their carry-on luggage.) It’s been a good vacation, albeit with little writing, and I missed a very big anniversary while I was gone.

I consider October 30, 1993 as the day I became a writer. I mean, I learned to put together words into sentences and paragraphs decades earlier, and I wrote short stories and term papers for classes before that, plus I did five issues of a zine of heavy metal record reviews. But that’s the day my life took a major turn and I decided to put pen to paper and start the long crawl of learning the craft and piecing together my first book.

The story is stupid, and I’ve told it before. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy falls into an endless depression about said girl. But after a long run of failed relationships, I turned to brain-dumping my thoughts into spiral notebooks. I lived a few miles from campus and did not have a car, so I’d walk to work, walk to class, and had this patchwork schedule that involved enough time stuck on campus with nothing to do to go completely mad with boredom, but not enough time to hike home and then back. I guess I spent a lot of that time logged into VAXes in the public computer labs, but I found it cathartic to find a remote corner of the student union, sit down with my little notebook, and pour out words. I did not even know what I was writing about, I just felt a compulsion to write.

I started reading then, too. Vonnegut, Orwell, then I fell into a Henry Miller obsession, which led to Bukowski. I didn’t have tons of money, but I always found myself at the used book stores, digging around for paperbacks. I didn’t even have a real book collection at that time - maybe a single three-shelf bookcase with mostly computer books. But I started hoarding novels, and getting lost in the pages late at night, wondering how I’d pull together a novel like Kerouac, if I needed to split from Indiana and hit The Road.

My career in computer science fell apart around the same time. I was a horrible student, and could not deal with the math. A semester later, I dropped out of the program, and went over to general studies, so I could finish my degree by taking as many English classes as I could get into in my last year. I still worked with computers, helping people print their papers or whatever, but it was just a paycheck, another way to pay my rent and blow the rest on books.

It took me a couple of years to really get into the swing of things and apply myself, start my first book, and apply myself to write for hours a day. It didn’t start to fully click until I got to Seattle in 95 and had nothing to do every night except sit at the computer and type. And I guess the first book didn’t cross the transom until 2000. But I still consider 1993 as my start point, when I decided to do this.

I look back and it’s hard to imagine a time when I wasn’t a writer. In the worst of my writer’s block, when the frustration is so high that I seriously contemplate quitting all of this, I try to think back to what I did with my time before I was a writer, and I can’t even remember. I burned a lot of cycles with depression and relationships, and I guess I obsessed over music and computer programming, but there wasn’t any defining force like writing in my life.

I’ve now self-published nine books, and published a bunch of stories, some in anthologies or published elsewhere. I’ve met some great writers, and in the course of doing this, ended up reading hundreds of books, many of which have changed my life. I always feel a certain disappointment in my writing, that the last book wasn’t good enough, that I’m not progressing as fast as my other peers, and that sales are bleak. None of this thought is good, and I wish I could just stop it, but I can’t. I think a certain amount of it is helpful, in that it motivates me to keep writing. Regardless, I think I have found my momentum in the last few years, and I’ve been pretty productive and able to put out a lot of books. They don’t sell, and even worse, everyone assumes I’m making bank because some other guy with an almost exact same name as me is making millions writing detective stories, but that’s something I’m learning to ignore.

I’ve got a book almost done, and I’m just about done outlining the next big thing, which I am hoping I won’t self-publish myself, but will get someone else to do. I have a lot going on, and I’m always tired of looking back and falling into a huge nostalgia trap. But nice even numbers make you stop and think, and so I am.

Almost ready to get on the plane and lock into five hours of internet-free writing. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Thanks to everyone who has supported my work so far, and I hope to be doing this until the next big even number and beyond. Mahalo!

First things first: go to The Lit Pub and read this review of Thunderbird:

http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/thunderbird-flash-stories/

I am still working on two projects, switching back and forth when one gets to be too much. One is just starting, and the other is getting close to 100,000 words, but is still very vague in its overall structure.  That’s keeping me busy, but it’s also taking all of my time, which is why I haven’t been updating much.

I have been obsessed with the movie Eraserhead for the last few days.  This started because I went to Amoeba records this weekend, which is my favorite record store, although I usually associate the name with their big store in Hollywood, because it is the record store in LA.  I don’t go record shopping anymore, and buy everything from iTunes, which I don’t tell musicians, because that’s sort of like telling old people about Obama.  But I used to love going to record stores, and walking the racks from A to Z, looking for stuff I hadn’t seen elsewhere, rarities and imports and bootlegs and whatever other oddball stuff I could find in the wild.  And Amoeba is a cool store, a wide selection with a lot of unique stuff and a cool staff, so I grabbed a few things I hadn’t seen lately.

One of the things was the soundtrack to Eraserhead, which is this twisted combination of ambient noise, wind sounds and radiator hissing and layer after layer of dialogue and dirge and destruction.  It’s the perfect writing music, because it’s ambient, but isn’t new-agey and won’t put you to sleep.  The only problem with it is that it pulls me down this rabbit hole where I need to watch the movie again, need to read all of these articles and interviews and find out what was in Lynch’s head as he put this whole thing together, and it’s an unanswerable question.  I can’t even find the real script, which is some 20-page oddity, a prose poem with weird drawings all over it.  But I find too many articles about the movie, and they keep me diving through the internet, coming up with more questions.

One of the things I wonder about with Eraserhead is if it’s possible to write such a minimalist surreal work in print.  My writing tends to be the opposite, long sentences with lots of twists and turns and terminology, very manic and frenetic.  I don’t even know if I could write something so subdued.  But I wonder if it would even work without the film element or the soundtrack, just the text itself.

Music makes me think the same thing, because I listen to a lot of drone music, stuff like Boris or Sleep, where the same riff or guitar feedback is sustained or repeated over and over, building this long-form sonic texture.  I don’t know the literary equivalent of doing that, because if I just repeated the same text over and over, it would get stupid fast.

Nothing else to report.  I’m trying to cram in as much writing as possible before a flurry of appointments and travel and other distractions come up in the next couple of months.  I’m also getting close to the book purchase lockdown that I have to enact before the holidays so I don’t buy duplicates of gifts.  That means I’m buying too many things now, and I have a stack of reading taller than me.  What about you?