The Middle of the Dark

Octavia Butler, dead at 58 . Butler didn't drive. She took the bus like me, or walked. She died walking. Too soon, but walking. I recieved some more contributions for the zine today. One was an extraordinary poem from Doug Powell, a piece of riveting non-fiction from Mandy Hurley , and a great cartoon from Matt Hanneman . I forgot to mention I got a great poem (and a call!) from Polly Brewster. I spent a couple hours working on the zine and discovered I'm actually very close to filling out its pages. I should have the final contributions for the first issue soon, as well as that pesky cover... I'm up to 117 pages on the new novel. Don't go in dark basements.

Slipstream ain't what it used to be, ain't what it used to be... A really good review of Ali Smith's new novel The Accidental spins off larger questions about life in the age of public narrative, and also, if the book is slipstream or not, and just what is slipstream nowadays. Read Bruce Sterling's 1989 essay for sure. Slipstream is more or less what I've been calling 'deep-dish lit' here on the blog; writing that inhabits a strangeness that isn't orthodox in either literary or genre terms. I consider myself that kind of writer. I don't particulary appreciate the term 'post-modern'. It's outdated, and I have issues with it. I'd rather just say I'm a 21st century writer. I'm a writer coming of age in a century very young and undefined, that changes exponentially every year. Our art and the means of its delivery to the public changes every year. It's very hard to define things that can't be or aren't mean...

The Veteran's Walk on the riverfront downtown.

Your president in action . Maureen McHugh's Hodgkins may have returned. I wish her all the best. So I promised the zine cover this week. Mmm... the week technically isn't over yet. So we'll see. I may have found a new title for it. I'm up to 110 pages on my novel. And I was in a car accident today. Nothing major. But the other guy was perhaps the biggest asshole I've met in quite some time. Aren't they always, though? We had pulled over to the side of the road to avoid an ambulance (as you're supposed to) and who comes flying out of a driveway? Asshole. We honked the horn for like five seconds and he just kept coming. He told me 'it didn't matter.' It was a generally crappy day. What can I say. But I found out Mandy watches Project Runway too! I'm so addicted it's not even funny.

The blurry line between YA and adult fiction . I think about this sometimes. When I was a teenager, I graduated into 'mature' comic books before I did novels. At the time DC was in the early days of what would become Vertigo; Alan Moore was doing Swamp Thing, Neil Gaiman was just starting Sandman, and comics weren't comics anymore. I started reading more 'adult' books, at first things like 'The Stand', and then 'The World According to Garp.' I think about this because some of my fiction straddles this line, the same as it does genres. I don't think books should be labeled YA or OA or whatever, anymore than they should be shoe horned into categories and genres. It helps for young readers to have a realm of books all their own, but the best books, as they quickly find out, live there like ghosts; they're there, and they're not. Went to the doctor again today. Same old story, except I've now lost 80 pounds. It's sort of hard...

This week I'm proud to present an interview with Molly McNett. Molly is a former teacher of mine from Iowa, and she was very supprotive and encouraging to me way back in my tadpole days. She teaches at Northern Illinois, and she's a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. She was a finalist for the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, and her story "Catalogue Sales" appears in the 2005 editon of The Best American Non-Required Reading . Q: What was your first literary crush? A: I'll answer this literally- my husband. Because he was much better read than I was--still is--and writing seriously already when I met him. I hadn't read anything to speak of. And my husband's family was a wonderful thing to me, because they are all readers, and my mother in law is a writer. But to answer the real question: Mary Gaitskill. I still have a literary crush on Mary Gaitskill. Part of it is her language. She has such style and control. ...

Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon working on my novel-in-progress. I usually don't write in the daytime, but the little cage I keep this one in has been rattling very, very loud, and so rather than upset the neighbors, I fed the beast. I brought it up to 101 pages, which was a big goal for me. Normally 100 pages isn't a big deal; that's about a month's worth of solid work, but this one has been challenging in many ways. It also came along at a turbulent time. I suppose I'm a third of the way there, then; I always saw this as one of those slim puply newstand books that you could fit in your backpocket. On the zine front, I'm very proud and humbled to say I'm going to have contributions from Caitlin R. Kiernan and Steve Almond . I'm also very happy to have a comic from Matt Hanneman , an all around great guy, and one of the luckiest guys in the world. Check back tomorrow; I'll have a new conversation with Molly McNett.

