I work for a corporation. I get my entertainment from a corporation. My food and beverages are all provided by corporations. My mortgage payment goes to a corporation.
For some reason I only really think this way after I’ve been shopping at IKEA.
Here’s what you do when you go shopping at IKEA. You park the car and you take the kids inside and make them take off their little shoes and put them in a plastic bucket to train them for when they get older and have to go through airport security. You tell them you’ll be dropping them off for an hour at a play area with other kids whose parents are also shopping. Then you trade them in for a pager that has a little red light that blinks to prove your children are still alive and you hit the sales floor. On the way up you pass the IKEA café where you can get a ninety-nine cent hotdog and you listen to John Mayer and you wonder if it’s necessary to have Swedish names for every single item printed on the tags. There are things called Tivor and Yosgov and Sknov and there are usually umlauts involved in this. All the books are used for props and they're in Swedish too, even the ones by Phillip Roth, and you wonder if that's to keep people from stealing them. Everywhere you go you’re surrounded by other young couples doing the same thing you are, looking at things and wandering around trying to imagine how it would all look in their houses. The place is so big you really don’t have any sense of the size or shape of it, it goes on forever, and as you stare at all the brushed steel and blonde wood and cushions and fabric you’re slowly and irreparably ensconced by a safe prophylactic kind of lust that is really the closest thing middle-age people feel to adolescent infatuation.
Something about the whole experience makes you feel like you’re in the first scene of an action movie, right before Bruce Willis comes through the ceiling. Or maybe it’s a romantic comedy. Or maybe a gentle Pixar satire of American consumerism. In any case the ritual of it feels both processed and somehow important as if you’re participating in some larger cultural event just by walking around and nodding your head at the right moments. All that’s missing the iconic moment that happens immediately after you leave the store with thirty-eight dollars worth of plastic cups and Teflon frying pan and a bag of red candy fish. But that doesn’t matter. Simply being at IKEA makes you feel as though you’ve fulfilled some small but vital role in a much larger tapestry, a design whose overall scheme—when viewed with enough perspective—becomes almost profound. It’s corporate consumerism at its most validating. For the time you’re there, you feel like just shopping makes you transcendent, like the way God must feel when He’s shopping at IKEA.
All IKEA is a stage; we are merely players.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Contest Update
Wow. You people will eat anything.
Entries are pouring into my inbox from all over the globe and I for one couldn't be more thrilled. If even half of you are telling the truth about this, then you all deserve signed copies of Eat the Dark, and possibly gift vouchers for an ER visit or some sort of gastronomic psychotherapy.
Meanwhile, the search continues for the darkest thing you've ever eaten. What better way to celebrate a long weekend? Eat something really dark. Win a scary book!
Entries are pouring into my inbox from all over the globe and I for one couldn't be more thrilled. If even half of you are telling the truth about this, then you all deserve signed copies of Eat the Dark, and possibly gift vouchers for an ER visit or some sort of gastronomic psychotherapy.
Meanwhile, the search continues for the darkest thing you've ever eaten. What better way to celebrate a long weekend? Eat something really dark. Win a scary book!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Duane Swierczynski's Severance Package
What’s the best book I’ve read in the last week or so? Well, it came on pink paper…it was labeled TERMINATION NOTICE…and it was only fifty pages long—and I can’t even get the satisfaction of finding out how the damn thing ends until sometime in November.
If the 50 page preview that I read is any indication, Duane Swierczynski’s Severance Package, due out this fall from St. Martin’s Minotaur, is some of best hot-blooded pulse pounding holy-crap thriller writing I’ve come across in a long, long time. The setup is cunningly simple—a Philadelphia corporation whose true purpose seems to be functioning as a CIA front is being shut down, and its employees are all getting the goriest golden handshake imaginable from their boss. In the fifty pages I read, we’re introduced to a handful of familiar, sympathetic, likeable characters and invited to pull up a chair while, by all accounts, they’re about to fight for their lives through handguns, hangovers and poison gas.
