Looking back, looking ahead

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So the Glendale B&N was sweet.  I got to touch base with old friends and new babies (who were very helpful during the event).  The B&N was beautiful (see photo), and I was thrilled to hang out with some awesome people whom I love a lot.  Thanks to all of you who made it out!

I’ve got some other local (AZ) appearances coming up: Monday night at 630 at Changing Hands teaching a seminar on publishing a YA novel, and a PARTY book discussion on July 18 at 1 pm, also at Changing Hands.  Both events are free, but the seminar requires registration.  I have plans to also be in Las Cruces and Silver City NM in August.  I really should get busy on visiting some other states (I’ve had requests for Florida and NY so far), except for this whole “flying” thing.  Not my cup o’ travel.  That may be changing soon whether I like it or not…

In looking ahead, I have superawesome news that I can’t wait to share, but have to hold back a little longer.  Hopefully, that’ll get worked out by next week.  Meanwhile, I’m dabbling with, at last count:

  • a YA science fiction;
  • a YA supernatural;
  • a MG adventure;
  • and a YA contemporary. 

This does not include the MG contemporary which is out for revisions right now.  Which of these, if any, will stick to the wall, I don’t know.  But then, that’s part of the fun.  Which of these sounds most promising?  Drop me an email or message me on FB.

Also, I start summer school on Tuesday.  That should actually be very cool.

Our Huntington Beach vacation was pretty sweet–I even got my bad self into the wild and wasteful ocean.

So it’s been a pretty laid back yet productive summer so far, and it’s only July. 

Have a good summer, stay safe, and we’ll compare notes later.

See ya!

Skating Phantom

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We went downhilling last night, which, for the uninitiated, amounts to lying on a skateboard and rolling down a paved hill really fast.  I reckon other skaters have other names for it – luge, perhaps, if I spelled that right, or longboarding maybe.  We have always called it downhilling.

(WARNING! Graphic image ahead…)

And now that we are Old and Infirm, we confine our downhilling to this hill on the south side of Camelback Mountain.  All our hills get named.  They get christened after the first person to have a major bail (or whatever the cool kids call it these days).  I, for instance, have a hill on the north side of Camelback named after me: Get-A-Grip.   That’s where I got the rock in my finger.  My all time favorite hill name is Faceplant.  Because that one is true to its name.  Happily, Bishop is still alive and well despite that inauspicious hill name.  Phantom Hill got its name because to date, no one ever really crashed on it.  Crashed bad enough to draw blood, anyway.  That’s one of the requirements I think.

Lately we go whenever A) someone is getting married, or B) we’ve got friends from out of town here to visit (see “A”).  This time around, though, we went strictly for Reason B.  And one of the reasons he was here was to see me at a book signing.  Nor was he the first or only to fly across country in support of PARTY and me.  You can’t fake that s***.  You ask me what motivates me, what my inspiration is, I tell you it’s the guys I’ve known for anywhere from 13 to 23 years now.  (It’s also my wife and their wives, because somehow, our ladies didn’t get the memo that we were a bunch of dumb hoods.  Or maybe they did, and that’s why we love them so much.)

Apart from whistling down a mountain road at 40 mph with your skull about three inches from the blacktop, the best part of downhilling is the chill out time before the next run, sitting on our boards at the top of the hill, seeing the city spread out before us.  We talk about all sorts of stuff in those moments; we argue about who said what to who 20 years ago, that sort of thing.  Even after all these years, there’s something about sitting in the dark, sipping Super Big Gulps, and staring down that dark, curved road ahead wondering if tonight’s the night Phantom gets re-named in your honor. 

“I have good friends there,” our visiting brother says.  He pauses.  “But I wouldn’t sit on a skateboard at the top of a hill with any of them.”

“I never had this in high school,” says our youngest.

“Thirteen years,” another tells him.  “Know how many people we hung out with for that long after we graduated?  Uh, you.”

It was a good night (despite the Large McBigHuge OUCH I got, which I wish I could say happened doing something cool.  Alas, it was stupidity.  But it was worth it).  We’ll go again in November  just before the next man walks down the aisle.  We’ll all be there for that, too.  We got it good, to put it simply.  We made it. 

There’ve been casualties.  Fallouts. Catastrophes and tragedies.  Sure there were.  You know how it goes.

But we still climb that hill with our boards and skate that sucker every so often.  Till one of us breaks a hip or something, anyway.  (And in fairness…we do get driven to the top now by our understanding wives…)

So, I need to get going and clean the living room up a bit for our gathering tonight.  It’ll be a blast.  It always is.  For your viewing pleasure, here’s a look at the only injury of note last night.  It hurts worse than it looks.  Or maybe the other way around.  You be the judge.

See ya!

The *one* time I remove my gloves, this is what happens. Idiot.

