Road trip -- end of last day

I'm back in San Francisco. I unloaded the car and returned it to the rental car place by the airport, Cris giving me a ride home. On the way home we went grocery shopping.

Miles driven: 5620
Motels stayed in: 10
States driven through, in addition to California: 13
Time zones visited, in addition to my own: 2
People visited: 3
Pictures kept: 253
Coffee drunk: 11 days x approx. 24 oz. per day = 4 1/8 gal.
Number of mornings I had to scrape snow off the car: 2

Here's the whole route:
B: Wendover, UT
C: Ogallala, NE
D: Vermillion, SD
E: Bellevue, NE
F: Des Moines, IA
G: Clear Lake, IA
H: Eagan, MN
I: Staunton, IL
J: Olathe, KS
K: Colorado Springs, CO
L: Gallup, NM
M: Laughlin, NV
N: Barstow, CA

Road trip, end of day 10

I started fairly early from Gallup, NM and plowed down Interstate 40 on my way to Barstow. It took about three hours to get to Flagstaff, where I had brunch, and after that I encountered about a hour's worth of light snow going through the mountains between there and Prescott. But I knew the temperature wasn't below freezing, so I wasn't worried.

I just want to say how helpful the internet has been on this trip. Whether it was me planning my route the night before, or at times stopping in a McDonald's to check weather conditions or look for a motel -- and a lot of McDonald's have free wi-fi now -- it's been extremely helpful. Sometimes I even called voncookie to ask her to look up something for me when I was en route and couldn't find a connection.

After I came down off the mountains, the desert started looking like the Mojave Desert I'm familiar with. I decided to take the scenic route -- old route 66 between Seligman and Kingman in Arizona. And it was really beautiful out there. The clouds were still low, and it was drizzling much of the way, but there are no giant billboards, and almost no traffic. It was like driving through a national park at 65 mph.

After that, I still had no patience for Interstate 40, and for some reason I really wanted to play roulette. I can't explain it, but it was a strong urge on my way out, though when I went to a casino in West Wendover the first night, all I did was futilely plop $20 into a slot machine to no avail. But today I found myself descending a steep slope on an Arizona state highway, from elevation 5000 to elevation 500, down to the Colorado River. You cross a bridge over from Arizona to Laughlin, Nevada, a town consisting entirely of huge casinos and a few shopping centers, with no fanfare, no "welcome to Nevada," because, well, it's kind of obvious.

I went in search of a Bank of America ATM to get some money with which to gamble, and then walked into one of the casinos at random. Having never played roulette in my life, I stood watching for a while before jumping in. Somehow, no doubt through beginner's luck, I turned $60 into $140. Actually I was up to about $163 before sliding back and then quitting before I fucked up too badly.

Having actually beaten the house, however trivially, I got the hell out of Nevada and drove the rest of the way to Barstow. I got a great desert sunset too.

Tomorrow I'll drive to San Francisco and home. It's supposed to rain.

Road trip, end of day 9

This morning I had to choose between taking I-70 through the Rockies, or taking I-80 as I had done when I came out, or taking a southern route. The weather forecast for the northern routes was very snowy, and though I came on this trip to find snow, I do have to be back at work in a few days and I couldn't really afford to get stuck overnight a thousand miles from San Francisco. So I decided to take I-40, which goes through Flagstaff.*

I headed south out of Colorado Springs, quickly leaving the parts where snow had fallen last night, and drove south until I got to Santa Fe. There I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a shopping center, which was ten times better than I've generally been eating, because I had fish tacos and the ingredients were fresh and good. It is true that they got my order wrong at first, and after the waiter had taken away the mistake, I said out loud to myself, "How could they get that wrong?" whereupon the woman next to me said, "At least the proprietor seems to be sober today."

Then south some more, across the New Mexico border and past Raton. I went through Raton in 1976 in the middle of the night, and at the time I got the impression that it was sort of clinging to the side of a mountain. It didn't seem nearly that precarious today. Maybe in 1976 I was at some out-of-the-way gas station. I do remember that I had just woken up, and it was cold at night even though it was late May, and the guy who was doing the driving explained we were in the mountains. I really had no idea which way was up.

Then I turned west on I-40 at Albuquerque. I had another decision to make: stop in Gallup at sunset, or keep going another three hours to Flagstaff. The fact is, last night I was really exhausted by the time I got to bed. So I decided to stop early tonight. The fact is that I'll return on Sunday even if I did tackle another three hours tonight, so I decided to take it easy on myself so that the last full day of driving tomorrow would be more pleasant.

Driving through Colorado and especially New Mexico was just beautiful today -- the red mesas, the snowy mountaintops, the dramatic clouds, the rain showers seen in the distance, the grassy foothills.

* Actually it's supposed to snow tomorrow in Flagstaff anyway, so I might get snow in any case.

Road trip, end of day 8

In the morning, I met a friend from Open Salon for breakfast in Kansas City, after which we took a fast spin around a few of the city's really nice neighborhoods. Man, there was a lot of money in Kansas City in the first part of the 20th century, judging by those buildings. I was able to take a few pictures before my camera ran out of batteries.

