Aye aye oh! Shake your foundations.Sometime in fifth, or as late (!) as sixth grade, I started reading Stephen King. Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, his early collections of short stories, were and remain my favorites. (Although you must read The Long Walk by his Richard Bachman alias if you haven’t. One of my top five books of all time.)

In 1986, King’s directorial debut Maximum Overdrive came roaring into theaters, which means I must’ve seen it in ’87 on VHS or HBO. It’s a fun film–not to say “good”–based on King’s short story “Trucks,” starring a very smarmy Emilio Esteves, although to say the movie “starred” anyone is a stretch. The opening sequence includes a mechanical drawbridge that raises on its own!!! and makes cars crash all over the place. Later, kids are slain by rapidly ejecting soda cans!!!

But the soundtrack that played over it all . . . merciful Zeus. I had found AC/DC.

Which, I was promptly informed by my Missouri-Synod Lutheran school classmates, was an acronym for

AFTER CHRIST/DEVIL COMES!!!

I am not making that up.  True story. I still remember the kid’s name who first told me. And he was certain of this.

I tracked down the soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive; officially, AC/DC’s Who Made Who album, which only contained three new songs: the title song and two instrumentals, with the rest being a sort of “best of.”  I started scooping up AC/DC tapes

(New tape smell! Someone bring that back!)

as quickly as I could afford them. My favorite, still ranking as a top-five desert-island pick, was Fly On the Wall. Every song hit just the right note for adolescent me, with great riffs and colossal middle fingers raising to lyrics like:

Born in trouble they gave up on me/Teacher preachin’ what not to be/Call me dirty trash my name/Just tell the boys that I’m gonna be/Back in business again!

You could find this poetry scrawled on one of the yellow tab divider sheets in my Trapper Keeper in eighth grade. When I drafted a couple friends to make my first horror movie at the ripe old age of 13, I knew which music I’d be using for my soundtrack.

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I wrote the notes to what turned into my first movie  in sixth grade. I was home alone, and a few odd things happened, like rain with no visible clouds, the lights flickering, and the cats acting . . . okay, like cats, so maybe that wasn’t exactly noteworthy. These eerie events!!! formed the basis of what became my first feature film, The Moon Daemon.

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There are a number of things I could complain about when it comes to my K-through-8 school. Hell, there might even be a faint whiff of lawsuit if I closed my eyes and concentrated. But there are two specific things they did great, for which I am seriously grateful.

One: They let me write a novella, Derro the Warrior, which I later took to a Young Authors Conference at Arizona State University. That book stood in for a yearbook (I have zero yearbooks from the school), and was signed by everyone I liked, or everyone who tolerated me.

Two: They let me shoot a movie and edit it with their equipment. A horror movie. With a sound track by AC/DC. That included “Hells Bells.”

In retrospect, part of the allowance the staff must have made was the film didn’t star my best friends, two or three other ne’er do wells like myself. Rather, the film starred me, the pastor’s kid, and the board of elders’ kid.

It’s always about who you know.

But who cares? They let me make the thing and screen it during class time!

Furthermore, for all the things I could tell you about when it comes to my parents, and there’s plenty to go around, I have to give my dad credit: the guy put on a truly ridiculous costume and played the Big Bad for me in the movie. I mean…that’s love. Ain’t it?

He has a three-pronged garden tool for his right hand. BOO!

Now, this footage has not been seen by anyone — except maybe Joy — since 1988, when I showed it to my then-girlfriend and her family so they could appreciate the true genius that was my film. Inexplicably, instead of recoiling in horror, they laughed. A lot. And oddly, they insisted on referring to the film not by its blockbuster title The Moon Daemon, but rather as the diminutive Bucket-head.

Well, okay, maybe it’s because he had a bucket for a head. That makes sense.

Ridiculous or not, when we screened the film in class, we did get one legitimate, startled shriek from a girl when the titular character suddenly appeared behind us as if by teleportation. That was a great moment for me. It meant I could physically affect people by storytelling. That’s no small thing.

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I don’t remember the last time I listened to an Ozzy song on purpose. Decades. Nothing against Ozzy, he did some damn fine work; it’s just that tastes change. I know a guy who’s gone from Exploited to Enya. ENYA! I don’t get it, but it happens. It happens.

 (There’s a handful of Enya songs I like, too, but again…it’s been decades since I actually listened to one of them.)

