What’s the Deal With the Marsburg Diary?

Some may be asking, “What the flippineck does ‘Book one of the Airel Saga Diary Books’ mean?” Simple: The Marsburg Diary is the first book of the subseries in the Airel Saga.

Clear as mud? Good. I like to trust that my audience is smarter by several degrees than the average television-watching slob. Plus working with a quality man like Aaron Patterson is at least a small guarantee of that. Sort of.

By the way, I love compliments that come prepackaged with the tiniest hint of insult; they’re balanced.

So, for those who’ve read Airel and loved her, loved her story, dug the varietals in the plot etc., I have a treat in store for you. Remember the prologue? That little bit about William Marsburg in Stuttgart, 1897? Remember the gigantic question mark that hung in the air as it ended? Well, get ready for resolution in The Marsburg Diary.

And get ready for more questions. But you love that, don’t you. Yes, you do. And you know it—it’s what’s great about being a reader of books. There’s no spoon-feeding here.

Today, get ready to meet Harvey Marsburg: William’s slightly clutzy youngest son. The elephant in the room is that Harvey was born in 1967…which is kinda impossible, given that William would have to have fathered him at well over one hundred years of age. It’s one reason Harv has always thought the old man was crazy. He hates the memory of him and is glad to have moved on after his death—or at least tried.

The problem is, the foundation that William established to provide security for his boys—Jack and Harvey—has now sent a large trunk to Harvey. Addison, the executor of the estate, has left a cryptic note for ol’ Harv. But what starts things in motion before all this is the letter bearing William’s seal. There’s a weirdness to the address that seems to portend more than one meaning…plus, Harv could swear he’s being watched. As a huge thunderstorm rolls in from the west, Harvey begins to look into the trunk. And though it goes against everything within him, he begins to lose all his reasons for disbelief.

Harv gets lots of questions answered, but as a result, he has even more questions now than when he started, and so will you. Don’t miss The Marsburg Diary, available now for Kindle and Nook. Coming soon: Michael, book two in the Airel Saga, and next year look for The Wagner Diary, book two in the Airel Saga Diary Books series. 

Strongbox

It's amazing, really, what can come from a simple dream.

I recently dreamt something very simple: there was a box. It was made of bulletproof glass and high strength steel, and it had a door on one side. There was a girl there; she either lived inside it or wanted to. This is where the dream turned, though, because as my mind wove the scene together, the girl was suddenly pushed out of the box screaming.

The hook of the scene is that whatever is outside the box is dangerous. Hence the screaming girl.

Anyway I decided to write something along the lines of the dream the next day. In about an hour, I had the rough shape done. Over the next few days I perfected it, and today I just read part of it for the Huckins Writers' Guild in Boise. The feedback I got was quite good, with one person telling me that the story sounds "mythical," a connotation that I find very desirable as a writer of stories.

So, coming soon, I'll be releasing my first digital short: Strongbox. It'll be free. And I'm pretty sure you'll like it.

Follow Through

Art can exist within the shroud.

I have to wrack my brain to remember, but I’m pretty sure the first time pen hit paper in regard to my debut novel K [phantasmagoria] was about two years ago. That would mean I started writing the first bits of the concept right about the time I was just starting to pull out of a debilitatingly vivid depression over what the experts call a “life event.” Suffice it to say that personal loss can drive an artist to produce amazingly potent and relevant work, which I believe this work will be. Never mind that it’s taken so long to write it.

It’s funny that when I set off on K [phantasmagoria] I wasn’t much of a writer. I didn’t know much about fiction beyond what Aldous Huxley and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had donated to me from beyond the grave. I had no concept of what passive voice might be. I was unaware of the dangers of direct address in fiction. I didn’t know the rules. So I started to make some of my own. I’m vaguely aware that it’s a no-no to use contractions in the narrative now. But I do it when it fits, for instance, because it just reads better.

Basically there are no sacred cows. Including that old chestnut about not dwelling over the work. And not re-writing anything until the rough draft is done. And the whole idea of NaNoWriMo, which encourages writers of all stripes to bust something out from start to finish every November. Sorry, mate. Not this time round, anyway.

You ever hear that old joke about how something happened on the way to the theater or whatever? Yep. It’s the same with me and my novel, only my novel is what happened to me on my way to finishing it. I’m sure someone out there can relate.