Then it was west through Kansas. "Trig" told me "You'll see plenty of Kansas," and was he ever right. It took all day to drive across. And I didn't dare speed, because there was a highway patrolman every 20 miles or so.

Kansas started out rolling hills and sorta treesy, and by the time you get to the western border, it's completely flat and there isn't a tree in sight that wasn't purposely planted by someone.

There was no snow at all on the ground all through Kansas, at least on I-70 today. When I got into Colorado and the sun set, I got a little snow. I wound up in Colorado Springs just as it started coming down for real.

Perhaps the strangest site today was the horrible black eye on a waitress in a diner in Salina. Poor thing.

Road trip, end of day 7

I spent much of today on a nostalgia trip visiting the places in southern Illinois where I spent my childhood. First I swung by the Mordor-like town of Roxana, the site of the (now former) Shell Oil Refinery where my father worked and where I actually lived for several years as a tot. Yes, along with several other families, mine actually lived inside the refinery fence in "staff houses." We were among the last families to live there; after we moved in 1963 they tore down the houses, which had stood from the 1920s. In this picture, where you see a red brick building on a low rise, that's actually where the houses were.

But the visit was not a complete waste of time, as there is actually a very well-stocked museum just outside the refinery gates, utterly filled with memorabilia from the refinery itself, from jackets and coveralls worn through the years by workers, to photographs of self-consciously smiling men looking at huge pipelines, to pictures of them bowling and playing baseball. Staffing the museum was an ancient, bent woman who identified herself as the former secretary to the refinery's manager during the years I lived there. She did recognize the name of my father, who was one of the managers.

In 1963 we moved to nearby Edwardsville, a very Norman Rockwell-ish small town. It was only about five miles away, but the hellish environs of the refinery were unseen and (more importantly) unsmelled. We lived in this house until January 1970, when we moved to Texas.

I spent a few hours driving around the town. I had visited once before, in 1995. At that time -- 25 years after leaving -- the town struck me as still rather like the town I had left behind. But today -- 15 additional years later -- it was much more unrecognizable. There has been a lot more development in the last 15 years than in the 25 years before that. The thing that really blew my mind was a new commercial development on the other side of a small wooded ravine where I spent endless hours playing when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. Seeing the ravine from the edge of this development -- a spot where there had not even been any roads when I was a child -- was a very surprising perspective.

I took a lot of pictures of the most historical things I could find in the town. Then I finally left. The town of my childhood is really no more.

After that I drove west across the Mississippi into Missouri, which I spent the afternoon crossing, arriving finally in a Kansas City suburb after dark. Here I am staying in a Hampton Inn, which is really nice, but a little expensive.

I used the gym, and then I drove to a nearby shopping center to find something to eat. For the first time in my life, I went to a Hooters. I'm sure the bizarre scantily clad waitresses are well known to everyone. It's just like being in a strip club, except they aren't quite naked, and they're not going to get naked. Instead, they bring you spicy buffalo wings or, in my case, a mahi-mahi sandwich which was actually very good. Otherwise, the girls are pretty much the same (though prettier), all false-friendly and bending over to give you a good look. Luckily there are huge televisions hung about the room at ceiling level, all showing sports; it's easy to just sit and look at these so you don't feel you are being unnecessarily exploitative.

Road trip, end of day 6

This morning I reversed my path through Minnesota on I-35 back down to the place in Iowa I had stayed on Sunday night, and then I veered east through Iowa, down to the Quad Cities, and down past cities like Peoria and Springfield, to a desolate exit on I-55 near a town called Staunton, and another Super 8 motel, this one in a somewhat unnecessarily grand building that I suspect was originally built as a Holiday Inn. When I checked in, I turned on the TV, and this is the first motel I've stayed at which didn't have the Weather Channel as the first thing that popped on.

It was snowy all the way down, snowy on the ground that is. The sky was perfectly clear all day long, brilliantly sunny and windy and cold. I saw a couple more spin-outs, one of them along a strangely unplowed mile of freeway in Illinois. That short stretch was the only part of the nearly 600 miles of freeway I drove all day that was covered in snow and ice.

The countryside didn't vary that much today. It's either very flat and covered with snow, or rolling hills covered with snow. Today the rivers and creeks I saw in Iowa and Illinois were not frozen, as were all the rivers I saw Sunday and Monday in Iowa and Minnesota. The other surprising thing is just how much rural countryside there still is in the U.S. I feel like I've seen fewer than expected suburban housing developments, like the kind you see in California.

I've driven more than 2700 miles so far and I'm just over halfway through the 11 days of my trip. Tomorrow I'm going to check out my old home town of Edwardsville, Ill., which I have only been back to once since I left in 1970, and that one time was 15 years ago.

