Promises Kept, if Overdue

In recent weeks , I have made promises that I have failed to keep to you, my unknown and perhaps imaginary readers. I will try today to remedy that oversight.

Wednesday, March 17, I promised to tell you more about DC Showcase Presents "House of Secrets" by various writers and artists, and the Showcase collection of "The Warlord" series by Mike Grell. The quick version:

I skipped most of the "Secrets" because every single 4- or 8-page tale was a "twist" ending that either made no sense or you saw coming from a mile off. Those get tiring very quickly. However, there were a few gems, and if you like that sort of thing then this would be the sort of thing you'd like.

As for "Warlord," it's the sort of thing I like: sword & sorcery-meets-high tech, with a test pilot crashing through a hole at the northpole into the hollow earth to become the legendary Warlord. Awesome storytelling, humor, tragedy, adventure. It's the pick of the two.

Also on this date I teased you that I had just watched "The Time Traveler's Wife" on DVD. I loved the book (I'm a sucker for stories that thoughtfully use time travel). The movie touched me too. There were significant differences between the two, however. I would advise you to read the book first and just let the movie carry you along on its alternate universe plot.

Author Audrey Niffenegger has constructed a confounding non-linear novel told from various points of view that eventually ties together its disparate threads into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

NEXT EVENT:
Going to Century, Florida, to celebrate Sawmill Day and meet & greet folks, and sell books (if at all possible) on Saturday, April 24. Find me in the historic district, where I will also be collecting photos and video for a book trailer to promote "Welcome to the Dawning of a New Century."

Peace.

Photos from the Passing Days

Where have I been? There and back again.

Spent an evening last Tuesday listening to Kathy Patrick tell her story at the Bay County Library, then attended a cocktail party at the home of former Panama City Mayor Gerry Clemons in her honor the next evening. Photos:

Kathy Patrick, Linda Macbeth, Debra Simmons, Tony Simmons, and Michael Lister

on the balcony overlooking St. Andrew Bay at sunset.

Bettina Meade from the Library, Kathy Patrick and me outside the Library.

Friday, I attended the opening night of Gulf Coast Community College's spring musical, "Guys & Dolls," and worked the Joy Boots booth with Marisa's dad, Charles. We were joined for part of the evening by Berkely Reeves, Debra and Jessica. Photos:

The cast and crew of Guys and Dolls meet the audience after the show.

Center of attention is Kayla Dibble, who portrayed Adelaide.

Charles and Berkely doing the good work.

Saturday, I found a treasure or two at the Lynn Haven Good Will store, the best being a copy of "X-Men" No. 29 from February 1967 in very good condition, bagged and boarded. It's the pick of the week:

And finally, my friend Brady loaned me a copy of Warren Ellis' "Frankenstein's Womb," which reads like a literary novella, intertwining Mary Wolstoncraft's life and writings with those of her lover and later husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, as well as historic records and the works of Mary's parents. Mary finds herself guided through the past and future by the spirit of the Creature, her brainchild, who shows her how her life and imagination brought forth a future of towering skyscrapers and hospitals where the dead are regularly revived by contained bolts of lightning.

A great piece of work, brilliantly written by a master of the comic form and illustrated in moody black and white. It's Today's Pick.

And then...

Today, Michael delivered his newest novel to me in hardback. I already have read the advanced proof, and I've interviewed him for a story about it in this week's Entertainer (I'll link to it later this week). But he wanted me to have it in hardback, which I greatly appreciate, and he wrote a gracious note in the front. Be looking for Thunder Beach soon.

All for now. Peace.

The Book of Gabriel

Last night I finished a long-term writing project to transform "The Traveler," a serialized tale I originally wrote for the "366 Days" project, into a novel that I'm calling "The Book of Gabriel." Admittedly, it is a short novel.

The challenge was to smooth the transitions between the chapters, which were often written days or weeks apart and sometimes had contradictory or redundant information in them. (Each chapter posted was a first draft, per the rules of the original project.)

This afternoon, I plan to print the thing out and get it in the mail for what no doubt will be only the first of many submissions to publishers. Wish me luck.

If you read the Traveler tales, you'll know that luck is something I will definitely need.

Peace.

Agnostics of the World

These folks are open to the concept of healthcare, but aren't sure if they believe in it:

(Sometimes messages can be found even when some of the lights are out.)

Anyway, a couple of links for you today:

>>My Sunday column about the closing of one of my favorite bookstores.

>>A rewritten version of two stories I did some years ago after interviewing Majel Barrett Roddenberry.

>>A rewritten/updated version of an interview I did with Babylon 5 actor Peter Jurasik some years back.

>>My blog today that got at least two people riled up (one of them being me).

And a reminder that I will be in Century on Saturday, April 24, to sign and sell my books, including in the now-in-trade-paperback version of "Welcome to the Dawning of a New Century."

Peace.

