After three months of doing nothing but largely fruitless self-promotion for World Leader Pretend, I finally got back to the writing table last week.

Being away from a novel for three months is frightening, because each week away equivocates to about a day of fiddling about trying to recall what the heck one was trying to do with the novel anyway. I ended up fiddling about for the last two weeks--in a maddeningly bored manner--but I've arrived at some sort of working outline with which to guide me through. Last Wednesday I started writing again, and although I feel rusty and clunky, a few grains of magic seemed to sift through.

Labels: Writing Process

Another what-I'm-reading update:

The Motorcycle Diaries - Che Guevara: Still on the bookshelf feeling neglected.

After the Gold Rush - Lewis Buzbee: Made it's way into my bookbag. Read another short story--Hairpin--on the bus. Might be my favorite Buzbee story, although that could be because I know him, and have visited many of the places he describes.

Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino: I'm making an effort to understand story structure, and have therefore added some screenplays and plays. Unfortunately, I've been reading this in an unstructured way--picking it up and absent-mindedly reading a sequence while I'm at work--so I haven't learned anything.

Dinner with Friends: Philip Marguiles: Another play. A friend suggested I read this in my effort to get a better grasp on story structure. I read it fast, caught up in the storyline and completely oblivious to it's structure. A nice psychological treatise on the effects of a couple's divorce on their friends.

Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart: My wife picked this up off my bookstand and said it was overrated. I probably won't read it. My wife loves books, and rarely comes to these sort of conclusions.

Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon: I found the much ballyhooed Kavalier & Clay to be too wordy, and so I hesitated to pick up another Chabon book, which a co-worker recommended. Loved it! Although, I confess to finding it hard to read, not because it was wordy, but rather because it's about a burned-out middle-aged man who has written a 2,600 page opus that he is unable to finish. (I'm having my own issues with wandering opuses (word?) that I am unable to finish...)

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene: Something tells me I've tried to read this classic before--we'll see how it goes this time. Another novel about a preacher that I felt I needed to be aware of while writing VMP.

The Best People in the World - Justin Tussing: A fellow Oregonian's debut novel.

Only Revolutions - Mark Z. Danielewski: Something tells me I'll give up on this labyrinth fast...

Labels: Book Lovers

One of the secondary consequences of moving into my new digs at Mercury Studios is that my laptop stays there in the evenings and the weekends. In a mere week, this has improved the moods of my wife and daughter, raised my dog's ears, improved the countenance of my kitchen, and even shrunk the always growing pile of books by my bed.

I knew that I had problem, but the extent of it didn't hit me until the computer was gone for a few days. I use the Internet much like my father used the T.V. when I was young, something which I always hated him for--he tuned out everything and channel surfed, watching shows that clearly bored the hell out of him. Seeing your father waste his time like this, instead of say, playing with you, permanently altered my relationship with him.

What I do on the Internet is identical. It's terribly boring stuff that I tune out to: I'll read arcane sports article after arcane sports article on Sportsline.com, despite the fact that I couldn't care less about who the new basketball coach is at Wichita State; or I'll read all the comments on Steve Master's hurricane blog on wunderground.com, despite the fact that I live in Portland, Oregon, and don't have even a passing interest in meteorology.

What I hate the most about my addiction is how hollow it is. People who are addicted to WoW are at least addicted to something interesting that there's some sort of community around. Hell, their kids might even think it's cool. My addiction is far more nihilistic. It's really a big fuck-you to my very existence.

I've always found complimenting people to be a difficult thing to do. I can criticize with skill and precision, but when it comes to the compliment, the best I can usually come up with is a "you're awesome" or a "that's great." It's really too bad, and I imagine my relationships have suffered because of it.

Today, I received an email from a gentleman named Gerard Fleck, who I was in a writing group with for a time. The letter he sent was the most complimentary I can ever remember receiving. What I like most about it is its precision--why are most of us so good at criticizing with precision, and so bad at this?

