Returning to Earth

I'm reading a galley of Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth right now. Harrison's a longtime favorite and this book--a dictation of a dying man's family history--is being touted as one of his best. For once the hype is true. Though I'm only a tenth of the way into the book, the voice is immensely full and rich without being the slightest bit pretentious or overbearing. It's already turning into one of my favorites.

Dave Cockrum, 1943-2006

My first view of the comic that would more or less shape my view of comics in general came from this man. He wasn't my favorite Marvel artist -- not even my favorite X-Men artist -- but he deserves to be championed for at least two things: the crazed, flare-cuffed, not-always-successful 70s-style exuberance he brought to splashes and covers like the one above, and the creation of a character that has since poured about a billion dollars into the coffers of a lot of already rich men.

Supposedly Neal Adams led a drive to convince Marvel into paying Dave Cockrum $200,000 and royalties for the character of Nightcrawler -- though they still wouldn't own up to the fact that this was, simply, the decent (i.e, right) thing to do. The fact that Cockrum was already in financial straits and living in a VA hospital in the Bronx might've tipped them off, but I guess if money makes people stupid, then a whole of money makes people a whole lot of stupid. It's no secret how hired guns get treated in the creative industry -- music, comics, you name it -- but he deserved better.

But this wasn't supposed to some kind of vindictive finger-pointing fest against the Man. I'm sure there are already plenty of better-worded and more well-researched screeds out there in the blogosphere with dozens more to come. What ought to be remembered first and foremost is that Dave Cockrum's artwork grabbed the eye of a lot of kids and got them involved in the lives of make-believe people that, for a long time, we loved more than air. He did what he loved and it came through in his work.

In the end, he deserved better.

NAT

Wanna hear my least favorite part of the job?

No, not this job -- writing still doesn't seem like work, even after multiple rewrites, outline restructurings and attempts to come up with titles for books. Even when I was getting paid by the hour to adapt Dante's Inferno as a rap opera it was still fun.

No, I'm talking about my day job (the one I mostly do at night) at the hospital. Contrary to what I might have said in a pseudo Mr. Crankypants-type mood, this is a good gig. The technologists, physicians, nurses and administrators that I work with are smart and very good at what they do, and the work itself provides an excellent variety of human interaction in 45-minute doses. More than occasionally, you actually get to feel like you made somebody's life better.

Then there's the children.

The sick ones are hard enough. Generally, because most kids about seven and under require some form of sedation if not outright general anesthesia to hold perfectly still for the length of time it takes to do the diagnostic tests I perform, they're not exactly order on a whim. Your kid's got to be pretty sick, or present the possibility of being sick, in order to go through the hassle of sedation. And those sick kids are hard enough, but that's not what I'm talking about here. By and large, really sick kids are some of the bravest patients you'll get.

But the ones I'm talking about, the younger ones mainly, are the ones that come down with a history of NAT -- non-accidental trauma. Hospital-ese for abuse. It's bad enough to read about this stuff in the paper or see it on the news. As a health care professional, you read the history, you look at the previous studies, sometimes you see the parents themselves on the other side of the glass, and you try to fathom why.

As a parent, you're horrified.

As a human being, you're outraged.

It's beyond counterintuitive. It pisses you off that it even exists. Like a total stranger walking up to you and asking you to eat ground glass.

I have a friend who questioned my tendancy for putting children in jeopardy in my fiction. Fair enough question -- I don't really have an answer. Except to say that, in my scary stories, there's a redemptive element at work when that highest-stakes game comes into play. In order to make the magic work for me (and it always has to work for me, before I can make it work for you) I need to be balls-out committed to the story and its progress...and sometimes that horror, that outrage, comes leaking in from my work as an MRI tech into my work as a writer. I have always written for myself first, and the children who survive my make believe monsters are one way I address the sickeningly undigestable reality of abuse -- the shaken infant, the newborn kicked in the face by his angry father, the toddler dropped from the balcony. I'm not making these cases up; I've scanned them.

It's my least favorite part of working of my job.

But my other job, the one I do at the laptop and in my dreams, is a pressure valve for that.

And for that, I'm grateful.

