UPDATE on big JACOB prb + bonus bitching

UPDATE:
It occurs to me, regarding CLOWN, that I never really tried to publish it before because publishing SUCKS if only 19 books sell in the first couple of weeks. Wtf?!?!

Anyway, on to JACOB, on to part 3 of the ongoing saga- how to write novels and not get paid for shit for them.

Jacob should probably grad in like '98 so he's got some experience before he's sent to the CIA's contracted evil mentory dude. Shall I call him Biff? (Oh, the despair is palpable. Dig the starving artist despair of Harkonnendog y'all... taste of it, sniff it, roll around in it like a puppy rolls upon the corpse of a dead rat left on the lawn by the cat, REVEL IN IT!!!)

Okay, enough of that. (But wait, you ask, why the despair now instead of before? Well, I just found out that- of the 19 copies of CLOWN which have sold, thereby garnering me a full $74.00 in royalties, 10 were bought my mom... LOL!!! Oh 'tis a sweet bittery taste- in fact I would say it is much like Heinz catchup, in that all the flavors of the palate are there- that's actually a fascinating essay btw, on catchup. No, really. Anyway, thank you Mom, love you.)

So Jacob is what, 98 - 17= he was born in 81 I guess. May as well make him a Libra, so October. Okay dokey. So in pre-October ought-five he's 24 - yeah... maybe make him a year older, you can go to school late if you're an October plus baby- so he's 25. That's about right.

All this stuff is so elementary- none of this was necessary for CLOWN because Clown took the frame of my life. I really lacked discipline while I wrote the rough of JACOB... I was distracted by my then girlfriend/now wife. Anyway...

Okay, I had another scene in mind, involving evil mentor... or did I? If I did I don't remember. HiGlish!

Buy CLOWN. If it was a shoe The Manolo would say...

The Manolo likes the CLOWN for its comfort, look, and ruggedness.

What CLOWN looks like.

There it is, CLOWN, in the flesh- well, a picture of the flesh, well, a picture of the paper.

Anyway.. Here's the link if you'd like to purchase it.

That' is http://www.lulu.com/content/182896 for those who prefer to cut and paste into their browser.

What I've learned from HBO's Rome

In ancient times the consistency of male flesh was similar to raw sausage. Their bones were about as tough as cooked sausage.

Therefore, gravity was much lower back then, since they were able to walk and stuff.

Thank you for your time, that is all.

Big problem with JACOB.

He's supposed to be a college kid but he fought in Somalia? No way. Woke up this morning and that just popped into my head. So now I'm thinking forget the entire Somalia thing- he was loaned to the CIA by the Marines so that he could work under a Jordanian intelligence guy in Pakistan to find bin Laden... and he gets hurt- captured/killed/tortured, whatever, over near the Afghan Pakistan border. That way he can still be pretty young when this novel takes place...

Update:
Okay, why does Jake need to be a Marine at all then? Why can't he just join the CIA in the wake of 911??? Wouldn't that make more sense, in many ways... Hrm... Farg! Then he spends two years in Pakistan or whatever and comes back? I guess...

Okay, CIA, NSA, something A it is. No longer a Marine- or a SEAL, or whatever- straight from highschool into CIA... ???? WHAT?!?! THAT'S RETARDED! Okay... From Marine to CIA- makes sense actually. Jake graduates class of 2000, joins up. In wake of 911 CIA raids people who can help them- Jake is already in Marine intelligence 'cause he got tagged because of his looks, insane language skills, etc., and he gets put in an immersion program and sent to Pakistan to help the contractors the CIA has hired to make up for the lack of humint... so he's a marine on loan to the CIA who has him working under a Jordanian expat American in Afghanistan. Why a Jordanian? why not a Pakistani or Afghani? an Afghani- Either way it works. The main thing is one of the fattest pieces of cellulite has been cut. Thank God!

Okay, so how does Jake get hurt? Gotta be friendly fire because that would explain, in part, why he's so pissed.

BUT WAIT!!! He's supposed to do evil shit so that he hates America, remember? So now this entire fugging line of thought his blown. Asshole! What were you thinking???? WHAT THE FUCK YOU WASTED TWO HOURS ON THIS SHIT!!! That's what I get for acting on something I woke up thinking...

But wait... Maybe I don't need Jake to hate America because he did evil shit? WAIT!!! What if he does do evil shit? What if he helps to torture people- what if he gets caught up in his mentor's game and does a bunch of shit, evil shit, for the flag, and it all ends up being for nothing... or for Evil Mentor's money... then you've still got the redemption thing at the end- also you've got a better reason for him wanting to commit suicide at the end... This works. So SOMALIA's out, EVIL MENTOR IN PASHTUN LANDS is in. Okay...

