SEARCHING FOR ICONS

This is a blog post simply because it's too many words for twitter. I've bludgeoned a fair amount of social media types with blurbs, updates and annoying reminders of a book I wrote entitled Coma Dog. This basically falls in line with the same self-pimping barrage except it's not a request to buy, read or review the book. I'm actually just looking to shift a few little icons onto my Amazon page. Footprints in the sand. Say what?

Hello Darkness, excerpt two

He is in his room, it's neat and organized. He loads cell pics into his laptop and one-by-one, alters each, taking out the vibrant hues until they are nearly colorless. He prints his favorite ones, small perfectly cropped images, adding them to a collage on the wall above his desk. A neatly arranged capsule of how he sees his world every day, reduced to an opacity that reflects his self-image.

Time passes. He is on the internet, researching caterpillars and their proper care. The search logically leads to chrysalis – the metamorphosis from cocoon to butterfly. He doesn't want to be interested in this part of it, he only wants to know how to feed and care for his fuzzy black friend. Yet, he returns to the images over and again. The caterpillar is still in its jar. It will need a better home. He looks at it.

“You need a name. I'm gonna call you Darkness. Because you're so black.”

A soft ping comes from his laptop. It's his messenger.

She stayed in her room. She got her first tattoo. And then she got another, She kept them hidden because she didn't want to fit in with other girls who were shunned and alienated. She put earbuds in and listened to music that didn't sound like music. She began to like the sound of objects hitting other objects and strange electrical buzzings. She took a lot of her mother's pills and went to the hospital. She managed to graduate from high school. She didn't go to any after parties.

Hello Darkness, excerpt one

The smell of cut grass washes over cracked sidewalks. Nobody pays attention as he passes by, ever. Or they might have once. Sometimes they still did. Sometimes they fooled you. He had grown up ordinary with ordinary looks. Normal mousy hair and normal brown eyes. He can't even be called a nerd, he doesn't fit in with loners - he is that ordinary. Sometimes he likes words and sometimes he doesn't like words. Sometimes words are tricks. He never changes them though, every word on every class paper, every fleeting thought. They are ordinary and at some point a long time ago he decided that he too would be ordinary.

When Nathaniel was younger he had friends, the result of being a nonthreatening spoke in various wheels. In time, his friends found things that defined them, that in turn defined other hubs. They moved in orbits and sub-orbits. He slipped away. Sometimes he listens to insects, the relentless buzzing of cicadas. The sidewalk smells like warm earth and wet grass. It is uneven and and houses pass as he walks by. It smells like an ordinary day. He is walking down the street to the community college. Sometimes he likes being inside his car but sometimes he doesn't. He has a backpack. He has entered the words he needs to enter for his classes. He hasn't changed them. His cellphone predicts torrential rain, that's okay. He lives in Iowa.

1994 Olds Cutlass Ciera. V6, chilly air, 189K miles, runs sweet, torn headliner, burns some oil, needs brakes & tires. Awesome pioneer cassette/AM/FM. This could be yours for $1400.

An instructor is droning on. Nat doesn't really know what the instructor is saying but he will memorize words and apply them to tests and required course work. He is not sure what he wants to do. His parents once told him that things would get better. If he were to ever write a story it would be about an ordinary, unnoticeable life. There wouldn't be any vampires or hot chicks, there wouldn't be any crime. There wouldn't be any trees or colors. There wouldn't be any monsters. He thought about it. There might be trees but definitely not colors. Unless there was some color after most of the color was taken out.

He is walking home, he still lives with his parents. The day has turned cloudy and slatey cold, raindrops begin to fall. He might have to drive tomorrow. He skirts a community park, edges further onto the carpet of wet grass. He uses his phone to take pictures of trees, a park bench, a colorful mural. Other images were captured earlier while he was walking to school. It was sunnier then and the colors were brighter, they were deeply saturated. They won't be bright for long. He sees something on the ground, a fuzzy black caterpillar. He bends down to get closer, takes a picture. He picks the thing up. It curls into a ball in the palm of his hand. He read once that some caterpillars are poisonous. He doesn't think this one is.

UNIVERSAL STAR

I woke up the other morning, had a cup of coffee and clicked on Kindleboards where a fun and disparate clan of self-pub writers swap stories and advice. I was feeling good about receiving my fifth favorable book review on Amazon. It's not a lot of reviews but it's still nice to receive a modicum of appreciation. I penned a happy post, receiving a few kind expressions of support in return. Shortly thereafter I checked my Amazon page and saw that my book had received yet another review. This was fantastic! Until I noticed that it was the bottom of the barrel one-star rating, guaranteed to send a happy morning straight into the toilet. Unless, there is a helpful lesson to be learned.

The person who bestowed this tasty treat (labeled “All over the place”) goes by Michael C. He's written literally hundreds of reader reviews for Amazon so I figured he must be a pretty dedicated fan of literature. I dove in with great interest – if he gave it the worst rating possible under the Amazon system then it would probably include some first-rate critical analysis. This would no doubt make me a better writer and isn't that what constructive criticism is all about? Curiously however, Michael hadn't actually read much of the book – he based his analysis on the free excerpt at the beginning. It was in his words, “too tiresome to bother.” I can understand where he's coming from. Sometimes I find things tiresome too. Sometimes, the tiresome nature of things sends me straight to a late morning nap.

THE WAY WE WERE

It's the Fourth of July, Independence Day, which we usually celebrate by exploding things in the sky. When I was a kid we'd go down to Wellfleet, Cape Cod where my grandparents had a summer home. Friends and neighbors would congregate in the backyard which was the best-bar-none spot to watch fireworks set off from Cannon Hill, right across a narrow inlet of water. Dads would drink Ballantine Ale and moms would help their kids roast marshmallows and we'd all watch the fireworks and it was pretty spectacular. The next morning my older brother Alec and I would trek across the rickety Uncle Tim's Bridge and collect unexploded ordinance. The gunpowder inside was rich and black and very good for personal projects.

TALKING DOG FICTION

About eight years ago, I made the first in an unceasing series of disastrous decisions. I had recently come to the end of a ten-year stint as a literary agent in Los Angeles, repping writers in film and television. I was burned out, the industry was rapidly shifting and I didn't pursue a new job with same ambition I might once have. I had been a reader of books all my life and decided that it would be a tremendously good decision to write one.

I started with a new laptop and no actual idea of what to write – this being a sound plan for an out of work literary agent who had spent years advising desperate writers who overspent after scoring their first big deal in a town that feeds on writers who score their first big deal. Electronic books were in their infancy at the time. Imagine if I had possessed a modicum of foresight, I could have crafted a mother-lode of vampire assassin stories and be set for life by now.

NOT SEARCHING FOR SLAVA

This is my new site because I apparently don't have anything else to do with my precious scraps of time. And because other writer-types that I interact with on various forums seem to think having a separate and unique site solely for “book promotion” is a good and necessary thing. And that it is ridiculous to continue double-purposing my  Searching for Slava blog. Said enterprise having been started as a basketball thing that eventually imploded into stories that posed broadcasting icon Craig Sager in bucolic Saskatchewan settings with woodland creatures and Leonard Cohen music. Anyways.

There's a lot of green in the background and banner and I'll probably have to do spend time obsessing about that. And I'll have to go through all the hassle of figuring out gadgets and widgets again and at some point I'll have to write about writing. When I did a spell check on "Saskatchewan", Scottish vivisectionist came up for some reason. There are many things about the interweb that I just don't know.