wish you were here

…but I was asked by the very nice all-around bloke Jorge from Las Vegas Poets.org website to start hosting slams. I said that if I only host and do some light promoing, I could do it.

Our first slam is on September 9th. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to send a team, or if we’ll have all our paperwork in order, but at least it’s something to try and get a semblance of a scene going. Even if we have a solid season this year, we’ll be set up for 2010.

So I’m back in the game. Kinda.

And we’ll need features, local and out of town. Please.

Later, Chef.

Jesus, and Bernie Mac, too?

I need to stop going to the lake. And I accidentally erased all my pictures from this weekend. But it was awesome nonetheless.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence music has had on my life and my writing.  Every story I’ve written has had some kind of soundtrack or playlist associated with it.  I’m one of those people who writes with music playing in headphones or on the stereo, and music textures always inform my writing.

And lately, I’ve been going back, way back, to when I first started seriously writing when I was about 14. I grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop and whatever was on the radio, so I still have an affinity for New Jack Swing as well as New Wave. But by the time I’d hit 13-14, Queen was making a comeback on the charts, and I was all over it.

I’m not sure what it is about “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that shit was like a gateway drug into an obsession that was really not healthy in high school. But it was like a healthy gateway drug? Maybe?  Is it a good thing to be obsessed with an awesome band?

I’d bought every tape I could. (This was before I’d started buying CDs when I was about 16, then all those tapes eventually got replaced.) Anytime a Queen video or special was on TV, I taped it on my junky VCR. I bought books, posters, shirts. Whatever I could get my hands on, eventually.

Queen made me want to write poetry.

It all started with a song called “Is This The World We Created.” I guess for some reason, when I heard the lyrics, it made me want to write a poem about how we’re fucking up the earth. (Yeah, I was all environmental and shit in ‘92. Okay, not really.) I really thought I was writing some deep verse. And no, I’m not going to post it.

But it was this song that really made me think about lyrics, and poetry, and it made me want to write. I’d just started playing violin, and hearing Queen’s lyrics made me want to write songs, and be in a band, and be a rockstar writer.

I still want to be a rockstar writer, but I’m a little more practical about it these days.

I don’t listen to this song as much anymore, probably because it feels hokey after that first listen 16 years later, but whenever I happen to hear this song either on random or I happen to catch a Queen concert somewhere out there in cableland, it reminds me of that summer night in my bedroom, listening to my tape with the headphones on, rewinding the tape every time the song was over and just playing this song again and again.

Goodnight, Mr. Pausch.

The Vegas Valley Book Festival is going to kick ass this year.

Opening keynote, Thursday, Nov 6: Neil Gaiman, award winning author and New York Times bestseller, graphic novelist, screen writer, science fiction/ fantasy novelist and one of the top comics authors for more than two decades, who has gone from cult favorite to the edge of mainstream celebrity.

Closing keynote, Saturday, Nov 8: Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, acclaimed as one of the most celebrated authors in modern fiction, whose works include The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Finally.

This is George. He showed up at the shop yesterday. He scared the crap out of me, then I named him. We’d kept him yesterday with some crackers in a box, and everyone who happened to see him (as well as a couple of us in the shop) said, “That’s the biggest beetle I’ve ever seen in Vegas. Ever.” At 2 and a half inches long, he became our mascot for a day.

Today, we let him out into the grass so he can continue on his little beetle adventure. Bye, George.

You know where the name comes from.

Again. But I changed my air filters, which I’m pretty sure was the problem.

But I was thinking about a couple of music posts, but connecting them with my writing. Hopefully if my brain gets herself together this week I may do a Sunday appearance.

The new job is fun. And busy. Seriously. I can barely check email at work.

I think I may have accidentally erased some comments on the Wordpress blog. Sometimes my comment list fills up with spam, and things get lost in the ether, unfortunately.

I started on a new story last night, and looking back at my old project list, it’s been cooking for awhile, apparently. I just needed a title to kick it going. And the novel’s not forgotten, just being nibbled at.

Actually, seeing Kater and Jocelyn this weekend gave me a nice little kick in the writer-pants.

Also, my dumb ass watched Live Free Or Die Hard just because it was on. If that movie had a drinking game, you’d be done in the first 20 minutes. Things Get Worse.

Yeah, to bed. If I can actually get to sleep quickly. My chest has been feeling heavy all day with congestion.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long-ass time, but I’ve been either lazy or busy or both. (Usually both.) But now all of us Clarion ‘07 alumni are getting our nostalgia on, and now that I’m working on a few things, I wanted to write about personality in writing stories.

Ever since last year, I’ve been thinking about one of our sessions where I was getting a story critiqued, and the story that I’d workshopped was set in an urban fantasy setting that could be silly and kitchy, but I went a little more seriously with this particular piece. And I can remember there was a theme of disappointment from the other folks because in real life I come across as an entertaining person, kinda funny, and yet I’d turned in this story that was totally not reflective of my personality.

Now, let me mention that looking back on the story, and after having revised it, I kinda agreed with that assessment, but I still struggle a little with the idea that just because a writer has a certain personality in person, we expect that personality to be ever-present in their writing.

I’ve experienced this with a lot of performance poets, obviously. There are the really serious, beautiful poets who are just jokey off the mic, and the really funny folks who are just beautiful and serious because they’re not “on” when they’re onstage. Me? I’m a little of the gray area– I have funny poems and sad poems and a few that incorporate both.

But I guess for me, being funny is just how I gauge people, how I try to figure out where I am in a group of folks. I try to make other people laugh because I don’t like to dwell on the bad things when I’m around other people. So when I’m writing stories, I’m trying to work out the really serious crap so that I don’t have to be the brooding writer that seems so easy to stereotype.

And, honestly, I think that being funny on paper– I mean, humor flowing easily on the page– is more difficult that confronting your shadow self on that same page. I believe that everyone can be funny in some way or another, but trying to make that work in a story is a tricky skill. I don’t know.

And, well, maybe I just don’t feel like writing funny stories. So there!

Goodnight, George Carlin.