Spent all of yesterday and today packing. This involves throwing out enormous numbers of old papers, notebooks, magazines. It’s sort of like the burning of the Library at Alexandria, only worse. What a momentous loss for the future David Barr Kirtley National Library. It kills me to lose all this stuff, but what’re you going to do? I can’t fit it all in my car. Or, for that matter, in my new apartment.

Many of these notebooks are from college. Lots of stuff I barely remember about how a bill becomes a law, etc., etc. The notes themselves are no great loss, but some of the doodles are spectacular. I’ve been trying to salvage some of the best ones, but I’m sure I missed a few treasures. I never noticed before how much I like armor. Some 90% of my doodles involve either armored knights or armored futuristic soldiers, each protective plate lovingly shaded. It’s funny how there’s an inverse correlation between the quality of a class and the quality of the doodles. In a good class, doodles are small and careless, and don’t start appearing until the end of the semester. On the other hand, the notebook for a particularly lousy class I took in Ireland (Postmodern Theory) contains a virtual cornucopia of maniacally detailed grandly full-page blue-lined masterpieces.

Also into the box old love letters (can’t bear to discard them, can’t bear to reread them). Maps of places I’ve haunted — Austin, Manhattan, Villefranche Sur Mer, Konstanz, Cork, Grenoble. Books without which life is meaningless: The Chronicles of Amber, A Song of Ice and Fire, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Scar, Anubis Gates, Ender’s Game, Use of Weapons, Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Forever War, Book of the New Sun. A few movies (I don’t buy many): Fellowship of the Ring, Donnie Darko, Last Unicorn, Bourne Supremacy, Solaris. Maybe two dozen photos (I don’t take many). Into the box, into the box all.

I’ll be leaving Wednesday or Thursday, driving west and staying with friends along the way. In the meantime, I’ve been madly lining up lunches and dinners to see various friends one last time before I go.

Also, the dude who handles acquisitions for Fictionwise is taking this week off, so it’ll be at least another week until my stories start appearing there.

Whew. I finished editing all my stories for Fictionwise. I sent the stories off yesterday, then spent today fiddling with my website, adding graphics and stuff in anticipation of the time when the stars are right and my stories go on sale. I must’ve read over one story in excess of a hundred times in the last few days. I made fairly major changes to the underlying narrative logic, while retaining most of the actual details. It was like the Pimp My Ride of polishes.

Reading over old stories so many times, you really start to notice small details. For example, how did I ever become so enamored with dashes? Some of these stories have like 50 dashes. I took out a lot of them. I probably should’ve taken out more, but I left some in just in deference to my 18-year-old or 23-year-old self. Also, I never noticed before how often the words up and down serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever in a sentence.

Friday was the last softball game. We all went out to dinner afterward and Adam handed out medals to everyone. Printed on the back they say No Pressure. We need this. (It was a pretty relaxed atmosphere for a softball game.) Everyone was really cool. I was telling one person about how I first got invited to play, and one of the women, who’s a fashion model, explained, “He was so hot we just had to ask him to join us.” She was kidding around, but that still made my day.

After that I tagged along with one of the other women over to Washington Square Park to watch her play chess. We ended up playing each other, and it was an almost mystically intense game. It was daylight when we started, and we played through twilight and well into evening. Some artist has installed fancy colored lampshapes on the ring of lampposts there, which was breathtaking after dark. We were perfectly evenly matched. I took an early lead, controlled the board, and started playing a daring, all-offense game. Then I got greedy, grabbed her bishop rather than shoring up my defenses, and my whole center collapsed dramatically. I thought I was doomed, but managed to scrape by until I was able to bring my rook over to reinforce my flank, which bought me some breathing room. She still kept chipping away at me, and I was just about ready to concede when I noticed she’d left her king exposed. Pieces fell left and right, and we ended up racing pawns to be queened. She would’ve won, but I still had a knight I could use to stymie her, so I won. (Luck on my part, all luck.) The magical atmosphere was only marginally diminished toward the end by the indigent chess hustler beside us repeatedly shrieking, “Motherf***er!” at his opponent.

I’m really going to miss New York.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I just added the most devious twist to the story I was polishing. And it’s so perfect, I barely had to change anything. And forget Use of Weapons. My story is now the sine qua non of sneaky viewpoint tricks, hiding from the reader that no fewer than three characters are not who you thought they were. (And it’s only 15 pages long.) Am I going too far? Well, in the words of Ferris Bueller, “You can never go too far.” Well, okay, maybe I’m going too far, but I don’t think so. I’m 90% sure I’m going to keep the new twist. And even if I don’t, it’s still pretty damn clever.