And have the marines teaching him Arabic BEFORE 911... Islamist terrorism was happening before then so it makes sense. Okay...

And then amoral EM fixes him... wow. hmm. gotta take a crap I'll be back.

You HAVE to read this post... GREAT post of the day!

Click here to be taken to the Belmont Club, for one of Wretchard's best.

Ed Morrissey is Luke Skywalker

I've given up on ever being Instalanched, but I still email Glenn Reynolds from time to time. Today I sent him this:
Subject: Ed Morrissey deserves more credit than you gave him.

I think the Captain brought down the government. Justice John Gomery imposed a ban on publication of the Adscam testimony by Canadian journalists. The Captain subverted the ban... otherwise none of this happens.

I believe this post:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004220.php

which you linked to, started it all. Ed Morrissey has joined Charles Johnson in an exclusive club. Call it the Luke Skywalker club. Individuals, unkowns, using a mysterious, almost mystical medium, somehow took down huge, bulking, bureacracies.

Stream of conciousness chapter.

This is just an example of one way I write. I wrote most of CLOWN using this method, and it works pretty well for artsy-farsty books written in the 1st person because I'm an artsy fart. However, JACOB is not an artsy fartsy book and it is written in 3rd person almost selectively omniscient and, in fact, it doesn't even HAVE a narrator...

What I mean by that is I didn't create a character, NARRATOR, and then write JACOB in his voice. For a 1st person book you obvioulsy have to create a narrator and write with his voice, but it is probably a good idea to do the same thing for a 3rd person viewpoint. But I didin't. Nonono- I did, in fact I created a series of them, accidentally, as I read others books and copied their style or watched movies etc. See, that's why it is a good idea to create a narrator- like, for consistency.

What I should have done, when I started JACOB, is picked a great book and read it for half an hour every day before I started writing JACOB and used the narrator of that book for my book. But I didn't. And I think that's a big part of the reason JACOB'S a fat fucking mess.

Anyway, because JACOB IS such a fat fucking mess I think I'm going to start using Clown as my narrator. Because I'm blocked- I'm as constipated as Saddam when he was hiding in that hole hearing American voices.

So I'll write the following chapter, which has floated around in my head for like 3 months, in Clown's voice, because I LOVE Clown, and I want to hear him. Okay... here we go... Now, I won't edit this or anything, and if I get stuck halfway I'll just be stuck, or if this thing just completely flops that will be it, it will be a failed experiment. Oooh my fingers feel good the words are flying onto the page I LIKE IT!

...

When I first got here I could not believe the dust, the squalor, the pain... I used to think Calvinists were assholes, you know? Calvinists think they were destined by God to lead good lives and that's why they were so blessed, and since God is just that meant they deserved to be blessed... But when you come to a place like Somalia you understand it.

How the fuck can you live with yourself when you see how much these people suffer. Not the assholes who cause the suffering- but the KIDS! This place is hell. So now I think Calvinists were just rationalizing, and I can hardly blame them. This place sucks.

Anyway, for the record, I arrived in Somalia weighing about 225 with, I'd guess, like six percent bodyfat. I mean I was ripped and very strong. I was a friggin' stallion ready to race. Three months later I weight 165- no joke, and I had about 0.1 percent bodyfat and I was addicted to Kafiyeh and I was functionally retarded. Well, retarded is going too far. But my brain really didn't work anymore. You see these starving Somalis running around with AKs and shooting them by sticking them around the corner or over their heads and you think they're cowards. But really, they're high and their brains don't have any sugar and they just- they're just STUPID. I know because that was me.

There are two kinds of MIOs. (Marine Intelligence Operatives). The first kind basically gets attached to a battallion and he helps plan attacks- spies out the locals- tries to find out who the enemy is and what they'll do- the kind of stuff that isn't even classified, you know. The second kind does shit like plan feints or use computer viruses to knock out missile detection radar sytem computers.

The third kind does spy shit. Now this third kind is a response to the CIA's decision to stop developing HUMINT resources in the late 80's. The Marines felt they needed HUMINT, especially given the new non-Cold War enemies. But they had little experience with it, so they went to the Israelis. The Israelis said no so the Marines went to a man names Ivan Romansky- yes, it is a made-up name- I'll never tell so don't ask.