It’s not that it’s in need of salvage. Far from it. It’s just that, in a way, I started writing it too soon. Again, I’m sure there’s a writer out there who can relate.

All of this baggage conspires against completion, though, y’know? It’s true. Better to get things done quickly. Better to resist some of the more controllable, optional distractions and slug it out, get it done. All that conventional wisdom.

But as it turns out, all the delays and distractions have served a greater purpose. They’ve given me time to think my way through the plot forward and backward, get to know the premise, lay things out just right, fine tune everything…and learn how to write, let alone write a novel.

This is just to encourage you. Follow through on that project that’s been shelved for God knows how long and for God knows how many reasons. Follow through on it and start to finish it. It will be worth your time. Your effort. Because it’ll be as much a part of you as you are of it when all is said and done. Follow through.

Pandora

I’ve been growing a reputation for reviewing the weirdest things. So I’ve reviewed dictionaries, sue me. Why not review Pandora? I suppose part of it has to do with what must be undiagnosed ADD, ADHD, PTSD, and whatever other psychobabble alphabet soup will stick. My contention is that most of these disorders are code for “man” in a world obsessed with femininity; one in which real men decidedly don’t fit.

But there are other reasons for my penchant eclectique. I think a lot of it has to do with me spending quite a bit of my free time in my student days classically training to be a musician. I look at all creative art through this lens. Movies, painting, writing, the lot. And I’m proving who I am right now with this rabbit trail.

So I guess I’d better get down to it. I recently gave into Pandora. It’s an online music streaming service, for those of you in Twentynine Palms. I was all jazzed about setting up my Pandora account so that I could get my ears on some new music. I like to write while listening to movie soundtracks, concertos, opera, symphonies, old jazz standards, and on and on. I was stoked to get on with one of my custom-built “stations,” Needtobreathe Radio, built simply by typing in one of my favorite bands’ names to the search bar and pressing play. Not only does it play Needtobreathe, but in my opinion, a lot of the stuff Air 1 ought to be playing.

And that brings up the nasty reality of the music industry these days. Radio play is that irritatingly repetitive because of the fact that record industry heavy hitters pay for play. It’s not democratic or even fair. It’s not about popular demand for music, or even an overzealous radio program manager. It’s about money. Which sucks, because if a label has enough cash it can pelt us through the radio waves with the same song five times a day for eternity. I don't know if you mind it, but it drives me right up a wall.

Enter Pandora, where you get to choose. Ha! I guess I should explain. You can give each song a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You can also skip songs. If you give a song the thumbs down, Pandora grovels before you:

Okay, we’ll never play that track again.

That’s nice. Yes, I am the master of all I survey.

If you skip a song, sometimes you have to sit through ads. There are less intrusive ads on the iPhone app, which is why I usually listen to Pandora on my iPhone. But you’ll never guess what happens if you skip too many tracks. Oh, it’s lovely. It made my day not too long ago. It was full of awesomeness.

I gotta set this up. When bands and songs that are whoring themselves out on the radio also pop up on my Pandora playlist, I give ‘em the thumbs down. Hello, that’s why I’m not listening to the radio: to avoid the same songs that have been on the program manager’s playlist for a decade or more. Case in point: Jars of Clay’s Flood, which makes me borderline homicidal whenever I hear it now. It’s not the song. It’s that it came out about sixteen years ago and has been played every day since on Christian radio stations. Home Depot plays it on their Muzak system. Yes, you can hear it while walking in the orange-festooned Aisle of Man. It’s freaking everywhere. It’s like Barack Obama, really. There’s no escape.

So we’ve established that I have been customizing my Needtobreathe Radio playlist on Pandora by skipping or giving the thumbs down to tracks that I abhor. Well, just the other day The Fray popped up on my channel. I always give them the thumbs down because the lead singer sounds hopelessly bored with himself and everyone else, and I just don’t need that; I have a hard enough time getting through my day without listening to some effeminate fool on suicide watch endlessly bitching about how he could have known “how to save a life,” and quite off key as well. All this to say that when he popped up I gave him the thumbs down. Nothing happened. I fingered the button a little more assertively. Nothing. The Fray was in my head, torturing me, and I feared I’d be irretrievably depressed if something was not done quickly. More button clicking and still nothing. I closed out of the app. Ah, silence. Then, foolishly thinking I had won, I re-launched it, and there he flipping was again, agggh; so I pressed the thumbs down button again. Pandora informed me curtly that:

Our music license only allows you to skip a limited number of tracks.