The *one* time I remove my gloves, this is what happens. Idiot.

Get your Geek on

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Joy & I met James Marsters - also a masterful storyteller, and wicked cool.

Joy & I met James Marsters – also a masterful storyteller, and wicked cool.

Ya gotta love the geeks, freaks, nerds, and dweebs. 

You just  gotta.  Because if you don’t, they’ll mow you down with their oversized wooden replica swords from Final Fantasy MXXXVVVIII or whatever. 

This is my assessment after two days at my first comic book convention as an author:  These are My People.  These are from whence I came.  I’ve actually grown rather fond of football season, thanks to my wife, but given a choice, I’ll take a good comic book or any other fantastic tale any old day of the week.  (And now so too does my wife.  So we’re even.)

So, I’m more or less a bona fide Joss Whedon disciple, principally because the man can tell a great story.  He also has an eye for exceptional talent – male and female – and he gives them outstanding stories to work with as actors.  I got caught up into Buffy somewhere around season four originally, but what sold me was (SPOILER!…like it’s a secret anymore) when Angelus killed Jenny Calendar in season two.  Still a little shaken by that.  (And not just the murder, but the method and the motive.)  It was a brilliant, risky move.  I wish I took more of them in my own writing. 

Anyway — Joy and I had the pleasure of meeting Georges Jeanty at the Phoenix Comicon, and first off, we were just thrilled to meet an artist of his caliber who so well continues the Buffy arc through the Season 8 comics.  We’ve had a poster of his on our living room wall for years.  He’s just awesome.  (So is Jo Chen, who paints most if not all the variant covers; she is wicked incredible.) 

What made us appreciate Georges even more, though, was his emphasis on storytelling.  He gets it.  Big summer blockbusters with Whatshisname and Whatshername, those hottest young stars…they’re fine, they’re entertaining, I don’t begrudge them that.  But to be entertaining and spin a riveting story that sincerely examines our collective human conditions, that’s a whole other thing.  While Georges isn’t the writer of Season 8, it’s his job to make the words come alive.  It’s art, it’s entertainment, and above all, it’s story.

Like so many modern immortal characters — Kirk, Wolverine, Jules, Batman, to name a few personal favorites — those characters in the Buffy universe are, before anything else, human.  Prone to errors in judgement, to mistakes, to making the hard call when the hard call is what’s needed to win the day.  But they’re also heroes, of a sort.  I realize naming Pulp Fiction‘s Jules as a hero might be a stretch, but I think part of what goes into making a hero is that sense of trying to right past wrongs, to strive for redemption.  A good storyteller can take these fallible humans and show us that anything is possible; and not just show us, but make us really believe it.

It’s fiction.  It’s make-believe.  We pay storytellers to lie to us.  And we love it!

I don’t dress up like my favorite characters, I don’t cosplay (whatever that is).  And while I laughed as hard as anyone at Shatner’s notorious “Get a life!” bit on SNL, the reality is these fictions reach us on a very important level.  You want to dress up like an anime character and sing an a’capella version of the Superman theme at full volume (and a spot-on version, I noted, because I’m a geek), be my guest.  Because for as silly as it might look to those championship atheletes* who happened to be walking by at the time (which was hysterical to me), these freaks, dorks, and assorted spazzes — exactly the kids I would’ve hung out with in high school, and in many ways, still do — are on to something.  What some see as ridiculous, I see as high praise.  As the most heartfelt “Thank you” I can imagine anyone bestowing.

They’re saying thank you for getting it right.  For understanding.  I’d consider myself lucky to have that kind of impact someday.

Good storytelling mirrors us.  It’s what people like Jeanty, Whedon, Roddenberry, Stan Lee, and Bob Kane (to name a few) understood best:  We’re all heroes, if we dare to be.

So thank you, Comicon, for reminding me that it’s okay to “be a kid,” to act a little nuts sometimes, and to dream.  That’s a gift.

(* and if a person spends time and money playing fantasy football/baseball/whateverball, while dressing up in his or her favorite team’s costume, then that makes them…?  Well, let’s just say they’re storytellers, too.)

“I hugged my mom.”

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Quick story:

Recently, one of the students in my writing class said that after reading the short story I’d submitted for critique, she gave her mom a hug and told her she loved her.  (The story was about a teenage girl who was trying to work up the courage to talk to her mother about a pretty serious topic in the girl’s life.)

That’s why I do it.  That’s why I write.  I do it because I hope it matters to someone.

If something I’ve written gives you a break from real life, from homework headaches or taxes or your sick grandma or a job loss or whatever…then I figure I’ve done my job.  If something I’ve written motivates you to tell someone you love them, then I figure I’ve done my job.  Man, I love being an author – all the ups and downs and stress and joy.  LOVE it.  It’s what I always wanted to do, going back to middle school.  But what really gets me going is this idea that something I’ve invested so much time and energy into can have a seriously cool impact on someone’s life.

