I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the bro’d. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see hot LA actress chicks and try In N’ Out burgers, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect bro for the road because he knows how to fucking party. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few Facebook status updates written by Dean from the Arizona State Beta Phi Omega house. I was totally stoked about Dean’s status updates because they were funny as shit, asking Chad to rate some pictures of girls he hooked up with the night before. At one point, Carlo Marx and I texted about the status updates and wondered if we would ever meet the epic Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the crazy fucking jagoff he is today, when he was a young Communications major shrouded in Axe Body Spray. Then news came that Dean was out of ASU and was transferring to OSU; also there was talk that he was bringing some slam piece named Marylou.
2 – Flipcup and Phoenix
One night I was playing flipcup at the Delta house and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean just got in and was staying at the Holiday Inn Express near East Campus. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in Columbus, with his hotass stacked trixie Marylou; they got out of his Land Rover and cut around the corner looking for some grub and went right into Buffalo Wild Wings, and since then B-Dubs has always been a bitchin symbol of Columbus for Dean. They threw down cash on fucking tasty wings and brew-dogs.
All this time Dean was telling Marylou shit like this: “Now, babe, we’re at OSU, and even though I haven’t laid down the plan for you, we gotta forget about whatever stupid shit happened between us in Phoenix and fuckin’ cowboy up and start thinking about how we’re gonna pregame tonight…” and so on in the way that he had in those early days.
3 – A Natty Light-Slugging Hero of the Southwest
I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to work part time at Foot Locker to cover tuition and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking at his Samsung Galaxy, nodding like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every work, throwing in a thousand “Hell yeas” and “right ons.” I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to go to the gym and do laundry and so on. My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest. In fact he’d just been in the hospital for alcohol poisoning before hooking up with Marylou and coming to OSU. Marylou was a nine-out-of-ten with a Mystic Tan and a crazy rack; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her iPhone in her hands and her oversized Dolce and Gabana sunglasses on, waiting like a less-hot Megan Fox in that first Transformers movie. But, outside of being pretty hot, she was a total bitch and capable of being a defcon-one psycho hose-beast. That night we all slammed Bud Light Limes and pulled stop signs out of the curb till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around hung over as shit and watching Sportscenter, Dean got up like a total pimp, paced around, and decided the thing to do was have Marylou get some grub. “In other words we need some breakfast burritos, babe.” She had some kind of bitch-out about it and I peaced out.
Stories require all kinds of shapes and sizes to exist. Some need the space of hundreds of pages, others only hundreds of words. Heather Palmer flirts with the latter in her debut chapbook, Mere Tragedies, and kicks some pretty good game.
In Mere Tragedies Palmer opens up small windows into the lives of various characters, allowing us to peer in only for a moment before slamming them shut. Each story –– most not much longer than a page, some shorter –– situate a reader in an instance; a snippet in fictional time.
Some of these snippets are heavy, such as the one involving a man overcome with shame. Shame in the form of knick-knacks like candy wrappers and unflattering elementary school pictures he hides daily under his mattress. Shame that pains his reflection with blemishes, “he’s blue-black and when he looks at himself he thinks of a bruise.” And with tact, Palmer’s words project this mans shame off the page, allowing us to connect on a human level –– it’s no secret that every one has something they are ashamed of. Read more »
“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and ‘fall into a vortex’, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace… She did not think herself a genius by any means, but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh… The divine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her ‘vortex’, hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent.”
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Timothy Gager for getting a free copy of alt.punk by Lavinia Ludlow.
This week, we are giving away a copy of All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman. All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. There’s the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she’s sure that Tom has abandoned her. So she’s moving to Vancouver. She’ll use her superpower to make Vancouver perfect and leave all the heartbreak in Toronto. With no idea Tom’s beside her, she boards an airplane in Toronto. Tom has until the wheels touch the ground in Vancouver to convince her he’s visible, or he loses her forever. Read an interview with the author about the book here.
A week or so ago I was reading a review of David Lindsay-Abaire’s new play where the critic basically blamed the crappy ending (in his opinion) on Lindsay-Abaire’s foray into Hollywood:
“…The actors perform skillfully, but Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Rabbit Hole,” has been spending time in Hollywood, and the industry’s habitual glibness infects the ending of the play, which seems as fraudulent as it is bewildering.”