Ivan was in his late thirties when I met him. He had no accent, but I don't believe he was an American. I don't believe he was any nationality. He got paid to do a job and he did it, and that was about it. What you need to understand about Ivan is that he was
1) 100% results oriented
2) he was a tech geek
3) he believed, with absolute conviction, that humans were robots.

3) is a BIG deal because it made him absolutely amoral. He thought the brain was a supercomputer- the body was a robot- (I'm really simplifying this because, as he explained many times, he considered the entire body to be a part of the computer- he thought a brain alone could not fuction- that it NEEDED a body to have self-awareness)- and that things like pain and love and hope and etc. were just software. The best software resulted in more replication.

So, take this to an extreme, and you understand that Ivan didn't think any more about shooting a person than a kid playing a video game thinks about shooting a video game construct. He didn't think of HIMSELF as anything more than video game construct, for that matter. But he did think he was better than everybody else in that he felt he was more self-aware of the fact that he WAS a video game construct.

Imagine you wrote a program that contained a character that was programmed to think it was self-aware. Okay, is it? No. It is programmed to think so. That's what Ivan thought of people. Now imagine that construct decides, one day, that it IS a program designed to be self-aware. NOW is it self-aware? Yeah. That's what Ivan thought of himself.

More important, Ivan wanted to learn
a) how to manipulate the code
b) in order to, eventually manipulate his own code
c) so that he could plug into the program that created the environment he lived and
d) manipulate that.

Okay, so Ivan wanted to become God. Or, a Wizard or something like that, at the least. And the Marines in Somalia hired him as a civilian contractor because Jordanians had used him with great results and recommended him.

Now, for all that- the weird thing is that Ivan liked me. I mean he was not immune to emotion, anymore than you are immune to liking your dog. And, in fact, he loved me and admired me the way a hunter would love a great pitbull. I was the equivalent of a champion pit fighting dog, to the kind of man who gets off on fighthing dogs, if you see what I mean. Besides, I made the guy a ton of money. And the more money he had, the more he could spend on finding different ways to manipulate people's codes.

...

Okay that's the end. Now I've got this character Ivan down. And I didn't before. I don't need to keep the Jordan stuff or the Marine intelligence stuff- but now I've FINALLY got a handle on Ivan, including a name (which, again, I don't need to keep).

The problems are
1. this isn't CLOWN and I can't just throw freewheeling exposition into JACOB
2. can't have the Marines contracting this guy STUPID
3. can't have them lending a Marine to him if they did STUPID

or... maybe I can do 2 and 3... I don't know.

But it makes more sense to make the guy a higher ranking dude in Marine intelligence, a Colonel or something, who has been like this all along but has hidden it until recently. Why isn't he hiding it, how does Jacob know about it? (Jacob needs to know about it for the reader to know because JACOB is written in 3rd person limited omniscience) Because Ivan has been getting high on his own supply, a little bit??? Hmm...

More problems:

4. how do introduce this? another flashback? JACOB has way too many already. Invade Jacob's dream- have Jacob explain it to Jenny?

Now THAT has some possibilities. What if Jacob is pissed because Ivan messed with his head? But then Ivan is the one that gets rid of his pain later, too... That could be cool, maybe. It is still just another flashback though.

I could do it part dream and part Jenny. Shit, THAT is probably the way to do it... Have Jacob just mention it to Jenny on the quad overlooking the protest, then have him dream about it after he fucks what's her name... This scene.

...

"This is a worm," Ivan said. "Dimethyltryptamine, aka DMT aka N,N-dimethyltryptamine."
"Okay."
"Crackers have been using this in South America for centuries. Good stuff."
"You want me to take it."
"Yup."
Jacob ate the pill.
"We've got a couple of minutes before it kicks in."
"What's it like?"
"Well, it isn't like kefiyah, or MDMA, or anything you've tried so far. This is soul-changing stuff. When you come out of it, odds are you'll think you had a mystical experience. You'll think you opened a portal into a different dimension and had a conversation with an intelligence that is the equivalent, brain-wattage wise, of you to an ant. But look, it WON'T BE REAL. When you first come back you'll think it was real, and you'll be angry with me for saying it isn't, but remember that I told you what you'll experience before you experienced it, okay?"
"A mystical experience?"
"Yeah. You'll think- the trademark of a mystical experience is NOT that you think you're seeing God, okay, it is that it seems MORE real than reality. I've done DMT quite a few times and when you're on it reality is more real. And real life, which this IS, don't be fooled, this IS real life, this IS an external reality, okay? But when you come off the DMT you will feel like this is a dream because the intensity of the DMT experience is so much more palpable than reality."
"What the fuck does this have to do with catching druglords, sir?"
"This is the stuff, Jacob. I pop the guy with DMT and when he comes off it- when he's in that window where he can pay attention to me but still remembers the DMT experience, I represent myself to him as a prophet and he'll tell me everything. Everything. Because the real world is no longer real to him, and because I'm the door to the real world. You understand? I use the MDMA, or acid, when I can't get this. MDMA is a firefly to DMT's lightning. The only thing is it is so strong it might fuck you up for life. I mean people have taken this and become mystics."
"Why do I have to take it?"
"Because I need to know the real reason you're here. I'm going to question you when you come off it. I'm going to make sure you're not here to entrap me. I gave you the MDMA because I wanted us to bond, and you seem okay. I feel like I can trust you. They used to give that to married couples in counseling. We got friendly quick right. But I've cracked my own code quite a bit lately, so I need to be more careful. " But Jacob wasn't listening anymore. His eyes were wide, his pupils were dialated.
"Oh my God," Jacob said.