I quote verbatim:

I really enjoyed reading World Leader Pretend. It was very original and kept moving at a good pace that kept me interested (and laughing). Although as an amateur writer, I found that thinking about the task of connecting these people through an online game in a meaningful real world way, kinda daunting --- you pulled it off quite satisfactorily. I'm glad you did not get bogged down in technical detail or the intricacies of on-line gaming. I think that is one of your strong suits, that you deal with a subject not initially accessible to someone who does not get into on-line gaming, yet you give just enough info to get me interested and then you really kept the story about the characters, with game as a backdrop or rather a web that ties them together. I finished reading it about a month ago, and don't have it with me right now, so can't reference the exact character names -- but -- the parts that are very memorable are the guy who ends up in Antarctica - the parts about him living in NYC, picking up girls was very well done. Also, the guy who wants to walk all the time, was good comic relief, but then when he finally does talk, he nails Xerxes - nice. The way your write about Gabby, being nuts, very convincing because you just put the reader right with her without getting bogged down in trying to prove she's nuts or use alot of clinical mumbo jumbo, she's just a young adult who is in fact a bit off kilter. When she tossed the baby off the mountain and hits Xerxes with it, and when the walking dude falls off the rock, absolutely brilliant and hilarious. Also, Gek Lin and Charlie's storyline came across very convincingly, animated, funny, yet with an understated seriousness. I think most guys can relate to Charlie being compromised in their desires to both help and ravage Gek Lin. And most folks cheer for Gek Lin and feisty determination.

Every moment throughout the book I never questioned your authority (ie: your demonstrated ability to be the author of what you were writing - credibility, I guess is the word), or the stories authenticity. I never once broke awkwardly from the narrative or found myself saying 'yeah right.' Even with such a truly mixed bag of characters and events that include a marriage on the south pole, an Olympic class skier from England (where they have no Olympic class mountains!), a millionaire underworld gangster in Thailand, a dotcom upstart gone bust, a therapist intern who moves from NY to AZ for a one-hour per week internship, Gabby & X's absent parents, absolutely outrageous coincidences around a chandelier mounted web cam, it all worked and worked quite well! Overall it was timely with the Internet company bust, the edginess of the characters, casual sexual and drug related references, a strip mall based mental health facility -- your book has quite a good sense of the y2k zeitgeist, my man. To be blunt, your book has all the elements that could have, in a less skilled writer's hands, amounted to schlock, but you, my friend, have clearly created literature. You should be proud of your skillful acrobatic act, and especially the way you stuck the landing.

Stay cool, keep on scribbling, and yes, I have recommended WLP to several people. I'm looking forward to seeing [your next book] in print.

Your Friend,
Gerard

Gerard has obviously made a friend for life...

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

LitPark has a great interview with indie publisher and Portland lit scenester Kevin Sampsell today.

Labels: Portlandia

On Monday, I moved into my new digs as part of the Mercury Studios in Portland. A quick glance at this website will reveal that this studio I have joined is full of comic book artists--last anyone checked I'm a novelist. What does a novelist intend to do crammed into a very tiny office with a whole bunch of comic book artists?

Well, first of all, I frickin' needed to get out of my house. After 3 years holed up writing novels, I've lost all sense of normal human interaction. How do normal people talk to each other in a working environment? I have no idea, so I joined the studios.

Secondly, this second novel I'm supposedly writing about a zinester--well, I've never spoken more than 2 minutes with a zinester, so I joined the studios to help gather material. (Although, as I'm discovering, zines are a whole different beast from comics.)

And thirdly, Holy Bankruptcy, Batman, I need work...

Labels: Portlandia

My brother Joe called me yesterday to let me know that he had looked up World Leader Pretend at the Portland Public Library, and discovered that they had 6 copies, and that these copies were all checked out, and that there were currently two holds on it.

Despite acting like I couldn't care less, I did, of course, care, but mostly that my brother would look something like that up and call me to tell me about it.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

I don't know if other people have had this experience before, but occasionally I discover books that disturb me too much to finish. (This is different from the many books I lose interest in and don't finish, and even books that I don't finish because of boilerplate gratuitious violence.)

The two books that come to mind are Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love.

These books were creepy in different ways. House of Leaves is about a couple who buy a house that, well, grows. It doesn't measurably grow, but some of its rooms, when entered, lengthen. House of Leaves is written similarly to the movie The Ring; that is, it is written so that the reader gets the creepy feeling that by reading the book they are somehow involving themselves in this house, and that they themselves might be drawn into a house whose rooms grow to the extent that they may not be able to escape. Add to this the fact that House of Leaves is a gigantic book that itself seems to grow as you read it, and that it has a creepy cover and strange formatting (including having the word house printed in blue whereever it appears) and you get this feeling that if you don't immediately rid yourself of the book something very terrible is going to happen to your house.

One morning, I quite literally had to remove House of Leaves from my house. I took the book to the curb and left it there. (And woe to whoever picked it up.)

