#NaNoReMo Megapost

National Novel Reading Month begins February 1st. The rules are simple:

1. Find a classic novel you've never read, preferably one you've been meaning to read for a long time.

2. "Classic" is up to your definition. If you feel Beloved is a Modern Classic, you read it.

3. Between February 1st and 28th, read the book.

4. Join in on Twitter, blogs and Facebook to discuss your journey through the classic. You're even welcome to come back discuss the books in comments threads on this post.

I've chosen Middlemarch, a social commentary on 1800's England by Mary Anne Evans, under the pen name George Eliot. I've wanted to read it ever since missing registration for a class on it in college. Les Miserables came close, but my copy is 1,400 pages, and that's simply too long for me to be sure I'll finish in a month with beta reading, more medical tests, and at least two big road trips. Middlemarch's 1,000 pages as far as I'm willing to push it. It's technically eight books in one - a collected serial. Fortunately, Catherine Russel is picking up my slack, having chosen Les Mis for her own #NaNoReMo!

If you've picked your book, please mention it in the comments here and I'll add you to the post. I'm going to link any blog or Twitter accounts so people can check out reading progress. Feel free to blog across the month as you get insights into your book, or tear through it and move on to still more classics.

#NaNoReMo Readers List
1. Catherine Russell: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
2. Danielle la Paglia: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
3. Tony Noland: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
4. John Wiswell: George Eliot's Middlemarch
5. Andy Hollandbeck: T.H. White's Once and Future King
6. John Gray: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
7. T.S. Bazelli: Toni Morrison's Beloved8. Eric Krause: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars
9. Beverly Fox: Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby 
10. Paul Philips: BOTH Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man
11. Janet Lingel Aldrich: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
12. Katherine Nabity: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
13.  Ross Dillon: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
14. Maria Kelly: Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles 
15. Katherine Hajer: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
16. Helen Howell: Bram Stroker's Dracula
17. Icy Sedgwick: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
18. Susan Cross: Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice
19. Cindy Vaskova: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

20.Rachel Frink: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

21. April L. Hamilton: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Bathroom Monologue: Editing Better

“I'll tell you how to make it better. I can't do crap to make it sell, or tell what this agent prefers, or what resonates more with Heartland audiences. I can only tell you how to improve every single paragraph, and the plot strung along them. Somebody else can tell you what they'd like better. I won't argue with them. They'll be wrong. All of them will be wrong if they disagree with me, but I won't argue. Everybody has an opinion. Mine just so happens to be correct and will guide you to producing the best art. Whether anyone else agrees? I don't see why you’d care.”

Bathroom Monologue: Heat of This Sun

Clark always insisted he was an alien. As young as three years of age he would lead friends on play dates into his barn where he alleged his parents had buried the ship on which he’d reached earth. They never found it, and he never manifested the alien powers he claimed he was supposed to get from sunlight. All it did was earn him the nickname “Unvampire.”

At five years of age, Clark began convincing girls on the playground to let him save them. It was his duty as a more evolved alien god-man. They would pretend to be trapped on top of the jungle gym, or that the slide was on fire, and he would run across the yard to pretend his incredible hearing was picking up their distress. How the fires were slain by him blowing on them was chalked up to imagination.

How the house fire began is still a matter of contention in the county. Clark was nearly burned alive trying to pull his mother from beneath a collapsed beam. The local paper has a heart-wrenching photo of the child kicking a firefighter for pulling him outside and, to quote, “stopping me from saving them.”

The tragedy begat several years of transitive living, with foster parents who all had praise for the boy’s intelligence and drive, but all reported he was simply too outgoing to fit in. He wanted to captain sports teams, be head chef at dinner, and yelled over every argument. His second foster father was an engineer, and tells the story of how the boy redirected sunlight through his glasses into a heat ray unlike anything he’d ever seen. The experiment conveniently destroyed the glasses and half their garage, and was largely thought of as apocryphal until his teens.

At age thirteen he lived at a shared home in a particularly nasty part of Chicago. It was almost as soon as Clark moved in that a series of grisly murders began along the waterfront, each a helpless young man or woman. The sites and times were spaced so that no one was able to create a narrow field of subjects. Not until Clark. With amateur blogging and diligent photo evidence of what was available to the public, he was able to lead the police to the murderer within only two weeks. It was a disturbed homeless man, whom psychiatrists later testified didn’t even know he’d done any of it. He’d squatted only a few blocks from Clark’s shared home.

Solving the gruesome killing spree launched him into a sort of regional celebrity. He was consulted on further cases, though solved none, and charities soon raised the funds to send him to the college he deserved. He had a plethora of glowing references and was admitted at the age of 16 to MIT.

Clark had the knack for engineering and immediately bonded with other top students and professors in key programs. He claimed he’d always loved rockets, and dedicated his post-graduate work in alternative fuels to a roommate, who died tragically from taking the wrong prescriptions. Clark revealed staggering breakthroughs in fuels only a month later, and patented enough that he was able to fund vast improvements in Chicago’s slums. To both orphans and astronauts, he was heralded as a hero. In retrospect, it seems bizarre they let him go up in that shuttle. It was all about stardom and reigniting the American passion for space.

There are doubts. While the alternative fuels initially tested producing no carbon emissions, the temperature of the planet has raised dramatically in the last three years during their adoption. Scientists still struggle to explain the cause. It would be too ironic if he had to wait for Clark to return and fix it for us. He’s already done so much, and we don’t even know what he’s up there looking for.

Bathroom Monologue: An Ode to the Towel

Hark and grace unto this invention: the towel. Yes, you can dip it in barbecue sauce, or nutrients for later sucking, or hail a spaceship with it, but there are other uses.

