Crunchy Peanut Butter...

Here's another Fun Fact About Tony:

For years, I've been convinced I don't like crunchy peanut butter.  I shunned away from it.  I didn't want anything to do with it.  Creamy peanut butter for me, please!

And while I was editing Fall in Their Place, I discovered...Well, I found out the truth.  It seems a decade back, I decided crunchy peanut butter was bad on bagels.  And apparently that was enough to drive me away for...a decade.  A whole decade.  And during the course of that decade, I became convinced I didn't like it at all. 

So that's how these things can sometimes happen, I guess.  Sometimes you can plum forget the original reason you turned away from something, and eventually draw completely different conclusions. 

Yeah.

Oh, and by the way, I bought a jar of crunchy peanut butter recently.  Have been making sandwiches with it for the past week.  And it's been perfectly fine.  Of course.

Sunshine Blogger Award

Hey, just saw that I got this from my longtime blogging pal Armchair Squid, so let's get to answering some questions.  (You can see more of what the Sunshine Blogger Award is supposed to entail, if the recipient chooses, on Squid's blog.)

1. If you could live one year of your life over again, which year would you choose and why?   The year I spent raising my niece, the Burrito, more or less singlehandedly, because that was the best, most magical year of my life.  And I would try to be less grumpy in the grumpy moments (which had nothing to do with the Burrito herself).
2. If you could learn to be an expert at something without putting in the work, what would it be? The stuff I need to research in order to write some of the stuff I want to write.  That would make writing that stuff so much easier!
3. If you could learn a new language instantly, which would you choose and why? It's not really a "new" language for me, but mastering French would be nice.  Because despite taking classes in high school and college, I really only ever considered it a nuisance.  But it disconnects me from my past, and that sucks.
4. If you could give $1 million to any charity, which would you choose? I don't have any particular charities in mind.  Generally for needy folk, I guess.  But isn't that kind of the point?  I would start with the people I know, and then the communities I know, and then maybe something I don't know at all, because charity isn't really about what you know, but what you don't.
5. When was your Robert Frost moment a la "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."?  The poem (read it here) says you can't go back and that is true.  "Way leads on to way" and so forth.  But if you could, would you?  What is the difference you think it would have made?  I've often wondered what it would've done to my life if I'd decided to stay in the general vicinity of the college I graduated from, if that would've spurred me to different creative realms, because that was what a classmate planned to do, and she generally seemed to have a much better idea of the writer's life than I did (or do).  But changing the past means sacrificing a lot of stuff I really would not want to change, not the least of which being that I probably would never have had the magical year with the Burrito (and that has made all the difference).
6. Time travel: where would you go and when?  Why? A few years into the past.  Just to be able to experience the Star Wars phenomenon from the beginning, I suppose.  Sneak into a theater.  Nobody would notice.
7. Who would you want on your fictional character bowling team?  You get to pick four. I said elsewhere the Pin Pals (from The Simpsons) or the Wesley Crushers (from The Big Bang Theory).  I can't come up with anything better.
8. What would you want for your last meal? Pizza.  Whatever else, but definitely pizza.  I'm a pizza guy.
9. What's your favorite song? I can only say "at the moment," as in "from the recent past," and that would be "Not Tonight" from Hootie & the Blowfish's new album, Imperfect Circle.  I've had it stuck in my head.  Love it.  Love that I love the new stuff enough to have, organically, at least one song stuck in my head.  They're my all-time favorite band.  Glad they finally got back together.
10. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Definitely introvert.  If I can avoid people, I'm fine.  I can do the people thing okay, but when others are wondering how they could possibly survive any kind of isolation experience, I'm really only wondering, Will there be books?
11. If you came over to my home and I offered you a drink, what would you want me to serve you? I'm not fussy.  A cool glass of water.  Cheerwine or Moxie, if you happen to have it (extremely unlikely as that would be).  But a cool glass of water is easily doable, and I really do love it.

Some thoughts as 2020 begins...

This is a joke I have to make, given my abysmal vision (going all the way back to first grade! I'm the proverbial "coke bottle glasses" guy, but I've been wearing contacts for twenty years, so don't feel too bad for me, and quit reading this parenthetical digression, already), but 2020!  At last I have perfect eyesight!