I never lost my taste for AC/DC, though. With AC/DC, there are no surprises. That explains why some people don’t like them, I suppose. For me, they’re a comfortable old leather jacket, relic of a bygone time, yet valuable for exactly that trait: It takes but one progression or riff to take me back to when getting in trouble was fun; when I lived in that short moment where everything was new, everything was the first time. Watching some other old videotapes recently, I took a note about my friends and I, regarding my fiction: “Don’t forget the joy. Everything we did, we did with unfettered f***ing joy.” And it’s true. We did suck the marrow out of life, we did take everything–good and bad–to the Nth degree.

(Sometimes I miss that part of me.)

AC/DC does that, too. They’re never not fully engaged, whether it’s blowing up your video or shaking you all night long. Yeah, it all sounds alike. Yeah, it gets repetitive. But I like that predictability. You can trust AC/DC to give you a simple chord progression, a sweet solo, and a driving beat. AC/DC is everything that’s good and right about hard rock, and when I listen to them, I’m reminded viscerally about that brief moment in time when it only made sense to videotape a horror movie with a zero budget, no script, and a dad with a bucket on his head.

Good times. It’s what AC/DC and eighth grade should be all about.

Carrots are better with a little dirt.

Yes, I have click-baited my blog post with a “5 Things” headline. Live with it.

So I’ve got this garden, and only by sheer force of will am I able to keep myself from using sarcastic quotes around the word “garden.” Except, I just did it right there, so…moving on.

There really are at least five things I have picked up from teaching myself how to garden that are applicable to your fiction writing. In no particular order, they are:

1. Trust the soil and sun.

I don’t have a green thumb, though my father does. I pushed little holes into the store-bought dirt, chucked some heritage seeds into them, covered ’em up and hoped for the best. What that got me was not exactly a bumper crop, but for my first time out, the sugar snap and snow peas were delicious, and the carrot came out pretty nice. Your soil and your sun are your history, your experience, your feelings. Trust them to get the job done. They are what makes your voice and story different from any other.

2. But you have to weed and water.

That being said, gardens don’t grow themselves. Not the beneficial, yummy kind, anyway. It requires effort on your part to tend things, to make sure they’re getting enough water, to make sure weeds or pests aren’t destroying things. Most of us can’t roll out of bed, pop out a manuscript, and send it to Random House. Consider your first few years of novel writing as your apprenticeship. Trust your voice, yes; but learn your craft, too.

3. Use shit and scraps.

I didn’t use any actual manure in this garden, but I did use a homemade compost made from leftover soil and our fruit and veggie kitchen scraps. Your best writing, no matter the genre, will come out of your metaphorical shit. All the gross parts, the goo from the broken eggs, the fragile shells, the wilty green stuff. Fiction is about conflict and adversity, always. It’s the shit of human life, so bring yours to the keyboard and use it. All stories are about characters, and the more we identify with your characters, the more we will love your story.

4. Learn from your mistakes.

Like I said, I’m not a gardener, really. I threw stuff into the dirt and poured water on it. But even that modicum of effort showed me that I can actually grow stuff that is fit for human consumption. That’s a powerful thing, the first time you experience it–and so is storytelling. Never forget that.  But now I know how much water to use next time. I know that I needed to plant some other types of vegetation to help reduce the insect issues I had. I learned a lot this season from that little ill-tended square-footer; what might have happened if I’d actually paid close attention? Really gotten my hands dirty, so to speak?

No manuscript–no sentence–of fiction is ever wasted. Every word and every mark of punctuation is like money in your writing bank, slowly building toward a novel or story that will knock people’s socks off. That means even…no, that means especially the bad stuff. You won’t publish every word you write, but you’ll learn from each one.

5. Don’t share until it’s ready.

It really sucks to pull up what you think is going to be a gorgeous carrot, and instead it’s this little runty pale orange root. Growing food takes time; so does writing a novel. Or a story of any length, really. (In fact, I’d argue writing a great short story is much harder than writing a good or even acceptable novel.) Don’t pull your stories out of the dirt until they’re actually ready to be consumed; don’t show them till they’re ready. For beta-readers, that might be after you type “The End.” For agents or publishers, though, it means making absolutely sure everything that went into that story is the best it can be. Did you use good soil? Did you use good shit? Did you show enough patience and get enough coaching and help to make sure it’s ready to show off? Be patient, and keep working. The story and the vegetables will let you know when it’s time.