Here, humanity has said, “I have this wetness all over me and no biological recourse against it. I would dry it with my hair, only my hair is wet.”

And what was humanity’s answer? To create a rectangle of something else’s hair to get wet for you, with as little effort as a brief application and a tap. Or a scrub, or a rub, or a flossing motion that you really ought not to try when other people are around. It absorbs wetness even better than human hair, and is thus an improvement on evolution, a superior portable toupee that you can wear over your head, or around your genitals, or as a cape, unless your friends are judgmental pricks.

They are cheap, efficient, and do a job evolution utterly failed at despite having shat us out of the ocean by several million years of effort. Some will say the towel is an extended phenotype, a necessary invention of our evolved brains. These people are trying to help evolution reach the towel rack. Even fundamental forces of history and biology want in on the towel.

Here’s to it.

Last House in the Sky is Done & Next Big Thing Award

I said there’d be good news today.

Well, Last House in the Sky is done. It’s not a Rough Draft. It’s not a First Draft. It’s in the hands of a test-reader, and off to betas soon after that. My mad love project, sending heists into the post-apocalypse and crossing cars with dinosaurs, is growing on up. With good health and luck, I’ll be querying it by summer.

Recently T.S. Bazelli tagged me for the Next Big Thing question series. I sat down with these last night to celebrate. Let me know what you think of my answers, and how the book sounds to you.

---What is the working title of your book?

“The Last House in the Sky.” People seem to like it.

---Where did the idea come from for the book?

Intense friendship is one of my favorite themes in life and fiction. I love those small units of incredibly diverse characters, who you’d never imagine tolerating each other, yet whose bond is unquestioned. It’s often testy and tested. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are one. Lupin the 3rd and Samurai Champloo are prototypes of this. You get this intense samurai, this horny lock-pick, this Noir marksman – they should hate each other, and yet they never turn on each other. I could read or watch those bizarre dynamics for hours.

There was a week, I think it was the summer after college graduation, that I stuck three fictions in a car, with a far off destination, and made them talk until they revealed who they were to me. Soon I had my voices, of the aristocratic sociopath hopelessly in love with a lesbian, and that master-thief lesbian who willfully abuses his affection, and the failed sidekick who hates them both but can’t do better. Then they arrived and stole the sun out of the sky. These three have been with me ever since, and I kept going back to them, knowing eventually they were going to get their own book or series. I just needed to find the right heist.

---What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A trio of misfit thieves seek to steal the last shreds of civilization from an apocalyptic cult, who'd otherwise waste them blowing up what remains of the world.

---What genre does your book fall under?

Secondary World Fantasy, but also Heist and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, since the world has suffered a series of civilization-ending catastrophes every 200-300 years. It’s really a Post-Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic novel. Survivors have almost gotten the hang of surviving by now.

---Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d love a Studio Ghibli adaptation, even though their adaptations are notoriously loose. Anyone who worked on Castle of Cagliostro and Princess Mononoke could make this work in animated form.

Casting people is always hard for me since I don’t write thinking of my characters that way. They’re distinct, they have their own physicality, and so the impulse is to get a lookalike or someone who played a role that’s anything like this before. Let me try to ghost-cast The Trio…

Ninx Anzhel: The boss of a group that pretends it’s democratic. Rosario Dawson keeps coming to mind. I have a soft spot for Clerks 2, and she was a doorbuster in 25th Hour. She can balance flippancy and confidence in the crucial way, and turn it up later.

Randigo “Randy” Chambers: Son of hero-parents. Sidekick of the greatest hero of previous generation. Utter failure, now a nudist and wheelman. Aren’t I insulting someone by casting them? I don’t know. Maybe Kunaal Roy Kapur? Or anyone from Attack the Gas Station.

Egal Vineguard: He’s a triclops, so either I’m asking some great actor to wear a prosthetic over his head or we’re in CGI territory. Perhaps the best shot would be WETA-style cinema magic with Mark Hamill as a voice. He’s an incredible voice actor, and was a bit of the original voice-inspiration for Vineguard. Vineguard is the perpetually upbeat, shrewd and educated man who simply will not stop pursuing Ninx. So, Kevin Kline would be great. Matt Keeslar would make me happy. The triclopes in the part of the world I’ve written are Caucasian, but I’d also love to see (or hear) Souleymane Sy Savane try this. I’m willing to bet in five minutes he’d be the definitive Vineguard-voice.

---Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’ll seek representation and send out a package to houses like Tor and Angry Robot – places I’d love to work. It’d be funny if this beat my previous novel to press.

---How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It was May to September to write the rough draft, interrupted miserably over the summer for all number of events and travel. That was about 90,000 words. I’ve only just finished the perfectly clean draft this month. It’s off to an alpha now, and betas soon.

---What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Thieves are archetypal in Fantasy, and humorous Heist Fantasy is precedented in the mainstream in both Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Sequence. The Last House in the Sky has a harder edge than Artemis Fowl, with more emotional development and maturity along with all the woeful immaturity that makes life worth living. Gentleman Bastard Sequence, which thus far is master-class Fantasy, is still more cynical and political. There isn’t enough of a world left in my Frontier for that much politicking, and is always defined by the personal experiences of these characters. Even the world-building is restricted to what they think and experience; I give plenty of references to the bigger world, and you can connect dots, but there won’t be chapters of exposition on something they barely see.

---Who or What inspired you to write this book?

At the beginning of May, 2012, I was more or less done with edits on my previous novel and waited on theta readers. I knew I’d be in a holding pattern for final edits and submissions to agents and editors, and I didn’t want to spend all that time producing nothing. I had about five novel ideas and couldn’t pick which was best, and so asked friends. One asked what ever happened to The Trio. That incepted me. I’d convinced myself it was their time by that evening.

