Ketchup

Continuing down memory lane, this is one of my favorite songs by one of the all-time greatest rock bands. I should warn you, the video's not exactly dazzling. Just close your eyes and listen.

Labels: Jethro Tull "Teacher"

No, I don’t mean this photo of me in college. Dude, I was smokin’. ;)

This is 1989, believe it or not. I went to school at a small mountain college in a small mountain town called Prescott, Arizona. Gorgeous country. It was also a very insular place. As I recall, the population was 10 – 20K at the time? It’s exploded since. I hear they even have a Wal-Mart. But the Sixties’ mindset migrated to Prescott decades late, and it stayed, and a lot of us were very laid back and yet passionate about the environment and peace and the whole shebang. Saw a lot of free love, too, man, and that was groovy.

Notice the lieutenant’s bars, though. I’m nothing if not loaded with contradictions! The bars were my father’s, who made captain in the U.S. Army, and I have a lot of respect for the kind of self-sacrifice and technological might, as you might guess from reading my books.

What the hell am I talking about?

Our little fashion chat got me thinking about microcosms, one of my favorite themes in the Plague trilogy. Even in this day of instant global media, the local community still reigns. People still think differently in every town, at every level, down to every little clique.

In no way do I dispute Thug Nasty’s assertion that the Gangsta Slop Look is totally passé for those on the cutting edge. I’m hardly the guy to tell you. I don’t get out much, and, when I do, it’s not to hit the night clubs or the street scene, let me tell you. Sushi and a movie with my wife, sans children, is sheer glory. Nor do I read magazines or watch TV. Also, we live in a fairly high-end town. We don’t see a lot of Slop, which is why that junior high kid last week really jumped out at me.

My father lives much further inland, though, in the San Joaquin Valley near Stockton, which is near Sacramento. The Gangsta Slop Look is huge there. The schools have buckled down with strict dress codes, but, once the bell rings, the pants slide down and the XXL football jerseys come out, bitch. I’m told that this style actually originated in prison, where belts are disallowed. It really is a gang thing. Tough guys looking like marshmallows?

In literally the reverse direction, when we drive to San Francisco, what you see is tattoos, lip studs, nose studs, gelled hair in odd lengths, and everyone dressed in tight black clothing. So is that the cutting edge? Beats the heck out of me. Every day I wear jeans and a t-shirt. The same t-shirts. My wardrobe is 20 t-shirts and 3 pairs of pants. Wow.

Here’s where I tread into dangerous territory! Don’t be alarmed.

I think there are other forms of fashion. Everyone wants to shock their parents. We all want independence as we come of age, even if it’s only cosmetic.

Again, I don’t get out much, but we do ski in Colorado regularly, and I’m here to tell you that it’s not a particularly colorful state, certainly not like here on the Pacific Rim. In Colorado, you got white people, you got Hispanic people, and the two don’t appear to mix much, especially up in the hills.

Diana and I were in downtown Denver for WorldCon this August, however, where we noticed a new trend (or a statistical anomaly). One day we broke from the convention just to get in a short walk and some food. In the space of a dozen blocks, on a Sunday afternoon in a non-crowded outdoor mall, we saw no less than eight separate pairs of mid-twenties white girls with mid-twenties black guys. The girls were invariably blonde, sometimes obviously dyed. All of the guys were clean cut — none of the Gangsta Slop here.

Maybe there was a White Girl Black Guy convention going on simultaneously with WorldCon? That seems unlikely. Diana and I thought we’d walked into a glitch in the Matrix when we kept encountering the same phenomenon.

My guess would be that shocking your friends and family by dating outside your race is a pretty hot thing in Denver right now, just as it was in California a couple decades ago. Maybe it’s everywhere in the metro scene across the country. In part, it must be a fashionable thing to do.

I don’t have a problem with it, btw, which you already know if you’ve read my stories. In fact, I’ve seen hate mail from rigid-minded folks who for example have gone so far as to call Plague Year “a steaming pile of liberal propaganda.” (Yeah, I memorized that one; I’m still very, very surprised; it’s just an end-of-the-world novel, dude!) I suppose it’s obvious that I’m a fifth-columnist pinko with an agenda since the two main heroes in the book are a genius Jew and a Hispanic, and one of the villains is a white U.S. senator.