Wasn't this supposed to be the magical far future?  How did we get here?  (Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.)

(Reference to a message board I don't visit anymore and/or has relocated and is bizarrely much harder to access, a switch that happened last year.)

(Anyway.)

A week ago I was severely depressed.  I should explain.  A week ago, counting from when I'm writing this, 5 PM EST, I was in New Jersey.  My sister's wedding had taken place late that morning and I had just spent a glorious afternoon with my niece, the Burrito.  I hadn't seen her (not counting video chats) for six months, and we picked up right where we had left off.  I cried at the wedding, not because of the wedding, but because it was now official, that my niece was part of someone else's family, and I wasn't a part of it.  She was upset while pictures were being taken just after the ceremony, insisting I was part of the family, and all I could do was cherish that she still believed. 

Getting to the wedding was adventurous.  I have rarely traveled on my own.  On the few occasions I have, I've been able to successfully make the connections (whether on a train, a plane, or a bus, or John Candy & Steve Martin's automobiles) (a movie I've never seen).  But it's one of those nightmare scenarios that usually only manifest in my actual nightmares (I have a recurring one where I can't find the buildings for any of my classes in college, which for the record was never actually a problem).  This time I had to get to the airport, catch a connecting flight, and then find my way to the hotel.  The return trip would be easier, just one flight, but I think I was actually more nervous that morning, because I needed to stick the landing, as it were.  Of course I did all that.  Mostly flawless victory.  (TSA really doesn't like sweat, for whatever reason.  Weirdos.) 

I had to book the flights to accommodate what I thought at the time was a fairly small window of opportunity, a Friday-to-Sunday deal.  Long story short, but originally I thought I wouldn't get vacation approval, because the wedding was in the Bermuda triangle of holidays.  Later, I got more time off than I could've dreamed, so I had plenty of time off.  But if I'd been able to leave sooner, I would've had more time with my niece.

I always tend to begin preparations with the best possible results in mind (I packed copies of some of my books in case anyone at the wedding, or even a great seatmate on the plane! was interested, for instance; every copy came back with me, alas).  I thought I might still get more time with the Burrito, either later Saturday night or even Sunday morning, but that didn't happen.  I spent Sunday waiting and waiting and waiting.  And that was the whole day, until the flight, and getting home, and the day still had plenty of hours left, and that was kind of weird, like the whole day was a vacuum that never really switched on.

The vacation time, I would've spent a lot more of it writing, at pretty much any other point in my life.  I have written a few things, here and there, recently, but haven't tackled anything major.  A year ago I was in one of those big projects.  I've done editing recently.  I almost quit one of the editing projects in the fear that the thing wasn't actually salvagable, but then I realized, at the time, that was exactly what I meant to write.  Even with some needed editing, this wasn't really a case of a young writer not knowing any better.  Even if I were to write it differently today, that's what I wanted to say back then.  That's the kind of writer I am.  There was a reason for that approach.  So I gave myself permission to breathe.

And I've written and submitted a few things.  One was a short story for a comic book company, and the other for one of those contests.  Of course it'd be nice to get one or both accepted.  One of my goals for the new year is to write more, regardless, and to keep submitting.  I've gotten really horrible about that in recent years.  I just stopped trying.  

I've talked here about some of the big projects I want to tackle, and I do want to tackle one or all of them within the next year.  My schedule at work is changing at the end of the month, and suddenly it feels like the break I only thought I got with a different change-up last year, which never really worked out the way I thought it would.  I tend to react better with a more limited window than a wider one, and that's what I'm going to have, and hopefully I react accordingly.  As always, we'll see.

I don't know where the year will take me.  I'd love to move, to find myself once again in the vicinity of my niece, but again, I don't want to be selfish.  Her new family is her new family, and I don't want to get in the way.  That's just how things stand.  I could pursue other changes.  Things could change.  Things could stay the same.  The future, as always, is wide open.

At the moment, I'm okay with that.  I got new glasses at the end of the year, the first time in a very long time, and these things tend to go, at first it was hugely disorienting, and whatever technology they're using these days, I noticed things I'd never noticed before, not because my vision was suddenly so much better, with glasses, than it had been, but because the technology was making colors pop out, like 3D glasses, and that made things quite interesting.  Now it's weird noticing how my vision is different from glasses to contacts, in a totally different way.