The Hairy Man

This, for those of you who don't recognize it, is Kenner's Six Million Dollar Man Bionic Bigfoot, circa 1976. In this era of retail frenzy, wherein I'm just barely able to hide all the Christmas toys that I've already bought for my own kids, I find myself looking back on the Bionic Bigfoot with a kind of nostalgic longing that bears little or no relation to the sheer, gut-clenching, addiction-level desire for this toy when I was six years old. I remember lying in bed, unable to sleep, terrified to live in a universe where I might be denied Bionic Bigfoot.

Here's the thing: I didn't even like the Six Million Dollar Man that much. I remember watching it at my cousins' house in California; mainly I remember the opening title sequence and the chilling phrase, "A man barely alive." But if pressed, I couldn't confirm that I even saw one full episode...and I'm pretty sure I never saw the Bionic Bigfoot two-parter.

But Bionic Bigfoot -- man, I had to own that thing. And now I find myself wondering why. In an attempt to better understand how my desire for this toy fit into my journey to adulthood and ultimately scary parenthood, I googled "hairy man" and found a helpful interview with man expert and poet Robert Bly. (Note: In order to make this excerpt more relevent, I've added the word "bionic" here and there.)

"One image I've found useful in imagining masculine feeling, and where to find it, is the image from the opening section of the story called Iron John or Iron Hans, preserved in the Grimm Brothers collection, At the bottom of the male psyche, the story says, there is a BIONIC man entirely covered with hair... The Wild BIONIC Man is aware of his own wound. His BIONIC wildness is more like the wildness of the old Zen priest, or the men in the Arthur stories. As the Iron John story goes on, it's clear that he, when brought up from the water, becomes a BIONIC teacher and guide of younger men. So the entire BIONIC story gives a good image of the union of Young Man and BIONIC Old Man as a carrier of masculine BIONIC feeling, something I hadn't imagined twenty years ago..."

Reading over this, I thought, wow...now I really get it! I'm so furious at my parents for never buying me this freakin' toy! But if they had -- well, in my wildest imaginings I can't begin to speculate how my life would've been different.

For example I definitely would've gotten Oscar Goldman and his exploding briefcase...

Black Friday

None for me, thanks...I'm already stuffed.

We Give Thanks

For the New Yorker covers of Owen Smith and Chris Ware.

For free Campbells Soup at the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade.

For kids who still get excited about marching bands and parade floats.

For Sufjan Stevens' Christmas boxed set.

For the time and space to write.

For living in a country where you can drink red wine with sushi and nobody gives you crap about it.

For undeserved tolerance when you accidentally give your spouse the wrong directions and end up having to backtrack.

For the poetry of Hayden Carruth.

That there are only 788 days left...

38 Million People with Same Great Idea

On the road tonight, headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

I'm the one in the blue VW Eurovan.

If I Blogged It

Of all of those saddened at the announcement of the cancellation of OJ Simpson's book, none swallowed a bigger, bitterer pill than I. As one of a select few consultants hired by ReganBooks to help transition one of our finest athletes and comedic thesps from bestselling writer to blogger, I was honestly looking forward to working one on one with "The Juice" and helping him through the tricky class-five rapids of converting the ethereal fairy dust of publishing cache into hard-won real-world blog capital.

Of course, the mania of blogsites snapping up authors willy-nilly isn't what it was even, say, a year ago. Who can forget the recent ballyhoo of blogsites which will mercifully remain nameless, pouring out heaps and scads of money to every Zadie Smith and Milan Kundera, who it was assumed would make fine bloggers, simply because they could write books? Who among us didn't gloat over the PW report of the million-dollar blog deal gone wrong when Marilynne Robinson failed to produce the weekly blog Gileaddled, after that book's acclaim in certain literary circles? Who didn't enjoy a healthy side-order of Schadenfreude when a "genius" like Cormac McCarthy and his apparent ability to engage a handful of New York critics didn't exactly transfer to the rough and tumble city of big shoulders that is the blogosphere (or the 'osphere, as it's often called by those in the know)? No country for old men, indeed!

Listen, people: these big blog moguls aren't dumb. Fool them once, shame on you. Fool them twice, they're gonna learn. And learn fast. The blog marketplace has toughened up severely since John Irving's short-lived Garp. Garp? Garp! blog flitted through and left the public conscious with scarcely a nun's fart. So when ReganBooks contacted me and a few others to put together a team to whip The Juice into shape for a blog, we answered with a resounding, "Heavens, yes!"

Only now, look. It's not gonna happen. And I want to tell you: more's the pity.