---What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Besides heists and road trips through the Post-Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalypse, driving in an ancient gremlin car among seas of glass, the bones of giant demons, and herds of dinosaurs feuding with carnivorous robots? A triclopic swordsman facing down a bulldozer? Mutually assured sexual harassment? Inter-dimensional lock-picking?

Then there’s this little promise. If you’ve ever read my blog, you know I strive to write from my heart. Weird as it is, this sort of madness is what is closest to my heart. This is as pure John Wiswell as it gets. That means heart, and that means heartbreak, and heartbreak is always funny.

Too Many Humans in Fantasy Novels?

As I began wrapping up the latest draft of Last House in the Sky, a new fear struck me. Good God, I’d made everyone humanoid. It’s terrible when Fantasies squander their secondary worlds with people and people-shaped beings, so many Star Trek guys of the week.

Four main of the characters were human. A fifth was a triclops, who was psychologically different, but physically about a “Star Trek” away from human. Skin tone, size, aerobic make-up and head-shape only go so far. Now he introduces us to imps, with their suicide-fetish and heads full of horns, sphincters and surgical implants that no one will accuse of being human, but still, the overall body is vaguely human-shaped. Not good enough.

Well, but that sixth main character was a decapitated gremlin head. She walks around on prehensile ears or combustion-powered prosthetic bodies. That was less humanoid.

Of course, she invented one of the key antagonists of the book: automatons. Giant spherical drones that suck you through vents. Enormous and hungry construction equipment. A little better.

And sauropods are everywhere. An ankylosaurus gets a big scene. Compsognathus. Brachiosaurs. Hadrosaurs, even Premium Hadrosaurs. Many references to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the filet mignon of lizards.

Dorads, the sentient balls of snakes that form gestalt consciousness, in this novel to administer drunken church services. Nine-legs, granting a little radial symmetry to the background. Likewise, land-squid. Oh, the land-squid.

I’m still feeling self-conscious about all those human characters, though. I’m woefully failing the arthropod equivalent of the Bechdel Test.

Next time. Next time.

Some good news coming tomorrow.

My Foot Stopped Working: MRI Day

Some time since my original post I began experiencing a similar numbness and loss of control in my right foot. It began with the outer toes, just like the left. As though fearing it's being out-shined, now four toes are perpetually numb on the left and I have to consciously exercise them to make sure when they operate. Today I felt the loss of control in some calf muscles. It's back now, which is a relief. I wasn't able to identify which muscles went out on me.

Breezy.

On Friday I had a spinal MRI. Blood tests came back almost entirely negative, which was great in that I didn’t have any of those diseases, but disappointing in that I didn’t have an explanation. It’s worthwhile trade; it’s simply a disappointment-balance I want to note. In brainstorming other horrible bodily malfunctions we crossed my history of back problems; after I learned to walk again in Middle School, it would go out as often as four times a week on me. So the hypothesis is that some lingering vertebrate problem or pinched nerve is hampering my legs. Seems plausible enough to warrant manipulating magnetism for my benefit. They rarely let you manipulate magnetism when you want, like in traffic or in a queue.

MRIs fascinate and soothe me. A lot of people complain about claustrophobia and the noises – both of which are sensible complaints. If some jerk behind the glass hit a button, the platform could easily crush you to death. It’s the most immediate representation of how medical science puts our lives in other people’s hands.

The MRI operator offered me headphones with four varieties of music: 60’s, 70’s, Hip Hop, or Classical. I chose Classical, and as I was elevated into the ceramic doughnut of magnetism, I was treated to the most foreboding piano solo imaginable. If you imagine a montage in any movie where the main character goes to the hospital, gets tests and gets bad news, this would be playing in the background. I almost hit the emergency button because I was laughing so hard. It got better when the piano was overridden by the MRI noises itself.

The noise-canceling headphones did not work against the brute force of the MRI machine. Those noises bother nearly as many people as the claustrophobia, but I like them. It sounds like someone is hammering in the next room, and several times it’ll sound like a circular saw, only not as constant, instead broken up into deliberate patterns. The noises are loud and startle a primal part of the psyche; but they’re habitual, highly intentional things as well. The cacophony is too deliberate to be ruckus. That’s good science there.

I see my primary care physician about it tomorrow. We’ll find out if the problem lies in my spinal column soon.

Fine, here's a goatee picture.

Bathroom Monologue: Debt Game

It goes like this.

The plumber wants the coins. He doesn’t know why, but he’ll scarcely ever turn back in his furious pursuit rightwards of the shining golden GIFs.

The player wants the plumber to have the coins. They’re a detached score, extra lives, the promise of hidden unlockables, and most of all, rotating motivation to make the plumber run faster into stimulation.

The designer wants the player to want the plumber to have the coins. Getting hooked on this feedback loop will mean the player will play it longer, play it more often, buy the sequels, the t-shirts, the cellphone skin, the tie-in movies. Then the designer will be able to feed his family.

The publisher wants the designer to hook the player on getting the plumber those coins. Employing and taking the work of such a designer means greater profits for the release quarter, shareholder satisfaction, brand awareness and stability. The publisher can turn this into an institution.

The investor wants the publisher to find the designers that can hook the players to do dumb crap. Then the yields will be up, dividends may begin, and the portfolio will be rosier. The investor can watch the publisher’s daily NYSE rating tick up and down with news, reviews and sales figures of the designer’s game that the player is playing. The chart goes up and down and ever rightward, like the trails of someone jumping.

They all have less time than they think. Neither plumber nor investor knows why.

7 Lines from Last House in the Sky

So last week while I was running between medical tests, Tony Noland and Icy Sedgwick both tagged me in the "Lucky 7" game. The game requests you go to either page 7 or 77 of your manuscript, count down 7 lines, then copy the next 7 lines to a post. I wasn't sure about this, both since I was exhausted and it only seemed possible to do well if the passage was unintentionally funny.

