The Imminent Fiction

Another review has come in from Writer’s Digest magazine:

“This is a wonderfully imaginative work of science fiction. The story is top notch for its genre. This is the most creative writing [I] have read in a long while.”

In other news, a new blog is currently in the works. “What is that?” you ask. “Where did I put my canker medicine?” No, wait, that’s not what you’re asking … you’re asking, “A new blog? That’s unpossible!” Oh, it’s rather un-unpossible, believe me. Coming soon…

Until today, I had never heard of the California Institute of Integral Studies.

What makes them integral? Well, for some reason, they recently bought ten copies of my book. That sounds pretty integral to me!

If there are any students out there looking for an institute to study integral things in California, I can give no higher recommendation than CIIS.

According to the statistics on their “About CIIS” page, 75% of the student body are female. And we all know how the chicks dig the books with lizard people on the cover!

The online magazine Kirkus Discoveries has posted quite a favorable review of Imminent. I have included an advanced copy for my bragging pleasure in the reviews section. I will also post the link to the review at the Kirkus web site once it’s posted, just so you know I didn’t write it myself.

Very soon, the review will also appear on my amazon.com page. Thanks to the readers who have posted reviews. Keep them coming! They all help.

Today I completed the first draft of the new book. Yay me.

When I started this project in September 2006, I thought it would be a fairly straightforward story, and that I might struggle to flesh it out to 250 pages.

Well.

The first draft tops out at 486 pages. So, not so accurate with that original estimate. Now I begin the process of whittling, and taking into account a 5-10% attrition, that still makes the new book significantly longer than Imminent (and, one hopes, significantly better).

This thing is still very far from seeing any kind of daylight, so as long as you’re waiting, why not pick up a copy of Imminent? If you’ve already read it, you should donate it to your local library. Of course, that means you no longer have your own copy, so you can just buy another one. Actually, buy two, a lot of you who read this live in drought-plagued California and this whole state’s gonna go up like a cinder once the Santa Anas hit this autumn, so you should send one to out of state relatives for safe keeping. (Along with photos of your family, if you think those are important, too.)

Today I discovered that I am on YouTube. Normally, when people find out that they appear in a YouTube video they previously did not know about, angry cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits follow. For me, though, all this revelation brought was a sudden and severe dose of nostalgia.

This is me, summer of 1992, performing as Tigger at Disneyland. I come in at about the 1:30 mark.

Here’s the last act, I come in at 2:30 (”Just say no! No thank you to sweets!”):

I can’t believe I used to jump around like that, in the giant furry Tigger costume, with those legwarmers that were heavier than they looked, in the Southern California summer heat, five times a day … VOLUNTARILY. Yes, I was 21 at the time, but still, how did I not collapse? I think if I tried to do this today, I would die of multiple organ failure.

Those summers in the early 90s were easily the most fun of my life. I was at Disneyland for five years during the tail end of high school through college, the longest I’ve held any job. I’ll never have as much fun while getting paid for it, ever, and I made friends that I keep to this day.

Seeing this brought the memories careening towards me like an asteroid. The sweat, the costume, that awful music, the card games we would play between shows, the slight feeling of superiority we had because we were “show” characters that didn’t have to actually stand amongst the smelly, tail-pulling masses on Main Street. Doing this show, I found, required the very definition of “pacing yourself”. Believe it or not, during rehearsals, that aerobics routine was even longer, about twice as long as it appears in the final show. At least I got to run off stage and pull my head off for a few minutes to suck in a few ragged, steaming breaths after it was over, poor Goofy had to stay out there the entire time.

The show itself, really, is pretty horrible, isn’t it? I can’t believe people would sit there in the heat and watch the whole thing. It was shaded, though, so that was a plus. And the set was … to put it kindly … colorful. And the music was … over quickly. Of course, to us, it didn’t matter how awful the show was, all that mattered was that we were performing, getting a paycheck to do it, and not having to stand at a photo location in the sun sweating our balls off in Eeyore.

