Edged in Blue

My traveling this year is completely nil.  Gas prices haven’t helped, but haven’t exactly been a deterrent, either.  No, life changes have overwhelmed me to the point where the slush fund is gone.  I now have two house payments for the foreseeable future and a new car to deal with following the death of the Wintermobile.

It’s too bad, because I really wanted to go to Bouchercon this year.  With Ruth Jordan and Judy Bobalink in charge, it’s going to feel like it’s our con.  (Well, it always does, but this is the first year I know the organizers on a first-name basis.  And the Jordan clan throws great bashes at all this writerly stuff anyway.)

But most of all, I’m going to miss the mingling.  I spent almost all of the 2006 con in Madison in the bar.  Not drinking, though I did plenty of that.  I sat in there and did more networking and commiserating than I had in Toronto and Chicago.

And let’s be honest.  I love Baltimore.  But this year, my only conference was Love Is Murder in Chicago, and it was on the company dime.  I had to work for BigHugeCo at its Wacker Drive office that weekend, and shot up to O’Hare Saturday evening to hang out.  (Hi, Michelle Gagnon.  Remember me?  Remember that drink Jason Starr thought was a beer?)

But there’s something deeper going on here.  Conferences are where I meet my fellow writers in the flesh.  You can only convey so much in email and on MySpace and Facebook or whatever annoying social networking site is hip this week.  You can look that person in the eye over the rim of your beer glass, kvetch with each other with a mouthful of onion rings, or just chill in the hotel lounge.  Plus, I landed my first agent from an in-person meeting with one of her clients.  Who says nothing gets done at these conferences or at book signings.

Yet real life has intruded.  My book budget is pretty much gone while we sell Nita’s old place, and I have no writing/web design/standup comedy income coming in that will pay for traveling.  Yes, I’ve got to face reality.  I can’t traipse across the country like I did for a few years.  Does that mean I’m finished?

Hardly.  We live in the Internet age.  There are some who decry the intrusion of technology, complaining that email is impersonal and no one wants to meet in person anymore.  Ever notice those are usually the same people you probably would have ignored in back in the covered wagon days of the 1980’s and earlier?  The fact is the Internet has let me get more done and talk with more people than I could have when we were dependent on The Phone Company (TM) and the US Postal Service.  Some people complain that you can be deceived by someone on the Internet, and it’s true.  I’ll go as far as to say I was defrauded mostly on the Internet a couple of years back.  But you know what?  That’s always been around.  It just happens faster and electronically now.  Same with bad men stalking your kids and con men trying to trick you out of your money.  What’s changed besides the speed and gimmicks they use?  If anything, they’re just as prevalent as when we had only Ma Bell and the mail man.  Or were you not paying attention when your mommy told you not to talk to strangers?

I digress.  I communicate with my current agent via the Internet.  My gig at January came about because of the Internet.  I pay my bills on the Internet.  It’s here.  I use it.  And to stay connected as a writer, I have to keep using it.

Do I feel disconnected?

A lady I’ll refer to as my Big Sister got me through the early stages of my first marriage ending with frequent emails.  A pal in Seattle reminded me by instant message that I had proposed a debt management book (Who better to tell you how to get you out of horrendous debt than someone who narrowly avoid bankruptcy?).  Li’l Sis and I communicate almost exclusively by Internet, an extension of a relationship that started as a letter exchange and frequent long-distance calls.

John Scalzi uses the Internet extensively to promote and interact with his fans.  Lynn Viehl uses it pretty much exclusively.  And the Net fits prominently in MJ Rose’s bag of tricks, as well as JA Konrath’s.

The point is I don’t have to spend vast sums traveling when they’re not to be had for the time being.  I can stay put and interact.

But I do miss the road.

Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel by Joe Hill

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Joe Hill definitely is a chip off the old block in Bangor, Maine, but one thing he has over father Stephen King: He gets to the point much faster.

In Heart Shaped Box, Hill tells the story of an Alice Cooperish rock star gone to seed who’s duped into buying a ghost. In the worst way, Jude Coyne’s love-’em-and-leave-’em ways have literally come back to haunt him and anyone who helps him. Frightened, but undeterred, his Goth girlfriend Georgia sticks out the ordeal, nearly meeting her end several times. Over the course of the book, Georgia comes to identify, and eventually bond with, Coyne’s dead ex-girlfriend Anna. The ghost is angry for what Jude Coyne did to Anna. It may surprise you, though, that the late Anna is not.

Hill has clearly grown up on movies. His prose describes supernatural events in ways that suggest well-known movie and music video special effects. It’s a cinematic book, but not all that distracting.

Overall, great job and hard to believe this is a first novel.

View all my reviews.

Yesterday, the drones from TimeWarner arrived en masse” to hook us up with four DVR’s.  This makes AJ very happy as he now gets to watch soft porn** on Cinemax Friday nights while Nita’s watching Family Guy on Fox and I’m listening to The Awful Show live.

As I mentioned yesterday, I did the preliminary work.  I strung cable into AJ’s room after learning my former office did not have a cable hookup.  I also learned that my house had 3 cable outlets but only one hookup.  The techs spent a lot of time in the basement.