So, yeah.  That’s why I do it. 

Now go hug your mom.

…but half will.

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One of my favorite movies is Teachers with Nick Nolte, Ralph Macchio, a teeny tiny Laura Dern, JoBeth Williams…ah, anyway, a bunch of good actors.  It has one of my favorite set of movie lines ever and is the topic of this evening’s post.  Ralph Macchio’s character has set off the school fire alarm, and the entire high school empties out into the parking lot, thrilled to be out of class, smoking in the parking lot, etc.  Nolte, a teacher, has this exchange with Judd Hirsch, a vice principal (paraphrased):

HIRSCH:  Alex, half those kids won’t come back after the fire alarm.

NOLTE: But half will.  I think they’re worth it.

They are.  They’re all worth it.  Lookit, trust me, there’s a whole lot of teachers and other grown-uppy types out there who were probably certain where my future was, and it sure as hell wasn’t where I ended up (thank God).  I wouldn’t say I was a bad kid, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.  What I do know is this: A small but dedicated group of those grown-uppy types didn’t give up on me.  They were hard sometimes, they lost patience with me, yes, and some of ’em I went out of my way to make miserable.  (Apologies for that, if any of you are out there.) 

But when all was said and done, they said, in effect, “He’s worth it.”  They didn’t have to.  They chose to.  And in about six weeks, my first novel is going to be on the shelves as a result.  I was one of the half that came back.  So were most of my friends.  Where might we be if not for those teachers and leaders who didn’t let us give up on ourselves?  (Not blogging on my author website, for one…)

I can’t take back a lot of the evil, vile crap I did to some of my teachers over the years.  But I can and I will do my best to pick up where they left off.  Fact is, a pretty large percentage of teens only needs one thing: for one adult to stand up, to fight for them, to be there.  Yeah, they’re gonna mess up, make mistakes, pull fire alarms.  That’s what teenagers do.  (And I get to write books about it!) They also care tremendously – about a lot of different things.  They have the time and energy to devote to change things that  a lot of us grown-uppy types don’t.  Or won’t.

This applies equally to adults and teens:  Don’t let anyone ever, ever tell you can’t do something, and don’t ever give up on going after what you want.  Make choices today, even small ones, that will bring you closer to your goals.  Because half the people you know today aren’t coming back after the alarm.  But half will.  The only question is, which group do you belong to?

I think you’re worth it. 

 

a thin scream

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I’ll be honest with ya’ll, it was a rough end to ’09 and ’10 is defining itself as a time in which I’m trying desperately to refill my emotional gas tank, the needle of which hovers over E right now.  But I know one thing.  I know one thing.  I have a reminder of it on every Bauer bag/murse/backpack I’ve carried since about ’93 or ’94.  It’s a crappy yarn-woven bookmark that is useless for that function, so now is merely decoration and a reminder.  It was knitted for me by an older lady I remember only as “Babs” who I met while in intensive day treatment therapy and one lovely evening as an in-patient for a number of psychological problems.

I know one thing that this crappy yarn bookmark reminds me of every time I see it:  I will not ever let myself get so out of control that I need to go back to that hospital.

I’m tired, worn out, stressed, on the virtual brink of being broke; I’ve been a shoulder, a confidante; and I’m out of gas.  But I will never hurt myself again.  Ever.  If I ever thought I was about to, believe me, I wouldn’t hesitate to get the help I needed. But I don’t think that will ever be necessary, because I won’t let it be necessary.  I’ll work it out.  I’ll hit the heavy bag in my garage or scream or cry or play really f’ing loud Social D on my crappy Mexican Fender, but I will not hurt myself.

Nor should you.

Self-injury is not cool, not hip, not wicked-awesome, not anything but a thin bloody scream for help.  Don’t let it get to that point.  This is your only body.  Use it wisely.  Treat it well.  This is your only mind; ditto.  Your only heart; ditto again. I’m not saying ignore any hurt, any stress, any drama.  I’m saying find a good way to deal with it.  Hurting yourself is not going to help, not going to make it go away, and is not something you can take back.  It’s as addictive as any drug.

So please — don’t.  Get help.  A friend, a parent, a teacher, I don’t care, but get it.  You matter to me, and I guarantee you matter to others.

I’m not a licensed anything – not a doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, or anything else. I’m just a guy who took a mental tumble many years ago and made it back.  So can you.  It does get better.

Hang in there.  Instead of carving Liar, Hopeless, Failure, or anything else into your body, “write love on your arms,” a thousand times if you must.  But don’t give in and don’t give up.

Take care.

~ Tom