Also, there’s Pepperidge Farm cookies.
Swierczynski handles all of this with such goofy, off-hand aplomb that you just know he’s having the time of his life. His enthusiasm is contagious. You know how you sometimes read people saying, “The story grabbed me from the first sentence”? Well, Severance Package really did grab me from the first sentence. I was standing in my kitchen making my kids peanut butter and fluff sandwiches and basically trying to turn pages while I did it. The rest of it I read while walking from the parking lot into the hospital where I work. I couldn’t put the sonofabitch down.
What we have here, folks, is the most enjoyable, compulsively readable skewering of corporate culture imaginable…and in this case, most the skewering is probably going to be literal.
If the 50 page preview that I read is any indication, Duane Swierczynski’s Severance Package, due out this fall from St. Martin’s Minotaur, is some of best hot-blooded pulse pounding holy-crap thriller writing I’ve come across in a long, long time. The setup is cunningly simple—a Philadelphia corporation whose true purpose seems to be functioning as a CIA front is being shut down, and its employees are all getting the goriest golden handshake imaginable from their boss. In the fifty pages I read, we’re introduced to a handful of familiar, sympathetic, likeable characters and invited to pull up a chair while, by all accounts, they’re about to fight for their lives through handguns, hangovers and poison gas.
Also, there’s Pepperidge Farm cookies.
Swierczynski handles all of this with such goofy, off-hand aplomb that you just know he’s having the time of his life. His enthusiasm is contagious. You know how you sometimes read people saying, “The story grabbed me from the first sentence”? Well, Severance Package really did grab me from the first sentence. I was standing in my kitchen making my kids peanut butter and fluff sandwiches and basically trying to turn pages while I did it. The rest of it I read while walking from the parking lot into the hospital where I work. I couldn’t put the sonofabitch down.
What we have here, folks, is the most enjoyable, compulsively readable skewering of corporate culture imaginable…and in this case, most the skewering is probably going to be literal.
Win an Advance Galley of Eat the Dark!!!
Dinner is served!
That's right, one lucky reader will be the proud recipient of a signed advance galley of Eat the Dark, which won't be out until October. That's right, a whole summer of chills, an entire season early. In order to enter this contest, you'll need to answer one simple question:
What's the darkest thing you've ever eaten?
This may be interpreted any way you choose. I will say right now that creativity counts in a big way. It might be a dark chocolate cake or it may be....something else.
Email your answers to joeschreiber1@yahoo.com. The contest ends when I've got enough entertaining entries to fill a post. I'm guessing about a month. All entries will be posted right here.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
The Ongoing Struggle to Write Something Worthwhile
I was reading a writer’s blog the other day. The topic was how often an author, particularly one trying to establish herself in a field as crowded as thrillers, should endeavor to produce a new book. This writer put forth the idea that two books a year might not be an excessive goal -- might, in fact, not be enough to lodge their names in the collective mind of the public. How much is enough? this writer wondered. Three books a year? More?
I don’t doubt this is true. We certainly see frequent fiction from big bestselling writers from Robert Parker to Danielle Steele filling the new hardcover tables at Borders. If these already incredibly well-known people feel compelled to produce such copious amount of work, shouldn’t we lesser mortals make the same effort? Shouldn’t we as beginning writers, in effect, be busting our butts to compete with all the other distractions -- movies, video games, reality TV, other books -- that might keep potential readers from noticing our work? Isn’t this kind of consistent branding an enormous part of achieving lasting success as a commercial writer?
Yes. And no.
While I do think that it’s important to keep your name in play, I can’t help but think of a remark that David Foster Wallace once made about writing seeming to get more difficult the longer he does it. What I’ve found is that, even when it’s not necessarily harder with each progressive book, the challenge to write well is always formidable. At times it’s damn near insurmountable. Something about seeing your work typeset and bound in hardcover (not to mention critiqued in the New York Times) make you want to write better, rather than faster. Once you've published it, it can't be undone. The errors, the failures of nerve, the obvious clunks, all the places that you could’ve been better if you’d just done it one more time…these things glare at you. They haunt you in your sleep.