Galactus is Coming

Jack Chick's hardcore Bible tracts scared the crap out of me as a child. I am astonished and humbled by the brilliance behind this.

John Connolly and the End of the Road

So, John Connolly, author of the Charlie Parker series and most recently The Book of Lost Things, was in town yesterday signing. Even if I wasn't enjoying his new book immensely, I would've gone out just to see how charming and genuine an author can be after spending two months on the road. Next week he's finally going home to his family in Dublin.

John is a gentleman's gentleman -- smart, funny, engaging and extremely sharp. He's one of those rare people who can sit at a table of ten and miss nothing. Jim Munchel, manager of the Borders Express where John was signing and another highly underrated individual, was generous enough to invite me to join him and a handful of others for dinner and drinks at the Elephant and Castle after the event. The table conversation veered from writing and travel to necrophilia, and John told the story of a man he'd met who divorced his wife because he found out she was having an affair with William Shatner.

If nothing else, those answering machine messages could've gone for a pretty penny on eBay.

Tempus Fugitaboutit

I was fired once in my life. Best paying job I ever had.

In the fall of 1999 my wife and I were living in Boston. She was working as a nanny and I was passing the days as a freelance editorial consultant for what might charitably be called an "entertainment packaging firm" in LA. My biggest gig for them was ghostwriting the autobiography of Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. That telephone call happened like this:

Them: "Hello, is this Joe?"

Me: "Yes."

Them: "Hey, great! Listen, great news, we just made a deal with Jesse 'The Body' Ventura. He's the governor now, you know."

Me: "I heard."

Them: "Yeah, so anyway, we're writing his autobiography."

Me: "Uh-huh."

Them: "Yeah! All we need is a title."

Me: "Well, let's see, he was in Predator, right? He had like, one line...'I ain't got time to bleed.'"

Them: "Hey, great line! Did you just make that up?"

Me: "Um, yeah. You like it?"

Them: "You want a job?"

I didn't ghostwrite the whole thing, only a couple sentences with the SEALS and some paragraphs of his adolescence. They paid me like $500. Not bad for an hour's work --

-- but absolute peanuts compared to what I'd be making a few months later when I got a call to move to New York and write two-minute Flash-animated Behind the Music satires for a web site that had just secured something like five million bucks in venture capital. With this money, the two guys who had started the site, (let's call them Connecticut Backwards-Hat Guy and The Blowjob Aficionado) had rented a couple floors of a building on W. 34th Street and were busy spending money faster than anyone on earth could possibly earn it. They hired a bunch of us to sit in a dangling Plexiglas-enclosed room with laptops, and they hired a sexy girl to sit out front with the phone, and we ordered stuff from Kozmo and Urban Fetch, and me and a couple other guys wrote our little cartoons. Bill Clinton was in the White House, September 11th was just a random date, and the world was good.

That was How I Spent My Summer Vacation, 2000.

Then one day came the Meeting.

First they told us everything was all right. Then they told us we had nothing to worry about. Then they told us our checks might not cash. Not this week's -- but maybe next week's. Mmmaybe.

A few weeks later, I flew out to LA for a day or two with one of the other writers for a series of pitch meetings. We were trying to sell a comedy spec. We came back on Monday morning and were immediately called into the office, where Connecticut Backwards-Hat Guy and Now Extremely Pissed Off Blowjob Aficianado were ranting and fuming about how we'd betrayed them. Here they were fighting like hell to save their company, and here we were, galavanting off to California, stabbing them in the back. When we got back to our little Plexiglas warren, our laptops had vanished. We were escorted out the door and out of the building.

Dazed, we retired to my pad on E. 14th Street to drink gimlets and ponder our future. Surely this turn of events was nothing but good. We'd collect unemployment while readying our screenplay and soon be on our way to megastardom. Getting fired from this job was the best thing that could've happened.

That was six years ago.

Life has changed pretty dramatically since then. A lot of the things we expected for ourselves then have not come to pass, and even more things have happened that nobody -- least of all me -- could have predicted.

It was only time in my life that anybody ever said, "You're fired." It was a peculiar, intense, flavorful moment, a time when failure somehow tasted like opportunity, and it formed an enormous part of the lasting impression of my New York year. What does it all mean? Could it--should it--have somehow happened differently?

In Hogwarts they say, Draco Dormiens Nunquam Tittilandus. It doesn't pay to tickle a sleeping dragon.