*Bonus: Ask around.

Read what others before you have learned. Talk to them in person whenever possible. You can learn more from a five minute talk with a published author, and from a ten minute backyard garden tour, than almost anywhere else. There are plenty of awesome books on both gardening and writing, and you should read them. (Tiny list below.) You don’t have to write this book or raise this garden entirely alone.

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Okay, look, I apologize for straining the analogy here. It’s a bit goofy, and a dash trite, I know. But the take-away is still for real: If I can plant a garden that yields an edible–nay, delicious!–carrot and some peas, then you can write a great story. Get busy!

Recommended Reading:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – Barbara Kingsolver

Plot – Ansen Dibell

Burning Down the House – Charles Baxter

COMING UP:

Behind the Music, episode 3: Shake Your Foundations

Type Something Up: What to do with too many ideas. 

“I recall that you were there/Golden smile and shining hair/I recall it wasn’t fair.”

This is therefore an examination of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope rather than reiteration of it, but any readers who have lost their hearts to a troubled waif or watched while someone else did will relate to Ty’s obsession. In fact, it is the watchers in this tale that carry a lot of the interest; Syd, Ty’s sister, and his zany best buds all provide admirable support in different ways for their lovelorn pal as he works very hard to break his own heart. —The Bulletin

As I’ve emphasized time and again, manicpixiedreamgirl is not autobiographical. Not literally. Emotionally, maybe. If you’ve read it — and you should! — you may recall a moment where our self-heart-breaking protag Tyler catches a glimpse of not-so-manic pixie Becky’s bag, on which is pinned a band logo patch. The band, astute readers have no doubt noticed, is Just This Once, who made an appearance in Zero opening for Gothic Rainbow at Damage Control. This little moment is based on reality.

[Sidebar: Just This Once is a real band that played exactly … wait for it… just that once. True story. I’ll post it someday.]

I saw my personal MPDG (who, like Becky, was not at all one) standing at a bus stop in front of the 7-Eleven nearest our school. She was just stepping onto the bus, and I saw her wearing that T-shirt. The orange earth and mysterious runes reading GREEN R.E.M.

First and only thought: What is a green rem, and how can I get one??

Fortunately, I had pop-musically trained friends like Tim and Greg to gently explain that a “rem” was R.E.M., and Green was their newest album. Great! I went and got it, and not unlike Tyler, listened to it until I liked it (manicpixiedreamgirl, p.160)

That’s the day I became an R.E.M. fan. Because, as I wrote in manicpixie, it’s about a girl. Isn’t it always?

It turns out I genuinely did enjoy Green. It also turned out I’d already enjoyed older songs by the band, I just hadn’t known it was them. Superman, It’s The End of the World, and The One I Love had played in the background of Tim’s house several times before, but I hadn’t bothered asking about them. To be sure, the jangly pop of R.E.M. was a big departure from my roots in junior high, where Ozzy, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC were de rigueur among my degenerate stoner buddies.

Huh huh–you said rigueur. That sounds like “dick.” Huh huh! OZZY!!!

But there was a girl at stake, and if she liked R.E.M., then by god, I would too. I even…

(Hold on. I am about to actually make this public. Jesus. Well, in a hundred years, who’s going to care?)

I even learned the “Stand” dance. Perfectly. I would correct others. Because there were lots of people out in public doing the “Stand” dance.

Not really. But I did buy the cassingle with “Memphis Train Blues” as the B-side.  By that point, I was committed. I picked up their previous albums (from Murmur through Document) and proceeded to listen to them endlessly.

I confess, linking the “Stand” video to this post has got me a little nervous, because while I probably still know the “Stand” dance — muscle memory, I swear to god — it’s not something I would show off at, say, a Social Distortion show. But to be fair, I hadn’t been to a Social Distortion show at that point. Music appreciation (or over-indulgence) is a fluid, incorporeal thing, with no real certainty of continuity, especially in high school.  Then again, so are friendships, romances, future plans, and often, parents.

Long after my non-relationship came to a non-close with that T-shirt wearing girl, R.E.M. remained a staple. I’m sure I would have fallen for Out of Time like the rest of the galaxy if I hadn’t already been a fan, but even then, their hit singles weren’t my favorite. Oh, I listened to “Losing My Religion” just as…religiously…as everyone else, but it was never my favorite. Just like “Stand” wasn’t, either.

