Voyager*
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...
Read MoreWith a Little Help from My Friends
As we gear up for launch day tomorrow, our friends at Riff Raf are lending a hand. Fellow musicologist and Riff Raf chief Richard Fulco recently invited me over to talk about the music that both inspired and inhabits Believe in Me. Hope you’ll stop in and check it out. This also seemed like a good time to share some of the wonderful comments we’ve been receiving from early readers, each one a friend I’ve connected with along this fascinating path that weaves between the worlds of music and writing. My thanks to each of these gentlemen for their kind...
Read MoreThank You*
Believe in Me (Wampus Multimedia, Nov. 29) begins one sunny July morning and ends during the first week of that same November. Which means Thanksgiving does not happen in the book. Now, when I sat down to write this post – the title having felt inevitable considering the timing – I initially thought I might rattle off a few thank-yous of my own. But there’s already an author’s acknowledgements page in the book itself, we’re just six days away from publication, and enough about me, anyway, right? We’re here to talk story, and these characters… well, to be perfectly honest,...
Read MoreFaith
When I started writing the story that became Believe in Me (Wampus Multimedia, Nov. 29), it never occurred to me that faith would play a role in the narrative. When I started writing this blog, it never occurred to me that faith would be a topic for one of my posts. The fact that I was wrong both times begs the very question that I found unexpectedly developing as a secondary theme within the pages of Believe in Me: what about faith? Is the universe simply a random collection of atoms colliding with one another, or are there larger forces...
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