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?

Everyone else on various gadget and tech sites has been doing this lately, so I thought I would, too.  Here’s a picture and explanation of every item I carry in my pockets on a daily basis:

The items are:

1. Serrated bread knife.
2. Soaring Society of America glider pilot flight log.
3. Butcher knife.
4. $250 in Confederate currency.
5. Auvi-Q epinephrine injector.
6. Business cards.
7. West German circa-1980s analog metronome.
8. LensCrafters wet glasses cleaners.
9. 50,000 Saddam-era Iraqi Dinar.
10. Proventil inhaler.
11. WikiReader portable offline Wikipedia browser.
12. $800 US cash in $20 bills.
13. Glover Pocket Ref reference manual.
14. Keys to house, two cars, storage locker; garage remote; loyalty keychains for Panera, Borders, Ralph’s, CVS, Subaru roadside assistance.  (I do not live near Ralph’s or own a Subaru.  I’m lazy and don’t want to split my fingernails apart removing old ones.)
15. US Passport.
16. CRKT anti-shark dive knife.
17. Moleskine notebook and pen.
18. Cough drops.
19. iPhone 4S.
20. Big Skinny Wallet containing driver’s license, credit cards, $1000 US cash.
21. Kleenex.
22. Microfiber.

It is time for another bulleted-list update.

• I was recently so bored that I rewrote the first three pages of an erotic story, retitled it as “Randy Orton and the Loins of Passion” and submitted it to a small press for consideration.  The story was an erotic coming-of-age tale involving Randy Orton, his father Cowboy Bob Orton, and Roddy Piper.  It was not picked up, so I will cease writing homosexual incestual WWE-related pornography and go back to my usual work.

• Speaking of which, Ryan Werner mentioned me in this essay he wrote a bit ago about starting said small press, going on tour, and working as a janitor.  Read it here.

• I am 83,477 words into a book and still do not know what it’s about.  It may actually get split into a couple of things.  It is 200-some pieces of flash fiction, and maybe could end up similar to Rumored to Exist, but it may take a while to get there.

• I never knew this, but Jackson Pollock was allegedly decapitated in the car accident that killed him.  I’d like to think the interior of the car looked like one of his paintings after the incident, but that’s just wishful thinking.

• Having just one hobby that I am no good at that makes me constantly want to spend thousands of dollars on new gear instead of practice to increase my skill (bass guitar) is not enough, so I have been doing down a k-hole with photography.  I am intent on learning WTF the difference between aperture and shutter speed is (I think I know now) and I’m trying to stop using the automatic mode on my camera.  I’m also trying to not spend any money on new gear.  I haven’t taken any phenomenal pictures I’ve posted online lately, but my flickr page is the home of all shots I have snapped.

• Here is a new thing to obsess over: http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/4716/a-russian-enigma/

• One sister-in-law was here for about a week, so we got to go to all kinds of places we only go when people visit us, like the Pacific Science Center and the Oakland Museum (pics).  Unlike her last visit, we did not have a blackout, did not have a closet collapse, and did not go to see a Jackass movie, but otherwise it was cool.

• We babysat the 18-month-old twins overnight for the other sister-in-law last weekend.  Even more miraculous than the ease of this operation was the fact that not one person mommyjacked my status update on facebook to ask me when I was going to have kids.

• Joel-Peter Witkin created, among other things, the photo used for the Pungent Stench album Been Caught Buttering. Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility spring from an episode he witnessed as a young child, an automobile accident in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated:

  It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it — but before I could touch it someone carried me away”.

• We’re going to Maui in October.  I have never been to that island, although I really liked both of my trips to Oahu.  (2003 pics, 2005 pics)

• Thunderbird is still available and you should buy it.

• I believe the 2015 convention for my UFO cult will be in the Bahamas, so please contact me for details.