I preferred, unironically thank you, R.E.M.’s more off-the-R.E.M.-path stuff, though I think now that they did, too. Document‘s “King of Birds” can still be found on my mix-CDs (which I do have, thank you again. If you’re nice, I’ll show you the video I made for it. But probably not.) I wallowed in mellow purple songs like “Perfect Circle” off Murmur. “Swan Swan H” (Lifes Rich Pageant) made zero sense then and makes zero sense now, but its slow-marching tempo and inscrutable lyrics were great for eyes-closed late-night crooning along. I’m still not sure what bone chains are, but it’s fun to sing.

The great thing about R.E.M. at that time was their sheer selection. If you bought AC/DC at any point in the last, say, eighty years … you got AC/DC. As Jim Breuer points out, they’d do a great “Row Row Row Your Boat.” You ready? You got to row! row! row!…Fire! All right! You ready?

R.E.M. gave this teen options. Plenty of fun, “Everyone sing along!” songs like “End of the World,” whose lyrics I believe are still being debated in Congress, or “Pop Song 89” which has a good beat and you can dance to it.

But then other times, sometimes even moments after a great dancing song when you’re all pumped up and ready to take on the night with your buds, you’d need to settle down and smoke a slow cigarette and wonder what SHE is doing right then. At those times, you needed a “World Leader Pretend,” where Michael Stipe could put into words so effortlessly what you were feeling:

I sit at my table/And wage war on myself/It seems like it’s all/It’s all for nothing.

(Did a video for that one, too.)

I lost my taste for R.E.M. right around Up. By 1998, other bands had supplanted the Athens group who’d walked me through a number of broken hearts and stupid choices. Once the internet became the internet as we know it today, I found myself going backward rather than looking forward, scouring the web for rare acoustic or live versions of older songs I loved. Apart from personal taste, no one can take away from R.E.M. that they put on a hell of a show, and they stuck to their artistic guns – for better or worse. Any band on Earth would do well to emulate how they did things, no matter the style of music.

Which actually leads me right back to Social D, another one of the few uncompromising bands that’s ever existed, but they don’t really share the same space as R.E.M., not in our world, and not in my own. So I’ll cover Mike Ness and his Spinal-Tapian cycle of musicians some other time.

It’s just funny how we find music. If you grew up in the 90s, you were going to find R.E.M. whether you wanted to or not. I’m glad to have found them before Out of  Time happened, because, street cred. But they would not have had the impact on me they did if not for that distressed T-shirt worn by That Girl at a bus stop circa 1989.

And for that, I thank them.

I may or may not be high in this photo. But I am definitely ROCKIN’!

The first pop music I can remember is Men At Work*. I had a recording of Business As Usual on audio tape, which I played on a tape recorder*. The tape: probably something inherited from my sister, the last sibling to leave the house. The tape deck: appropriated from my father.  This was not a stereo or boom box*, but a tape deck made mostly for recording meetings or interviews, complete with a cheap-ass Radio Shack mic.

(*ask your parents. Or possibly grandparents.)

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In 1973, a British band called Pink Floyd released a little-known work called Dark Side of the Moon.  Maybe some of you have heard of it.  (I wasn’t born yet.)

In 1983, a little college band which had nearly named itself “Cans of Piss” debuted their first album, Murmur. Apt, because most people couldn’t make out a word being sung. This was clearly a band destined to have little impact on the world of pop music.

And also in 1983, to, I’m guessing, zero national fanfare at all, a bunch of Orange County punks released a record called Mommy’s Little Monster. I didn’t care. I was in second grade, writing my first short story.

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These days, the truth is, I just don’t listen to full albums anymore. Not of new bands, anyway. There’s a few old standbys I can tolerate, but by the time I learned how to make mix tapes my freshman year of high school with a side-by-side tape-deck stereo, the idea of absorbing entire albums at once started waning. It wasn’t a quick death, but the most recently released full album I’ve listened to is Lindi Ortega’s Little Red Boots. (That was 2011.) Prior to that, it was probably 2004, with Social D’s Sex, Love, and Rock n’ Roll.

Sidebar: If you have anything besides your ears pierced, put any color in your hair that is not blonde or brown, wear anything resembling combat boots, have a mohawk…thank a punk. Those guys and gals got their literal asses literally kicked so you could one day watch Cadillac (!) commercials (among others) backed with music by the Ramones.