I’ve said it many times, my years at Disney were an amazing and profoundly formative period of my life. I was becoming an adult at the same time I was earning a living at a place that promoted eternal childhood. At the time I left Disneyland, in December of 1993, it was already becoming a much different place. The character department, which was a chaotic but tight fraternity when I started there, was transforming into a consortium with a far more regimented structure, with a far less free and creative atmosphere. I sometimes wonder if I should have stayed longer than I did, as the end of my Disney career meant the beginning of one boring, sloggy job after another, but that’s a question that will have to exist in an alternate universe. (You do have to say this
about the crappy, dull jobs: they pay a hell of a lot more. At the time of these videos, I was probably making about 7-8 bucks an hour.)

Those adventures provided a tremendous resource of memories, both divine and frustrating, that I will always possess. Fortunately, new adventures await, and those hopefully won’t involve so much sweat, children screaming in foreign languages, and stinky fur costumes that are washed far less than they should be.

*

I also have a slightly interesting side story that relates to this show. The rehearsals were held at a dance studio in Anaheim in late April of 1992. At the time, I was finishing up my junior year of college at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles. I would go to class in the morning, then drive to Orange County to make it to rehearsal in the afternoon.

On Wednesday, April 29, 1992, the Rodney King verdict was released, and Los Angeles went pear-shaped. LMU is located in the west outer reaches of the city, so that area was not affected by the riots, except that the freeways going in any direction were wall-to-wall cars with very nervous drivers. On Thursday afternoon, I tried to hit the road back to Orange County to, putting it mildly, get the holy fuck out of there, but it took me a full 2 hours to go one freeway exit, from Manchester Blvd to El Segundo. The gas tank needle was quivering just below “E”, and I knew making it to the next exit was likely out of the question, let alone all the way back to the O.C. Of course, not a single gas station anywhere was selling gas, given the fact that many of the residents of Los Angeles had chosen to express their displeasure at the previous day’s legal proceedings by burning the city to angry cinders.

Needless to say, I missed rehearsal that afternoon. Fortunately, a friend who lived in a not-on-fire neighborhood allowed me to spend the night on the couch, and we watched the city burn on television while we sat with the lights out and the blinds closed.

Next morning, I was blessed to find an open gas station and high-tailed it back behind the Orange Curtain. Los Angeles continued to disintegrate into a seething cauldron of racial hatred, while I was able to resume rehearsing for my show as a tiger slash aerobics instructor.

The release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is less than a month away, and the internets are aswarm with folks supposedly “revealing” the ending. I’m trying to avoid all press associated with the book, mostly because I want to find out what happens when I read the book for myself.

I do have a guess as to what happens, though. Since I’ve been meticulously avoiding all press, I don’t think this counts as an official spoiler, as it’s only my conjecture.

Here’s what happens: The Deathly Hallows turns out to be a local, comfort-food type diner. Harry Potter walks in alone, and one by one, is joined by Hermoine, Ron Weasly, Hagrid, and Dumbledore (who is not dead). They eat onion rings and listen to Journey, until the bell on the diner door chimes, Harry looks up, half expecting to see one of Voldemort’s Death Eaters walk in armed with an Avada Kedavra spell. But the last page is printed all in black.

We’ll see if I’m right on July 21st. (Well, you’ll have to wait, anyway, because I already know I’m right.)

In my continual efforts to avoid having to chain my ankle to a partition in a cube farm, I’ve completed the process of becoming a notary public. As of today, I am officially a commissioned notary public of the state of California. Secretary of State Debra Bowen says so if you totally don’t believe me.

The next order of business is to find some notary work. I have a few contacts, so hopefully I’ll be able to get something going soon.

I’ve made the professional decision not to try and push my book on people when I do signings, unless of course, they specifically mention how much they like speculative fiction about lizard people. At that point, really, what other choice do I have?

On a separate note, I wonder if the blog entry titles I choose are too obscure. The quote I used for this entry is the first line of the song “Who Are You,” which I thought was appropriate for the topic of becoming a notary, whose job is to make sure people are who they say they are. Too ambiguous? Not ambiguous enough? Not very amusing? The last question is most likely to be true.

I suppose apologizing for not updating a blog that nobody reads is like wiping your feet before entering an abandoned building.

Of course, it’s a chicken-or-egg situation. If I was more active here, I would get more folks reading.