I recently had the pleasure of watching Wings for Wheels, the documentary about the process that Bruce Springsteen went through producing the Born to Run album. In it, Springsteen discusses the long, painstaking, sometimes torturous process of committing himself to exploring a potentially endless series of creative blind alleys, as part of the process of finding the right way to go. He talks about going through revisions of music and lyrics, over and over, stripping away clichés until all that was left was the best possible version of the work. He put himself and his band through all this because, even then he seemed to know that he was producing something durable, something that people would continue to appreciate for decades. And it would lay the groundwork for the next thirty years of his career.
It seems to me that even if you’re just starting out -- maybe especially then -- this commitment to quality, page after page, seems at least as important as the amount of published material. Yes, you ought to write a lot. Yes, you want to make an impact in the reader’s consciousness. Yes, you ought to work hard and seriously and produce, produce, produce. But at the end of the day, when you have the thing that you’re going to take out into the world as a reflection of your heart, your ambition, the height of your powers -- in a word, your soul -- you owe it to yourself to make it the best you can be. And be sure. Because even if nobody else knows, you'll know.
I don’t doubt this is true. We certainly see frequent fiction from big bestselling writers from Robert Parker to Danielle Steele filling the new hardcover tables at Borders. If these already incredibly well-known people feel compelled to produce such copious amount of work, shouldn’t we lesser mortals make the same effort? Shouldn’t we as beginning writers, in effect, be busting our butts to compete with all the other distractions -- movies, video games, reality TV, other books -- that might keep potential readers from noticing our work? Isn’t this kind of consistent branding an enormous part of achieving lasting success as a commercial writer?
Yes. And no.
While I do think that it’s important to keep your name in play, I can’t help but think of a remark that David Foster Wallace once made about writing seeming to get more difficult the longer he does it. What I’ve found is that, even when it’s not necessarily harder with each progressive book, the challenge to write well is always formidable. At times it’s damn near insurmountable. Something about seeing your work typeset and bound in hardcover (not to mention critiqued in the New York Times) make you want to write better, rather than faster. Once you've published it, it can't be undone. The errors, the failures of nerve, the obvious clunks, all the places that you could’ve been better if you’d just done it one more time…these things glare at you. They haunt you in your sleep.
I recently had the pleasure of watching Wings for Wheels, the documentary about the process that Bruce Springsteen went through producing the Born to Run album. In it, Springsteen discusses the long, painstaking, sometimes torturous process of committing himself to exploring a potentially endless series of creative blind alleys, as part of the process of finding the right way to go. He talks about going through revisions of music and lyrics, over and over, stripping away clichés until all that was left was the best possible version of the work. He put himself and his band through all this because, even then he seemed to know that he was producing something durable, something that people would continue to appreciate for decades. And it would lay the groundwork for the next thirty years of his career.
It seems to me that even if you’re just starting out -- maybe especially then -- this commitment to quality, page after page, seems at least as important as the amount of published material. Yes, you ought to write a lot. Yes, you want to make an impact in the reader’s consciousness. Yes, you ought to work hard and seriously and produce, produce, produce. But at the end of the day, when you have the thing that you’re going to take out into the world as a reflection of your heart, your ambition, the height of your powers -- in a word, your soul -- you owe it to yourself to make it the best you can be. And be sure. Because even if nobody else knows, you'll know.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Over My Dead Body
This was my wife’s idea for a lavish coffee table book. The basic premise is that a man whose wife has recently died takes her corpse along with him to do all the things she refused to do while she was alive, taking pictures of the two of them all over the country. Thus we’ll have lavish full page illustrations of the man with his wife’s body on a rollercoaster, dining at Hooters, camping at the Grand Canyon, visiting various Civil War battlefields and holding her up in front of the world’s biggest ball of twine. He’ll take the body to minor league baseball games, breweries and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With each photo, of course, her body will be progressively riper.