I say: Tempus fugitaboutit.

And while you're at it, sic transit gloria.

Eat the Dark

This is officially the title of next year's novel.

The Fall '07 launch was Monday -- Keith, my editor at Ballantine, talked to in-house people and key sales reps -- and nobody had any problem with it. Me? I like it. Unlike the title Chasing the Dead, which originally came out of my word processor with the unexciting monicker The Route and was renamed by my publisher, this one was my idea.

It's a line from one of my all-time favorite novels:


"They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe."

Since the novel takes place in a hospital on its last night of operation, where the power goes out (and stays out) for roughly half the story, it seemed appropriate.

At least one smartypants has already suggested that Eat the Dark is quite the appropriate title for an author who lives near Hershey, PA. Personally I prefer milk chocolate.

Eat the Dark. Write it on your Trapper Keepers, post it on your bulletin boards, engrave it on the bottoms of your sneakers and walk all over the world.

Islands in the Ghost Sea

Once upon a time when we all lived in the forest and no one lived anywhere else, there were eight seas instead of just seven. The eighth sea was also known as the Ghost Sea—the biggest of all the seas on earth, and the place where your spirit went after you died. Countless ghosts swam in this sea instead of fish—the water was full of them.

As time went on, though, people became uneasy with a sea full of ghosts. It was one sea too many and they wanted it gone. After a lot of deliberation they found a Fat Man so big and thirsty that he could fit the entire sea in his belly, and sent this man out to swallow the entire ghost sea. He drank it all down with the exception of a single cup, which he simply could not fit inside himself, and the solitary ghost that stayed inside that last bit of water, that last of its kind.

One day a small boy was wandering through the dry seabed, beachcombing, when he came across a shell with the last of the Ghost Sea inside. The ghost called out to him, saying, “I’m lonely, and I miss my kind. Will you bring this cup to the Fat Man and ask him to swallow me so I can be with them?”

The boy took the cup with the last of the Ghost Sea in it, and went to town, to the Fat Man’s house. This man was so big that his house had but one room, and when the boy went in he saw a man so large he filled it to its walls, a man so swollen with the Ghost Sea that he was one enormous circle with a face. The Fat Man was sleeping, and when the boy got close enough, he could put his ear to the Fat Man’s belly and hear millions of ghosts that he’d swallowed moving around inside him.

“Go on,” spoke the ghost from inside the cup. “His mouth is open. Pour me in.”

The boy did as he was told, tipping the cup back to pour the last of the Ghost Sea inside the Fat Man’s open mouth. As he did so, the Fat Man woke up, sputtering, coughing, but it was too late—he swallowed the last of the Ghost Sea, the last bit that he’d been unable to hold. He sat up and the boy heard an unearthly groaning sound coming from deep inside his belly, and realized that the ghost hadn’t really wanted to be with his own kind inside the Fat Man after all. He’d wanted all the ghosts and the Ghost Sea to be free.

The Fat Man’s mouth opened and the entire Ghost Sea came pouring out with a roar, along with all the ghosts inside. A huge flood tore the house down and spilled out into the town. The boy ran as fast as he could but the floodwaters were gaining on him and he knew he was sure to drown.

At the last moment, though, the ghost that the boy had brought to the Fat Man’s lips recognized him standing there. “Go around him!” the ghost called out, and the Ghost Sea parted, all the ghosts moving around the boy so that he stood untouched.

And that is where he still stands to this day, grown into manhood, a solitary island in the Ghost Sea.

Emotional Mapquest

We've all had times when we find ourselves looking up, wondering how we ended up feeling like we do. It's like you stick your head up out of a foxhole, remember your mindset from earlier that day -- and try to figure out how things got so far out of whack.

That's where Emotional Mapquest would come in.

With this new online service, which I plan to start beta-testing just as soon as I get the time, resources and intelligence to launch it, you'll be able to enter in the way you were feeling and the way you are feeling, and the software will generate easy-to-follow step-by-step directions.

Example?

ORIGIN: CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
DESTINATION: EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR

From CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM go approximately 10.5 miles thinking about the day's obligations until you arrive at CREEPING APPREHENSION.

From CREEPING APPREHENSION advance 40 miles until you see the first signs of FREE-FLOATING ANXIETY.

From FREE-FLOATING ANXIETY, allow 6 centimeter detour into SHAMELESS FANTASY.