So I finally took the plunge and arranged to have some of my stories sold through Fictionwise.com. Fictionwise is a site where you can buy books and short stories. (It’s sort of like the iTunes of prose fiction.) Some of my friends are on it, and have had good experiences.

It’ll probably take a few weeks to get rolling, but these are the titles of mine that’ll be available: “Seeds-for-Brains,” “Seven Brothers, Cruel,” “They Go Bump,” “The Prize,” “The Skull-Faced Boy,” “The Disciple,” “The Black Bird,” “The Second Rat,” “The Trial of Thomas Jefferson,” and “Lest We Forget.” Basically, most of my published work since I was 18.

So for the last few days, I’ve been madly giving all these stories a final polish before sending them off again. I’ve already read and edited each of these stories hundreds of times, so the fact that I’m still able to spend days making line edits really drives home how much my prose style has evolved in the last few years. (Plus I’m still finding really blatant typos. Argh!) I don’t think any of these changes would be really apparent to the casual reader, but to me they make a huge difference.

I’m particularly proud of the edits I made to one story. I was always dissatisfied with one aspect of this story, but didn’t know how to fix it. Basically, I have a character who’s pretending to be someone else, and the viewpoint character knows this, but the reader isn’t supposed to. If the viewpoint character refers to this character by their real name, it gives away the surprise, but if the viewpoint character refers to this character by their assumed name (which is what I did), it’s really cheating the reader.

There is a sneaky solution to this, which I’ve learned in the intervening years, and have lectured about, but I didn’t realize I could apply it to my own story until I just went back to polish it again. Basically, you only refer to the character by name in the dialogue, and in the exposition only refer to the character by pronoun (he) or descriptor (the man). This requires a lot of massaging to make it not draw attention to itself, but I think I did a pretty good job. (For a real tour de force example of this technique, see Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons.)

Of course, some purists argue that any critical information withheld from the reader by a viewpoint character is unforgivable cheating, but I think that’s too restrictive. I wouldn’t make a habit out of it, but really, what’s the fun of writing fiction if you can’t just screw around with the reader every once in a while?

Played softball in Manhattan again yesterday. I did all right, and had fun. I got my first invitation to an L.A. party — one of the softballers is a clothing designer, and is having a reception at her L.A. retail shop a few days after I arrive. Another softballer said he’d put me in touch with a friend of his who’s also starting at USC this fall to study screenwriting (though she might be in a different program), so that was cool too. After the game, I went out to dinner with a bunch of people, then a few of us went over to Central Park to watch a free, open-air modern dance show. It was actually pretty interesting, though our location was pretty uncomfortable. (We were seated on a carpet with the texture of steel wool, and our view was mostly blocked by people in front of us in folding chairs.)

Back in April, I applied for grad student housing at USC. Given the multitude of students and the paucity of student housing, I thought the chances of me getting anything were pretty slim, particularly after they emailed me a few days ago and told me to forget it. But they just emailed me again last night and offered me a spot in a 2 person 2 bedroom place at the Twin Palms dorm. (Certain to be known, after my upcoming wacky time travel adventure, as the Lone Palm dorm. Haha. Anyone? Is that too obscure?) I have until July 26th to decide whether I want it. I’ve heard that the dorms aren’t great, but right now I’m leaning toward taking it, just in the name of expediency. Hopefully once I’m out there and start meeting people, I can find something cooler.

Tonight was my last night (for the forseeable future) attending the monthly fantastic fiction reading series at the KGB Bar, as I will be in L.A. by the time the next one rolls around. I will sorely miss my KGB, where everybody knows my name and they’re not infrequently glad I came.

Tonight’s readers were Kelly Link and Michael Blumlein. Kelly Link left no doubt as to her mojo, packing in the largest crowd I’ve ever personally witnessed there, with audience members perched on every available horizontal surface. In fact, I had invited a new acquaintance to come check out KGB, and had assumed she hadn’t shown, but she emailed me later to say that the crowd was so voluminous that she’d been unable to even get within listening distance, and had eventually given up.