Believe it or not, it was also my wife’s idea that the book ends with all the sexual positions the wife refused to do while she was alive.
See why I love her?
Believe it or not, it was also my wife’s idea that the book ends with all the sexual positions the wife refused to do while she was alive.
See why I love her?
Friday, May 11, 2007
Imaginary Fan Mail
One of the great things about being an established and well-known novelist is the sheer amount of letters you receive from your readers. Conversely, one of the great things about being a less established and less well known novelist is the fact that you can make up your own fan letters until such time that your work actually generates a fan base that writes real letters to you.
Hence I offer this piece of wholly imaginary fan mail:
Dear Mr. Schreiber:
I'm writing for two reasons. First because I just finished reading your novel Chasing the Dead, which I enjoyed very much. I'm a big fan of the horror genre and too often I'm disappointed by the work of many horror writers who don't really "deliver the goods." All too often these other writers either fail to create sympathetic characters, or don't push the envelope, thus generating really big scares. I'm very excited about your next novel and I can't wait to read it. I'm a horror fanatic!
The second and more important reason that I'm writing you -- and the reason that I ever picked up your book in the first place -- was because of my mother. She's actually the one that forwarded me the link to your Amazon listing. It turns out that you and I both happened to live in Thermopolis, Wyoming, in the fall and winter of 1972. We were both three years old at the time and, by doing a little research, my mom discovered we were actually in the same daycare center together. I'm referring to Rise N Shine Daycare on East Apple Street.
Of course it wasn't until the early 80s that the authorities finally realized what happened in the warehouse next door to Rise N Shine -- I'm talking, of course, about that terrible theatre and those movies they showed every day. Of course there was no way that we little Rise N Shiners could have NOT heard all the noises coming through the walls, every single day, especially the groans and screams. To be honest I didn't recall it until my third year of therapy...it was a long time ago! In any case, after reading Chasing the Dead, I was curious if any of your experiences might have influenced what you choose to write about. You sure love to write about blood!
I thought you might be interested to know, thirty-some years later, how many of us little Rise N Shiners ended up either dead or in jail. I'm not one of those types who blame everything on a bad upbringing, but it is kind of funny to think about. I've stayed in touch with quite a few of our old playmates and you'd be surprised how many of them you wouldn't want to run into "in a dark alley"! You and I might be the only sane ones out there. Ha-ha!
Anyway, I'm rattling on. I mainly just wanted to drop by and say howdy from an old friend and tell you how much I liked your book, even if it was a little light on the red stuff. You'll do better next time, I bet.
Your friend,
XXXXX
PS: Thanks for including your address on the "Scary Parent" web site. Mom and I are taking a road trip this summer, we'll be sure to stop in and say hi!
Hence I offer this piece of wholly imaginary fan mail:
Dear Mr. Schreiber:
I'm writing for two reasons. First because I just finished reading your novel Chasing the Dead, which I enjoyed very much. I'm a big fan of the horror genre and too often I'm disappointed by the work of many horror writers who don't really "deliver the goods." All too often these other writers either fail to create sympathetic characters, or don't push the envelope, thus generating really big scares. I'm very excited about your next novel and I can't wait to read it. I'm a horror fanatic!
The second and more important reason that I'm writing you -- and the reason that I ever picked up your book in the first place -- was because of my mother. She's actually the one that forwarded me the link to your Amazon listing. It turns out that you and I both happened to live in Thermopolis, Wyoming, in the fall and winter of 1972. We were both three years old at the time and, by doing a little research, my mom discovered we were actually in the same daycare center together. I'm referring to Rise N Shine Daycare on East Apple Street.