Actually, moron, that’s just what the world is like. Not all of the good guys are squeaky clean Aryan Christians. This is especially obvious in the 21st Century Bay Area, but may be unclear wherever the author of that fine email lives.

Here’s a quick break-down of some of our married friends:

White woman, black man
Hispanic woman, white man
Chinese woman, white man
Japanese woman, Jewish man
Egyptian woman, Italian man

Those last two are especially exotic, aren’t they? Italy and Egypt are just across the Mediterranean from each other, but not exactly similar cultures. Boy, do those two have a story!

Having said this, however, I don’t see eight young biracial couples here in a month, much less one day — again with the caveat that I’m not exactly hanging around the scene. Maybe it’s the hot new national trend. Teens and young adults want to establish themselves as separate from their parents. That’s a good, healthy thing. It's just interesting to me how this manifests itself sometimes.

Who else has a fun or wild story?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Labels: Deep Thoughts With Jeff

A great email today. A new webzine called Terra Incognita will be translating my story "Long Eyes" into Portugese. It's a pay-free transaction, but still exciting, since that's a new language for me. Even better, the editor enjoyed Plague Year and War and has asked to run an interview about the books with my story.

Life has been totally nuts lately (isn't it always nuts?) but I'll try to post something fun, shocking, and insightful tomorrow before the holiday.

Labels: "Long Eyes", Brazil, Portugese, short fiction sales, Terra Incognita

Here’s the cover art for Antídoto, better known to you and me as Plague War. It’s nice and freaky, and matches the first book perfectly. I like where Minotauro is going with the trilogy. La Plaga. Antídoto. Maybe the third book will be called New Outbreak, but in ultra-cool Spanish, of course.

In more somber news, my editor reports that the global crisis of the economic downturn is affecting the book world on the other side of the Atlantic, too. Minotauro looks strong, which is welcome news, but a rival publisher is laying off 500 people. Ouch. Sales numbers are tanking worldwide. This is not good for folks like myself who depend on consumers’ disposable income.

"Hmmm," you're thinking. "Should I pay the rent or buy a new book? Pay the rent or, uh..." Tough call, right?

And yet Team Minotauro has an evil plan which fills me with excitement, gratitude, and hope. They’ve put a rush on Antídoto. The book will be out in January, their intent being to capitalize on the success of La Plaga. Also, as a major coup, because of Minotauro’s support for both titles, book stores across Spain have agreed to maintain their floor displays and/or prominent shelf placement of La Plaga well after the normal promotion period would have ended, all the way through the holiday shopping season, at which time Antídoto will join La Plaga in those eye-popping front-of-store displays.

Wow. Just wow. I freaking love these guys, and I have to say that packing up the family and moving to Europe suddenly seems like a viable option again.

Habla español, dude?

Labels: Antídoto, book sales, La Plaga, Minotauro, the writing life

On this morning's drive, I saw a young teenage boy on the other side of the street. He was walking in the same direction as I was driving, so his back was to me. There are plenty of kids on their way down this particular road every weekday to the junior high school. What drew my attention was that I thought he might be injured. His walk was a broken, shambling thing. Night Of The Living Dead.

I slowed down slightly, then sped up again. He wasn't hurt. He was a victim of the Gangsta BeeYotch Fashion Style affected by so many white suburban kids here in northern California. The poor idiot's jeans were so huge and saggy that the waistline was -- I swear it -- hanging down to the middle of his thighs. If his shirt hadn't been large enough for three of him, I suppose his butt would have been hanging out. It's a sharp look. No doubt it makes the girls crazy. Alas, with the waist-line below his ass, the crotch of his jeans had fallen to the space between his knees, which greatly impeded his ability to move his feet.

But it looked cool. I guess. If you were under sixteen and your frontal lobes still had yet to fully develop. My friends and I rebelled, too, trying to look tough in denim jackets and longish hair, but at least we never intentionally crippled ourselves.

I must be getting old.

What is that look really about? Conspicuous consumption of textiles?