The highlight of the evening for me was my brief chat with Firebird editor Sharyn November, during which I described my short story “Seeds-for-Brains” that was in Realms of Fantasy, and she exclaimed, “Oh, I liked that one!”

Back in the spring, I gave a radio interview for Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf program on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York. I have audio clips from the interview up on my site in mp3 format. If you’re curious, you can listen to them by clicking these links: 1, 2, 3, 4.

The Quotable DBK

On Pets:
“All I’ve done, I’ve done for my pet turtle. I love you, Fluffy.”

On Religion:
“Metatron! He’s the angel that can turn into a truck.”

On Language:
“I didn’t know the Romanian language contained
any words that didn’t mean ‘I am a vampire.'”

On Romance:
“Why thank you, I’ve been secretly wanting some
exciting strange man to break in and lick my toes.”

On Perseverance:
“WOMBATS DON’T LAUGH! On your feet!”

See more quotes heard at Alpha here, here, and here.

I’m home now from teaching at Alpha, the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers. This was my third summer there. This year, the sheer awesomeness of the workshop was pumped up to near-apocalyptic proportions by the addition of my onetime Clarion classmate and perennial partner-in-crime Tobias S. Buckell. Toby and I tag-team-taught a number of lectures, including ones on Originality & Ideas, Character & Dialogue, Plot & Structure, and Titles. We also critiqued stories, organized after-dark frisbee games, and stayed up late dispensing almost terrifying quantities of wit and wisdom.

Then after that was Confluence. I did a couple panels. I wasn’t scheduled to do a reading, but due to overwhelming demand, I offered to do one in my room. Since I was reading my scary demented pirate story, I decided to trick out my room in haunted house decor. I downloaded scary sound effects off of iTunes, and then, in less than an hour and using only common hotel items, created a freakishly glowing throne fronted by a spooky altar, placed one gruesome corpse under the covers of the bed and hung another (well okay, it was a bathrobe) from the the sprinkler. I also conjured up a squamous fiend, the Lurker in the Bathroom, to devour anyone foolish enough to disturb my toiletries. Unfortunately, one student dared its wrath. Aside from her hideous shrieks of undiluted terror, she was never heard from again.

Then yesterday I hugged everyone goodbye, shuttled over to the airport with a bunch of people, said goodbye several more times, and flew home. The view out my airplane window was staggering. I mean, I’ve flown on hundreds of planes, and I’ve often looked out the window, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Huge — I mean just gargantuan — columns of black thunderheads stretching for miles, and behind them a blazing red-and-yellow-streaked sunset. Then later we flew among the lightning, which lanced toward the earth and lit up the clouds above like bright-white fireworks. It was the first time I’ve ever really been tempted to skydive, to be just plunging among all that beauty and power and majesty.

Then, walking out to the airport parking lot, I found a $100 bill lying on the floor.

Update: And hey, if there are any Alpha students reading this, I am making the super secret Alpha gang sign at y’all.

Attention fellow Confluence people: I’ll be reading my demented pirate story in my room (Room 203) at 10:00 p.m. tonight (Saturday). Anyone is welcome to come.

Okay, I’m back. I’ve been unable to journal the last few days due to circumstances I shall now relate.

My laptop is slow. Always has been. I bought a very cheap version, foolishly thinking that since I was mostly just using it for word processing and email, I hardly needed massive computing power. The problem with this reasoning, of course, is that you need a computer approximately 1,000 times as powerful as the ones we used to go to the moon just to run Windows. If I turn my computer off, it takes half an hour for it to boot again. Microsoft Word crashes (locking up my system) every single time I try to close it, even if I haven’t even edited a document. Often, my computer will randomly go off into flights of chugging reverie during which I can do nothing and that are so protracted I almost expect it to come back with the answer to life, the universe, and everything. This has seriously impacted my productivity. I break into a cold sweat at the prospect of having to open Microsoft Word, and I’m sure I’ve spent a solid month of my life just watching it dither.

Back around Easter, my cousin attempted to help speed up my computer by somehow telling it not to load so much stuff during startup. Unfortunately, somehow this included not loading whatever drivers are necessary to interact with secure servers, so I could no longer buy stuff through Amazon, Audible, or iTunes, or sign into various websites associated with grad school. My cousin then denied that he had done anything, and I had no idea how to fix it. I managed to limp along, but really needed to get it fixed. I finally saw my cousin again at his sister’s college graduation party, and I told him that if he didn’t fix it, I was going to try smacking my laptop repeatedly against his forehead and see if that did the trick. He did something, and everything seemed to be working again, but when I got home I discovered that now livejournal had stopped working.