Of course it wasn't until the early 80s that the authorities finally realized what happened in the warehouse next door to Rise N Shine -- I'm talking, of course, about that terrible theatre and those movies they showed every day. Of course there was no way that we little Rise N Shiners could have NOT heard all the noises coming through the walls, every single day, especially the groans and screams. To be honest I didn't recall it until my third year of therapy...it was a long time ago! In any case, after reading Chasing the Dead, I was curious if any of your experiences might have influenced what you choose to write about. You sure love to write about blood!
I thought you might be interested to know, thirty-some years later, how many of us little Rise N Shiners ended up either dead or in jail. I'm not one of those types who blame everything on a bad upbringing, but it is kind of funny to think about. I've stayed in touch with quite a few of our old playmates and you'd be surprised how many of them you wouldn't want to run into "in a dark alley"! You and I might be the only sane ones out there. Ha-ha!
Anyway, I'm rattling on. I mainly just wanted to drop by and say howdy from an old friend and tell you how much I liked your book, even if it was a little light on the red stuff. You'll do better next time, I bet.
Your friend,
XXXXX
PS: Thanks for including your address on the "Scary Parent" web site. Mom and I are taking a road trip this summer, we'll be sure to stop in and say hi!
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Fixed for Life
Every so often, I crack myself up. Usually this has less to do with something being particularly funny, and more to do with striking me funny at the time--probably because I'm not expecting it. The other day I was catching a nap before work and a thought popped into my head, not so much a dream as a concept, and I woke myself up laughing. Since then I've convinced myself that it could be turned into a comedy screenplay, but since I've vowed never to write another screenplay as long as I live, I'm stuck with the idea that will always be just that. An idea.
Anyway, this is Fixed for Life.
Basically it's the story of a guy in his late-30s, inveterate bachelor type, who's dated a lot of women and basically sex and romance have lost its mystique for him. There are no more worlds to conquer. He's got other problems -- big gambling debts, maxed out credit cards, no prospects for the future. Through a mutual friend he hears about a fabulously wealthy woman looking for male companionship. It seems this woman has been cheated on by EVERY SINGLE MAN she's ever been with, to the point where she has lost all ability to trust men. However, she needs someone, a companion to share her life with. The man she marries will have total access to her millions, and he'll never have to worry about money again.
The one condition is that he has to have his testicles removed.
Thus, our hero, as he entertains the possibility of accepting this offer, really would be fixed for life.
It's a comedy about how far people are willing to go for love...and cold hard cash.
Anyway, this is Fixed for Life.
Basically it's the story of a guy in his late-30s, inveterate bachelor type, who's dated a lot of women and basically sex and romance have lost its mystique for him. There are no more worlds to conquer. He's got other problems -- big gambling debts, maxed out credit cards, no prospects for the future. Through a mutual friend he hears about a fabulously wealthy woman looking for male companionship. It seems this woman has been cheated on by EVERY SINGLE MAN she's ever been with, to the point where she has lost all ability to trust men. However, she needs someone, a companion to share her life with. The man she marries will have total access to her millions, and he'll never have to worry about money again.
The one condition is that he has to have his testicles removed.
Thus, our hero, as he entertains the possibility of accepting this offer, really would be fixed for life.
It's a comedy about how far people are willing to go for love...and cold hard cash.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Mark My Words
His name is Mark Henry. His blog is Burlesque of the Damned. Since last fall, when he gave Chasing the Dead a rave review, he and I have been swapping nonsense on each other's blogs for no particular reason except that it's fun. And, oh yeah, somehow in the midst of this six month period, Mark has also managed to 1) Finish his novel Happy Hour of the Damned 2) Get a kickass agent 3) Get a three-book publishing deal and 4) Get his book optioned to Showtime as a series.
And what have you been up to lately?
So, three cheers for Mark Henry. Drop by his blog and say congratulations, if for no other reason but to start sucking up to him now. He's gonna be a big noise. Hell, he already is.
And what have you been up to lately?
So, three cheers for Mark Henry. Drop by his blog and say congratulations, if for no other reason but to start sucking up to him now. He's gonna be a big noise. Hell, he already is.
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