Road trip, end of day 5

Not much driving today -- just the 140 miles from Clear Lake, IA to the suburbs of Minneapolis, and then into the city. After scraping the snow off the car -- not so difficult, because it wasn't really frozen on, and it was just a matter of brushing a lot of powder off the car -- I got on the road. I saw a few more overturns, because the morning was as snowy and windy as the previous afternoon. But the weather calmed down by the time I arrived at my hotel in suburban Eagan. I had time during the day to do laundry and exercise in the hotel's exercise room.

Then it was into the city to meet my friend Alexis, who is a local celebrity of sorts, author of the relationships advice column in one of the weeklies, as well as food critic and budding restaurateur. We've known each other for several years, since she wrote a fan email to me after reading my work, but we'd never met. After dinner at a Minneapolis bar-restaurant, she gave me a comprehensive driving tour of the interesting parts of the city, and threw in St. Paul for good measure. She didn't even know how much I like to be taken around like that. If only I'd had a better night's sleep in Clear Lake, I might have been a little bit more lively too.

Tomorrow, a big driving day, all the way down almost to St. Louis, Mo.

Road trip, beginning of day 5

Here's my car this morning:

Of course all that snow around the car has been accumulating for a week. In the Des Moines Register this morning there was a story about how cabin-feverish Iowans have begun attacking each other with snow shovels.

I bought a scraper.

Road trip, end of day 4

After my coffee with C.F. in Des Moines, I came out of the cafe to brilliant sunshine. The snow had stopped. But before I'd left, I'd looked on the internet at the radar for the area, and saw a storm coming down from the northeast. It would cross my path as I headed north.

I got on the freeway anyway and took I-35 north across northern Iowa. At first it was easy going; then the wind picked up and began blowing snow across the road. As I was in the leeward lanes -- the southbound lanes were more exposed to the wind -- I wasn't too worried. But toward sunset, after I'd been driving about an hour, I began to see cars that had run off the road. I had seen the same thing in the morning, and in fact asked C.F. about it, and she said that the cars with florescent green streamers on the aerial were those which had been checked by the highway patrol and their occupants rescued if necessary. Those cars were waiting for tow trucks and might have been there for a few days, she said.

At first I saw cars like those, with the green streamers, but then I started to see cars which actually had people in them. then I saw two cars off the road with one overturned. And then I realized there was a stretch of about half a mile, on a broad, sweeping curve, where about 10 cars had gone off the southbound lanes into the hundred meter-wide snowy median. WTF! When I looked back over my shoulder at the mini-diaster -- there were already emergency vehicles arriving -- I saw that the setting sun was right in the eyes of these people in the southbound lanes as they rounded the curve. (Here is the only picture of a crashed car I was able to take.)

Fuck, I thought. How come all these people -- presumably locals -- had gone off the road and I was still on it? Was the sun in their eyes really that bad? I started to get a little paranoid -- was there some danger lurking around the next bend that would claim a dozen cars from my lanes?

The wind was clearly getting worse. It was getting dark. A man on the radio said it was ten degrees. C.F. emailed me and said to get gas now because it was going to get really cold and I didn't want to be outside the car. I drove another half hour, exited at Clear Lake, and got a motel room, another Super 8. Drifts of snow two feet tall were piled up on either side of the driveway. It is like the freaking South Pole here, and I'm not even in Minnesota.

At this exit is the first Denny's I've seen since Nevada. One of the illusions shattered for me during this trip is the ubiquity of Denny's. Also Starbucks -- until today at midday I hadn't seen one since Salt Lake City. I hadn't had a decent meal since breakfast, so I headed for the Denny's. I personally had no traffic disasters; in fact, my rental car, a Ford Focus, is handling like a champ. (The approximately 20 cars I saw today that had gone off the road were of all types and sizes, so clearly having a "heavy" car does not necessarily mean you won't spin out.)

Road trip, middle of day 4

I'm at Java Joe's Coffee House in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, to meet a contact from Open Salon. Java Joe's is a funky wood-floored place in a historical brick building, an establishment that would be totally at home in 1970s Austin, Texas. There's even an attached theater space.

This morning I drove through some beautiful snow-covered Iowa countryside -- rolling hills, more trees than Nebraska, the occasional beautiful Victorian farmhouse. It was snowing lightly but steadily, and accumulating anywhere a car or truck wasn't traveling. When I pulled off at a rest stop -- and there are AWESOME highway rest stops here that are like little airport terminals, complete with cubbyhole workstations and free wifi -- the parking lot and sidewalks were snow-covered.

While driving I listened to an awesome polka show broadcast from northeastern Nebraska -- the same area I drove through yesterday. This show was like everything "A Prairie Home Companion" pretends to be, but for reals. People would phone in requests and dedications and talk about the falling snow, and there were funky local commercials. It was a totally great show, broadcast from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 pm every Sunday. Was it AM 900? Yes! the All Star Polka Show on KSJK.

Road trip, end of day 3

I started the day in the dusty, grimy truck stop/motel area of Ogallala, Nebraska, tootled down I-80 some more, and finally left the road at Grand Island. Heading northeast and then north, I went through towns like Central City and Columbus before approaching the Missouri River. The last twenty miles or so were more interesting in terms of the stress of the driving -- snow blowing across the road made me pay attention.

