Master of Time
A great novel is like the best acid trip in the history of the world. It lifts you out of your reality and places you in another one, with a new identity, a new environment, new perspectives. It wakes you up to possibilities you hadn’t considered and drops you in the middle of experiences you’ve never had. I just got back from a trip I was taken on by an old friend (not really, we’ve never met, but it feels that way sometimes after almost four decades as a Faithful Reader) —by the name of Stephen King. Long known primarily...
Read MoreMaking Movies
Maybe it’s the pace of life. Maybe it’s the overwhelming volume of choices we face every single day. Maybe it’s the near-death experience that our nation’s middle class has been going through over the past decade. Whatever the roots of the situation, it seems that when it comes to our stories—books, movies and the like—America is going through a period of desperate cravings for cultural comfort foods. Book (and comic-book) adaptations, sequels, reboots and remakes dominate the screens at the nation’s multiplexes, with original stories an almost-forgotten relic of an earlier, more imaginative time. All of which is prelude to...
Read MoreConnection
Last Friday morning, I tweeted “Headed to the Ronnie Montrose tribute show in SF tonight. The memories will be swirling around all night long (Hagar pun intended).” They were, as one world-class player after another hit the stage to play the music of my youth, the music made famous by a man who late in his 40-year career became my friend. There were so many remarkable moments crammed into one evening that I’m hard-pressed to keep this post to a reasonable length. But I’m not here to deliver a concert review (capsule version: an awe-inspiring display of both love and...
Read MoreVoyager*
One of the strange things about writing fiction is, you can accomplish a lot without actually writing anything. In my “spare time,” I wrote 3000 words this week, without ever opening the file for the novel I'm currently working on, and yet I’m quite sure I made good progress on it. The first piece was a sad one, a remembrance of a friend who died last Saturday, guitarist Ronnie Montrose. For 14 years we were casual friends—the sort you catch up with three times a year, but every time is memorable—and it would not be an exaggeration to say that...
Read MoreCome Talk To Me
Two quick things this February morning: -- First, Wampus just published a nice Q&A with yours truly, exploring some of the ins, outs, and miscellaneous travails of the working writer. It was fun to dig into the meat of the creative process instead of the more prosaic questions that interviewers sometimes ask (“Where do you get your ideas?”). And yes, Believe In Me fans, work on the next book is underway. -- Second, in the tragedy surrounding the loss of one of the most memorable musical voices of her generation, Whitney Houston, I couldn’t help noting the emerging details: she...
Read MoreBorn to Run?
So, the other day when I sat down to write a blog post, all that came out was a rant about the SOPA debate*. That’s really not what this forum is for, so—let’s try again, shall we? The other thing that’s been taking up mental space for me just lately is imagining (hoping, dreaming) what the new Bruce Springsteen album due March 6 might be like. There’s been a taste already in the form of the single “We Take Care Of Our Own,” and it seems promising. I’ve been a Bruce fan for decades now, and while he’s taken his...
Read MoreDown by the Schoolyard
So, spending half an hour the other day wallowing in the latest Interweb meme—Tuesday’s catastrophic PR meltdown by a one-man firm called Ocean Marketing, begun on Penny Arcade, mainstreamed by MSNBC, and covered in depth by International Business Times and The Escapist—got me thinking about (a) why this happened and (b) why this is exactly the sort of thing that the Internet ecosystem tends to flock to in droves. It comes down to this: nobody likes a bully—especially anyone who was ever bullied. Whatever else you want to say about the whole scenario—and my bet is case studies will one...
Read MoreMore Than Simple Cash Can Buy
Pete Frame got me thinking last week. Not that I would expect everyone to find inspiration in the work of a guy who charts out impossibly complex and detailed family trees of rock bands both famous and obscure—but for a liner-notes fanatic like me, his work is thoroughly absorbing and brilliant in a borderline savant sort of way. What Frame reminded me of is that, for all its thematic trappings of rock and roll and political activism, at its core, Believe in Me is about family—both the one we’re born into, and the one we create. It seems to me...
Read MoreDrive
Where do stories come from? That, it seems to me, is the question behind the oldest question in the history of fiction: where do you get your ideas? The emphatic eye-roll the latter question generally receives from authors is because it’s impossible to answer. You might as well ask why the wind blows. (If you’re really interested in a lecture on either barometric pressure or neuron/synapse function, Wikipedia awaits.) No, the real question is the first one above, and the answer is, stories come from everywhere. Consider this: I’ve never done press work for a political candidate, or met a...
Read MoreDon’t Give Up
I wrote my first real story when I was 16. After seven months of junior-year high school literature study, the assignment from my English teacher – Mark James, a wise-cracking Englishman who was also a fine actor -- was a short story of five to 10 pages. I wrote 31. The story exploded onto the page over the course of several days in a feverish blur, filling every line and many margins of sheet after sheet of college-ruled binder paper. What came out was virtual Stephen King fan fiction; I brazenly borrowed plot elements from his classic 1975 vampire novel...
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