It. Is. Freezing. It's 30 below right now with the wind. The coldest it's been all year and it's not going to let up anytime soon. I went to an open mic night at the Center for the Arts tonight. I hadn't read in public since Iowa City, so it was a little nerve-wracking, but I had a lot of fun. I read a couple newer poems, "The New Girlfriend", and "Surface", which I wrote for an art project my brother and I plan to do. There was another wonderful poet there named Pat King, who read all sorts of style poetry, Slam, some rap, some sermons, it was great. The trap of the bottle rocket writer. Because they take off and then go "BOOM!" "Look, if she's bludgeoned to death, I want to make sure we see some blood." I got back on the novel horse Thursday night. What else to do but write a big fat novel when there's half a foot of wind driven snow on the ground, right? I think I've decided to go ahead with the space-no...

This image, like the last one, also appears in my brother and I's poster project, though in an altered form. I call this one 'Flames.'

So we got hit by about six inches of snow today. It was nearly 60 degrees two days ago, which only goes to show that Iowa is really just a big tease. It's okay, though, since in one month's time it's St. Patrick's Day, and many of my dear friends I met in Ireland are coming to Waterloo - to Waterloo! - to celebrate. I cannot wait. The friends I made from that summer in Dublin and Belfast are some of the most special people in my life and I'm grateful to know them, much less them have them in my town. The new Irish pub downtown, Jameson's, will be open just in time for us to christen it in true IWP style. A while back I emailed a wondeful poet, D.A. Powell, to contriubte to my zine. I first met Doug when he gave a reading in Iowa City several years ago at Prarie Lights; he encouraged me to have faith with my writing and always keep going, and I've always remembered what he said. So I'm very, very glad to say he's planning to contribute a poem t...

The world is crazy. People are crazy. There's no advice for how to deal with it, regardless of what Dr. Phil says. If a big bald guy ever wants to sit behind a monitor and watch you go on blind dates and then talk about it on TV, you are not getting advice. You are getting more crazy. Luckily, there's a secret book for writers with juicy bits of writerly advice. Caitlin Kiernan divulges a little bit of this super secret info on her blog today: One thing it takes to be a working author, one thing that is absolutely requisite, is the ability to accept at least one grievous and unwarranted insult each and every day from a perfect stranger. There are no exceptions.(from pg. 15) So I sold two stories the other day. I also recieved a rejection letter that partly dismissed the story in question because it might be considered intolerant toward gays. Get this: the story is about people fingering people who advocate intolerance toward gays. And Charlie Brown says "UGGGGHHHHH...

Some love poems. I have nothing much to say on the subject. Usually I spend the day listening to Fleetwood Mac's "Sara." Yeah. "In the sea of love, where everyone would love to drown." Okay. My brother has designed an incredible cover for the first issue of the zine, which I think will now be called Other Than . I also got a new story from a former teacher of mine, Molly Mcnett, which is really incredible. One of her stories was recentely selected for the Best American Non-Required Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. My brother also took a photo of me for one of the magazines I sold to yesterday. It caught a lot of detail, like my razor burn. Need new razor...

My life is feast or famine. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. Good things in clumps, bad things in clumps. Today, this year hopefully, considering the last, seems to be the start of a good clump. I learned today I sold two short stories (commences with Peanuts Happy Dance to celebrate selling two stories in one day). The first, "Paper Man", will appear in a forthcoming issue of Shimmer . The story is about a young blind woman named Millie who sees the world through the things she makes of paper. The second is "Black Eyed Moon," about best friends who go in search of fallen moon rocks after an asteroid strikes the moon and the debris falls to earth. This will appear in the summer '06 issue of Fantasy Magazine . I want to take a moment and thank E. Sedia for her confidence in me and this story, and all her help. I really appreciate it. Back to happy dance...

It's the second Sunday in Feburary. There's a blizzard in New York. That can mean only one thing: Toy Fair. You're never too old to be a kid, and plus, some of these damn things are practically works of art: Kong. Star Wars . Buffy . Wow . Sideshow Mace Windu . Obi Wan . Animated Star Wars statues . These seem styled after the Clone Wars cartoon, and they are really cool. Especially Leia & R2 . Battlestar Galactica . For Sugu and Ben: Transformers . Mostly all this stuff is just a reminder to me of how poor I am. The really expensive stuff interests me more as I get older, mostly because they're not really toys, but replicas and statues that are virtually film props. I can always dream...

