a repository of cast-off consonants

I have been cleaning my office this week.

Well, not today, because I am up in Berkeley.

By Tuesday of next week, my goal is to have an office that is so clean and spacious, it will say to you, "This would be a nice place to commit suicide."

To me, that is the number-one quality I look for in an office.

After all, writers have suicidal impulses in their blood.

It is like hemoglobin, or shit like that, to regular people.

This is a stack of original manuscripts that were scattered around the floor of my office. I piled them up and took a picture of them. I have not thrown them away yet.

The stack is higher by two manuscripts now.

Well, actually, by about one-and-one-half manuscripts.

When I cleaned out my car to prepare for the road trip of driving my son up here for his spring semester at Cal, I found a complete manuscript for Stick (my novel that invisibly came out in October), and about the middle-half of Passenger, the sequel to The Marbury Lens that will be coming out this October.

So, yes... those manuscripts, for the most part, are not in order, and there are some "chunks" floating around inside the jumbled stack. But there it is.

I have two news updates on Passenger, too:

The first one, I cannot tell you yet, because I am not finished thinking about it and I have other shit to do this morning.

The second one is that the package of pages (which happened to be my favorite part of the book) that I MAILED to Ian on the other side of the country on December 7, finally got to him. It took more than one month, and Ian ended up getting two packages from me -- the second of which I shipped via UPS which included a different set of pages and a handwritten (in seven-year-old's script) letter and poster, and was delivered to him in just a few days.

I am happy the kid scored twice, and relieved that the US Postal Service did not lose those pages and proved that I always do what I say I'll do for the kids who deserve good things.

Like Ian.

Who now has about 20 original pages from the manuscript for Passenger.

The rest of it is in that stack up there.

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the silo

I am leaving this morning very early.

I am driving up to San Francisco for 5 days, taking my son back to begin his second semester at UC Berkeley.

Next year, in early 2013, my book Winger will finally be published (by David Gale at Simon and Schuster).

When I wrote the book, I did a lot... er... a number of drawings and diagrams right in the middle of the story. It was my intent to have the book be a kind of hybridized graphic novel/analytical experiment in storytelling.

The narrator is quite a creative guy. He likes to draw comic book panels and charts and shit like that to explain what's going on inside his head.

He kind of reminds me of someone I know, but I can't think of who, exactly.

Anyway, I never intended my artwork to be used in the published version of the book, because, well... you see I'm not really an "in-the-lines" kind of artist, and I just thought that a real artist could do it better.

Thankfully, Simon and Schuster agreed.

Meet Sam Bosma.

Sam is the guy who is set to illustrate Winger.

Take a look at his work, it's pretty amazing.

Sam Bosma is an illustrator.

By the way, I might be gone for a while if you need me.

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this is what the end of the world looks like:

"did you actually just say prostitute?" "um... i can't be certain."

[As always, click on the images to see them more gloriously clearly]

a real dynamo

I should make a FAQ page on my website.

The FAQs I get are not FAed to most other authors I know.

If I kept track of such things, the Q I am most FAed is this:

When do you sleep?

I told you before:

I sleep when I achieve a state of reversible (thank God for reversibility! thank God!) unconsciousness, during which time my pulse and respiration slow, and my brain enters a wave-pattern known as delta.

That is when I sleep.

But I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about how I sleep, and I thought it was kind of telling about how I write, too.

By the way, it is Monday, January 9, 2012. God help me, I started writing today.

I haven't really written since mid-ish October. I've just been reading, re-reading, and editing in the last three months.

I guess it is appropriate to get working about now.

Every night, without fail, I sleep like this:

I go to sleep for an hour or two. It's a meaningless, black, sleep in which I think about nothing, possibly the likelihood of non-reversibility.

Then I wake up and lie there, conscious.

Usually, I am awake for an hour or so. Maybe 90 minutes. During that time, I think about things. Lots of things.

Then I go back to sleep.

The second time I sleep is when I have intense, vivid, colorful dreams.

This always happens.

Last night, I had four separate dreams during that time. They were really cool dreams, too. Especially the last one, where I had a big boat in the harbor and there was a ladder floating in the ocean that had fallen off the upper deck of my boat. I won't tell you the whole dream, but I do remember that it cost exactly $400 per month to rent the slip where I kept the boat in the marina.

I keep a pad of paper and a pen on the nightstand beside my bed. On that nightstand, there are also 6 books, the framed copy of Exile on Main Street my son gave me, and a statue of Ganesha.

I used to train myself to wake up and write down my dreams.

I wrote a lot of the narratives to In the Path of Falling Objects and The Marbury Lens this way.

In fact, just about everything that happens to Jack and Conner in Marbury happened first in the delta waves of the reversible (thank God!) unconsciousness of my sleep, which I wrote down (in red pen, by the way. I don't know why I have a particular fondness for writing in red ink).

Now, even though I keep paper and (red) pen nearby, I do not need to write down my dreams. I always remember them. Every day.