Something like 2020.  Something like that.

My Quixote Year

I've been waiting all year to write this one.  I can't wait any longer...!

Back in 2012, I had what I dubbed "My Trojan Year," although the actual blog post I wrote about it, apparently, was called something else (which was kind of disappointing to learn).  I read a lot more Trojan War stories that year than I experienced versions of Cervantes' Don Quixote in 2019, but there was enough.

First was Don Quixote itself, which I had never read before, but a copy of which had long been on my to-read list, probably due to length.  I found it incredibly enlightening, considering previously I only knew the story from cultural memory and Man of La Mancha (I saw a local production of it once, and enjoy the 1972 film version starring Peter O'Toole).  The story is infinitely more complex, in any manner of ways, than I could've imagined.  Like a lot of older novels, it's a far different kind of narrative than we have today.  Thankfully, it's no Tristram Shandy!  (But thanks to the brilliant film adaptation of that one, I'd love to revisit it some day.)  And it is a story of ideas, but not necessarily the ones (or just) the ones from the musical.  It's not all "impossible dream" and windmills (which, as you might expect, show up fairly early).  Anyway, the Goodreads review I wrote was one of my favorites from the year, too.

I of course went out of my way to catch Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote when it finally received wide(r) release this year.  This was a movie that famously, infamously, underwent a tortured production history, to the point where there was actually a film release (a documentary, anyway) long before it finally became a reality, called Lost in La Mancha, and for years seemed as if the only way fans were going to be able to experience Gilliam's vision.  As I detailed in another post on another blog, I opted for the DVD release of the movie, which was...about equally problematic as anything else about its sorry history.  Walmart didn't carry it.  Target only had the Blu-ray.  And Amazon didn't even officially carry it, instead listing independent vendors.  (Amazon has officially become the 21st century Sears catalog, the Walmart of conglomerate shopping.  Yay.)  But order it I of course did, and unlike a lot of other people who bothered to make the effort to see the results, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's still my pick for best film of the year.

Later in the year, Salman Rushdie released his latest novel, Quichotte (pronounced "key-shot").  Apparently inspired at least as much by a French opera version of Don Quixote as anything else (and as usual, Rushdie had plenty on his mind), the results are about as good as anything else I've read from the author (but it's no Satanic Verses, which to be fair few enough books are).

I didn't really plan any of this.  I mean, the Trojan Year thing was sort of easy to arrange, but I couldn't really plan for Rushdie's next book to center around Don Quixote.  I knew, coming into 2019, I had as good a shot as there had ever been to finally see Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and so that was the impetus to finally read the book, I admit.  I didn't wait to read it, all these years, on the off-chance Gilliam's movie would finally get made (much less shake loose from ridiculous "producer" entanglements).  That would have been absurd!

But I like that I ended up enjoying all three versions so much.  They each had their own things to say, even though they were basically playing from the same playbook.

Which meant, as the Trojan Year had already prodded me to think (props to anyone who went back to read about it), all over again, that I simply can't abide the perennial laments about remakes.  It seems you can't go a single year without someone (and usually, a lot of someones) complaining about the latest Hollywood remake.  (I guess Disney gets a free pass when it does those live action remakes of their animated hits, but I digress.)  I like to point out that the history of storytelling is all about retelling the same stories, that most of the old stories we know we wouldn't even recognize if presented with their original versions.  The mark of a good storyteller isn't the story but how they tell it. 

If I were to come up with a story that was popular enough for someone else to feel like making their own, I'd welcome it, I really would.  If I were lucky enough to get a movie made out of a story I wrote, I wouldn't sit here complaining about how "unfaithful" it was.  If my story wasn't strong enough to stand changes, I clearly didn't do a good enough job with it in the first place!  If someone improved on it, great!  And if someone just wanted to add to it, great!  (Ironic, given that Don Quixote, as it exists today, is presented in two acts, the second of which Cervantes wrote because someone had written what he considered a poor imitation.  I suspect history would have forgotten the imitation, as it did, even if Cervantes had never addressed it, much less written it into the second act!)