...

Okay, I like that. I think that actually makes the cut. And I can write the part where Jake explains what a monster Ivan was later. It can almost be an aside. It will fill out the part where Jake says "You know what I've done for my country?" well. Speaking of that, that's just goofily written anyway. I should just replace that with Jake telling Jenny the Marines gave him to a psycho...

Scene now??? I don't think so... Couple hours of writing a day is enough. Well, is it though? Maybe I should- no... I'm fatigued, I know this feeling. Done for the day. Things will move along quickly enough if I keep up today's pace.

What CLOWN looks like.

There it is, CLOWN, in the flesh- well, a picture of the flesh, well, a picture of the paper.

Anyway.. Here's the link if you'd like to purchase it.

That' is http://www.lulu.com/content/182896 for those who prefer to cut and paste into their browser.

Sales have leveled, off, btw, from the initial massive burst of 15 on Tuesday, down to 2 on Wednesdy and 1 yesterday. Hehehe. Fuck.

If you do buy it I strongly suggest you buy the paperback version. I know it costs more but most of those who've read it have read it at least twice. It lends itself to that sort of thing because it is full of soul orgasms. What's a soul orgasm?

This excerpt from CLOWN describes it...

I don’t know. I’d never been to the SAM. People in Seattle always call it “The SAM.” Like they call Seattle’s Best Coffee SBC. People in Seattle are pretty cool except they’re always trying to show you how cool they are.

I’d walked past it on the way to the Metro tunnel after work but never gone in. In front of the entrance there’s a fountain that flows over some rocks protruding from a blue gray marble type of floor. I’d never bothered to really look at it before, and the only impression I had of it was that it was kind of like a Japanese rock garden. It was plain but conveyed a mood, a sort of melancholy mood having to do with loss.

Stephen Crane has a poem that goes:

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

That sort of mood. A feeling of inevitability because the universe will be how it is regardless of how we want it to be. But it was just an undercurrent, a mood, and I never really paid attention to it and I didn’t think the fountain was anything special.

This time I looked. It is a monument to Americans from the Northwest who died in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, and the Persian Gulf. It is a very good monument. Like The Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., it has a wall with the names of all the dead carved into it. There are a lot of names there. And you know they all grew up around the area you’re in.

I knew that most of them, probably all of them, died before they were my age. It was the first time I’d ever really seen a war memorial. They are more than memorials to people who died fighting wars for their country, they are memorials to people who died young. Every name there is a carpe diem poem.

All the names on that wall are flesh without function now. Flower food, worm meat. Most of the bodies from before Korea are probably just dust on what they were buried in, now. And I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it.

Every soul gone. Or worse, if you’re not a believer in the after life or eternity, every soul blinked out of existence. I’m having a hard time explaining this because I want to give an idea of how tragic it is, how utterly horrible, but also say that it wasn’t in vain. That that was how great what they all did was.

And I believe it. Easy for me to say since I didn’t die with them. When I see people of my generation saying that all the government systems are the same, or that wars are fought just so industries can make money, I wonder how they can think so shallowly. Imagine a fourth Lord of the Rings book that takes place a generation after Aragorn and Fredo and Pippin are dead. Just imagine a bunch of young teens sitting around in Mordor, evil-free Mordor, talking about how that war was a bunch of crap. Talking about how the bow and arrow guild was behind the whole thing. That’s what I think about kids who are cynical about the 20th century wars. A lot of people in Seattle are too cool to believe something like that, true or not.

No matter how well or worthily they died, though, they’re dead. So like I said, the monument is more than a monument to their sacrifices or heroism, it is a monument to the tragedy of young death.