The farther north I got, the more snow I encountered. I crossed into South Dakota at Yankton, then visited nearby Vermillion, home to the Univ. of S.D., because @voncookie has applied for a job there. Kind of a nice town. See the pictures.

Then I planned to go all the way back down to Des Moines, Iowa. But on my way down I-29, it started drizzling a little. Knowing the temperature was at or below freezing, I was afraid of encountering ice on the dark highway, so instead of Des Moines, I ended up in a suburb of Omaha. I'll hit Iowa tomorrow.

I really enjoyed the snowy landscape today.

Road trip, afternoon of day 3

I'm in Vermillion, South Dakota, home to the University of S.D. There's about a foot of snow on the ground, a brisk wind, and it's about 30 degrees. The sun should set in about an hour, but the overcast is so thick I'll never see it.

I drove north through Nebraska to get here, through rolling farm country. The snow got deeper the farther north I drove, first along US 30 and then US 81, and the last 30 miles before the South Dakota border there was snow blowing across the road. But none falling. I crossed the border at Yankton, where I took a few pictures, then headed 20 miles down the road to Vermillion, where I found a small, nice, used bookstore downtown. Then I found the university campus and drove past it and took a few more pictures. Now I'm in a McDonald's across the street.

There are zero pedestrians braving the cold wind. I won't blame them.

From here I'll drive into Iowa, might make it as far as Iowa City.

Road trip, middle of day 3

I'm in Columbus, Nebraska [map], a medium-sized small town (for Nebraska). About 90 minutes ago I finally turned off I-80, around the halfway point between San Francisco and New York, and turned onto US 30, which goes northeast for a while. The US highway parallels the train tracks, and in the 90 minutes I saw four long freight trains. I drove through tiny towns with one gas station with a convenience store attached, one grain elevator, and a collection of houses. Usually there are two brick buildings on what used to be the center of town, but the highway is often a few blocks away from those. Other times, such as Central City, you go right through town.

Between towns it's flat farmland. Rolls of hay lie on the edges of fields, long irrigation contraptions stand on spindly legs, and a few inches of snow lies between rows of brown stubble. In western Nebraska there was almost no snow, but there's much more the farther east I get.

The day turned very gray, but checking the radar I see that a storm is to my northeast, and since I intend to drive due north from here along US 81, I think I'm going to miss it.

Road trip, end of day 2

I got up around 7:00 a.m. in Wendover, Utah, a place which in the light of day looked just as horrid and ugly as it did at night, only without the glamor of the casinos' neon lights. Eating only an energy bar and taking a coffee from the motel lobby, I took off eastward across the Utah salt flats. I got breakfast in Salt Lake City, zoomed into the mountains east of there, and up into the very high desert country. All along, I had great luck with weather. Either the bad weather stayed to the south, or it blew through before I got to a particular spot.

I hit the Wyoming border about 11:30 and all continued clear. It was only after I left Rawlins and started climbing up even higher that I went through my first bit of weather. Around a place called Elk Mountain, I went through about ten minutes of blowing snow and snow showers. But it wasn't bad -- the visibility was never less than, say, half a mile. And it was over in ten minutes. I did see an overturned big rig.

All in all, Utah and Wyoming were really beautiful. There was slow all along the roadside, until I got into far eastern Wyoming, when the land started flattening out and (no doubt) dropping in elevation. I crossed into Nebraska around sunset, and kept going another couple of hours until I got to Ogalalla, which was enough driving for a second day.

In Ogalalla I went looking for a place to eat, and made a really bad choice. I went to a local pizza/pasta place, or that's what the sign said. Inside they had a huge buffet full of the kinds of things you might imaging a high school cafeteria would put together for a soup and salad bar, and they also had everything that was on the menu was also on the buffet, so I said I would do the buffet. The only thing I could really face eating, besides some canned corn, was the pizza. And the pizza was like... Imagine if a church youth group decided to have a pizza night. And a couple of the girls in the group were industrious, and wanted to do it right, so they actually practiced. They made practice pizzas through trial and error for two weeks, and when the time for the pizza night came, they served what I found on the buffet. The choices of pizza were: Cheese; Hamburger; "Special"; and "Taco." The last one was full of canned green olives. Everything was just horrible. Man.

I started uploading pictures I've taken along the way. A lot of them are shot from the driver's seat of my rental car, obviously. A few times I got out into the cold wind and actually took a picture and tried to level it correctly.

Road trip, end of day 1

I got off to a rocky start today. The rental car reservation I made turned out to be at a rental car agency that didn't want me to drive the car outside California. Hey, maybe that's why the 10-day rental fee was so cheap! So I made my way to the main rental car terminal of San Francisco airport, courtesy of the first agency's courtesy clerk. He kept up an entertaining New York-ish patter about how his van didn't have the right kind of license to drop off and pick up passengers at the airport, he was only supposed to take people to and from the on-airport rental car center, but he didn't want anyone to miss their flight and maybe we could give him $5 each since he could lose his job if he got ticketed for doing it. We all gave him $5, he didn't get a ticket, everyone was presumably happy. Except I had to pay three times as much for a real unlimited-mileage rental car.