“WHAT?!” I bellowed. The air became blue. Well, purple. Dark words. Okay, not really, but there was darkness in my mind. If Pandora was at that precise moment physically in the room there would have been murders. End of story.

But wait, there’s more! I’ve always wanted to write that; I don’t have a rational reason for it. But there is more. I just want to pose a question to the music industry: Really? You just don’t get it, do you. You’ll suffer another Napster soon (I hope and pray) if you don’t stop FORCING your customers to listen to certain bits of art that you really want exposure for because they make you more money. Imagine if an indie author rolled like this?! I mean, I can set price points and be a greedy and manipulative capitalist, sure, but holy cow; I would never force anyone to consume art so that I can make more money. Anyway, that’s all. Disillusionment is such a violent thing. Actually, if anyone ought to have learned by now, it’s the fans of the music. I guess we want to hear our faves badly enough to sit through all the piss poor opening acts and Captains Comeback and Pay-for-Play Polly Populars the music industry can throw at us. It’s too bad something as potentially cool as Pandora is tainted by the money machine. Thank God publishing is the world's only perfect industry.

The Incorporate Editor

Good editors don't tread on you or your sacred process.

To be incorporate is to be united or mixed, not having a material body. That’s what, lately, I have realized is the best role an editor can have with his client. The idea is of an invisible influence upon the hand of the writer in the sense that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, that editor and writer work as one, to singular purpose.

It’s fascinating to me to be able to continue to learn as life goes on. I have a passion for it, though I never was really a good student in the classroom—too many questions on too many divergent rabbit trails—but a life lived contends against the most forcible teacher known, and one doesn’t go far without learning something.

And sometimes it comes in degrees, like it did for me just the other day. It wasn’t an epiphany, just a realization. Finishing up a rather large editing project, I realized how integral to the process of publishing and writing an editor really is. This isn’t to glorify the editor, either. It’s just to say that certain things that happen in life are archetypal, like the truth that two heads are better than one, that we cannot achieve excellence without sharing our ideas with people who can help us develop them into something beyond us; something transcendent, something that’s only producible by more than one person.

This is why so many writers fail before they start: because they miss that connection with a competent editor. Their work is passable as-is, but it’s not exemplary. And so many writers want the logical end that their hard work can provide (if done well), but they don’t perceive the steps that will take them there, ending up instead on a siding somewhere out of the way of any chance of real success. The author writes the book, but the editor tunes the writing in the same way that the cover artist tunes its marketability and mass appeal.

Look at writing then as a team sport, or as an artist laying down tracks in the studio for a new record. There’s a production team working hard behind every writer with a finished book. Far from being segregate or abstract, the editor is integral to the production process—when things are working correctly—and he performs his job with confidence and boldness, deleting, adding, correcting, making suggestions, asking questions, finding holes in the plot, wondering why characters are doing or not doing certain things, and on and on. And if the editor finds flaws, Dear Writer, rejoice. Even guys like James Patterson can’t do what they do without theirs.

This business of ‘self-editing’ is a bit risky. We’re meant to share our work with people who can make it better alongside us. For a writer to miss his connection with a good editor is a shame. His work won’t ever be what it could be…what it should be. Writers: a good editor is far more important than a publisher. If the effort writers exerted on shopping their manuscripts to publishers was instead used on vetting a competent editor, I personally believe things would be different for lots of us. Unfortunately the world is upside down.

A Man Walks Alone

Jacob wrestled...and lived.

The summer heat is still oppressive, even after ten thirty at night. He can see stars; the night is clear and dark, with no moon. The occasional streetlamp interrupts with yellow smear the open blackness of sky.

But all that is peripheral. His footsteps pad on as silently as his internalized ire against the idea of God—an omniscient, omnipotent God who makes choices because He can. In this the man feels disregarded, discarded, rejected. Far from playing the victim or feeling pitiful, the man is instead indignant.

He walks to clear the air, clear his head, take his case to the God he has been serving now for the better part of these last twenty-one years. It’s hard for him not to feel hoodwinked, as if he bought a load of rubbish all those years ago, and he curses vain faith, empty hope, the life he lives that, though it protests, tastes more like death in the experience. There are those around him who insist the Christian walk is all victory and dancing and joy, a nonstop party. But his own journey has been far different, filled up with pain and suffering, want, questions without answer, bottomless paradox, delayed gratification, destruction and failure.