So I figured out how to fix that, but I’ve still had it with this computer. To add to my woes, a certain key just stopped working. I’d tell you what it is, but I can’t type it. Well here, I’ll give you a hint, it’s between the 5 and the 7.

So last month wasn’t a fluke. For the second consecutive month, I got my picture on the KGB photos page.

Stephen Colbert was great, of course. And Bewitched was actually more entertaining and a lot funnier than I expected, though his part in it is virtually nonexistent. (He said he did have some more substantial scenes that didn’t make the final cut.)

Someone in the audience asked him who his influences were, and he mentioned that in his youth he was a huge Tolkien fan, and read The Lord of the Rings countless times, not to mention The Silmarillion and all the histories of Middle Earth. I didn’t think this was possible, but I like him even more now, knowing he’s a proud fantasy reader.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to see a live interview with The Daily Show‘s own Stephen Colbert, which is awesome. But first I have to sit through Bewitched (which he’s in), something I can’t say interests me at all, but it’s sort of a package deal. Oh well, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. And I mean come on, it’s friggin’ Stephen Colbert.

If you had asked me this morning how I would be spending my afternoon, I almost certainly would not have said, “Playing softball on a team captained by one of the Beastie Boys.” Yet such is the surreal randomness that is my life, that is exactly what happened. Now, I know what you’re saying. You think I’m making this up. You’re saying to yourself, “Wait a minute here … you’re trying to get us to believe that you played softball.” I, who still bear the scars of trauma from my one year of Little League when I was twelve, who has never watched a baseball game on TV, and who, when I attended my one live baseball game when I was five, complained so relentlessly that I was bored that we left before the seventh inning stretch. But wait, I swear I’m not making this up. This is what happened…

I was in Manhattan for the editors lunch, which was fun, as always. Then I swung over to Chelsea to check out the new gallery exhibits. Walking back, I passed by a playground, and noticed a young woman on the field. As I went by, she called through the fence, “Hi. You want to play softball?” I paused. I contemplated this. On the one hand, I mostly associate playing bat & ball sports with abject humiliation, and I was dressed in slacks and stiff new loafers that were already starting to give me blisters. On the other hand, it was a nice day, I had no real plans, and my policy is to never turn down any opportunity that might make a funny story. And besides, I’m highly susceptible to suggestions from young women. I warned her, “I’m really bad.” She said, “That’s okay. I’m really bad too. A lot of us are.” I shrugged, and said, “Okay, sure.”

I walked around the fence and out onto the playground. I chatted a bit with the young woman, whose name was Wendy. I introduced myself to a few other people. There were about twenty players, and a roughly even number of men and women. We were divided into teams. My team batted first, but out of the first three batters, I don’t think anyone made it past first base, so I was mercifully spared from having to bat. Since I had no glove, I borrowed one from the other team’s first baseman, Juliana, and retired to the outfield, where I’m more at home, and hoped that no one would hit the ball in my direction. No one did, and after three outs I handed Juliana back her glove. She asked, “So how was that?” and I replied, “I was pretty satisfied with my performance,” and she laughed.

Next, I was made to bat, and on my first pitch I clobbered it way, way past the outfield. I rounded the bases in stunned bafflement, and came home for the first score of the game. Several people high-fived me, and someone called out, “We’ve got a ringer!” I was too surprised to even be excited. On my second at bat, I drove a bouncing ball into left field, made it to second base, and brought a runner home. This was actually kind of fun. Not only was I not humiliating myself, and not costing my team the game, I was actually doing quite well. However, shortly thereafter, reality reasserted itself. I struck out on my next two at bats, the pitcher having realized that I couldn’t tell a good pitch from a bad one and would swing at anything. A familiar feeling of frustration started to build. I consoled myself with the fact that at least Wendy would know I hadn’t been deceiving her when I told her I was really bad.

On my next at bat, it was the last inning of the game, we were down by one run (17-16) and there was a runner on third. I stepped up to the plate and asked how many outs there were. Everybody yelled, “Two!” It occurred to me that that was why everyone had been arguing for ten minutes about the last call: one more out would mean the game. I tend to ask these kinds of preposterously stupid questions during team games, and I’m sure that this has given many coaches and players over the years cause to wonder if I’m somehow mentally retarded, but really I just don’t find team sports that interesting, and my mind wanders constantly. Anyway, if I struck out again, we would lose the game. Someone called out good-naturedly, “It’s all on your shoulders!” Cue the awesome humiliation potential.