 

“You couldn’t walk into a mall get your little […..] pierced, and your little Doc Marten boots, and your crazy color for your hair. You walked down the street with blue hair, you was gonna get in a fight with about five angry construction workers, or the local college football team, rednecks, or cops.” ~ Mike Ness, Social Distortion: Live At The Roxy

The truth is, I didn’t discover Pink Floyd until at least 1988. Or R.E.M. until 1990. Or Social Distortion until about the same time. Just putting those three bands in a sentence will likely make at least a few of my few readers recoil in terror. I understand. It makes me feel that way, too.

The other truth is, I don’t much care. These are my people, for better or worse. The three bands that made the biggest impact on me. They – and many, many others of course – formed the soundtrack to a life later spent reliving it and retelling it in the form of novels. Without these bands, I’m not me, and in many ways, I don’t end up doing what I do now.

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So what follows will be a meandering look at my own musical history, from the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack (1986, thank you very much) to Tanya Donelly (the only musician to actually feature in the art in my office today), what was happening when I heard the music, where it takes me now, and whatever the hell else happens to pop up. This is a little side non-fiction project I’ve wanted to do for awhile, so it’ll likely be sporadic at best. But I need some journaling time, and kids, this is it.

Men At Work put out some great music. I’ve got a recording, don’t know from where, of Colin Hay doing a mellow acoustic version of Down Under that I rather enjoy. But Men At Work didn’t change my life. Being first doesn’t equate to being best, or favorite, or life-altering. I’m sure as I keep writing this series, I’ll find that many life-changing bands and songs, I don’t much care for anymore. That will be interesting to see. And some bands I won’t even admit to listening to. Unless two shits are truly not given at the time of the writing.

I’ll be using album release years to sort of anchor the stories, although as I mentioned above, actual release years may have nothing at all to do with who or where I was at the time (i.e., Dark Side of the Moon = unborn.) A lot of it will be about high school, as is appropos of my career path at the moment. We’ll see.

Anyway. Enough for now. I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

There is no dark side of the moon, really.

Matter of fact…

it’s all dark…

*Spoiler Alert* I’m gonna be swearin’! You’ve been warned.

So it’s been a righteously shitty few months over at the homestead, I’m not gonna lie. Nor am I gonna get into details because frankly, the list is epic and I don’t have the energy after the day I’ve had. See, there was this huge windstorm last night, and it knocked over the double-gate to my backyard. I mean, this thing was flat on the ground, snapped off at the posts, no shit.

The only reason I noticed, though, was that my dog Jacob kept going out, coming in, going out, coming in . . .

Which made me think, “Where the hell is Callie?” my other dog, whom I’ve had for something like eight or nine years now. A really happy, slobbery shepherd/retriever/maybe-chow mix. My first big dog. My first dog, really. So I tell Toby, “You know what Han Solo always says: I got a bad feeling about this.”

Sure enough, Callie is gone.

I don’t know for how long. As much as eleven hours is possible. We drive around, we post flyers, we cancel our trip out of town. And of course, there’s still the gate to contend with. Trust me when I tell you this is the shit cherry on my fucked-up-couple-months sundae. So in my head, because I’m too defeated to say it out loud, I pretty much just give up. On life, on people, on hope, you name it, the hell with it.

Here’s why we’re maybe not all doomed.

I call one of my best friends  and tell him about the gate. His response is, essentially, “Lemme grab my tools, I’ll be there in an hour.” I dunno if you’ve ever been in Phoenix in late June, but…it’s toasty out. And there is no shade by this gate. Did I mention my back went out so my help is basically limited to standing around?

But sure enough, he was there in an hour and going to work on that gate. My biggest contribution was driving to Lowe’s for the lumber.

Well, just as he’s wrapping up, the phone rings. It’s a neighbor a few streets away who, naturally, we’ve never met. They have Callie.

They took her to the vet to check for an RFID and get her checked out. They cancelled their plans to go out of town to help this dog they found in a school playground.

Start to finish – from the time I realized Callie was gone and the gate was smashed to getting Callie back and the gate back up – about five hours.