Return from SHAMELESS FANTASY after a brief 30-foot stab at HYSTERICAL SELF-DELUSION.

Descend slowly 45 FEET from SELF-DELUSION into GLUM SELF-PITY.

From GLUM SELF-PITY descend an additional 700 FEET straight down into FLAT OUT HOPELESSNESS.

From FLAT OUT HOPELESSNESS segue 22 FEET RIGHT to the closest STARBUCKS.

From STARBUCKS, explode 7 MILES HIGH into AN ABRUPTLY SUNNY STATE OF CAFFEINE-ENDUCED RAPTURE.

Leaving RAPTURE, crash hard and fast into LATE AFTERNOON SLOUGH OF DESPOND.

From SLOUGH OF DESPOND dither along through 6000 MILES OF INTERCHANGIBLE ROUTINE.

Arrive in EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR.

TOTAL TRIP TIME: 21 MINUTES

My Day

I'm midway through my next novel. Not the one due out next fall, but the one after that. It's exciting, because it's that honeymoon period of discovery where every idea feels fresh and new, and every plot turn opens a whole world of possibilities. Soon enough, it will all start to solidify, then gel, and I'll still be coming back to it, combing out the rough patches and working over the details. There are rewards here too, but they're less childlike, more elusive. Peter Straub has compared the process to working with a progressively smaller sets of screwdrivers, and that seems accurate.

Right now, though, I'm stealing time every chance I get to work on the new book. A typical day goes something like this:

5:30 AM -- Wake up. Tiptoe downstairs for coffee. Fire up laptop. Write like crazy.
7:00 AM -- First kid wakes up. Discussion of dreams from night before. Try to steal extra ten minutes to finish thought. Fail miserably and feel guilty anyway.
7:30 AM -- Second kid up.
8-10:00 AM -- Breakfast. Play trucks. Play horses. Play trains. Play Princesses. Play King Kong versus Godzilla. Play Godzilla versus trains. Play ponies versus Princesses. Crawl under stairs with both kids for first scary story of day.
11:00 -- Outdoor activity. Ride bikes, climb trees, measure width and depth of sinkhole. Bike past muddy pond. Tell second scary story of the day.
12:00 -- Lunch
12:15 PM -- Oldest kid to preschool. Have laptop and second pot of coffee at the ready. Write as if fate of world depended on it.
1:45 PM -- Mad dash to prepare for work. Shower. Shave. Pack lunch. Remember everything I was supposed to have ready for today. Save all work to flash drive. Put flash drive in bag along with wallet, car keys, ID badge. Run to car.
2:10 PM -- Run back into house to get bag. Run to car again.
2:30 - 10:30 PM -- Work.
11:00 PM -- Return home. Search for alcoholic reward. Check what's on cable. Renew acquaintance with spouse. Consider trying to write. Shake head mournfully. Make plans to get up even earlier the next morning.
12:00 PM -- Lights out.

Hole Watch Day 8

Check it out! Our sinkhole is bigger. Wider. It's still not big enough for two kids, but it's definitely able to accomodate a kid reading HOLES. Measurements to follow.

Midnight Shift

My next book is set in a hospital during a midnight shift. It's a scary place, especially in the small hours of the night. That's probably why somebody sent me this.

Basking...Basking, I say

Lookee here...Mark over at Burlesque of the Damned talks about how much he liked Chasing the Dead. And he points out a very real hazard of the book, reading it so fast you might miss something. Optimally it should be read in real time, bringing you out to the next morning.

Little known fact about this book: It was written extremely quickly, at a time in my life when I had no more than an hour or so at a time to write. So the velocity of the storyline was immediately related to my own desperation to find out how it was going to end.

I just found out Chasing is going to be one of Target's "breakout books" for the holidays, which means that when Black Friday comes and you're elbowing your way through masses of Romero-esque Christmas shoppers, somewhere in between buying Baby Alive and a designer wastebasket, you can pick up a copy of the book for the dirt-cheap price of 16.95.

Hole Watch - Day 4

Yesterday it rained. Our hopes of returning to the hole to find it full of water were dashed. Nor is the hole itself increasing in size. Measurements of the hole remain nominally the same as they were before the rain. It is still able to accomodate one kid.

Zombie Kid

On Sunday afternoon we found this hole on the other side of the creek from our house. It's not big -- three feet deep, a couple feet wide. Kind of odd.
Jack was immediately in there exploring it. It was only a matter of time till he had his zombie face on.