And speaking of which, a couple years ago I confessed to a second-cousin that I had a Hamilton story I wanted to write, this when Hamilton was still raging across pop culture.  She winced, suggesting that it was now a moot point.  But it really isn't.  Even if the story I still hope to write is nowhere near as pervasive, it still deserves telling, and has a vastly different viewpoint than the musical.  A few months back I watched White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, which were two Hollywood productions that obviously overlapped significantly.  But I found the results different enough, and not just because one was obviously a Channing Tatum vehicle and the other a Gerard Butler vehicle (which ended up producing two sequels), and Tatum and Butler are very different screen personalities.  Maybe it's because I don't believe in reductive logic when it's pointless, but there's always more room to wiggle in a story than people tend to allow. 

And anyway, between a Trojan Year and a Quixote Year, I can't wait to see how this happens again...

Fall in Their Place released

 



Fall in Their Place is now available.  The link here, depending when you view it, will merge the paperback and ebook editions.

The third poetry collection I've released at this point (second in as many months!), it contains work that began the process of streamlining my poetic thought process, so on that score it has some distinction.  It's still kind of ranty, but there's slightly less angst this time, so there's that!  It's fun going through the avalanche of poems again.  But I will also be working at finding real publishers for new poetry, and perhaps even new compilations of the highlights from these collections.  Yeah!

The cover image for this one was pretty easy.  For once the database Createspace/Kindle provides gave me an obvious choice.  But in no way am I implying the guy in the picture falls!  Symbolism, folks. 

(Unless he did fall.  Which would make the picture in considerable poor taste.)

(And me as well.  And cast a dark pall over the whole collection!)

(So I assume he didn't fall.)

Anyway, there's more coming, regardless of whether or not you rush out to get this one, or the last one.  Or the next one.  But that would be nice.  Christmas is coming, yo. 

Warder in the works

One of the other things that's sidetracked work on new material has been Warder, which you might otherwise know as The Cloak of Shrouded Men.

Cloak was the first book I self-published, the product of three successive, and successful, NaNo experiences ('04-'06), the first physical copies of which I received in the mail the same day the last Harry Potter book was released in 2007 (a coincidence that has always amused me).  I began noticing further grammatical revision needs immediately.  I was supposed to have a new edition through an upstart publisher fairly soon after, but that fell apart, and the idea of releasing one never really left me.

Part of the problem was the title, not to mention the name of the main character, a superhero called Eidolon.  I loved both, and never considered changing the latter (pronounced "idol-on," as I later clarified; based on a line in a Hart Crane poem), but have had numerous ideas for the former.  Recently I settled on Warder.

I've tried shopping the book around to publishers for years.  I unlisted it from the original self-publisher a few years back.  I've done revisions, will probably do more, but I've really liked some of the ideas that've occurred to me, including a radical new ending that redefines an important element (or two).  Finding a cover image has been another long-term quest over the years, if I wanted to self-publish again, but just a few hours earlier, I think I finally solved that, too.

I intend, if I pull the trigger, to publish Warder in three volumes.  This is a story I never really intended to write in the first place, but I've never been able to leave it behind.  I like what I did with it (even if I know some readers, like Pat, will think there's too much philosophizing, too little action), and yeah, I even think, foolishly, if anything were to finally get me into comics, this story finally landing properly could do it.  Probably.  Maybe.

Well, we'll see.  (Heh.)

We'll See released

I mentioned an "avalanche of poetry" previously.  I was sidelined in my recent writerly interests by blood that hemorrhaged in my right eye about a month back and caused some panic until I found out what was happening and settled into the recovery process, and then got back to business.  I did the family Christmas chapbook thing I've been doing the past four years (intended for family, as noted, so I never advertise them here), and I finalized the manuscript for the above collection.

You can find We'll See on Amazon here.  There's a lot of crazy material in it, but also some good stuff.  That said, if poetry ain't your thing, don't go out of your way.  Even if it is, I probably have more accessible stuff.  Mostly, I love that it's got some bulk behind it, one of the largest I've had in the 5"x8" format I've been using in releases since 2016.

Quite the salesman, I know!  But as I've said, I've got an avalanche of material, and I'll keep you posted about its book-style availability.