Well, this lovely older couple who found Callie of course refused any reward, nor would they even let me pay for the vet. So I go to our favorite local Italian restaurant to get them a gift card; it’s not enough for having my dog back safe and sound, but it’s something. The little Italian lady behind the counter asks me what the card is for. I tell her about Callie. She nods, nods, nods…then shoves a to-go cup at me and says, “Here. Go get something to drink. It’s hot out there. And I’m happy for you and your dog.”

So…

What could have and by rights should have been one of the worst of the worst days for me actually turned out pretty damned stellar. See, those people are still out there. My friend, this old couple, the restaurant owner. People like them, they are still out there. And by god, I needed to know that now more than ever after this last couple weeks. Yeah, it was a pain-in-the-ass kind of day, but I have my dog back, my gate up, and I discovered that just when I thought I could never and would never trust another living soul, these four folks showed up and took care of business. My business. They didn’t have to. They didn’t owe me.

They did it because that’s what you do.

So this week – this life – I hope you and I can both remember that when the shit looks shittiest, people like this are still out there, and they still care, even for people they’ve never met. Americans – the whole human race – we’re not doomed after all. Not while there’s this kind of community and selflessness happening. So hang in there.

Sidebar, I am so not kidding: Get your pet microchipped.

Have a great and safe holiday week.

Greetings to my three and a half blog readers! I know, I need a new website, something where I can and will post more often and talk about things that maybe matter in some small way. But I digress! What scares you?

Right now, I am either rapid-cycling or my barista gave me caffeine in my coffee drink. I don’t know which. But I’m all kinds of amped. Which is nice after the last couple weeks. But I digress! What scared you?

I was listening to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and thinking about my background, which really is in writing horror short stories as a kid. I’ve got about six different projects brewing right now, and one of them just so happens to be a horror story that I hope will more middle grade, but knowing me…well, it’s hard to say. I got to thinking about what books or stories actually, really scared me as a kid. Movies are easy; maybe you saw my Halloween blog post about them. But books? It takes a different flair to give someone the creeps (or terrors) than it does on film.

Then I remembered the inimitable (and late) John Bellairs. The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt is decidedly MG, but when the withered mummy shows up on a dark and stormy night…dude. That was creepy in fourth or fifth grade, no kidding. All of his kids’ books are awesome, some moreso than others, but none of which are merely passable. It was such a shame to lose Mr. Bellairs, and he’s someone I wish I could’ve met. I don’t hear his name crop up during discussions about scary books for kids, and I’m usually met with blank stares when I mention his name on panels and the like. This is truly too bad, and I hope you’ll give him a whirl. Start with The Curse of the Blue Figurine, or go straight to Mummy, whichever. But you can’t pick a bad one. (The possible exception are the novels released after his death, which were completed by someone else. Eh…I get it? But you can sort of “taste the difference.” )

Now, listen, let me couch what I’m about to say quite carefully, all right? I love Goosebumps. And Fear Street. They came around after I was past the age of his target audience, but only just barely, and I still (proudly!) have an almost complete collection of the original GB series. And yeah, I still read them. But let’s be serious: Stine is to kid lit as Saw 12 is to fine cinema, no? Oh, it might be fun. Maybe even one or two are memorable. They might even give you a chill or two. But can you give me three protagonists by name? I tried this and came up with: Carly Beth and Slappy. That’s one protagonist, and one villain. That’s it. I remember the endings to many of them (since endings were really what they were all about, other than manufactured page-turning cliffhangers). Compare this to Johnny, the Professor, or Fergie from Bellair’s Mummy series. Or Lewis Barnavelt, Uncle Jonathan, and Rose Rita. Bellairs wrote characters; Stine wrote sit-coms.

That’s not a complaint! It’s not even a fact, it’s just an opinion. Bellairs has a damn near literary quality to him that Stine doesn’t, and that’s okay. But what I wonder is, is there room for that kind of literary kids’ fiction? Is that what I’m even writing? (Don’t break your arm pattin’ yourself there, skippy, amiright?) Has the old guard of librarians already passed, to be replaced by fresh, young librarians who have no idea who Bellairs is? The thought is chilling. Which I guess is appropriate…

Anyway. I’m still researching this, and think maybe I’ll even pitch it as an article. Meanwhile, I’m watching my first film The Moon Daemon, shot on an ancient VHS videocamera, wherein the VHS unit itself had to be carted around seperately from the camera. Yeah, I’m that old.

But one last thing about The Moon Daemon. (Chad? Don? You out there?) And this ties in more specifically to the message I always try to convey at my school visits and other panels.