Slowed by this event, I didn't get out of the city until 11:00 a.m. But I still made it all the way across California and Nevada today. Taking Interstate 80 all the way, over the Sierras and through the high desert of Nevada. The strange thing about Nevada is that the borders look just terrible. Anybody who has seen only Reno-Sparks probably thinks Nevada really looks terrible. But the high desert is beautiful.

Then when I arrived in Wendover, the impression it gives at night is of a casino at the bottom of a strip mine. There are these bare rock cliffs -- that's all you can see. I hope it looks a little better tomorrow, but so far it's giving Reno a run for its money.

Most fortunately, the road was dry, and once you get into Nevada, practically no traffic and a 75 mph speed limit. So I made up some time.

I will now go blow $20 in a casino. That's my limit for Nevada.

Day 1 of the snowy trip

I'm leaving this morning for my trip across the country, or at least to the Mississippi, to research my book. It's a cool morning in San Francisco, mostly cloudy, a weak sun appearing from time to time. My friend Jeanne should be calling me soon to take me to get my rental car.

I packed last night in an enormous duffle bag that is at least four feet long. We ordered it thinking it would be more like an overnight bag but neglected to look at the dimensions. When it arrived we made a lot of jokes about how you could carry around a small person in there, but in the end we decided to keep it, since most of our luggage is extremely crappy. This is its first trip.

I dreamed I was at Holden Village, where they had decided they were going to embark on a major initiative taking care of orphaned babies. Everyone got one. Mine was named Alexy, and the main thing was to keep carrying it around, feed it, and keep it warm. (Changing the baby was not part of the dream.) I put Alexy down under a chair once to get some more food, and the cat came up and curiously sniffed it.

Weather along the way looks perfect for the first day. I'm going to see how far I can get on the way to Salt Lake City, but I might go only as far as Elko or Wendover. I'm tempted to drop down instead and go on Hwy. 50 through Nevada, since I've always wanted to do that, but I don't think I'll really have time.

I'm still getting over a cold, but my coughing is more productive, as they say, which tells me things are breaking up.

Journey coming up

I'm about to take my first long vacation in a long time, and my first really long road trip in over 30 years. On Thursday morning I'll be packing up a rental car and heading over the Sierras on my way to Salt Lake City. And from there I'll go anyplace this side of the Mississippi where there's snow. In fact I'll even go as far as Indiana, since it's flat and it still counts as the Midwest.

For ten days I'll be driving around the Plains and the Midwest to find falling snow. Ideally a snow storm or a blizzard. the idea is to research a section of the novel I'm working on, Knock Yourself Out. In part of the book, the main character gets stranded at the O'Hare Hilton by a blizzard and winds up trying to drive across the country back to California. On the way he gets slammed by yet another blizzard.

Since I have precious little experience driving in snow, and no experience driving in the Midwest in the winter, I'll set out to learn. the idea is not to cover the entire Midwest, but pretty much anyplace reasonably flat that's getting slammed by snow. I have only one person I want to visit on the trip, my heretofore online-only friend Alexis, conveniently located at one corner of the area I'll be covering, in Minneapolis. So it won't be a very social trip. But I do hope to find out a lot about snow and the middle part of the country and what it's like out there.

Previous research trip: to Bangalore in 2007 for my novel Mango Rain.

technorati: travel, road trips, driving

Netflix, may I kindly say 'Fuck off'?

Mark, based on your interest in "3:10 to Yuma" ...

We think you'll enjoy "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"

Is this kind of shit supposed to endear Netflix to me? Did they really award somebody one million dollars to improve their recommendations? Can I turn it off somehow?

Does anybody at Netflix know the meaning of the verb "to patronize"?

Change is a-comin'

I recently received an email from Google's Blogger service, which powers this blog, that they are doing away with support for blogs which publish using FTP, of which this is one. They said that fewer than half of one percent of their users' blogs were of this type, and though it was the state of the art when I began it in 2001, time has obviously passed me by.

So I'll be trying to figure out a way forward for the site. Since I've been blogging per se less and less, maybe the blogging function is no longer the most important, I dunno. We'll see.

Meanwhile, what have I been doing lately? I went to L.A. with VonCookie last weekend. When I came back I got the flu. This week I'm going on my trip to the Midwest to research part of the novel I'm working on. And I finished bringing out my novel Make Nice through the Lulu self-publishing site, so if you've been dying to read that book which I worked on from 1997 to 2003, and which I almost got published fer reals, but didn't, you can pick it up there. I'll have a more formal launch of sorts later.

Narcissism and literature

The new New Yorker has a review of a book titled "Memoir, a History," in which author Ben Yagoda looks at the history of memoirs starting with St. Augustine and coming down to our present era, in which a a desperate search by readers and the entertainment industry for authenticity and stories of redemption and triumph led to a spate of faked memoirs. (A couple years ago the NYT took notice of this phenomenon.) The writer of the review, Daniel Mendelsohn, names most of the recent flaming scandals except for the J.T. LeRoy hoax, but the LeRoy books weren't actually supposed to be memoirs. That particular flim-flam was more elaborate than a single (or series of) fabricated memoir.