It got me thinking about that generational thing again. How we would have met such challenges. What would we do if China invaded Taiwan or India? Nothing, probably. Think about it. We wouldn’t do a damn thing because we don’t care for ideas too much anymore.

It just happened that I was standing there, reading the names on that list, when she screamed. And RIGHT before she screamed, before I turned to see what happened, I felt and wished that I could be worthy to hang out with this group of guys when I died. Like a Valhalla sort of thing. And, (thought happens so fast.) as I turned I was thinking/feeling ‘now you’ll know, here is the answer to the challenge you sent out, here is your chance to become worthy to meet those who died for ideas.’

It was just a teenage girl screaming because her boyfriend or would be boyfriend had snuck up and tickled her. She wanted everyone around her to see how pretty and young and full of life and potential she was. I did see it all, and pretty much everyone around her also did because she screamed so loud. Who knows how many people muttered:

“Shut up you stupid whore.”

I know one person did, because I did. She wasn’t really worth that much anger. I was disappointed because, at that moment, I probably would have been brave and noble if she had really been in need. I was mad at her because she wasn’t a victim I could save.

Jon Donne wrote a poem called Batter My Heart, where he asks God to force him into loving God. Basically he realized that he turned to and loved God the most when he was most miserable. So he asked God to basically do horrible things to him constantly so that he could love God completely. ‘Batter my heart.’

He wanted his free will taken away so that he would not have the option to not love God as he knew he should. That was kind of what I wanted, and why, in a way, I envy my grandfather’s generation. They had little choice about whether or not they would be great. They had battered lives. They could either be great or fail, utterly.

My father’s generation, what I think of as the Clinton generation, had Vietnam. Things were a little less simple. You could go the Muhammad Ali route, which was to protest and suffer for not fighting. Or you could go the John McCain route, which was to fight and suffer the fighting. Or you could go the Clinton route, which was to weasel so you did not suffer.

And what great choices does my generation have? We have none. We had a war, but it was not a great war. There was an enemy personifying evil like in WWII, but he wasn’t a threat to anyone but his neighbor countries. There wasn’t a great controversy around a foreign war like in Vietnam. There was no crisis. There was just a won war. There are names on the wall from the Persian Gulf too, though. I’m not saying I’m not grateful to them.

But that war never even touched me.

In a way I always thought John Donne was an idiot for asking God to crush him so that he would turn to God to ease his suffering. But I also dig what he was saying.

Even the fact that he wrote that poem took a lot of nerve. He was a believer, so part of him knew that poem was a prayer, so when he wrote and published it he must have known that it might be answered. He reached the point in his life where he was tired of waiting for the tests so he asked for them. But he did it in a sideways manner, and I don’t think you can give him a lot of credit for it.

I never went into the Seattle Art Museum. You go into museums so you can have moments where you’re more alive, more conscious of what it means to be alive and capable of thought and feeling. Moments like the one the monument gave me. I call them soul orgasms because, like regular orgasms, you can’t have one right after another, you need some recovery time.

Unless you’re a woman. But even women can’t have multiple soul orgasms. At least I don’t think they can. Regardless, there was no point in going into the museum because I’d just had a soul orgasm and I wouldn’t be able to have another one regardless of what I saw in there.

I rarely have soul orgasms from paintings or sculptures anyway. Usually it has to be poetry. When I say poetry I mean music, too. Music is a form of poetry. Lyrical poetry. If you love music you love poetry, in case you didn’t know.

So I started walking away, but after less than a block I turned back. It felt like my body wanted to be there, but I guess it was my head operating through my body. I quit smoking the day I figured out that the feeling that I wanted something in my mouth was my body’s way of calling for nicotine. Before then I was always saying:

“It isn’t the nicotine. I just need something in my mouth.”

So I didn’t know the enemy, you know? But once I recognized the nicotine pangs for what they were, I knew the feeling I needed to resist in order to master the nicotine urges. Since then I’ve understood that our bodies’ feelings and desires are really mysteries to us. Maybe we just don’t have the vocabulary we need to recognize our bodies’ demands.

One of the problems with CLOWN is I finished it like 3 days before 911. So this entire excerpt makes no fucking sense unless I date the book... but I specifically didn't want to date it... and haven't... except 911 dated it... except people might think Clown (not me because I'm not Clown, Clown is Clown) lived through 911 and Afghanistan and Iraq and he didn't think that qualified as an identity creator for his generation... I have my own ideas about that but I won't share them because they're not in the book (yet) so your guess is as good as mine (unless or until I date it)...