“What does it mean?” he mumbles under his breath, conscious of the fact that he’s out in public and talking to himself—though the roads are deserted—he’s still preemptively embarrassed about the appearance he makes.

There’s no answer.

He’s been asking this question for a few days now though, because this latest chapter in the book of his life has been particularly difficult for him. He’s prayed about it too, and the answer God provided to his questions was simply to ask him, What could be the purpose of this season in your life?

“Perhaps it means I’m being chastened for something. I’m certainly not blameless.”

Silence.

“Perhaps the purpose of the pain of this season is simply the pain itself.”

Silence.

He walks on, platitudes and clichés circling his head like vultures. “But that’s circular logic, and empty,” he mumbles, the whisper resounding deep and soft within his chest as he turns onto a dark side road. Headlights rake him in a pair of stabbing arcs as a car backs out of a driveway ahead, then drives past him. He’s irritated that his walk for answers is interrupted by things like this; and his hatred for people in general grows within him. The world is stacked against his ambitions, keeping them down, jumping up and down on them, bullying them back into his heart. No man really understands him, and that makes them all enemies.

Silence.

“The pain is the purpose? What utter bullshit.” He’s upset. “No. Don’t tell me that the pain is the purpose of this season. You expect me to believe that? You know what—You know I need something to believe in. Something besides, ‘the pain is the purpose.’ So speak to me. I need something besides empty faith and wandering chaos; I need something real.” Something more real than my pain, he thinks.

Silence.

The man walks, a streetlight punctuating the night above him, interrupting his solitude, blinding him with a chemical yellow spray that invades him, itches his mind.

An eighth of a mile or so, and he approaches an intersection with a signal light and a large public school on the corner. He turns to walk across the empty parking lot as a lone bicyclist passes from one side to another in the darkness.

Do you trust me?

Internally, he’s staggered for a moment. God has spoken. “Do I trust you?” the man walks, considers. “So that’s why we’re out here tonight.”

We’re going to find out if I trust You, he thinks. Given how difficult life has been for me, the things You’ve thrown me into from the very beginning, in Your wisdom and omnipotence and omniscience, I guess I’d like to know if I want to trust You. Maybe that’s the question I should be asking, he thinks. “Why should I trust You?”

Silence.

The man walks on, gaining the smoothness of a wide white sidewalk alongside a main roadway with five lanes, and cars go by randomly, blinding him. A car and truck are lost right then and u-turn right in front of him, sweeping him with their headlights and all he wants to do is hide. “You know,” he says after they pass by, “maybe all the times I prayed for wisdom and understanding, I didn’t really know what it was I was asking for. Maybe from Your perspective it made perfect sense to give me pain when I asked for understanding, for how better to gain that for which I had asked? Maybe when I asked for wisdom it made sense to give me failure, because what better teacher of wisdom could there be?” More steps, more walking. “It’s my ignorance that has betrayed me, isn’t it. But what kind of Father gives such things to a son? I mean, why didn’t You warn me about—”

Two BMX cyclists shoot alongside the man as he walks, their freewheels whizzing predatorially, and he jumps a little as they pass him in the dark. Just as quickly, they’re gone, and he begins to recover a little.

“Do I trust You. I want to answer quickly, out of fear. I don’t want to lose You. Sick as that sounds to me right now, because mostly belonging to You has meant pain and suffering in my life. But I want to be careful with my answer and know that I mean what I say, that it’s not too hasty, because…because I feel like what happens after I make my decision…after I give my answer…will be important. Because I fear you.”

He walks on to the corner, the signal light, touches it like a goal and turns back toward home. The heat is stifling and he feels the prickle of sweat on his body, the occasional tickle of a gnat as it tangles in the hair of his arms, fouling its wings until he swipes it away, smearing it on him unintentionally.

“Do I trust You?”

Silence.

“Do I want to trust You. Do I want to throw in my hand for more punishment? More difficulty? More testing? More lack? More of the same begging for table scraps, settling for a bare life of subsistence in the desert of Your Will for my unlooked-for life? After all, what else have I learned? What kind of son is expected to settle for crumbs, huddling in fear under the Master’s table? It reminds me of my childhood, when I was small…”

Silence.