But on the first pitch, I hit it good — not as good as my first hit, but still pretty darn good — and fortunately no one caught it, which would have been a real drag, and so our runner came home and I tied up the game. Then later, after much furious blister-shredding dashing in my stiff new loafers, I made it home, and we were up by one. Yay!

Then the other team was up, and if we could prevent them from scoring, we would win. Someone got to first base, two batters hit fly balls that were caught, and then the next batter was a smaller girl with long black hair and a flaming skull tattoo on her shoulder who was visibly inexperienced and had not — as far as I remember — hit the ball all day. I thought the game was all wrapped up at that point, and was mentally trying to come the grips with the implications of me having tied and then been the winning run in a game. But somehow that girl hit the ball and made it to first base, and then the next batter was invincible, and I knew we were finished, as indeed were were. But that’s okay. It makes a better story that way, and I was happy for that girl, who could probably use an athletic triumph even more than I could. And at least it wasn’t my fault we lost, and I didn’t humiliate myself by randomly falling down on my butt during a time out or anything like that.

So anyway, after the game I walked a ways with some of the other players, and I asked Juliana how she knew this group of people, and she said she’d met them through a friend of hers who hadn’t come because she was “touring.” I asked, “What kind of touring?” and she said, “She’s in a band,” and I asked, “Touring where?” and she said, “The U.S., Europe, Australia,” and I said, “Wow,” and she said, “She’s in this band, you probably haven’t heard of them, they’re sort of a local indie band, it’s called Le Tigre?” Now, by an incredible coincidence, Le Tigre is the band I sort of stood around in the hall with when I hung out backstage at the Conan O’Brien Show (thanks Andrea!), so I told Juliana about that, and she said, “So she’s seeing Adam, who was at the game. Do you know who he is?” I wasn’t even sure which one “Adam” was. She described him. I said, “The one who was sort of organizing everything?” and she said, “Yeah, do you know who he is? Adam Horovitz.” I didn’t. She said, “He’s one of the Beastie Boys.” And I was like, “Really?” That’s so crazy.

Some random dude with excellent literary taste and glowing yellow eyes used a quote from my short story “The Black Bird” as part of his sig file.

So I saw Batman Begins yesterday on the IMAX screen (at Loews by Lincoln Center). Seeing it in IMAX was breathtaking — particularly the iconic circling shot of Batman poised on a skyscraper and looking out over Gotham — but it did create some problems. One (minor) problem was that there were hardly any previews, so by the time I got back to my seat with popcorn, the movie had already started, and I missed the opening scene. The bigger problem involves some…

Spoilers

So at the climax, Batman is battling a villain on an elevated train headed for the heart of Gotham. If the train reaches the center of the city, Gotham will be destroyed. Okay, I guess technically that was a spoiler, but come on, it’s a Batman movie, you knew that was going to happen. Anyway, Batman and his enemy are flailing away, and suddenly the screen goes dark, and all you can hear are the thuds and grunts of hand-to-hand combat. This stretched for several seconds, and initially I thought it was kind of cool — obviously the train had gone into a tunnel.

But then this went on for ten seconds, and then fourteen. Then the sound stopped. Then the house lights went on, and en masse five hundred irate batfans swiveled to glare menacingly at the projection booth. The projectionist, who sounded like the teenage service-industry worker in the Simpsons (there’s only one), announced that there had been a big power surge, and he would try to get the movie started again soon. Here followed about a ten minute break, which significantly dissipated the dramatic tension of the movie, and went on longer, as it turned out, than the whole rest of the movie.

Awesome day today. Just awesome. It was great to see Rob again. Batman Begins is friggin’ brilliant. Terrific writing and acting. It makes Tim Burton’s Batman look like Batman and Robin. Then I saw Jeff Ford and Greg Frost read at KGB, and spent a jovial and hilarious evening with friends.

Holy movie trailers, I really want to see Batman Begins.

Smash! Wham! Kerpow!

Update: I’ll be seeing Batman Begins tomorrow with my friend Rob. This is really cool, first because I haven’t seen Rob in forever, and second because he’s a big Batman fan. (He’s the one who first introduced me to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.)