Bear in mind, I haven’t been spending my time alone in the bathroom with my Tim the Enchanter Hat on trying to calculate the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. (Well, not all my time.) I have been abusing my keyboard. I’ve been writing. It’s just stuff you can’t see yet.

In the past month I’ve been concentrating on finishing the first draft of my next novel. When I first imagined the story a couple years ago, I thought it would be rather straightforward, and that I might struggle to fill out 250 pages. Ahem. Today I’m over 450 pages, and there is still a significant road to travel before wrapping it all up. As my friend Dennis points out, “That’s what good editors are for.”

I’ve also been busy sending out stories and articles to various publications, and since I don’t have an assistant, I have to open all the rejection letters myself, which eats up a healthy portion of my day. I mean, I’d like to spend more time here on the blog, but Writer’s Market has over 6,000 listings for agents, magazines, and book publishers, and if I’m going to be rejected by all of them, I really have to spend a lot of time keeping on top of it.

So … how about that Paris Hilton?*

(*Note: the reason for this reference to Paris Hilton is so that people doing Google searches on Paris Hilton might end up here. Rather a clever reason for mentioning Paris Hilton, don’t you think? Paris Hilton.)

I’ve added a new page that will collect highlighted reviews for Imminent as they are published. Click here or on the “Reviews” tab up above. The first review I’ve posted is a rather humbling rave from ReaderViews.com. Thanks Deb!

Paulie Walnuts is a rat.

The feeling washed over me this morning, as I was considering the first three episodes of the new season of The Sopranos. I think Paulie has flipped. At some point in the show’s timeline between the end of the last season and the beginning of this one, Paulie became an FBI informant.

This is not an official spoiler, because I don’t know for sure. It’s just a hunch I have based on many clues sprinkled throughout the first three episodes, especially last week’s, “Remember When”. A total guess. But I might be right. And if I am … marron.

I think the most obvious clue is the dream Paulie has after returning from his trip to Miami. He is shown walking into his lonely, sad apartment, and hearing someone cooking in his kitchen. He goes to investigate, and it’s none other than Big Pussy Bonpensiero, whom Paulie helped whack in Season Two when it was discovered that Pussy was ratting out to the Feds to keep himself out of prison for heroin distribution.

Now, let’s back up. The entire episode is shown from Tony’s point of view, as he gets increasingly irritated with Paulie’s big mouth. Tony even confesses to his old friend Beansie that even though he’s known Paulie his whole life and looked up to him like an uncle, when the shit hits the fan, he doesn’t trust that Paulie will be able to keep his fat yap shut. There is a queasy scene when Tony insists on taking Paulie fishing, which was the same pretense that Tony and Paulie themselves used to lure the rat Big Pussy out to sea for a whacking. The parallel is not lost on Paulie, who grim demeanor on the entire trip is a clear indication that it’s far more likely that his shot or stabbed corpse will be dumped over the side than he’ll make it back to shore in one piece.

Back to the dream. The obvious trigger for Paulie’s subconscious to dredge up the memory of Big Pussy was the boat trip. But what if there was a deeper reason? What if Paulie himself had turned rat? Wouldn’t that further explain his extreme discomfort on that boat trip with Tony, especially if he guessed that Tony found out about his flipping?

Last season, Paulie told Tony that he had prostate cancer. In episode two of the new season, when John Sacrimoni finally succumbs to the consequences of his four-pack-a-day habit and dies, Paulie reveals that he himself had “beat cancer”. Perhaps, in the intervening time, when Paulie had convinced himself he was going to die, he decided he was going to “do good” with his remaining time, and allowed himself to become an FBI informant? He was going to get whacked one way or another, by one of his own “friends” or by the cancer, so what difference did it make? He has no wife, no children, he is estranged from his “mother” (that’s a whole different box on cannolis there), and he’s got a big mouth and wants to be everybody’s best buddy.

But now that his cancer is in remission, Paulie is in an untenable position. Perhaps he’s feeling like a traitor, thus the dream about the rat Big Pussy.

All this is guesswork. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out. If I’m right, you can be sure I’ll return here to act all smug. If I’m wrong, well … it’s easy to delete blog posts.

Either way, man, I’m going to miss this show.