David Aaron Clark, writer

A man I knew very tangentally during the heyday of Frighten the Horses and my erotica writing career, David Aaron Clark, died last month, I just noticed. In addition to being an erotica writer and editor, he was involved with the adult movie scene, writing screenplays and covering the industry in reviews and news articles. No newspapers seem to have published obituaries, but here is a tribute by Amelia G, a fellow traveler.

technorati: erotica writers

Punctuation is important

I really laughed when I saw this mispunctuated news story from the website of the Clear Lake Citizen, which reports news from the Clear Lake area of suburban Houston, Texas, where I went to high school. Emphasis mine.

A long-running feud between El Jardin neighbors is being blamed in a triple shooting that resulted in the death of one woman and sent two men to the hospital Saturday night. ...

Curtis Shaw said he was in his house when he heard gunshots. "It was just unbelieveable." He knew the two couples were feuding "but you never would have thought it would come to this," he said.

"I am shocked I've been living here 12 years," said neighbor Julie Karanik.

Yes, it took a triple shooting for her to wake up and realize what a dump she was living in.

technorati: Clear Lake

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

technorati: bloggers, privacy, identity

A friend reviews my novel How They Scored

My friend Lisa B wrote a very nice review of HOW THEY SCORED. An excerpt:

After the men gather, the plot picks up steam and their interactions increase, with Pritchard quietly portraying a shifting dance of male alliance and competition. Their picaresque sex tales start to cast a subtler light on their characters. The story of the Serbian fashion model ends poignantly. A tale of a threesome takes an unexpected turn, with the storyteller unable to perform, feeling both sentimental about an old girlfriend and ambivalent about the suddenly aggressive behavior of his current one. In short, the scorekeeping of these men becomes less about tallying up sexual conquests and more about assessing their own strengths and weaknesses -- and the elusiveness of their desires.

Wow, thanks Lisa!

An understandable confusion

He was gradually, I wouldn't say losing his mind, but he would get confused about things. I remember when my daughter was born, he would refer to her as a book. And he would refer to his latest book as a child. He really had things turned around.

Screenwriter Robert Towne on novelist John Fante
in an interview in Stop Smiling magazine, no. 32

technorati: Robert Towne, John Fante, writers

I iz on vacation

Woo, it's December

Lots of friends of mine have websites which were really rocking at one time or another but which have fallen into only occasional use. Others have moved entirely to the semi-walled garden of Facebook, which I refuse to join. I don't want to be one of those people whose blogs languish, so I'll give an update -- whether it's needed or not -- for anybody who checks in here. But before I do, thanks for reading and being even occasionally interested in my words.

First, I've been busy in my day job as a technical writer. We're entering the last stages of a project that started almost a year and a half ago, and as I'm responsible for tracking the deliverables -- excuse me for lapsing into business-speak -- for a team of four writers including myself, I've been spending time tying up all the loose ends. Actually that project will go until freaking April 2010, and then there's a follow-on that has become almost indistinguishable from the current project that will deliver in July. Past that, the future at work is opaque except for version numbers that are higher than the version number of the product we're working on now.

Then I've been spending time every weekend working on my current novel project. I can't even remember whether I've mentioned it much on this blog. Briefly, it's based on several different ideas that go back as far as 1996, before I even started working on the first finished novel I wrote (Make Nice) from 1998 to 2003. I started working on this latest project with a final set of ideas I had about a year ago, and I'm about 58,000 words into it -- about halfway through, or a little less than halfway through. I'm more excited about this project than I have been about a project in a long time, both because of the plot, characters and setting on the one hand, and the fiction techniques I've chosen to use on the other.

Speaking of Make Nice, I'm thinking of self-publishing that too, to give fans an opportunity to buy it and to be able to give some copies to friends. Of course, I haven't sold very many copies at all of my other self-published books, How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, but more than 0, which is how many copies of Make Nice have been sold.

So if you're a reader of my sex story collections Too Beautiful and How I Adore You, you should like How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, even though they're rather different from the sex stories you're familiar with. It's still my writing. Still kind of funny.

That reminds me of something my erstwhile literary agent said when she had taken a first read of my Bangalore book (now titled Mango Rain), which contains one sex scene. Not having read my sex story collections, but only heard about them, she said that when the sex scene in the Bangalore book started there was a noticeable falling-into-place of tone, as if I was suddenly on more familiar and comfortable territory.

And that's one reason why I'm writing novels which are not all about sex (Lesbian Camp Girls, which is definitely all about sex, and How They Scored, which is only half about sex, notwithstanding). Writing sex stories was too comfortable and familiar.

So, back to the novel writing on the weekend.