And now?  I can Tivo the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica on four different televisions whenever they finally air.  I can watch HBO On-Demand again.  I can fall asleep to either Family Guy and reruns of Seinfeld or Real Sex or even, if Nita and I are feeling masochistic, Flavor of Love.  (Ugh!)  Life is now sweet.

Now comes the tricky part.  I went to cancel DirecTV.  DirecTV said fine.  That’ll be $350.*****

I don’t have $350.  In fact, I don’t remember them mentioning that when I signed up.  So here’s our little secret.

You know and I know and Diane knows I’m still friends with my ex.  DIrecTV doesn’t know that.  For all they know, Diane up and left me for some dude in Australia*** and left me with the house and all these bills and a huge ass settlement I’ll never be able to pay her back.  Right?  Right?

Since they’ll never match this blog with my account, it’s all good.  Right?

Anyone else have any creative ways of getting out of early termination fees? 

*Assumes “two” constitutes “en masse“.
**Don’t get your knickers in a twist.  It’s a joke.  AJ plays too much World of Warcraft to be interested in Skinemax.  Now, when he starts college…
***Kinda true.  Her first post-me boyfriend lives in Australia.  She brought me back some good beer.****
****Not Foster’s.  Foster’s is Australian for “watery, cheap beer.”
*****Despite this, I still recommend DirecTV.  Just make sure to ask about the early termination fees.

Amazon sent me some happy news yesterday.  The mad Dr. Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Neil Smith’s Yellow Medicine, and Reed Farrell Coleman’s Empty Ever After are all on their way.

And sitting on deck after I read those is Tom Nolan’s biography of Ross MacDonald.

Whoo hoo!  July will be Tom Waits, cold beer, and hot noir!

My wife and kid are going to go sooooooo sick of hearing Waits blaring from my office as I tear into these.  Maybe I’ll toss in Johnny Cash for Nita.

Sometimes crime pays, though not in financial windfall.  Over the Fourth of July weekend, a would-be car thief attempted to steal a van and discovered a bomb inside.  The thief moved the van to a less crowded area, then called a cop he knew from previous run-ins.  Police opted not to file charges as the thief likely saved lives.

So how was your Fourth? (Or First for those of you a few hours north of me?) My weekend was…

Strenuous.

Nita, AJ, and I took over my condo this past weekend. I know I said it last time I moved in here, but I’m not moving again for five years, and next time I use movers.

Not only did we move furniture and boxes fifteen miles from Deer Park to Eastgate, but yours truly learned a few things about himself, mainly that I’m a lot handier than I thought. For example…

• The previous owners never showed the former Mrs. Winter or I where the furnance filter was.  Did you know if you leave a 30-day filter on your furnance for about 14 months, your air conditioner will quit unexpectedly on the hottest day of the year?  Nita figured it out.  We now use 90-day filters with a schedule to change them every 2 months.  (Just because they’re 90-day filters doesn’t mean you need to keep them 90 days.)
• It is possible to rip up the carpet to lay the coax cable you thought already ran through the walls and put it back with little or no evidence you did anything.  I’d have made the cable guy do it this afternoon, but after DirecTV strung a fat cable through my kitchen because “drilling through the foundation is hard!“, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
• And speaking of carpet, I finally found that cat smell the steamer wouldn’t get rid of.  All it took was a lot of sniffing, a strong stomach, and a utility knife.  Unfortunately, I now need a couple of throw rugs to replace that section.  At least now, though, the family can use the family room.

So now we’re moved in and cleaned up.  However, we also now have two house payments.  Guess what we’ll be doing the rest of the summer?

Thank God Nita works for a real estate company.

This week marks Happy UK Spin-Off Week, with Canada Day and Independence Day on Tuesday and Friday respectively.  The former celebrates the day when Britain realized it was easier to let North America run itself than to do it from London; the latter recalls a time not too dissimilar from today, when an overtaxed people, deprived of their rights, told an idiot named George to go screw himself.  (Britain itself followed suit during the Madison Administration, replacing George III with Hugh Laurie.)  Also, this is the week I have to clean out the condo so my cat-allergic wife can move in.

Bottom line.  No one’s reading right now, and I’m too busy to write.  So the blog is shuttered until Monday, when I have more time, energy, and…  hopefully, readers.

See you next week.

Until then, here’s a gratuitous photo of my wife in her wedding dress…

Yesterday was a major cleaning day at Rancho Winter.  The former Mrs. Winter had vacated the previous day.  It was my turn to come in and purge the place of kitty dander and kitty fur and kitty spit.  (Still working on it.)

Late last night, I decided to finish off the day by cleaning the kitchen.  The stove was filthy, but I was out of paper towels.  What to do?  What to do?

Oh, wait.  I left my #85 jersey here when I moved in with Nita.

Now Chad Johnson has found his purpose in life:  Cleaning crap off my stove.

He’s also found his place in life:

My garbage can.

Have a happy season on the bench, Ocho Stinko.