But the passage on page 7, 7 lines down, 7 lines long, is actually a pretty good snapshot of one of my characters. So here's a taste of The Last House in the Sky:

     “Randy, put on some trousers. I can hear you being naked. You’re always too naked."

     He reached down and adjusted himself. “I didn’t bring trousers. I brought a distraction.”

     “Then put on your bed sheet.”

     He sat up and checked the cell’s lone cot. It was an oak plank; no sheets, mattress or treat. “No. Give me yours. I didn’t want to come this south anyway; the climate disagrees with me.”

With good luck, you'll be seeing more of Randy soon. They've got to get out of that jail.

Bathroom Monologue: The Sea in Which the Most Men Have Died

Foreman manned the left oar and Aftman manned the right. They propped their boots up on the parcel at the bottom of the boat. The fog swirled thick, but they knew this lake. They’d served on the estate for years.

Foreman said, “The last riddle Master gave to me was this: what is the sea in which the most men have died?”

Aftman puzzled this over. Stalling to come up with a clever answer, he asked, “What did you say?”

“Well I figured the Dead Sea, on account of the name.”

Aftman winced. “I think that’s rather a metaphor, friend.”

“As much he said. When he finished flogging me I went to the study. I came back to him with the Red Sea. Moses drowned a whole army in there.”

“That’s a good one.”

“But he had me flogged again. He said near Greece and Africa they’ve got all sorts of seas that have seen all sorts of wars, and so have soaked up many an army’s lives.”

“Master was a well-studied man,” Aftman nodded mournfully. He kicked the bundle. “I would have guessed that one near Jordan, what’s mostly salt. A body can’t swim in it, you see. They sink and die.”

“You’d have lost some skin on that, friend.” Foreman smiled. “That’s actually the Dead Sea. And I’m afraid that you can swim in it. Most everybody floats because of the salt. Picked that up in the study.”

“Well dash it all,” Aftman kicked the bundle again. “Then we both guessed the Dead Sea and were both wrong.”

“Yet only I lost the skin.”

“Like you’re the only one to be whipped. I’m still raw from last night. You would have killed me had he lashed one more time, you know?”

“I didn’t mean it that way, friend.” Foreman straightened a little, as though proud. “Funny thing. Before you came to me with this chore, I was working on a new guess. I think I’ve got it right this time.”

“Did you?” Aftman asked, letting go of his oar. He stooped and fastened the lead weights onto the parcel. “What is your new guess, friend?”

Foreman stooped with him and they boosted it together. The Master’s left leg stuck out of the bundle as they lifted. Both hesitated as though to stuff it back in, then they chortled and dumped it over the side. As the Master’s body disappeared in the drink, they took up their oars and Foreman hypothesized for his housemate.

“Now I think the sea in which the most men have died is idiocy.”

Bathroom Monologue: Zine Works Redux

Dale's cell vibrated on the desk, scampering over the surface like the plastic was coming to life in little bursts. He set his teeth and vengefully finished the paragraph, taking not just enough time to get back on track, but more than enough to get the wording to his standard. Finally he hit the period button with a little too much force, and picked up the phone.

"Hello?" he said, sounding unnecessarily annoyed.

"Dale!" The voice on the phone screeched. "Dale! I'm trapped in a magazine!"

"Fred?"

"In a magazine! No idea how!"

"It's okay, Fred. Calm down." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. This should not have been logically acceptable to him, but they both did a lot of drugs. "Look around yourself. What magazine are you in?"

"There are a lot of words, and a huge picture."

"What's the picture of?"

"I think it's a woman. Or an armoire. It's abstract."

"That could be any magazine. What about the words? What are they writing about?"

"Mostly ads. I think part of it's a story. Really short."

"Fiction is dying in print."

"I'm trapped in a magazine! Help!"

"Is there anything else in there?"

"Uh. A cartoon?"

"A cartoon?"

"Black and white. It's a lion on a cell phone."

"Is the caption ironic?"

"No duh it is!"

"Is it ironic but not funny at all?"

"How'd you know?"

"I just resubscribed to The New Yorker. I think you're on my coffee table. I'll get you in a minute."

Dale switched his cell off and looked at the monitor. He read the paragraph to himself a couple of times. Fred could wait – he knew better than to read Dale’s stuff without asking.

Bathroom Monologue: Retweet This

RETWEETs are perfect. There has never been a better form of communication, and never phrased better, or I would have written it. Instead I clicked RETWEET and my work is done. The world is mended.

I believe every single word and the implicit meaning behind every single image attached to whatever I RETWEET. Its politics are mine. Its opinions are law. The only thing I would change is making it my work.

I have never RETWEETed something by accident.

My Twitter clients have never malfunctioned and RETWEETed something without my consent.

I have never RETWEETed something so my peers would like me better. I have never done anything so my peers would like me better. I think ties have unmatched utility.

I have never RETWEETed something I disagreed with to show what the opposition thinks. In all those cases, I have never tweeted shortly before or after that, granting the RETWEET context. Every RETWEET is its own island of unquestioning support.

RETWEET this.

Bathroom Monologue: Virtues Bug, OR, It’s What’s Inside That Counts

As dusk whisked over their cave, Mummy Nine-Legs ascended to the ceiling and unfastened a few spools of humans for supper. Little Bug had never had his own human yet, being so young, and danced on all nine of his legs in anticipation. Yet when Mummy Nine-Legs handed him his bundle, and as he split it open, he dropped the fermented cadaver to the floor.

“Mummy, I want a good human,” he whined. “This one is covered in warts and moles, and she’s got an overbite like she’s all teeth.”