“Well? What else am I supposed to think? What else am I supposed to learn from constant trial other than that You despise me, that You reject me, that I have not yet paid whatever price You require me to pay? What else am I supposed to do besides walk on alone when I’ve been abandoned to the fangs of the world, the opposition of evil people? My very life started off with You, in Your wisdom and understanding, throwing me to the wolves. You know what I’m talking about; you know how evil that woman is. Where was my choice? Where was my free will? Where was my chance for bettering myself? And where is it now?”

Silence.

“You know what, look at me. Look at me in my life; how I have tried to follow You, how I have looked for You in the wildernesses of my life and prayed to discern Your will for me, for my family. Why would I have done any of the things I’ve done, why would I have walked forward in utter darkness through any of the open doors You’ve placed before me in my life if I didn’t trust You? Why would I be out here, walking in the middle of the night and talking to the Invisible God if I didn’t trust You? I mean, why else would I be here, now, in this hurricane of circumstance, in need of the very God who smites me, if I didn’t trust You?”

Silence.

“Do I trust You? Are you fucking kidding me?”

The man walks home in the darkness. It’s stiflingly hot. And silent.

Gentlemen Broncos

Yep. I said the same thing.

Oh dear. Where to start. Let’s say, hypothetically, that one sets out to make a movie. Let’s say, just for illustrative purposes, that one also decides to make that movie with…a unique purpose. Let’s say that purpose is to turn everything on its head by striving for excellence at being horrid. Bad. Amateur. Distasteful. Ugly. Inane. Pointless. Idiotic. Repellent by virtually every measure known to mankind. If all these hypotheticals were to be true, guess what? You’d be watching a movie far better than Gentlemen Broncos.

You know what, it reminded me of another movie I’ve seen before, that stands out for its utterly revolting effect upon my mind: Borat. I felt the need to cleanse afterward, which is the sort of sentiment one might find oneself articulating after mucking out the stables or inadvertently listening to hip hop.

And oh: I laughed. I did. But the movie wasn’t funny ha-ha. It was more funny what-the-f%#$. I’ll put it like this: a writer can get a reaction from a reader by deftly manipulating unlooked-for plot twists, but he can also get a reaction through sheer shock. Spoiler alert and exempli gratias: The protagonist runs out of a movie theater because he’s upset enough to vomit into a trash can. He’s followed by an antagonistic potential love interest; a seductress-type character who, once the protag has recovered sufficiently to draw breath and turn around to face her with the detritus of his activity all over his face, kisses him passionately, confessing her newfound realization of love to him. I mean yikes. This reminded me of the bedroom scene near the end of Borat.

And that reminds me of why I find myself once again in this kind of stupefaction. I remember now why I watched Borat all the way up to and beyond the aforementioned scene. It’s the same reason I watched Gentlemen Broncos: I kept repeating to myself, “Surely it gets better.” It didn’t. It got worse. It’s what I’m going to call dog-turd-humor from here on out. You get the idea. It’s a few notches below frat-boy-humor, which is exemplified by the Scary Movie franchise.

I was told that Gentlemen Broncos was like Napoleon Dynamite. It was, but only one of these movies was genuinely funny. The other was Gentlemen Broncos.

And though I’ve done my worst to destroy the thing, I have to say this too: there was one thing about the movie I absolutely loved. It’s the way Gentlemen Broncos roasted and mocked the sci fi genre. I’m no great lover of science fiction and I’ve made no secret of that. I look at it the exact same way I look at fantasy. I think, largely, these genres lived and died with their inventors; great masters of the craft of writing and creative thinking. Most of what came after is worthy of roasting with great vigor and extreme prejudice. Anything with wizards and unicorns and strangely named planets with freakish alien civilizations and impossible interstellar spacecraft has a mile-long list of hurdles to overcome on the believability scale, and it’s the brave writer who undertakes the genre, to say the least. I thought Gentlemen Broncos quite fittingly mocked all of it with Battle Stags and Yeast Factories and Old Pudding and Cyclopses and transvestite heroes who eat deer turds in order to fly. Those parts of the movie were uproariously just.

But the rest of it was only fit to be used as something to dip one’s blowgun darts into. Unfortunately you have to watch the movie to get the joke, which I don’t recommend at all. I watched it for its premise. I should have stuck with the trailer; it was far funnier. And now to try to gain back nearly two hours of my life that I have wasted.