Spent the day doing a little clearance shopping. First, it was the book sale at the library, where I got a copy of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days and Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? Then it was the mall to get some new clothes on those really cheap post-holiday prices. I got some new jeans and shirts and such to replace the puffy stuff I've been wearing. It was nice, for the first time in my life, not to have to shop in the big and tall section. And I've been shopping, sort of, for which novel to write next. I have competing ideas and interests here, as I'm sure lots of writers do. My choices are: Novel A: The third book in the sci-fi trilogy, which is a multi-character, multi-arc archetectonic doorstop kind of book. There's no real incentive to write it right this moment, as the first two books aren't published, and maybe more than that, I've lived with this story for over ten years and I'm reluctant to let it go. Novel B: ...

Now that the exhibits are over, I wanted to keep the Friday pic tradition going. I was inspired by the poster project my brother and I did for the Main St. Anniversary to present snapshots, segments, of how I see Waterloo. I'll call 'em 'Loo Slices.

A cousin of mine showed up out of the blue last night. He's been 'out of sorts' let's say for a year now, and this is the first time I've seen him since my uncle's funeral. My cousin had a fight, I guess, with his folks. I ended up having to walk him home at four in the morning, in like zero degree cold, because no one would come get him (I don't drive). These things always make me anxious, because there's nothing to be done. I hate that feeling of helplessness, which seems so pervasive. It's starting to lift though in regards to downtown, to the community, and I'm taking a more active and hopefully constructive role in the Metro Arts Guild, trying to contribute to the downtown revitalization . I've been working on the zine, the new short story, which is for a really interesting anthology about genetics, and of course, waiting. Always waiting to hear about submissions. Now, if waiting were a paying job...

If for some reason you haven't heard by now, the Bus, Cowher, Big Ben, and what is probably the classiest set of guys in pro sports won the big one on Sunday. You could not have written a better ending for Bettis' career, or a better start to Roethlisberger's. Another classy person I know, Mandy, writes about the lulling safety of Iowa. A lot of what she says is right on. The good thing about Iowa: insulation. The bad thing: insularity. I go back and forth with myself every single day, and have for years now, about whether to stay or not. There's always a reason to, and the problem is, there will always be. At least now the current reason is a good one. If I left now, I feel like I'd be turning my back on my city, right when it woke up, and right when it needs people like me the most. If Waterloo has a future, if Iowa does, it's in people my age, my brother's, all the people I've met downtown that see something better and are poised to do some...

... but you wanna talk. Good post from Matt on dialogue, with lots of links. He said basically everything I would about dialogue. I'd like to respond here (as I did on his blog) to a comment left there, regarding the idea that dialogue in a literary novel would be completely different from a sci-fi or mystery novel. Why? Because the former is supposed to be good, and the latter bad? The dialogue in Samuel R. Delaney's fiction is literary-caliber, as is Kelly Link's and a host of other writers too many to mention. My own fiction has always been a blend of what I suppose would be classified as literary elements, and also what I supposed would be genre elements; to me it's not blending high and low art. You should always want to tell the best story possible, and write it the best you can.

And last, but not least, Monica Bellucci. I rest my case. God exists.

Just a couple of days ago it was the anniversary of Challenger, and here we are, not accidentally maybe, at the anniversary of Columbia. Both were ultimately brought down by cold tempratures and bureacracy. I watched the very first lift-off of Columbia in April of '81. It's still probably the coolest thing I've ever seen. And we remember also Coretta Scott King , and Wendy Wasserstein . Bigger than Pluto .

This week I'm happy to have an interview with Martin Roper, author of the novel Gone . Martin recieved his MFA from the University of Iowa, and presently teaches at NYU, and also the Irish Writing Workshop at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, which is where I first crossed paths with him almost six years ago now. Q: What do you make of all the fuss lately about the scandal involving James Frey, or JT Leroy? At what point do you draw the line between fiction and fact in a piece? When is creative non-fiction just fiction? Is there a line? A: There is a simple difference between fiction and nonfiction and it’s fairly clear. When you write nonfiction there is a tacit agreement between writer and reader that the truth is being told. It’s that simple. There are facts to be told. (How those facts are told is the creative part of what we’ve come to term “creative nonfiction”) This is why we write and read nonfiction, for the thrill of the known. Fiction is invented and we read ...