“No one is all teeth,” said Mummy Nine-Legs, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

She took Little Bug’s prey and slit it down the belly for the babe to see. And indeed, inside the cadaver was as lined with lipids as any thin girl, and her liver was ripe and swollen. Her lungs popped in his mouth. By the end of their meal, he even found he relished the way her teeth settled in his gullet, and he realized how foolish he’d been. It really was what lay inside people that counted, and particularly when they lay digesting inside him.

Bathroom Monologue: I Deserve a Say

"I deserve a say. I have a right in this because I’ve spent the last forty years saying I don’t. When you wanted to enlist, I said it was your choice. When you didn’t want to get married, I said it was your choice, and so I slept in hospital parking lots every time you broke your stupid arm, because I couldn’t go in, because you decided. When they said the water was going to rise and you said the media exaggerated, I listened to you and said it was your decision, because secretly I figured if you were going to drown then I might as well too. So it was your decision.

"Not this one. Not this one, because of all the other ones. Because I love and you suck at making these decisions. So no, you don’t get to go to the doctor alone tomorrow, and if he says there are options, you don’t get to ignore what they are, and if they hurt, you’re going to grit your teeth, because for forty years I’ve grit mine. Your decisions aren’t going to be my mistakes anymore. I have the right. I deserve a say, and I say we’re setting the alarm for seven because your crippled ass has an appointment and I like coffee before I drive."

Bathroom Monologue: Atheist’s Prayer Equivalent

During my most recent medical emergency, several of my Christian friends publicly announced they’d pray for me. When this happens, there’s always at least one atheist friend who, usually when we’re alone, asks what he or she is supposed to do. In today’s case, it was a ‘she’ who feared she fell short as a buddy because she wasn’t paging a higher power to fix me.

I always have the same answer, and was honestly looking forward to delivering it this time.

“Do a fundraiser? After all, money is a higher power you believe in.”

Like these friends typically do, she got really mad at me. She ranted about delusions and fooling yourself and how she’d have to do actual work. She, like most of my friends in this circumstance, switched from feeling bad for me to feeling angry with me. Her apparent inadequacy disappeared in a puff of self-righteousness.

It always fixes them. It’s good to give.

Why I write daily, at FFDO

This weekend I have an essay up at Fridayflash.org about my creative process and why I don't just write daily, but publish daily. I've been blogging at The Bathroom Monologues every day for about five years. Estrella Azul was curious as to exactly why I do it.

It's mostly about learning to criticize your inner critic, and letting the ideas you actually want through. It's also about frequent failure and my sundry insecurities. So if you'd like a glimpse of my process or psyche, click on through here.

And thank you for reading.

Bathroom Monologue: Tell Me About Her

Tell me about her.

Whenever I made waffles, she’d steal my fork. She’d pair it with her own, turning them upside down, turning them into stabby feet, and have them march over the waffles as she narrated Mothra’s latest attack on Japan. She pretended to snore whenever I explained Mothra was a flying-type monster.

Tell me about her.

She licked the roof of my mouth too often when we kissed. She didn’t know how to kiss very well, but she was awesome at that one trick.

Tell me about her.

She was five feet and five inches in bare feet. She was a hundred and nineteen pounds in the winter.  She wore corrective lenses because she was nearsighted. Ever since she was a kid... this isn't right.

Tell me about her.

She once waited on a rope line for two hours to greet George W. Bush as he got off his plane in the next county over. It was raining and blustery, and she put up with all of it just to fake him out and pull her hand away as he reached to shake it. She did the whole “running her hand through her hair” thing. Afterward she had to talk to a guy for half an hour. She fell asleep in his office.

Tell me about her.

She loved sad movies and never cried at them. She'd lean forward in her chair and squint, and groan skeptically, and sometimes chew her upper lip like this didn’t make sense. When we got home she’d buy the screenplay. She only read screenplays alone. They’re what made her cry.

Tell me about her.

She loved hating sports. She would say she was going out, or upstairs to read, or simply promise to stay out of the living room, and within five minutes of starting time she’d plant her ass on the couch. I’ve never seen her so animated as when she was complaining about the rules being arbitrary and the game being dumb and the losing team being treated unfairly. Never. Well, maybe it’s a tie between that and sex, but I don’t have witnesses to how animated she got during sex. I have a Superbowl party of witnesses to her throwing a bowl of popcorn at a blind referee.

Tell me about her.

She always got tired. She got tired when we were in school – she fell asleep during a midterm and snored her way to a C+, so we didn’t think much about it. I drove. I shoveled the driveway. When I think of all the things I did instead of her, without really talking to her, or asking why, or making her ask why… She just got tired. It was a quirk. Except it wasn’t a quirk.

Tell me about her.

I don’t know how.

Bathroom Monologue: Gifts of Spartans and Concubines

So it's Jupiter and Juno's wedding day, and various presents arrive. There are garters of stars, armor that repels war itself, and a mysterious box from Pandora, which neither of them finds funny.

Two gifts are the most curious. At 10:00, three hundred of the grisliest Spartans ever seen march to the altar of Parnassus. Each is clad in full regalias, tower shields and immaculate spears.

At 10:01, three hundred of the most beautiful concubines seen under the sun march to those same altars. They perspire ambrosia and have such golden hair that mines close in despair at having been rendered obsolete.

Jupiter asks of his bride, "What's up with those people?"

Juno rolls her eyes. "The men are from Mars. The women are from Venus."

The two gods were banned from the wedding. The Spartans and concubines were kept around.

Bathroom Monologue: The Culture Machine, OR, The Five Star Scheme

“Star ratings were a conspiracy hatched by an Illuminati that seeks to de-luminate you. It’s clickable, skimmable, nonsensical and diabolical – that natural next step from awards shows. They are the neuro-cynics who make you cede your minds to their widgets.