He kept wanting to do it with bigger and louder screams, "let me try one with my Crypt-Keeper laugh," that sort of thing. Actors.

Dead Alive

I just got back from a signing at Borders Express in Camp Hill, and it went even better than I could've hoped. I brought the whole Scary family, because there's nothing like discussing horror fiction while your two and four-year-olds see how many Fun Size M&Ms they can filch from the complimentary Halloween bowl next to a stack of your books. The store manager, the incredibly author-friendly Jim Munchel, had a nifty display set up and told me he'd been handselling Chasing the Dead steadily for the last month as one of his staff picks.

I've worked at six different Borders stores over the last twelve years, not to mention a SuperCrown Books (anybody remember those?), and I can tell you, most author events are oddly stilted affairs, a weird combination of shotgun marriage and military occupation. They're often planned by events coordinators at the corporate level, and the staff has little or no say about who comes to the store and why.

In stark contrast, Jim is one those under-the-radar retail special forces guys, the type that, if you're a fledgling author, you just pray you'll run into. When he reads a book he likes, he goes the most direct route possible to share it with the rest of the world. He and his staff made me feel immediately at home, and when there was nobody at the table, he came over to make me look less pathetic. I can already tell you, I'd travel around the world to sign books at his store again. (If you don't believe me, ask John Connolly, author of the excellent The Book of Lost Things, new this month. Connolly is the embodiment of Big League, with Times bestselling numbers, and when he flies in from Dublin and could sign anywhere, he comes to Jim's store. That's how good it is).

Anyway, what a great afternoon. People showed up and swapped MySpace info, I got interviewed for the Patriot-News, and we sold lots and lots of books. Oh, and I got to eat the most delicious crabcake sandwich of my life. Thanks, Anne.

Windshield Eye and the Girl in the Wall

Once upon a time there was a boy who came across a magic car. It was beautiful, long and sleek, and totally unoccupied. He decided to climb inside and take it for a ride.

Once upon a time there was a girl who wandered in the woods. Her parents had warned her about those who dwelled there, but the girl went anyway, deeper and deeper, until one day she got lost.

Upon starting the engine of the magic car, the boy discovered the view through the windshield was not as he expected. The glass was crystal, and it had a spell on it that allowed him to see through things. When he looked at people, he saw bones; when he looked at closed doors, he saw what was going on inside. He was so distracted by unexpected vision of the world that he lost control of the car and crashed.

The girl in the forest ventured deeper into the trees. It was getting dark out but she wasn’t scared. She’d heard that most people got in real trouble in these situations when they started to panic. She was a smart girl. She wouldn’t panic.

The boy in the car survived the crash with a single injury—a bit of the windshield glass got stuck inside his right eye. The eye turned red, and from then on, it had the unique curse of being able to see through things. He wore a patch over it to cover it up but swiftly found himself an outcast—people called him Windshield Eye. Since they never knew when he was looking at them, and when he was looking through them. Patch or no patch, it was just easier to make him leave town completely.

The lost girl’s path led her to the house of a witch, who punished the girl by embedding her in a rock wall twenty feet thick. The girl tried to cry out for help, but no one could hear her muffled voice calling out from deep inside the stone.

The town searched everywhere for the missing girl but couldn’t find her. They ventured deeper into the woods than ever—they even found the rock wall—but still couldn’t hear her crying out from inside. Soon, they gave up entirely. Inside the wall, the girl gave her last breaths. She was running out of air.

Windshield Eye was alone in the woods. He found the wall and lay down against it. What did it matter now who saw his terrible red right eye? He took the patch off and flung it into the woods.

No sooner had he exposed his red right eye then he saw the girl trapped inside the wall. He grabbed a rock and started smashing the wall until he’d broken it to pieces, and taken the girl out, gasping for air. She lay in his arms for a long moment, looking into the eye that had saved her, the most beautiful eye she’d ever seen.

Didn't Greg Kinnear Make a Movie About This?

Here's a bit of Atlantic City news that I found simultaneously pathetic and awful, and blackly funny. Sort of like that necrophilia case out of Wisconsin a couple months ago. And like that case, the kicker on this story is the last sentence. If you don't read it all the way through, you miss the punchline.