Three 13-14 year olds improvised a three-act structure script (we had no actual script, we literally made up the scene as we went along. Yes, it shows.), shot it, edited it, and put it together. Silly, even stupid? Yes. But so much fun. And we did it. Several adults, including my dad and at least one teacher, helped us get it done, and even let us screen it at school.

More of that for our kids, please. Much, much more of that.

Happy Halloween…in June.

(P.S. I’ll be at Changing Hands on June 17 at 1 pm to be part of a reader’s group for ZERO. Hope you can make it!)

So I was reading this message board earlier in which the casual question was asked, “If science suddenly proved 100% for sure that the Mayans were right and the world’s going to end in December…what would you do today?” A fair and fun question, and once you — meaning, I — stop looking at it critically (the utter and complete breakdown of global society, etc.) the end purpose is, of course, to see what your priorities really are or ought to be.

The thing is, and I mentioned this in PARTY, you can’t functionally live each day like it was your last. You can’t. Or, you could, but you’d end up broke, in prison, and/or dead very quickly. I, for one, would immediately resume unhealthy habits that I fought for years to get rid of, and it’s only because I choose to assume and hope I’ll be around long enough to enjoy the long term benefits of having quit.

But what you can do is assess what you really want outta this gig. When I go to schools and tell students they can do anything, there are realities to contend with, sure. If the entire room wants to be NFL quarterbacks, well…that’s probably not gonna happen. True enough.

My argument is this: If you relentlessly pursue that goal, you will find other opportunities opening up that may make you even happier, and certainly no less happy, than if you’d gotten the big dream.

I always wanted to be a movie star (who doesn’t?). Some of my theatre friends and I always just assumed that’s where life would take us. Well, it didn’t.  (Thank goodness.) But I spent 11 years having a great time doing shows with my own theatre company. I had three great years of music and theatre and art at Chyro Arts Venue. I wouldn’t trade those for anything. I even got to make some very fun and very low budget movies with my best friends. Totally worth it. [That link is NSFW; language!]

So maybe you won’t be an NFL quarterback. But have you ever considered how many jobs are associated with just one NFL broadcast game? All the TV positions, all the on-field positions, all the behind-the-scenes positions? Going after that first goal will, I promise you, reveal and open doors you hadn’t even thought of.

You can’t live every day like it was your last. You gotta pay the bills. You have to hope and plan for tomorrow. But for crying out loud, don’t use that as an excuse to give up and just watch TV all night. Whatever it is out there that you want to do, go do it, and don’t let anyone stop you.

In other news:

ZERO comes out April 24! There will be a big release party at Changing Hands, so please come! And please get your copy that day or week from a brick and mortar store. It’ll help me and it’ll help them and, I daresay, ultimately it will help you. Bookstores and libraries are among those thing you might not realize how much are missed until it’s too late.

Speaking of Changing Hands, don’t miss this year’s Yallapalooza at the downtown Phoenix library. Classes and authors and signings and food and…just be there, it’s going to be sweet!

Take care,

~ Tom

If you follow me on Facebook (and you SHOULD!) you may have noticed a few recent posts about mix tapes.

First, I have to say, I feel bad for the youngin’s out there who will never fully appreciate this lost art. John Cusak in High Fidelity has a great speech about mix tapes that well-encapsulates their essence, magic, and, I daresay, necessity in figuring out one’s own pet angst.

Take this lovely doozy as a for-instance: The title of the mix is APOLOGLIES. (Read that carefully. Neat little word trick there, no?) Some of the song titles include Don’t Come Around Here No More; Sell Out; Bang and Blame; Beat on the Brat; Broken Circles; Indifference…

Cripes, who was I so mad at in December of 1994?

Then there’s the apparently bleak, oppressive, thoroughly hopeless Christmas of ’92. Mix title: Can I Have Some Time Alone? (cribbed, of course, from R.E.M.’s backing vocals on It’s The End of the World As We Know It). This lil beauty includes such Christmas gems as The God That Failed; Losing My Religion; Born to Lose; Sorrow; Am I Evil; and, yes, It’s The End of the World.

You’ll be happy to learn, I hope, that I feel much better now. Merry Christmas!