Labels: The Cutting Edge of Fashion

Here’s a freak twist of fate for you. I can see Alan Jacobson’s house from my front yard. He lives on the street across from us, and, through bad fortune, is also much closer to the new construction than I am. The 5000 sq. ft. monster-mansion is basically done… but the shack on the next property down the hill has also sold, and someone else is knocking it down as well as cutting out a lot of brush and trees. Welcome to the war zone! Chainsaws! Bulldozers! Hammers in the sky!

In the meantime, Alan is writing kick-ass, bestselling, twists-and-turns murder suspense novels -- no doubt in response to the nonstop antagonism directly over his back fence. I mean, you wouldn’t want to run into Alan in a dark alley.

The funny part is that we lived here for years without meeting. I only learned about him because one of my neighbors, who knows I’m a novelist, reported that there was another writer in the area after his teenage sons were caught whacking apples with a bat into the side of Alan’s house. My neighbor and Alan got talking. My neighbor relayed Alan’s occupation to me. But I never quite got around to knocking on his door. What do you say? “Hello. You write, I write, we… write?”

I read his books, though. False Accusations was particularly good, like John Grisham meets Fatal Attraction. Fun. Scary!

Then we met by coincidence in the local B&N. I’d come in to sign stock and recognized the manager with some guy. I stopped to say hello, and she introduced us — two miles from our homes, which are probably two hundred yards apart. Life is funny.

Long story short, if you’re up for some nail-biting suspense that luminaries such as James Patterson and Nelson DeMille call “compelling“ and “an impressively researched novel about serial murder packed into a tightly twisting plot,“ Alan is your guy.

The 7th Victim is gruesome, gripping, and lightning-paced. How’s that for a nice jacket blurb!?! ;)

Labels: Alan Jacobson, Recommended Reading, The 7th Victim

My one regret is that the only people I know who speak (much less read) Romanian are the two editors whose names run across the top of this book, which is the debut edition of a showcase anthology series by Millennium Press. It features short fiction written by their novelists.

Check out this line-up! And I'm the anchor, dude! They're running me first. Which is a first. Ha ha.

My story for the Millennium showcase is "The Frozen Sky," which is beginning to give "Pressure" a run for its money as my most-successful piece of short fiction. For those of you with Romanians on your Christmas shopping list, the anthology will be out in three weeks. ;)

Labels: Millennium Press, Romania, short fiction sales, The Frozen Sky

I don't think I'll ever get tired of gorgeous book porn like this, but fortunately I'm almost out of pictures like this. ;)

In the meantime, I'm afraid it's true. The La Plaga tie-in vacation contest is over. It's won! José Garrido Calero will be enjoying an all expenses paid, seven days, six nights extravaganza for two all the way from Spain to beautiful Aspen, Colorado, where he and a companion of his choice will have a nice head-start over the rest of us to safe elevation when the machine plague breaks loose. Aieeeeeeyaaaargh! Run for the hills!

I want to thank the team at Minotauro for organizing such an incredible promotion campaign. Seriously. The mind croggles.

Labels: book contest, La Plaga, Minotauro

No email. The horror! The horror... I've been out of town, and the only ISP within reach was an excruciatingly slow dial-up. So I was off the grid. The good news is that I wrote 7500 words and got some editing done, too, so all in all it was a most productive time. How are you?

Labels: the writing life

For those of you who don’t already know, November 1st marked the start of this year’s National Novel Writing Month, a fun if gimmicky event designed to motivate people to crank out an entire book in four weeks. Why? Beats the heck out of me. Most writers could make more money working at Burger King than banging away at our keyboards -- and you get free food, too! For years I considered this career change myself. It's only through insane persistence and good luck that I'm not asking you if you want a large fries with that.

The goal of National Novel Writing Month is 50K words, which is actually just half of a book unless you’re writing YA, but their catchy acronym is NaNoWriMo. If it was National Half-A-Novel Writing Month, they’d be left with NaHaNoWriMo. Or NaThirNoWriMo if you’re writing those door-stopper epic fantasy novels, in which case 50K is barely more than a third of your manuscript.

Anyway, it got me thinking, and I ran some numbers to see if I could compete -- and I can’t. Even when I have a week without interruptions, which is exceedingly rare, my personal best is 30K words in a month. Typically, I’m more like 20K, and my surprise for you today is that I actually prefer the 20K months.