For several years I've taken great pleasure in blogging about these cases, collected on my blog with the labels hoaxes and fakes (applied somewhat inconsistently, but do I look like a librarian?).

technorati: hoaxes, literary hoaxes, memoirs

Praise the Lord and pass the sniper scopes

Trijicon, a Wixom-based supplier that has a $660 million multi-year contract with the Marine Corps and additional contracts with the U.S. Army, inscribes coded references to New Testament Bible verses on its ACOG high-powered rifle sights sold to the military.

-- news stories

Outlining your novel using Post-Its

Trying to finish the first long section of the novel I've been working on since around April, I had to resort to the technique of writing scenes or bits of conversation on post-it notes and moving them around. It's nice to have a surface like a mirror, a window, or a whiteboard for this exercise.

Readers may recall a previous post from 2.5 years ago when I showed the results of using the same technique for a different book.

technorati: writing, post-its

Dream of Acker

I had a dream that they were making a biopic about Kathy Acker and she was being played by Mary Woronov.

Hubris repaid

A Canadian man who won a lengthy legal battle for the right to keep "exotic" pets was mauled to death by his pet Siberian tiger yesterday.

Previously:

• Michael Jackson's tigers telepathically informed of his death
  
  
• SF Zoo tiger attack nearly a classic SF story

Uh, happy new year

I didn't mean to stop blogging. I've just been paying as much attention as possible to the novel I'm working on. But something occurred to me over the holidays, as I became aware, in the back of my mind, that it had been a long time since I last made a blog entry. I realized that I'm just not paying attention to pop culture the way I had been, in the period from 2002 to 2007, when I would put up as many as five or six posts a day about politics, pop, and the "bad behavior" I used to take such pleasure in recording and making snarky comments about.

I'm no less sarcastic. I'm just not paying as close attention anymore, because I'm putting as much attention and energy and thought as possible into my novel. Writing a novel doesn't give you as much instant gratification, but it's the only possible thing I'll ever be remembered for writing, so I'm giving it my best shot. Not that there's anything wrong with blogging, which I'll still do. In fact I'll probably do it twenty times this month. Or two. Whatever.

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.

New/old story: 'Relativity'

More than twenty years ago I lived in Japan for almost two years, teaching English in a provincial city, Niigata. After several months, my present wife Cris -- whom I had just met and fallen in love with the year before, and who was broken-hearted when I left to teach in Japan -- came out to join me, and we've been together ever since. But before Cris came to Niigata, Seiko, one of my students, a cheerful shopgirl who was enamored of everything American or British and who claimed to hate Japan, got a big crush on me. She flirted with me in her very subtle way, and one summer night during a local festival she came over to my apartment half-drunk. It would have been easy for me to take advantage of her, but something about the situation didn't feel right, and besides, Cris was about to arrive on vacation to see me for the first time in months. Instead of kissing Seiko, I just listened to some music with her and then let her go home. And I never did go to bed with a Japanese girl, much as I would have liked to; it was too hard for me to understand how to overcome the difficulties in communication.

The next year a new teacher came out to work in our school. He was in his late 30s, rather cheerless, balding and not very attractive, but not more than ten days after arriving, he had snagged a gorgeous girl, a staff person at a local gym, and was sleeping with her. Whatever compunctions I had that made it hard for me to get close to a girl who could hardly talk to me -- he had no such compunctions.

To understand this dynamic, and to illustrate some of the other confusing cultural norms I encountered in my sojourn in the Japanese city, I wrote a short story, Relativity. I don't claim it's a very good short story, but it does try to illustrate the ambivalence I felt then about taking advantage of someone.

technorati: Japan

Talkin' 'bout my generation

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film Easy Rider, and the 40th anniversary of the exposé of the My Lai massacre.

It was all one back then, which is why the guys had to die at the end of Easy Rider.

technorati: Sixties

'Co-working' at a normally closed café

Cool article from a St. Paul, Minn. paper about a group that co-works at a café that is ordinarily closed on weekdays in winter. Unemployed and freelance workers pay $40 to co-work at the café and get free coffee, AC power, and wi-fi every Tuesday. They has a Ning group website.

The café itself is apparently well-known and loved in the Twin Cities area.

technorati: co-working, crema

Awesomeness of Wikipedia strikes again

While looking up the spelling of the phrase en deshabille, I ran across this page on Wikipedia: List of French words used by English speakers. (Curiously, it does not list en deshabille at all.) The best thing about it is the section Only found in English, which lists ostensibly French words and expressions not actually used by the French, including demimonde, pièce de résistance, and double entendre.