I guess I should date the book... I guess I HAVE to date it. Hrm...... I guess I could make a reference to the millenium...

Thanks to Horny G

I need to send a big thank you out to Horny G, who prefers to remain anonymous, for reading CLOWN and waxing rhapsodic enough to get me to decide to publish it and get serious about my writing again.

I don't need a lot of enouragement- I mean this is what I want to do- but even a cactus seed needs SOME fuggin' rain.

So thank you Horny G!

Btw, I think I've figured out how to approach finishing JACOB. First I need to identify the new chapters I need to write. Off the top of my head I've got-

Jacob in Somalia-
ESTABLISH:
a. Jacob worked intelligence for Marines
b. that's why he stayed for Black Hawd Down
WHILE THERE HE MET CIA GUY (Cole Burhart-does that sound like a good name for a crazy CIA guy?)
c. his crazy handler- who taught him how to use drugs to interrogate people- E, DMT, others...
d. will break the pain loop by using micro drug therapy as outline in WIRED magazine.

(BTW, dear blog readers, I know these references don't make sense to you- I'm sorry. I'm thinking out loud here... when/if you read the book you'll understand. Cliff Notes- DMT is a drug Joe Rogan (of fear factor UFC etc.) says opens a door to another universe where you speak with a super-intelligent being. I've never done it, but I did E enough times to know how easily you can think something like after getting ripped... WIRED magazine did an article abou pain- basically instead of drugging a person's brain some dude has figure out how you can use miniscule amounts of drugs to deaden the nerves that are sending pain signals to the brain, near the SOURCE. you stick a needle in the guys knee to cut off pain from a shit, etc. and a tiny electric motor puts itty bitty bits of drug on the nerve carriers directly to stop the signal. cool stuff. very applicable to JACOB, and would lend a LOT of credence.)

The problems, here, are where the fuck do I put this stuff. JACOB is already overrun with backstory and exposition... this is MORE OF IT. Fug... I'll update when I figure it out. Or maybe I should just write it first? But is AT LEAST TWO CHAPTERS, not one... I mean if I do it right, if I show rather than tell, and then we've got Jacob and his mom having flashbacks from chapter to chaper to chapter... wtf?Q!??!?!?!

hehehe

15 copies of CLOWN have sold... What's next?

First, as of today 15 copies of CLOWN have sold. I make $4 bucks a book, whether they are ebooks or paper books, so I've made $60.00.

YEEHAW!!! And no, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm genuinely stoked on that, lol.

Anyway, so what's next? I could pretty easily publish NEVA- I mean it is done unless I want to do a major rewrite 'cause I think it sucks.

So I guess the first thing I should do is reread it and decide whether it sucks or not. If it doesn't, I'll publish NEVA as well.

Beyond that, I've got two books that need finishing (as opposed to polishing). Finishing means they are done but I probably need to do 1/3rd of the total amount of work needed to finish them to FIX them.

These two books are THE ADVENTURES OF TUTUMAN AND LILIANA, a massive cultural guidebook to Kauai for children, and JACOB, a thriller about stopping an Islamist terrorist plot to release a modified version of smallpox at the Pro Bowl in Honolulu.

THE ADVENTURES OF TUTUMAN AND LILIANA was written on paper. I've put half of it on the computer. After that I need to take a bunch of pictures of the places written about and get somebody to illustrate... Proabably my friend from high school, Giampiero. Great artist. This is mostly grunt work, really, though there will be some editing involved.

JACOB is a big fucking mess. It is like I was high half the time I wrote it or something. I've spent countless hours trying to fix it- the chronology is screwed, the love story is off, the... you get the idea. I totally think it is salveagable and, if I do it right, I think it could be great... but i have to do it.

There's really no reason I couldn't do both. I could work on THE ADVENTURES OF TUTUMAN AND LILIANA for an hour a day and follow that up with JACOB... or probably vice-versa... Time to start taking baby steps. The FIRST think I need to do is locate the rough of TATAL... then I'll go from there.

CLOWN IS PUBLISHED!!!

You can buy it right here! Buy it!!! Buy it right now!!!

:)

Done with the typo reviews.

I guess... Also, I cut off the epilogue. I just don't think it adds anything, do you? I think the ending is more powerful sans explanation.

I really want to do ANOTHER typo review... I guess a person could end up doing a million of them... Will I? won't I? argh I don't know. It seems like such a final step to publish it. Maybe one more- ONE MORE ONLY!!! review would be better...