At least, every day I wake up I do.

I am not sure if other writers use their dreams in what they write, or if other writers even dream.

In my case, the majority of my dreams have almost no connection to the "real" waking world. I have never owned a boat (with the exception of my kayaks), and I probably wouldn't jump in the ocean to retrieve a floating ladder if given the opportunity.

And, to answer FAQ at the top of the list, that is exactly how I sleep.

Every night.

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the blue light was my baby

So I was going to write this post a while ago about how disappointed I was in the Postal Service.

Eh... whatever.

It's kind of a non-issue, like when people who want to be President of the United States of America talk about amending the Constitution of the United States of America in order to "protect" marriage against gay human beings.

That's probably the dumbest thing anyone who wants to be President of the United States could ever talk about in 2012. It is dumber than talking about the current season of Doctor Who, which, I am told, is a television program that I have never seen.

One time I told somebody that I had never seen Doctor Who.

You know what he said to me?

He said this:

That is really sad.

I did not know my life was really sad because I had not ever seen Doctor Who.

I thought all the sadness in my life was due to other things.

See how stupid and misled you can be when you do not watch television?

Anyway, that same guy -- the one who shook his head woefully and said That's really sad when I said I have never watched Doctor Who -- you know what I did to him?

I made him a character in a book I wrote and killed him.

I do that kind of shit a lot.

Oh yeah? You think it is "sad" that I do not watch Doctor Who?

Well, take that, motherfucker.

I was angry at the US Postal Service because of this important stuff I had sent to this important kid on the other side of the country, and the US Postal Service never delivered it.

There ought to be a Constitutional Amendment banning lost packages. It could come right after the one that forces me to stop killing people in my books who judge me harshly and find happiness by watching Doctor Who.

Are the Doctor Who fans getting pissed off at me?

Yesterday, I think I pissed off everyone in "Hollywood," as well as Andrea Bocelli fans, and possibly the Republics of Italy and North Korea, too.

I failed to mention that the movie I had watched had James Franco in it.

I think James Franco should run for President.

Or, maybe, he should be appointed Postmaster General.

James could do it.

I think those might be the last two things on James Franco's to-do list.

Me? I need to clean my office.

Remember the 12-year-old kid named Ian, who was solely responsible for bringing me out to Miami in November for the Miami Book Fair International?

Ian's a big fan of all things Marbury.

Well, it was probably the best thing I have ever participated in as a writer. So, before I left Miami, I got to spend some time with Ian, and I told him I would send him some original manuscript pages from Passenger, which is the sequel to The Marbury Lens, as well as a poster for The Marbury Lens.

So, I packed all that stuff up in one of those unstoppable cardboard tube things at the beginning of December and sent it off to Ian -- via the un-James-Franco administered US Postal Service.

It never got there.

I was bummed.

Ian was bummed. I know what it's like, being 12 and waiting for something to come in the mail. It is like a black hole.

Worse, I think Ian may have entertained the thought that I didn't do what I told him I was going to do.

I can't stand people who break promises to kids.

Now THAT should be a Constitutional Amendment, you stupid idiots who want to be President of the United States of America: There will be no breaking promises to kids.

Also, the pages I sent him were my FAVORITE pages -- from an original manuscript -- that no longer, apparently, exist in this universe. I sent him about 10 pages of this really creepy scene that takes place in the middle of the wasteland of the Marbury desert.

Part of that scene is on my Writing page on my website.

Some people who have read that short excerpt have guessed that it has something to do with Seth, the ghost from The Marbury Lens. I am not going to tell them if they are right or not. I will only say it is a very creepy scene.

So, anyway... I packaged up a new set of pages (from three different parts of Passenger), another The Marbury Lens poster, and a handwritten (well, printed, actually, since I can not handwrite) letter to Ian and shipped them all off -- again. But this time, it was with UPS.

I think it's cool to send handwritten letters to people, even if my writing looks like a nervous seven-year-old who needs to pee really bad and cannot write on horizontal parallels.

I have heard that James Franco has very nice penmanship.

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breakout session 4.1: optioning your book for film

Okay.

That was a bit caffeinated.

And, as usual, I forgot what I actually wanted to say.

I learned something the other day: For a film to make lots of money, it should be rated PG-13.

And for a film to be rated PG-13, you are allowed to say fuck one time only.

Uh.

One.

Obviously, that's how you make a book as long as The Marbury Lens fit into 100 minutes: make it PG-13.

I won't tell you how many "fucks" have to be cut to get The Marbury Lens down to the magic number.

It is a lot.

I realize, too, that I have not been very effective at reducing the number of times I use the vague quantifier "a lot," which has kind of been a New Year's Resolution of mine.

I should make a magic number:

I am only allowed to say a lot three times per day.

Three times seems like a lot.

When you have magic numbers, which are a lot like frosted raspberry cupcakes, exceeding them is, by definition, excessive in any quantity.

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