“Annual awards slowly tricked you into thinking great stuff comes out every year. Hey, a Man Booker shortlist. Did you watch the Emmy nomination livestream? And some movie wins every year, and now ten films get nominated! Culture is so saturated with congratulation that you never have the opportunity to reflect on the last work of art that profoundly altered you. Now simply mattering in an annual cycle bestows greatness.

“And now – now it’s even easier, because everyone votes on Amazon star ratings and Metacritic User Reviews. You don’t even have to review it. Just click! Four of five available stars? That’s pretty good, and since most users are too stupid to use anything but the top and bottom of the scales, thousands of products get high averages. Good for companies, good for actors, good for authors, as you’re gradually convinced that all five-star books are the same. You don’t need truly exceptional works, because Breaking Dawn really is as good as Brothers Karamazov. Heck, it’s rated a tenth of a point higher by the average reader! And who are these readers? The five-star scale doesn’t care, because democracy doesn’t care who you are. It’s about registering to vote. Registering to churn the culture machine.”

Bathroom Monologue: “But when we look around us at the state of literacy – and in particular at all those signs for “BOBS’ MOTORS”….” –Lynn Truss, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”

But Carmen couldn’t wait, not with that sign in the window. Her mother was an English teacher, damn it. She told Samuel that she’d pay and stormed into the gas station. She saw the clerk and was fixing him with her stare before she was even at the counter.

“I want to speak to the owner,” she said.

“I’m one of them,” he said, taking off his hat. “What can I do for you?”

“You’re Bob, then?” she said, glancing at the “BOBS’ MOTORS” sign in the window.

He nodded and shrugged at the same time.

“Like I said, I’m one of them.”

“One of them?” She gawked. “How illiterate are you?”

Another man came in from the back, this one taller, his overalls stained with oil.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Bob answered. “I think the lady wants to speak to us about literacy.”

The other man rubbed his hands on his overalls and looked at Carmen.

“There’s a rack of paperbacks by the door if that’s what you’re after.”

“No,” Carmen said, almost stamping her foot. “The sign on your store is incorrectly punctuated. If the store belongs to Bob,” she pointed at the man behind the counter, “then the apostrophe goes before the ‘s,’ not after.”

“Well, yeah,” said the guy in overalls. “But it doesn’t. It belongs to all of us Bobs.”

Carmen took a moment on this.

“You’re Bob?”

“Yeah. Bob McClane.” He gestured to the Bob behind the counter. “That’s Bobby Green. His dad’s Bobby Green Sr. I’ve got a cousin, Bob Jaffey. All four of us have a stake in the place.”

“In Bobs’ Motors?” she asked, regretting having not let her husband come in to pay.

“Yeah,” said both Bobs.

She looked down into her purse.

“Twenty dollars of unleaded, please.”

My Foot Stopped Working

So on Thursday the 3^rd I was in the hospital. I’m going back this week for updates and more tests. It’s nothing serious; I just can’t feel my foot, and if the condition spreads, I’ll never walk again.

We’re calling it “neuropathy” for now. It feels like nothing serious because of how I’ve been jerked around. The podiatrist gave me non-prescription drugs that did nothing and seemed annoyed that I wanted to know why my toes had gone numb. My regular doctor was too busy to see me; his physician’s assistant was willing, then too busy, and on our make-up, caught a cold and left work early. It took me four tries to see anybody.

But man, fourth try is the charm! They drew a dizzying amount of blood for three pages of tests. I’m fielding a new unit of measurement for blood: “the Tarantino.” Sally extracted at least a Tarantino from me to see if this is a blood disease, diabetes, hepatitis, MS, or, well, I hadn’t heard of half these things. Eventually the joke became that maybe I was pregnant (it doesn’t know where to grow in me, you see). I promised to name it after Sally if I was.

So now I’m editing my next novel and waiting for a phone call to find out if something is enormously wrong with me. Is this just my foot, or will it spread? Will that symptom turn out to be the tip of an iceberg? Hurry up and wait.

I’m going to blog about this going forward. I believe in publicly exposing our most sensitive moments. While fiction is my favorite means of self-expression, this is a gaping wound in my life. Every living person walks around pretending they don’t have gaping wounds in their lives, and so I’m going to show mine, in the hopes that more people don’t feel so uncomfortable or driven to hiding theirs. Hiding what’s eating you is a terrible idea, not only because you often avoid the kind of reflection and feedback that might help, but because human history is littered with people who hid that their fuses were burning until they blew. Whether it’s closeting your depression, or shouldering cancer on your own, or a marriage that needs scrutiny and only receives silence – there are too many ways we hurt ourselves. I’ll happily embarrass myself to do a little good for somebody else.

If that makes no sense to you, we can talk about it.

Bathroom Monologue: Paper Vs. E-Books

Your book is made out of dead trees.

Your Kindle sucks electricity.

Your book doesn't work in the dark.

Your Kindle needs to be plugged in or it goes dark.

Your book is the same book every day.

An e-tailer can't rescind my paper copy of 1984.

If my Kindle falls apart, they’ll send me a new one.

I love the smell of my old books.

I love the grayscale on my reader.

I like to make notes in the margins.

I like never losing my place.

My book never runs out of batteries.

My Kindle never runs out of stories.

Yours is worse.

Yours is worse.

Both are risky in a bathtub.

#NaNoReMo: National Novel Reading Month

February will be National Novel Reading Month. It’s a simple idea. We’ve all got at least one classic book we think we ought to read and have put off too long. Last year people flocked around the hashtag as they put away classics; I finally read Jane Austen, and am hoping for better results this year. I have six titles in mind, and the literary guilt may actually be killing me.