Ain’t that the truth, brudda.  Recently, after a comedy showcase (One of those gigs where you have to be invited), a comic from Dayton told me it took him five years to come up with a solid ten minutes.  Of course, a lot of this is probably due to writing.  If you don’t have time to do it very often, it’s going to take longer for that 90/10 rule to sift out the crap.  It’s taken almost a year to get a solid five minutes, and part of it comes from my original set.

Dying?  You just drop dead.  Step off a building.  Step in front of a bus.  Be the paranoid Republican sitting next to me on a plane panicking about the swarthy guy with a mustache in the next row.  (For the good of air travelers everywhere, I’d have to jam a pen in your carotid artery.  Your estate will be paying the dry-cleaning bill.)  Or just wait for nature to do it.  We’re all headed there eventually, one way or another.

It is death that brings us to this week’s final post about George Carlin.  Today, I want to bring your attention to Jerry Seinfeld’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.  (Unlike Bill Kristol’s, I did not read this while sitting on the john.  Nor did I need to.)  One of Carlin’s comments just days before he died was a joke about the recently deceased Tim Russert and Bo Diddley.

“I feel safe for a while,” Carlin told Seinfeld.  ”There will probably be a break before they come after the next one. I always like to fly on an airline right after they’ve had a crash. It improves your odds.”

Of course, George forgot about the rule of three, and ironically, he was #3.  Or maybe he knew there was a bit in it whether he died or not.  You’d expect nothing less from a 71-year-old man whose last gig was only a week before he died.  Not only that, he had a whole tour planned.

My Dad went like that.  He came home from work to start his vacation.  Apparently, he’d be vacationing with Mom, who died two years earlier.  Now that’s timing, ladies and gentlemen.

Carlin’s work ethic, though, shows what it takes to make it in an incredibly tough business.  Seinfeld writes:

You could certainly say that George downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways. Every comedian does a little George. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve been standing around with some comedians and someone talks about some idea for a joke and another comedian would say, “Carlin does it.” I’ve heard it my whole career: “Carlin does it,” “Carlin already did it,” “Carlin did it eight years ago.”

And he didn’t just “do” it. He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.

Of course, there is nothing new under the sun.  If every comic had to worry about a premise being used before, Bob Hope would have been a shoe salesman at Higbee’s in downtown Cleveland, and Jack Benny would have been a footnote in jazz history.  The trick is to make the audience see things the way you see things.  This is why people didn’t notice for a long time that Dennis Miller was conservative or why Fox News can have its people on The Daily Show.

Of course, you do have to worry about copying someone else, even unintentionally.  My stepson thinks Dane Cook is hysterical, and his repeating one bit everytime I wear my bathrobe around the house led me to take that premise and write a radically different bit about it.  I don’t think its Dane Cook, but I had to beat the hell out of it to make sure.

Which leads us to every comic’s last bit:  Death.  We’re all going to have to do that joke sooner or later, even if we leave standup comedy.  On that, Seinfeld says:

Like death, they were just more comedy premises. And it just makes me even sadder to think that when I reach my own end, whatever tumbling cataclysmic vortex of existence I’m spinning through, in that moment I will still have to think, “Carlin already did it.”

Nothing you can really do about that.  Maybe I’ll just have “Maybe it’s…  MEATCAKE!” etched on my tombstone.

Just giving credit where credit is due.

Dear Mr. Kristol:

Recently, in the Paper of Record, you wrote a piece that I may be late to the bandwagon in rebutting.  However, I finally did run across your column in June 23 New York Times while in the restroom at work yesterday.

It was a good thing I was already sitting down considering what it made me do.  Your column decried MoveOn.org’s most recent ad about a woman worried her toddler son may have to serve in Iraq because of President McCain’s policies.  Here’s what got my blood boiling and bowels moving:

I’m not persuaded. Having slandered a distinguished general officer, MoveOn has now moved on to express contempt for all who might choose to serve their country in uniform.

So if a parent worries that their son will be involved in an endless war, which, you must admit, your candidate is not doing a good job persuading us we won’t be, it’s contempt for those who serve in uniform.

Mr. Kristol, you are so full of what I was leaving in the toilet when I read your column that it’s a wonder you’re not wearing diapers.  Frankly, I resent your comment.  I am a new stepdad.  And while my wife and I doubt AJ will serve in the military (He’s probably better informed about the war than you are.), we (and likely AJ’s father) would be proud if he chose to do so.  It represents an opportunity I myself was denied when I was younger.

But I am scared that, if he has to pursue that option, he might very well die by a roadside bomb in a never-ending war.  Sure, John McCain says it would be more like our presence in Germany or Japan.  Any thinking person, however, knows that the culture of that part of the world would never tolerate such a presence.  Any parent with a child old enough to serve as part of that presence (meaning even some parents who haven’t been born yet) has a damned good reason to worry.  We’re not safer for this war.  My day job has me moving from between two major federal buildings to this city’s tallest building by 2011.  All this war has done is paint a Manhattan-sized target on my back.

So tell me, Mr. Kristol.  Is being a good parent unpatriotic?  If so, I’ll put my patriotism up against yours any day.

See, I love my country enough to criticize it, even if people like you can’t handle that.  You merely love your party enough to keep your nose planted in its backside.

That’s not patriotism.  That’s crass ideology.