Wikipedia has a very good entry on the book should you want to know more.

I attempted to read Geek Love many moons ago, so my memory of what precisely it was that freaked me out about it has dulled. It was different, though, from House of Leaves in that what disturbed me about Geek Love was its moral implications. The book has several storylines, but has I recall it, it's about a carnival family who purposely genetically mutates (chemically? I can't remember) their offspring to be freaks. One of the children has flippers and gills, and lives in an aquarium, another has no limbs. As the story goes on the child with no limbs starts a cult, and the people in the cult purposefully amputate their own limbs so that they can be like the child.

I got pretty far into Geek Love before I put it down, but what freaked me out about the story was that the cult was so convincing, and the parents reasoning behind purposefully genetically modifying their offspring so well-written, that you could see people actually taking the precepts behind Geek Love and using them as a sort of manual.

And in some ways this actually happened. Not long after suggesting I read Geek Love, the woman who did so obtained a full body of tattooes, and an arsenal of body modifications. Geek Love, and a few other cult publications (like RE/Search #12: Modern Primitives), got passed around the tattooing community like hotcakes, and before anyone knew it extreme body alterations had gone mainstream.

Labels: Book Lovers

I might have considered my reading at Books Inc. in San Francisco to be a failure, given that the audience consisted of 8 people. 3 of those people happen to be some of the most encouraging people in the whole world--in their own bizarre ways--and so it was difficult to be discouraged at all in their presence.

My brother Dave Frost is one of those people. I met my brother before the reading at Naan & Curry, one of my old haunts in S.F. on 9th and Irving. Dave hopped out of his car shirtless and shoeless--a car he had, incidentally, been living out of for the last month--gave me a bear hug, then fumbled through his trunk for a shirt and some shoes so he could make himself presentable in the restaurant.

Dave closes his eyes when something is giving him great pleasure, and many things give him such pleasure. One of those things is sushi--I have spent entire meals with Dave where he has eaten in silence with his eyes closed. It was incredibly encouraging, then, when I looked up for a moment during my reading and saw Dave with his eyes closed. There could not have been a greater compliment.

Also, in the audience was Matthew Yeoman. In a very bizarre transitional period of my life (I'd been sleeping on the friend's couch for a month, and had overstepped my welcome), I answered a random Craiglist ad for a household seeking a roommate. The household consisted of an aspiring screenwriter (Matt), an aspiring actress, and an AmeriCorp volunteer. The ad asked the potential roommate to answer the question: Why would we want you as our roommate? I had a bit of a devil-may-care attitude at the time (still do, really) and so I took great pains to write an over-the-top email, detailing how when I was an important and famous writer they would all have something to tell their grandkids about.

Fortunately for me, Matt and the roommates picked up on the tongue-in-cheek tone, and we became both roommates and fast friends. What amazes me about Matt, and what makes him such a great person to know, is that Matt has an almost photographic memory for things audio (is there a word for this?) He still remembers that email that I wrote, and can quote from it. He remembers other things I have said and repeats them back to me. It's almost like he has a portion of his brain in which he categorizes things--cool and funny things that X has said--at the ready during any conversation.

This is an immensely flattering quality to have. There is nothing a person likes more than to have things they have said remembered.

One other thing about Matt, he has a golden smile. Seeing that smile, coupled with a recently shaved head, in the audience, was both encouraging and Zen. Matt would make a great Buddhist.

Which brings me to another man with a golden smile and a shaved head, Dave Warnke, the illustrator who did the alternative cover for World Leader Pretend. I'd never met Dave before, but I'd always been struck by what an easy-going person he is. In a world of artists paranoid about copyright issues, Dave is a unique entity. When I asked him if he would do a sticker cover for my book, he said "Sure!" When I asked him if I could use it for whatever I wanted to use it for he said, "Sure!" When I asked him how much he wanted for it, he said, "Whatever!" (I think I ended up compensating him well.)

I love Dave's attitude towards his art, "Plaster it everywhere!" He's missing that "it's mine" meme that so many of us have planted in our brains. So many of us could learn from him.

Meeting Dave did nothing to alter my perception of him. He was quiet and humble, and yet when approached about his art was full of childish enthusiasm. I laughed at the thought of him, short and somewhat non-descript, wandering San Francisco late into the night, clandestinely putting stickers on everything he could get his marker-tainted hands on. A thief in the night, I thought.

Labels: Tour Dates, World Leader Pretend