Couple new CLOWN readers... 3 actually.

Yesterday a couple business associates asked me to email CLOWN to them and I did. They agreed to, if they really dig it, shell out 15 bucks for a hard copy from Lulu, which is the cool.

Meanwhile Horny George talked his buddy Matt into reading CLOWN- (Lactating Matt? is that a good nickname?) so I emailed Horny George the latest version for forwarding. I think I might ask Horny George to email me a short review for posting.

Today's goal is to finish the latest typo check. Starting now...

Great Poetry related Post of the day.

What do you get when you combine Aquaman, Trump, and bad poetry?

Here you go. Fuggin' great!!!

Why DERAILED sucks... Ebert too, of course.

Jennifer Anniston is the sexy, especially now that her steroid-swollen jaws have receded, but her new movie DERAILED sucks. I haven't seen it but I don't have to...

The Ebert review is here. This is the important part:

They exchange business cards. They meet for lunch. Lunch becomes dinner. Dinner becomes a hotel. Sex becomes a necessity, and then a brutal man with a French accent (Vincent Cassel) breaks into the room, knocks Charles almost unconscious and rapes Lucinda.

Charles tells his wife Deanna (Melissa George) that he worked late at the office and then was mugged. Deanna buys this story, I guess. She is one of the more trusting wives in movie history. But the nightmare is not over. The mugger, named Philippe, has Charles' name and phone number. He guesses, correctly, that Charles and Lucinda did not call the police (she's married, too). He has blackmail in mind.

Forget about how stupid this is... The movie introduces Charles and the first really important thing we learn about him is that he fucks around on his wife with strange women.

Okay, this movie blows. Charles is the hero. But I don't give a crap about Charles. I mean I know nothing about who he is except one thing- he cheats on his wife. So why should I care about him?

Maybe if the movie had established that Charles was noble and decent and good, somehow, then I would forgive him and care. But the movie doesn't establish that- I mean it simply can't do that when his being an adulterer is established during the 1st 3rd of the film.

Duh.

I guess Ebert and everybody who makes movies like this miss the forest for the trees...

Rereading CLOWN for the other kind of typo

Started today. Already changed one thing. Changed this:

Anyway, I guess nobody is allowed to tell people what I write and all, but I don’t want you to think bad about me either.


To this:

Anyway, I guess nobody is allowed to tell people what I write and all, but I don’t want you to think I suck either.

So... why? I think the first version is grammatically incorrect. The thing is I have very litte perspective on this. So you tell me... is the second version better or not? Does it lose something?
Hemingway said you aren't supposed to love your shit, but I do. So I don't know.

ng.

UPDATE:
On page 8 and I've found two more... had "north" capitalized incorrectly and... how do you say this??? I pronouned "about" with "who"... How the hell could I have missed such easy stuff? How much more am I missing? ergh

UPDATE 2.
1/3rd done with editing for this kind of typo, just finished Chapter 13.

btw Horny George requires that he be known, forever, as Horny George and ONLY as Horny George, and I will respect that. also, his buddy is reading CLOWN and I'll post his comments as/if I get them.

CLOWN update

Okay I've made it to chapter 33. There are only 40 chapters, so this particular editing job is jesabout done.

Good.

Then, I guess I'll print it out when I get home and read it over the weekend, looking for the kind of typos the computer doesn't catch. I enjoy reading it anyway. Then on Monday I'll come in and upload it, I guess.
Then y'all CAN BUY IT!!! WHOO-HOO!! (It sounds like Horny George is going to be the first to purchase.)
You'll be able to buy a real book for 14.95 plus shipping. Total rip-off EXCEPT it is not. Why? Because people constantly buy shitty books for 8 or 9 bucks because they've bought great books for 8 or 9 bucks. In fact I bet people buy 10 shitty books for each great book they buy, which means you actually spend $64-$81 dollars for a great book!

That doesn't even factor in the time you've wasted reading the crappy ones, right?

Well, CLOWN is great, if I do say so myself. And, yeah, I feel that way, so I'll say it. I would say it is better than anything I've read since Stephenson's Baroque Cycle... In fact it is better than any not Stephenson book I've read in the last 3 years. So depending on your reading habits it is worth AT LEAST 15 bucks, and possibly... well, the sky is the limit, given this logic, right? I mean if I had know Cryptonomicon was as great as it is I would have dropped a hundred without hesitation.

And it gets great reviews from readers. I mean the ratio of people who think it is great to people who think it is just another book is around 9-1. So odds are you'll dig it, and find it is at least 15 abalones.