Check your shelf. Check your conscience. Isn’t there something long removed from the Bestseller’s List you think you ought to read? Be it for craft, for history, or some gap in your personal English canon. #NaNoReMo is about catching up with the classics.

One thing that bothers me about National Novel Writing Month is it isn’t located in a country. “National” is a poor word choice for a program that’s clearly international. Yet it’s popular, so #NaNoReMo will double the dubiousness. Not only can you read it in any nation of your choice, but your classic doesn’t have to be a novel. Want to brush up on Virgil or Ovid? Go for it. The rule is to read a classic.

We’re using a personal sliding scale for "classics." Some people don’t think Jules Verne is a classic author. I don’t like to talk to those people, but they exist, and so they can read someone else. But if you do think he’s a classic writer who deserves your time, then it’s your choice.

It begins on February 1^st. We’ll be on the honor system; nobody cheat and start reading now. In advance you’re welcome to hop onto blogs and Twitter to chat about your potential choices. Our hashtag is #NaNoReMo. Then join us throughout February as we discuss our progress through our chosen classics. If it works the cross-pollination of encouragement will increase our reading lists as well as encourage us to finish reading great works.

I’m actually asking for advice on my choices. Each is too big to expect to read together.

• George Elliot’s Middlemarch
• Alex Haley’s Roots
• Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
• Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
• Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities
• And the book that lost to Austen last year: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

I’ve wanted to read them all for years, and have owned a copy of Roots since 2007. Wolfe and Bulgakov seem the most likely to entertain, while Les Mis has the greatest mystique with all its hype and plethora of adaptations. I can’t mention the book on Twitter without someone gushing. And I’ve never read Hugo, never read Elliot, never read Haley, and was only ever exposed to Dickens’s Christmas Carol. It’s a lot of literary guilt.

Is there one of the above you’d most like to subject me to, or read me digest? I know how much people enjoyed watching me squirm over how insufferable Pride and Prejudice was last year.

Bathroom Monologue: The Only Thing Worse Is the Cure

I have never encountered an illness like that of the Young Master. What more rational name there is than “illness,” I am unaware, though it is an admittedly uncanny affliction.

Never had I wished for a thing so as to continue in my employers’ service when they announced they were expecting. The Master and Mistress had gone to great strains to conceive, importing all number of chemicals and powders, and seeking all number of blessing. One night I even witnessed the Mistress reading an occult tome, though the next day she ordered our precious blind cook to burn it and toss it out with the morning dregs.

The Mistress conceived it was time for me to retire. I could not deny the charges of my posture, of my trembling hands whenever I carried a tray of dinner to the Master’s upper study, and of my liver was deteriorating in much the same pattern as had that of my father and two forebears. It was only upon extreme begging of their charity that they allowed me to serve in reduced capacity through the birth and entry of a new member unto the household.

The Young Master was born of perfect health. I checked him myself as the doctors swarmed our Mistress, chanting of “internal aberrations," though I cannot recall her ever complaining of such conditions before. I carried the Young Master out of the room so he might not witness such pain as his first experience on our earth. It would be unseemly.

In the weeks that followed, the Master spent his days either in utter solitude in the upper study, or with the Young Master. How he stared at the the child, I sometimes feared he was going vile. I was almost relieved when he took ill and could no longer visit the lower floors.

It was by these emergencies that I was charged with finding wet nurses for the Young Master. Never have I heard of such trouble. Six we went through, six sturdy women, every one of them documented and with fine history. Four suffered anemia after their initial visits, and the other two were bedridden from unknown malignities.

We had such weather the night our Master finally slipped away. Nearly all the staff remained by his door, and it remains a regret that I could not join them, yet the Young Master required attention. I had to call upon a wet nurse of no documentation, who swore upon her life that her malignity was exclusive to her person and in no way transferable. Had I not been so shaken, I never would have admitted her, and yet?

The Young Master took to her breast immediately and found no complaint. Her milk was as fine as any of the women who had attended him before. No illness beset him that night or any night afterward, whereas, and I appreciate the sound of irrationality about it, but the wet nurse’s sallow malignity seemed to dissolve by morning. Even the boils on her neck waned. By Friday, she was comely for her age. I’ve had letters from her since that claim a total remission.

A coincidence, if not for this personal factor: since the Young Master came into my hands, these fingers have never been so steady. The pleasure of snapping one’s fingers is a thing I had forgotten, and now reclaim. I stride through these halls with endurance and posture unknown to me for fifteen years at the most conservative. And the pain in my liver? I have not felt it bleed in nigh on a month, and I should, for the Young Master takes to prodding at it whenever I carry him about his estate.

Census of the staff confirms my conviction: arthritis is extinct, and malignity seemingly out on vacation, while every able-bodied servant has taken to bed or had to excuse himself. I took my census to our precious blind cook for advice of one who thinks without the clouded vision of sight. Her answer shook me to my core, for after I asked her, she looked upon me for the first time in our long tenure together, and I realized that was her answer. She saw me, and it brought a tear to an old man’s eyes.

She has no more notion of what to do with the Young Master than I. Is this a condition that can be cured, and is it something that even ought to be cured?

So I must indulge in an indiscretion. Tomorrow, before the authorities arrive to take the Young Master into their care, I will shuttle him to the insane asylum on the other side of the mountain. I have known numerous educated men who claimed insanity to be an illness of the mind. Well if this is true, then after I push the Young Master’s pram through those halls for an hour, I may find several dozen cured and grateful minds with whom to discuss how best to serve him.

My apologies to any orderlies who catch the annual chill from our visit. I hear it is quite savage this year.

Click here for Part 2.