No Joke: Save 10 Percent if you buy 'Century' today

My novel, "Welcome to the Dawning of a New Century," was recently reformatted as a trade paperback, and you can get a copy (or many more!) at 10-percent off today only by buying directly from the printer.

Go here and use the code APRILFOOLS at checkout.

Back again, with some St. Patrick's gold

Or rather, sharing some stuff in case you're interested.
1) My Sunday column about Jillian Weise and her novel, The Colony.
2) A rewritten/updated version of an interview I did some years ago with Star Trek's Robin Curtis.
3) A rewritten version of an interview I did with my friend Janis Owens when she released her Cracker Kitchen cookbook.

This week, I'm working on a column about the local vinyl record store, which occupies an old skating rink that turns out to have been constructed using timbers from the old L&N train station in Century, Florida, where I grew up. I'll link to that this weekend. (Dad asked me to write a guest column for the Historical Society about the place also. -- And speaking of that, I've been invited to the April 24 spring celebration in Century, where I hope to sell a few books, maybe.)

Currently reading: DC Showcase Presents "House of Secrets" -- loaned to me by my friend Brady. He also recently loaned me the Showcase collection of the Warlord series by Mike Grell. I'll tell you more later and provide some links.

Just watched: "The Time Traveler's Wife" on DVD. Loved the book. The movie touched me too. I'll give a deeper review in the neat future.

Be back soon, I promise.
Peace.

Weise Words

I'm currently reading The Colony, written by Jillian Weise, who used to write a student column in The News Herald's Education section, many moons ago. She's now a poet, playwright, novelist and a professor at Clemson. I plan to write more about her debut novel later. For now, I thought I'd share something I wrote in February 2006 when she released a collection of her poems. It ran with this headline:

Translating Jillian: Playwright, singer, poet — just a girl?

There’s a disquieting intimacy to reading Jillian Weise's poetry.


I read her Notes on the Body, and can’t help recalling the middle-schooler who so bravely approached me — What? 11 years ago? — about writing columns. I read The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, and there’s a high-schooler posing questions to then-Gov. Lawton Chiles. Having not seen her for some time, those are the images with which I live.

I’ve heard that some have a problem reading fiction by people they know: They imagine the friend in the process of writing, or living it, and can’t buy in. That’s not my reaction here. Reading her work, moments so quietly not fictional, I buy in, and there lies the discomfort.

(Forgive me, Jillian. I’ll be brave.)

Jillian's first chapbook, Translating the Body (All Nations Press, 2005) was a precursor to the full-length edition, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, coming this fall (Soft Skull Press). I read it recently when her father dropped me a copy, and I looked her up online.

“I’m intrigued by H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) question in Notes On Thought and Vision: ‘What is the body? Where does the body come in?’ My work seeks answers for these questions,” Jillian said in a recent e-mail exchange.

“As an aside … I am alarmed by the current climate towards physical difference. Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside both garnered Oscar nods in the same year. Both movies portray characters living with a disability who choose to end their lives. The movies appeared to large audiences in a year when stem cell research was hotly debated in a presidential campaign. While the poems I write are not about movies or presidents, they do argue for the validity and worth of living with a disability.”

Is she a hero? She may be. I once described her in print as the kind of kid who got an idea and made it happen, the girl who invited the boy of her choice to the prom, who embraced theater and public speaking “despite” physical challenges that would sideline others — a bone displacement disorder, severe scoliosis, a bad lung, marathon surgeries, metal rods, a leg amputation in childhood.

(Now one of her poems that crushes me in retrospect, I discover, was based upon that terrible word: Despite.)

As a Surfside and Rutherford student living in Panama City Beach, Jillian wrote regularly for The News Herald’s now-defunct Education and Generation NeXt sections. She’s now 24 and on a second-year fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod. (“Brrr,” she said.)

“I live on the third floor of an 1880s barn with a concrete seagull named Hoot,” she said. “The property used to house a paper mill until the 1960s, when a collective of artists purchased the land and surrounding buildings and created the Fine Arts Work Center. The FAWC is a non-profit arts organization that selects 10 visual artists and 10 writers a year from around the world to come and live rent-free with a monthly stipend. Our only obligation is to write or make art.”

Jillian recently worked as an editorial assistant at the Paris Review — reading submissions, scanning for talent and helping to “birth an issue.” Her plays have been produced at the Greensboro Fringe Festival and Provincetown Playwrights Festival, and her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She earned an MFA as the Fred Chappell Fellow at the University of North Carolina.


With Jason Matson — whom she met while both were students in Tallahassee and who moved with her to the Cape — she’s half of The Leaving, formerly The Jason & Jillian Band. According to her MySpace profile, she’d like to meet “people who drink sweet Alabama wine on ice in the winter.” She flosses her teeth.

And she writes unflinchingly about the pains and the freedom, the limitations and the pleasures of being who she is. Her voice is clear, nothing is lost.

A hero? Maybe she’s just a girl I’m glad I used to know.

------

Peace.