BDS

Bush Derangement Syndrome... I'm wondering how bad it is. If you hate Bush so much that you believe he is evil or run by a cabal of evil Jews or Neo-cons or Skull and Bones oil magnates or whatever...

Do you increase the risk of becoming a radical constructionist? Like you can imagine the worst of everyone and forget everybody has the same essential human make-up as yourself? I look at the wacky left and I see a lot of these people. The kook left is full of people who honestly believe the right is run by people who inhuman...

If you start to go there, led by BDS, which is pandemic, what stops you from devolving into a Michael Moore or a Farrakhan?

Still Working on CLOWN.

Hit the heavy duty fatigue factor 3 chapters in today... Which is ridics considering how mindless this kind of editing is. This is purely my own personal bullshit though- no matter what I do, I have a problem finishing. I painted and put new floors in my condo 2 months ago during my "vacation" and I haven't put the floorboards in... why? It would take like 4 hours 'proby... 'cause I'm a LOSER! At least when it comes to finishing big procucts...


Thankfully, there is a cure for this particular disease and I know it well. Caffeine. I will now close shop and drive down the road and get a quad venti sugar free vanilla latte and if that doens't work I'll chew some no doz and if that doesn't work I'll... that will work, surely.

Writer's Blog Day 2

Looks like Lulu.com is the way to go. Spent a few hours getting CLOWN ready. Will update as the day grows long.p

UPDATE:
Spent the day using the Microsoft Word grammar check. Got to Chapter 20. Mostly I'm deleting extra spaces between words, lol. I did learn, however, that you capitalize East when it is a place, as opposed to a direction, and that "I lay down" is past tense, and "have lain down" is correct... as opposed to "have laid down." Kinda fun, this mindless editing. Once I get the next 20 chapters done I'll reread CLOWN looking for the kind of typos Word can't catch. Misspelling that happened to spell other words, etc.

Not that I haven't done all this like 10 times. I have. Somehow these things grow all by themselves, I think.

Agghhh. Day 1 of the Book Blog

Okay. Here's the thing. I hate this more than I love it, but I'm all wrapped into it psyche-wise and such so I have to do it. But I am in constant rebellion with myself. Melodrama? Fuck you it is the truth.

Anyway here goes. Today's task:

Figure out how to E-Publish CLOWN.

CLOWN is about done. I mean there may be some tweaks necessary, a few typos I've missed, a couple things I could do... but I'm ready to publish. So how do I e-publish? Bet I can find out in one day. Hell, I can probably do it in one day.

Here goes.

UPDATE:
TMI syndrome. After four hours of surfing through the muck I found this site, which lays out pretty much most of the stuff I wanted to know. In short, it says the best way to publish a novel is probably .pdf form, and Adobe Acrobat is the best way to go, though there is a slightly worse method that costs $30- about $220 less.

Ideally I'll have the book hosted by a website, my website, where you click a button, pay your $5- with a credit card or paypal or whatever, and get to download the book. It would be automated, robust (it wouldn't fail if I won the writer's equivalent of the lottery and a million people decided to buy the book at the same time) and cheap (for me, meaning I'd get to keep at least four of those five dollars). I'd have a link here at Harkonnendog that would send you to the place, and... well you get the idea.

UPDATE 2:
This place will, for FREE, e-publish CLOWN and make it availabe for print on demand purchases. If someone does buy a copy they get just 20% of the profits. If people purchase 1 copy at a time it costs me $8- to publish the book, and then I add how much profit I would like. Say added a $5 royalty- they'd add $1.25 for 25% commission on my royalty. 8+5+1.25=$14.25... Pretty expensive for a paperback...

But they also e-publish for free, as part of the service. So every $5- I charge for that goes completely to me, apparently. I could have this done tonight... only downside, apparently, is it is too good to be true... Hmm...

Where did the motivation to blog go???

It is gone, no doubt. I think it left when the Iraqis approved their constitution. If I started this because I feared the left would Vietnam Iraq then I've no reason to continue if I think the left has lost.

I think it has. Of course this means we've all won, even the left.

But where does this leave this little bit of bloggedy goodness?

It could be a writer's blog, for publishing, sharing, and publicizing my novels NEVA and CLOWN, and for editing and illustrating my chidlren's novel THE ADVENTURES OF TUTU-MAN AND LILIANA, and for wrapping up my unfinished novel JACOB, and for selling my screenplay which is so old I can't remember its name...

Or maybe I could publish, here, my two hundred + poems- in a sort of big FU to the world or in a fit of self-mockery.

Hrm...