Consumed Podcast #14 is Live: Locke Lamora, Jo Walton, Battlestar Galactica, more

For the second episode in a row we managed to get all three hosts together: Nathanael Sylva, Max Cantor, and myself. This time we had an insane jumble of topics, two thirds of which we cut right before air. Still, we managed to cover a lot of distance, including the most book talk the podcast has ever seen, covering Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Jo Walton's Among Others, and Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Eventually we shift to the television shows Max and Nat have been binging on, particularly Battlestar Galactica and Justice League Unlimited. Surprisingly, it's the superhero cartoon that gets more praise for its depth, while Max struggles to balance the narrative achievements in Battlestar against its racial and plotting issues.

We saved the weirdest part for last, discussing Frog Fractions, a free videogame that starts out parodying educational games and becomes a genre-bending work of art that I could only compare to Tristram Shandy. I'm not even sure how much Max left in of this conversation, because it goes to a lot of paces, including self-publishing, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, how pigeonholded Romance is, whether editors help or hinder creativity, and... well, you should really just hear it.

You can download the episode for free right here.

Bathroom Monologue: Pigpun

There is a physician’s office at the end of the sty. It is open only Mondays and Fridays, when something funny is put in the slop. On those two days per week a particular pig puts on a pristine white coat and polished stethoscope and tends to the medical issues of her fellow cloven-hoofed kind. She has a PhD from out of state, an overturned slop bucket for a desk, and a banner with her motto: “Do No Ham.”

Bathroom Monologue: In Defense of Looper

Foreword: I haven't actually seen the movie. Allegedly I'm watching it tonight.

“Anyone fighting them must cross a certain skepticism: how is it that the mob, rather than a government or major corporation, controls time travel? We don't associate mad science with bowler hats and tommyguns. We certainly don't associate them with theoretical physics and R&D.

“To this skepticism, appreciate that whoever time travels first will control it retroactively. History will be changed, and it was.

“What do we associate with mob organizations? Moles. Spies. Inside men. Bribes. Things disappearing off of trucks.

“The mob didn't invent time travel. It had two financial backers, and one covert sleeper, in a Pentagon project out in New Mexico. Or it did, in a timeline we'll never remember. What we record is that they pulled the time machine out of the ether, and always had exclusive access to it, and every scientist who ever had a hunch in the right direction has been missing for time unknown.

“That's the devil of it, because it was a such fringe project that before an oversight committee could take it seriously, it was rewritten into a line where it had always been and no one could ever touch it. That's how we remember it because every time we've thought different, they've changed our past. We live in a gerrymandered present.”

100,000 Hits

I don't run many milestone posts, but I had to do this one. Sitemeter has long been flawed, but it's been monitoring my blog for so many years that I've grown attached to its often incorrect, often low-balled numbers. Usually the number on my page and the embedded counter don't even match up. Thanks to you, yesterday the counter finally ticked over 100,000 unique visits to The Bathroom Monolouges.

It stalled out at around 99,000 several days ago, and I thought Sitemeter was finally going belly up. A shame, really, since it'd be a wonderful way to ring in 2013. I love round numbers.


While it's a milestone, it's also an excuse to thank you. Thank you for every visit, every reading, and every comment you've left. Thank you for laughing, even when inappropriate, and cringing, especially when appropriate.

The Bathroom Monologues have been a weird rabbit hole to descend into. Between hits 1 and 100,000 I've made my first pro-rate sale, gotten my first partial-request, done anthologies and writing conventions. I'm deep into writing a second novel while still figuring out the best home for the first. A lot of a career has ticked away as you've clicked. Thank you, sincerely, because you've made much of this art worthwhile.

10 Things I Learned About How I Read the Internet in 2012

1. If you’re ranting, I will skim. I am not interested in vitriol, particularly because I’ve read so much of it that it all sounds the same to me. I want claims, evidence, and information. I can tell when you’re bending facts, and every time you make a leap of logic in order to continue attacking the opponent, my hand is getting closer to closing the tab.

2. If I’m tired or had a long day, and I have to use my scroll button at all in order to get to the point of your post, I will close the tab. More interesting was the discovery that this most frequently occurs on bad blogs and The New Yorker website. At my most generous, I will tab over and return to your work later. I don’t know when stream of consciousness and images became such a problem, but jeezy-creezy, learn to organize information.

3. Hell is somewhere north of Youtube’s comment section.

4. As much as I love long-form journalism, I don’t want to read it off a screen. 2012 was the first year where text on my monitor started to blur from reading too often. Even before eyestrain became a serious health problem, I hated clicking through five or eight NYTimes.com pages for a single article. Somehow the digital space has not reproduced the desire to consume great lengths of text, especially not when I’m spending so much time editing my own on that same screen. Will a tablet or Kindle change this? I don’t know. The Kindle does seem gentler on the eyes.

5. List posts are starting to work on me, but in tenuous fashion. Clearly they work enough for me to write one that includes discussion of them. I used to disdain them as the lowest possible thought, but now I’m so immersed in internet culture that I recognize a little of their utility. Now it’s merely any list that has two useless, redundant, boring or common sense items in a row that will get me to ditch out. Maybe I’ve already done so to you.

6. If there is a pop-up ad begging me to sign up for an RSS feed or mailing list, or to LIKE you on Facebook, I will close the tab immediately. You do not throw advertising in my face before I’ve read your content.

7. I don’t need gurus or motivational speakers. Seth Godin is for other people. When these things work for other people, they make me happy because those people are finding satisfaction. When those people try to turn me into a follower, I tune out.

8. Dozens of people will unfollow you if you tweet about trying to find a liver donor for your dying cousin.

9. Dozens of people will retweet you in an effort to find an Alzheimer’s patient who wandered from home.

10. It’s still big a mixed bag. Bring on 2013.