Previously: Things I had to look up: en petit comité

technorati: words, Wikipedia

The life of a writer, part LXMDVVVII

My friend Marilyn, who went through a few years when she supported herself by writing romance novels, posts a few anecdotes today that highlight the strange demands of genre work:

In the Secret Hours was even worse. It was my one & only book to have an exclusive distribution with Borders Books. I had just begun writing it. It was late May and I allegedly had until Labor Day to write a 255 page novel. But, oops! The publisher called in alarm to say there was some sort of misunderstanding in the contract and my novel had to be turned in by the 4th of July. I had 5 weeks to write an entire novel that I only had a vague storyline for. No outline, just some notes. It was really hell. I thought my fingers were going to fall off from all that marathon typing everyday-long-into-the-night. Not only that, but I seriously had to let the story tell itself. Whatever the fuck came out onto the paper became "the novel." It was a real nightmare for me. And when the reviews came out and were bad, well, what are you going to say? Complain about the fuck up in your deadline? It just makes you look like a cry baby.

Read the whole entry.

technorati: writing, novels

Lisa B's 'Poetry of Groove'

Here's my friend Lisa B, with a nice little video for her jazz-pop tune "The Poetry of Groove." I like the dancing and the kinda DIY low tech quality.



Lisa's part of a circle or artists and activists I got to know in the mid-80s, among them my great friend Christine (lower left in this picture).

technorati: jazz, video

Ostentation meets hype meets D&S

After some stranger followed my Twitter feed, I was led to this bizarre video in which the woman -- judging from the feed she works in promotions for some booze company -- is tutored by some aggressive British gent in the basics of enjoying some super-expensive whiskey. The British gent is so noisy, so controlling, so in-her-face that it's almost like watching a D&S scene. The woman's "What have I got myself into?" expression as the scene goes on and on is priceless.

technorati: live the lush life, whiskey

How They Scored now available on Amazon.com

My novel How They Scored is now available on Amazon.com as both a paperback ($16.98, available for free shipping) and Kindle edition ($3.99), though the latter has a strange notation that it is "not available for customers in the United States" / Update 9 Nov 09: The Kindle edition is now fully available.

The Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old, and other states

The Words Without Borders blog has a post on a series of books published by Whereabouts Press, the Traveler Literary Companion series. These are guides to countries (mostly) and some cities containing stories set in those places. To their credit, an examination of the Table of Contents for some of the books suggests that their contents were all written by natives to those countries; the India guide has no E.M. Forester or even V.S. Naipaul, the Spain no Hemingway or Orwell.

A splendid idea. But what if the definition of travel guide were extended to states of being, or stages of life? Thus a Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old might contain selections from Goodbye, Columbus, The Graduate, and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. The Travelers Guide to Homelessness would contain stories written only by people who had been (and maybe were still) homeless (voluntary homeless people need not apply -- again, no Orwell). The emphasis on authenticity might get a little dicey with, for example, The Travelers Guide to Mars -- but who could exclude Ray Bradbury from that collection?

technorati: travel books, books, youth

Read a new story, "Cleaning Up After the Champion"

I posted a short story to a new writers' website, Fictionaut. The story is called "Cleaning Up After the Champion," and is about how normal people react when their loved ones turn into superheroes.

It's either the first in a series of stories about superheroes, or the first chapter in a novel. Works either way. No other stories in the series, if there is one, have been completed, though I have started a couple of them.

Read "Cleaning Up After the Champion."

How I love her

Here's Cris on Martin's Luther's Ninety-five Theses, the document he famously nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg in 1517 to begin the Protestant Reformation:

Didn't he ever hear of the information mapping principle that people can remember only seven things at once?

technorati: Reformation Day, Martin Luther

Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

I had an agent for a few years, and she did a wonderful job getting my novel Make Nice in front of publishers. (Unfortunately none of them bought it, but that was my fault, not hers.) As most of my friends know, last year she quit the agent business, so I'm trying to find a new agent for my novel Mango Rain (which has had other titles in manuscript, including "Bangalored").

As I start the process of trying to find an agent again, these words from Augusten Burroughs are encouraging.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. I believe that if you have real talent as a writer, a true gift, you will eventually be published. But it may not happen according to your schedule. And it may not happen with the first manuscript you create. Or the second. So you have to be, if not patient, at least endlessly tenacious.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen. I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. The reason I was so confident is because I knew I wouldn't stop trying until it happened. And this is the secret. You don't need to be confident. You just need to be stubborn.

technorati: writing, rejection

I love this country

Some clever, strong-voiced protesters infiltrated an insurance industry meeting and sang their "thanks for killing the Public Option" to the dumbfounded attendees. (Courtesy Stellaa)

Of course, in a third-world country they all would have been taken out and shot.

technorati: health care, public option

Things I had to look up: Anagnorisis

I was enjoying this satirical chart of "42 Essential 3rd Act Twists" (courtesy The Rumpus) when I was stopped dead by the unfamiliar term "anagnorisis."