That “habitual glibness” (which, I think, means a consistent paint-by-numbers approach no matter the film’s subject matter, although it’s such a wide-open phrase that it’s hard to tell) is definitely a part of screenwriting, but what this critic and many critics across the board seem to miss is that unless you’re one of the few high ranking writers known by name, there really isn’t any other way to get a movie made in Hollywood.
So by saying Lindsay-Abaire’s new play was “ruined” by a Hollywood sheen, what the critic is really saying is, “you know that ‘habitual glibness’ [excuse my vague phrase] that’s basically essential to getting a film made and screenwriter paid? I don’t like it. And it makes for terrible endings. And I refuse to get to the root of the problem which is that it’s really, really difficult for a writer to simultaneously make a critic and producer happy [even in theater] – so I’ll just blame it all on the writer. For refusing to be creative.”
Critics and producers are like divorced parents who are so obsessed with their own agenda, they can’t possibly see that they’re tearing their child into pieces with their vastly diverging opinions. Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Cara for getting a free copy of Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Lavinia Ludlow’s debut novel alt.punk(if you haven’t read her guest post on the five not-so-easy steps of her editing process, you can check it out here). Grocery store manager Hazel is boring herself to insanity in an attempt to satisfy her parents, her boyfriend, her boss, and everyone else around her. Then Otis, a grungy, drug-addled Peter Pan of the punk rock scene, offers her the chance to ditch it all and join in on his wild life. But is this chaotic world of irresponsibility and self-indulgence really what Hazel’s been searching for? At turns funny, vulgar, and moving, alt.punk is a wild, quirky take on everything that it means to be “sane”, “normal”, and “happy.”
“I thought editors filled in missing commas and fixed misspelled words.” – Hazel, alt.punk
The recent release of my debut novel alt.punk was extraordinarily exciting; however, maturing the novel from first draft to publication was not without editing pains. Similar to the Kübler-Ross theory, I progressed through what I refer to as the “five stages of editing.”
Stage One: Ignorance
Yes, I was guilty of querying alt.punk to Casperian Books thinking, “I’ve revised and edited this to death. There is no way this could get any more perfect.”
Oh, how I was wrong. It’s embarrassing to admit just how wrong.
The Casperian Books team shot back a list of global revisions I needed to make, and after making those and resubmitting, they responded with something to the effect of, “better but it still needs a lot of work.” From there, I was paired up with an editor who, little did I know, would launch alt.punk into an extreme manuscript makeover, which to date, remains one of the most challenging ordeals of my life.
Dramatic? Yes. But it was a shock to learn just how wrong my visions of “perfect” were. Little did I know that I was progressing through the five stages of editing rather quickly.
Sooner or later, every writer comes face to face and does battle with the vicious monster known as perfectionism. Now, I know that you’re probably shaking your head at your messy apartment, your half-finished novel, and your stained coffee mug, thinking, “I’m anything but perfect.” Read on, my friend. Read on.
When I think of perfect, I think of a beautiful Hollywood actress or that kid we all hated in school that seemed to be in every single club photo. I absolutely don’t think of my writing, or what there actually is of it. Every New Year, tons of writers swear to anyone who is listening that they will Write More and Write Better, but our own desire to write amazing works can be what hampers our progress.
Let’s face it, not many people love to write. What we love is having written. When you look back at the beautifully typed, flawless sheet of prose that sprung out of the depths of your mind, you feel awesome. You don’t think about how it felt to stare at that blank screen, utterly convinced that everything you want to write about is boring or unoriginal. You just can’t believe what a bubbling well of genius you are, you sexy writer you.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Adamstefanoff for getting a free copy of The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green. From Cambridge to Ohio, Vienna to Antarctica, Bill Green takes us on a globe-spanning pilgrimage to important sites of scientific discovery and along the way relates the captivating stories of the scientists who lived and worked there. As in his award-winning Water, Ice & Stone, Green interweaves the story of his own life-long evolution as a scientist with a travelogue that is a personal and universal history of science. Along with lyrical meditations on the tragic life of Galileo, the mystical Johann Kepler, the wildly eccentric Tycho Brahe and the alchemical obsessions of Sir Isaac Newton, Green’s ruminations return throughout to the lesser known figure of Ludwig Boltzmann. Using Boltzmann’s theories of randomness and entropy in the microscopic world as a larger metaphor for the unpredictable paths that our lives take Green shows us that like art, science is a lived adventure, the remnants of which are left in the form of a painting or a poem–or sometimes as an equation etched into a tomb.