One manuscript page is 250 words, btw. My daily goal is 6 pages minimum. I shoot for 8, 4 is considered mediocre, and I’m usually mad at myself if I don’t hit the 6 page mark, although if I only achieve 3 or 4 pages in a day but write a particularly evocative or technical scene, I’m glad.

Yes, it’s a fun, heady feeling to crank out 10 – 12 pages in a single day. Yeehaw! But I’ve found that what I write on those big days is often the same stuff that needs the most work later on, so it comes out the same. Either you blast it out fast and do more editing later, or you find a happy medium and get it mostly right the first time. My editor considers me a “clean” writer, which is flattering. She means that my manuscripts aren’t full of typos, unclear sentences, continuity lapses, or plot snafus. Naturally I hope to keep it that way, so my preference is a quick but steady pace, not sprinting.

20K words is a fifth of a book. After five months like that, you’ve got a complete novel, although I typically need at least another month to clean up the manuscript, add a few nuances here and there, and brightly polish the line-by-line writing.

So why aren’t I publishing two books a year? Well, this year I wrote two books, more or less -- 80K for Colony High, and 115K for Mind Plague, despite the distractions. I have family, and a house and a yard, and the business part of writing seems to be encroaching more and more on my time; contracts; interviews; research; conventions; preparing for panels and classes at conventions; fan mail; outlining future books; etc.

I know, I know -- these are EXCELLENT problems to have!!! I’m not complaining. But for me, at least, 50K a month just ain't realistic.

Labels: Mind Plague, National Novel Writing Month, the writing life

Yeah, I realize I'm a little behind the curve, but, just for the record, I'm pleased that America made what was definitely the more sane decision. This is a country that not only elected George W. Bush but RE-elected him, so sometimes I feel like I must be living in a science fiction novel or something. I mean, honestly. Wow.

The always articulate John Scalzi put it perfectly here just in case you're dying to know how I felt about the candidates.

Labels: 2008 elections, Barrack Obama, president-elect

There are more important things happening in the free world on Election Day, but I was surprised and pleased this afternoon to receive a small check from Boys' Life, who ran an article of mine about a year and a half ago. They paid quite nicely for it, too. At a buck a word, I was happy to sign away a great many rights to the piece -- and now they've gone and mailed me a bonus. Bizarre! Fantastic! There was nothing in our contract that required them to do so, and believe me, this is a first in all of my short fiction and nonfiction sales. The letter was impersonal, but the check was not, ha ha. It makes me want to get them more material. Just gotta finish the book!

Labels: Boys' Life, royalty check, the writing life

It's been raining for days. Sweet, cool autumn! And when we got home today, we had crab rolls and hot cocoa. The grocery stores here sell ready-made sushi, which isn't topnotch but is inexpensive, healthy, and quick, and as skiers we always have packets of cocoa on hand. What a snack! How incredibly California, yes? Ah, the West Coast, melting pot of the globe...

Labels: Fall snacks and favorite foods

I’m on fire. I’ve written 30,000 words in the past four weeks, which is awesome, except that this is the price ya pay. Here's what I look like. And, yes, those are ice packs on my smoking hot wrists. Ouch!

It’s been especially psychotic. Land Wars. Halloween. Grinding out Mind Plague. In my last Catching Up, I forgot to mention that I also had a gig last week at the library in Tracy, which is about an hour’s drive from home. The evening went well. Yes, two of the warm bodies in attendance were my parents, but there were eleven total, with lots of good energy and questions. We sold some books and I was invited back to perhaps teach a writing class this spring, so although the event was a bump in my routine, I felt it was worth it. Plus it’s always fun to get out into the real world and talk to real people.

This week I also fielded an interview request from German web site Phantastik Couch, who will soon be featuring Nano as their book of the month. I also learned that a trade journal called “Technology Review” featured a big thumbs up of the book over there. Can’t beat that! I believe the Phantastic Couch transcript will be translated into German, but, if so, maybe I’ll post the original version here, too, if anyone likes?

More soon.

Labels: Mind Plague, NANO, the writing life