This morning I spoke to Jim, the manager at the Borders Express where I'm signing tomorrow, to check on any last-minute details. He wanted to know, based on what's been said over here, if I wanted police protection at the book signing tomorrow. Apparently a Lower Allen Township police officer read Chasing the Dead and the Jeff Vesek's blog, and was concerned for my safety. Touched, I reassured Jim that I think whatever concern Mr. Vesek may have elicited, the threat level is now back to white. Or fuscia. Or...you know...a non-threatening level.

Ahem.

Hippity-Hoppity-Hype

Sheila over at Book Fetish had some great stuff to say about Chasing the Dead. And LastCall at FantasyBookSpot seems to have dug it a lot too.



And listen, folks, it's all happening this Saturday, November 4th: call the airlines and catch those last-minute flights into Harrisburg International, because I'm going to be at Borders Express at the Capital City Mall, from 1-3. Call (717) 737-4298 for information. This is part of Borders' "After Halloween Bash." Will there be orange cookies and cider on hand? Does the pope...oh, never mind.

Oh yeah, and I finally got a MySpace page. I'm still trying to find out ways to "pimp" it, or indeed, what "pimping" one's space implies. A fascinating topic, and one certain to keep me pondering late into the night...

Eye Garlic

Fun fact about me: I love Google image search.



I mean, really. Talk about your x-ray into the dark heart of the psyche. Just type in the word "creepy" and bask in the banquet of visual deliciousness.



Of course, Scary Dolls are a staple of any healthy nightmare life.



And clowns. Everybody loves a clown.



This I find inexplicably unsettling in a j-horror kind of way.



I think if I was walking through this old building and saw this on the wall, I would probably turn around and leave. Although I wouldn't be there probably in the first place. Probably.



A different brand of creepy.



And of course, it doesn't get more horrifying than this.

You Can Write for CBS -- from the Middle of Nowhere!

Even the Scary Parent can't be scary all the time. Sometimes you have to branch out a little.

(Insert sound of comfortable chair being pulled back and settled back into, creakily)

A few years back (okay -- six) I sat down to write a story about a detective with multiple personalities. Sounds simple, huh? Like it could write itself. It was going to be funny and suspenseful and mind-bending, but also sort of a thriller, Elmore Leonard-esque, with allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle and Chandler and Hemingway, but also creepy and...

Simple. You know. Easy.

Four rewrites, three years, three apartments (New York, Philadelphia, Hershey, PA) and two kids (Jack, Veda) later, a slovenly stack of 300-odd pages had boiled down into a brisk ninety page novella called Split. And, I don't have to tell you, in the world of publishing, there's nothing more useful and awesome than a novella, unless it's a really awesome one, which this was.

I remember sitting there staring at it, loathing it, cursing at it, wanting my life back.

At some point, via connections too tenuous to describe, this weird novella/short story thing ended up on the desk of uber-producer/manager Lawrence Mattis of Circle of Confusion. Lawrence is a great guy, a busy guy, an extraordinarily connected guy. He told me he'd take a look at it. And then nothing happened. He showed it to an indie filmmaker named Jed Weintrob. And then nothing happened. Several treatments were generated. And then nothing happened. I went on to write other things and forgot all about it.

And then this happened.

Keep in mind, I had no idea that my little mutant was even being pitched around town, let alone to CBS-Paramount, until I got the call that the deal had been made. Because Lawrence and his partners are stand-up guys, they got me a writing commitment if Split goes to series. It turns out that getting the network brass to hand out a writing gig to an unknown talent is roughly the equivalent of convincing NASA to let Kevin Federline fly the space shuttle.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm still punching a time clock forty hours a week. A typical week for me at the hospital may include the vigorous scrubbing of any number of Fascinating Bodily Fluids from my hands. Whatever the pundits might say about writing for TV, the idea of getting paid a living wage week after week to come up with ideas that you get to see in full color six weeks later, sounds pretty darn appealing.

Will it ever happen? Who knows. I'm part of the generation that saw the Red Sox win the World Series. I believe in miracles. There hasn't been a whole lot more info at this time, except...

Yesterday, my agent emailed to let me know that CBS is extending their option for another year. They own the right to own Split until November 2007. Is that enough to inspire a yokel like me to press on for another day in the rough and tumble world of literary wanna-bes and coulda beens, to somehow find my way through what Melville called "planets of unwaning woe"?

Absolutely. Unequivocably. No question.

And friends, that's flippin' scary.