Anagnorisis -- a moment of sudden recognition by the main character in a drama or story of the true nature of things. For example, in "Chinatown" when Evelyn Mulwray's confession "She's my sister and my daughter" makes Jake Gittes realize the depth of Noah Cross's evil. (Screenplay.)

technorati: Chinatown, drama

Keeping abreast of body modifications

"Ultramarathon" runners -- those who take part in races of 50, 100 or even more miles -- tend to suffer from problems with toenails. So some of them have toenails permanently removed through surgery, a process that includes "pouring acid onto the nailbed" to prevent regrowth. Runners interviewed for the NYT story say things like "toenails are dead weight;" one who had all his toenails removed said "it's one less thing to have to deal with" on races upwards of 100 miles.

The piece is a little contradictory about whether runners who have undergone the procedure -- an estimated five to ten percent of "ultrarunners" -- feel like publicizing the fact. Some of them are "tired of being freaks, and they don't want to add anything more freakish to their résumé." Others sport t-shirts reading "Toenails are for Sissies" -- a clue to the mentality of the sport.

The most reasonable comment is from one doctor who says, "You know any sport has gone off the rails when you have to remove body parts to do it."

Utter dumbass of the month

Man charged with printing phony $50s to pay dancer CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A Wyoming man has been charged with counterfeiting money to pay an exotic dancer for a private performance. Rickey A. Kempter, 50, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors say Kempter hired the exotic dancer for a private dance at the Lariat Motel, and Kempter and the dancer shared a taxi to the location. The taxi driver called police after they arrived, saying Kempter asked him to hold a roll of $50 bills and he noticed that they looked odd and were not cut evenly. Court documents say Kempter told investigators that he made the bills on a printer in his home, but that he planned to go home and get real money to pay the dancer. From the sound of it, he didn't even have time to get it in. He'll have plenty of time to think about it, though. You can read a long version of the story in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle; unfortunately, no picture of Mr. Kempter. But courtesy of Yelp, here's the motel in question. Click through for a larger version. But be sure to read the Yelp reviews for the amazing comment about the Lariat's allure: It looked like a room to commit suicide in.

The lonely Brinks 'stockroom' man

It's one of those days when you read things in your spam inbox for entertainment. Usually I just peruse the subject lines, but I happened to open one of the typical Nigerian spam messages and realized just how quaint some of the assumptions are.

Dear/Madam,

I am happy to write to you this mail. I am glad that i have you as a friend and i hope that this mail gets to you with all happiness in your mind to help me out in this crucial matter.

First and foremost i want to tell you that i am the chief accountant with the Brinks Hellas Security Company Athens Greece with head quarters in Athens. i want to tell you that this matter all started last year 2004 when i was rounding up accounts for the year ended and also taking into stock what was in store.

Here we have a scenario worthy of the opening chapter of a Graham Greene novel. The formal, overly polite clerk of the Athens office of Brinks, somewhat marooned in his dusty backroom with God knows whatall. At the end of the year it's time to "round up" accounts, and he takes stock of "what was in store." Did I say Greene? It's almost Biblical.

Actually, I was taking into stock all the treasuries we have left, both the ones claimed and the ones not claimed, when i realized that there was this consignment that has been in the store room for about a year and a half now and no one has come to claim it. Really, i have been with this organization for about five years and know exactly when the consignments came in.

The actual destination of the consignments is from Malaysia belonging to one Mr. Hang Chen. All this stocks have been in my books and it is only me that knows whose goods have been claimed and whose goods are still in the store. ...

The letter then goes into the usual details designed to make the story more plausible -- the length of time (four months) Mr. Chen's goods were supposed to remain in the storeroom, a subplot about Mr. Chen flying to Dublin (of all places), and finally the literal money shot:

Now when i checked out the consignment late last year i decided to Scan it and found out that the consignments actually contains money and to my knowledge it contains 3 million dollars which are wrapped up. Honestly, this consignments has passed out the time lapse and i have already written it off the books.

Und so weiter. What impressed me was the opening: the figure of the lonely stockroom clerk, undoubtedly middle-aged; he's over-educated for a stockroom clerk, which raises the question of how he wound up there in the first place -- no doubt a sad tale of frustrated ambition, a sabotaged career, and bad luck. He passes the time by opening up unclaimed packages, really just out of curiosity. Imagine his surprise when he finds the three million dollars (dollars, not drachmas, yuan, Euros or whatever they use in Malaysia).

If it were a Greene book, the ensuing chapters might deal with shadowy agents seeking the true provenance of the three million dollars. It would turn out there was no such person as a Mr. Hang Chen. Inevitably, a lovely woman in her mid-30s with a classical name such as Helen or Daphne would appear mixed up in the thing, probably trying to protect someone, and the storeroom man would have to choose between his secret love for her and his moral duty.

But they don't write them that way anymore, except in spam emails.

technorati: hoaxes

Space tourists becoming boring

The founder of the Cirque du Soleil company -- formerly a charming group of European and North American hippies, now a multi-billion dollar corporation with simultaneous nightly productions in cities around the world -- was shot into space as one of those "space tourists" (in other words, he paid $10 billion for the privilege) -- and almost no one noticed, despite the fact that he reportedly spent most of the trip wearing a clown nose. I'm sure the dedicated scientists and pilots who worked for twenty or thirty years to get the same privilege really appreciated that.

technorati: space tourists, Laliberte