As I mentioned on Facebook, I’m sort of appalled at how many of these songs I’m just flat-out missing. Some I have no idea who the band is. I don’t have the tapes anymore; these are just the paper sleeves that went into the cassette cases. Something else Today’s Youth won’t ever understand: New Tape Smell. Who’s with me?! Man, I haven’t smelled a new cassette tape in forever. Geez. Now I need to go make a mix tape.

Anyhow, it seems appropriate that I should be sorting through these paper sleeves just as R.E.M. is disbanding, because they feature so prominently on these mix tapes. I was one of the world’s biggest R.E.M. fans for a long time. That time passed awhile back, but I still appreciate them, and still enjoy the music. Just not on quite the rotation as in years past. Thanks, fellas.

Bring back the mix tape! There’s far too much consolation to be had in their creation. Making a “playlist” is a poor substitute for decorating a sleeve. Where’s the art? Where’s the painstaking wait as you listen to each song as it records? None of this drag-and-drop crap; I want a dual-tape deck, man. I want to be alone in my room and tell my posters that no one understands!

Okay, I still do that, so, happily, some things don’t ever change.

If you haven’t heard, there’s a third novel of mine coming out in 2013, and I’m right in the middle of my first round of revisions. And, as I do for all my novels, I’ve created a playlist for it…but it’s not the same. Still! Always good to back and mine the insanity of high school for plot fodder. (Plot Fodder, also a good name for a band.)

In other news: Toby is cute. That is all. ZERO comes out in less than six months!

Wow. So it was a year ago today that PARTY first hit the shelves. A lot has happened — but then, isn’t that true for all of us?

LOOKING BACK:

I discovered two things that I love most about this job: The book people, and the reader people. I’ve met the most amazing booksellers, educators, and authors this year, and I’m indebted to all of them for helping me out along the way. It’s amazing how many awesome authors live in Arizona. And there’s more on the way. But they’re not just good writers; they are great people. Lisa McMann, Robin Brande, Jon Lewis, James Owen, Janette Rallison, Aprilynne Pike…and those’re just the authors. I’ve met friends of friends who I now call my friends too, who love a mean game of Apples to Apples and who sincerely love books and those who write them. I’m just one lucky son-of-a to have met them all.

Then there’s the students I get to talk to at the various high schools and libraries. They’re the real thing, and the real reason I want to do this for the rest of my life. The stories I’ve heard from them and from their teachers and administrators has made me so angry I couldn’t see straight. I am constantly appalled at how many parents out there really don’t get it. For awhile I thought that my PARTY characters were merely vague mirrors of me (and they are) as a high school student. After meeting so many teenagers, though, I realize that people like Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, Morrigan’s parents, are more common than I’d thought.

It’s pretty much my mission in life now to reach as many teens as I can and let them know they can do anything. Sure, there’s a certain measure of “being realistic” that maybe should be observed…but honestly, all said and done, teenagers are biologically wired to be reckless, and I think they should be. Not in a life-threatening way, of course; not in a drink-and-drive kind of way, not at all. I mean in a “I can accomplish anything” way. That’s the message, and I won’t stop saying it. Deal.

Since PARTY, I’ve sold my second novel, ZERO, which should be out about a year from now. So that rocks. I’ve got seven or eight novels in the works at present, I’ve gotten to speak at conferences and write articles, I’ve gotten to teach classes. All in all — a great year. And I saw none of it coming.

LOOKING AHEAD:

So there’s ZERO, and I’m excited to see it finally on the shelves. There’s another couple of possible projects being discussed, but I don’t think I can comment any more than that on it just yet. I’m hoping to release a “new” chapter of PARTY as a free PDF soon, and with a little luck, at some point I hope to have an audiobook ready to go. Time’ll tell.

Then there’s the baby.

Why do I have seven or eight books cooking right now? Because come August, I simply have no idea how exactly my life and schedule is going to change. There’s  a baby boy on the way, and…I just don’t know. I can’t wait to meet him, I know that much. I also know that I can’t not write, but I don’t know when or how just yet. I’ll have to ask him.

I’m working on getting a regularly scheduled video blog/vlog/whatever going, but my technology is not currently cooperating. I’m planning on some live-stream events, and am getting setup to do Skype visits. Here’s hoping that all works out!

Mostly, I just want to say thank you to all the readers, all the reviewers (yes, good and bad alike…both are instructive). I’ve gotten to do what I always dreamed of doing, and it’s sometimes unreal. But it should go to show you that anything is possible.

Hear me? Anything.

See ya.