Some days are diamonds.
Some days are rocks.

And then there are those special unique days that manage to be both. That manage to be, dare I say it, the best and worst of all possible worlds, rolled into one.

Discretion demands that I don’t speak of this further, but perhaps for this:

The Best of All Possible Worlds is now available in PDF. Drop a line my way if interested.

If you need me, I’ll be trying to surround myself with people.

Consider this an addendum to my earlier post today. Go read that, because I think it’s more interesting than this one will be. But this one has videos! Feeling strangely prolific today, like all my energy from traveling has been stored up and is ready to be unleashed.

In hell, you can watch all the baseball games you want, but every single commercial break between innings or for pitching changes carries the exact same sequence of commercials. And in the ninth circle, the commercial sequence in question leads off with a horrifically over-masculine aggressive commercial for a new planned-obsolescence rollout of conventional shaving apparatus. You know, like this:

Unfortunately, I live in hell, masquerading as a place called “New Jersey”. As Robin Williams said in one of the twenty greatest films of all time, “I found you in Hell – don’t you think I can find you in Jersey?” So this is my experience with MLBTV. It makes me a lot more likely to exit early from a game the M’s are already losing 8-3, but might also make me cut bait on a game where the score is reversed. I have never moved so fast for a mute button so many times. Ugh.

I really need to update my favorite films list. It may include this:

Yes, I am telling you all about seventeen times to see this movie. You need to listen.

Seriously. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube in twelve parts. Do it already.

Also, this:

That one’s available on Vimeo. In one take. People are just giving away thought-provoking cinema, people. Take advantage.

Finally, I’ve used the appellation “Tiny House” so many times lately that I realize I may never have explained the origin of same. It’s not just because the house is small; it’s also a reference. To this:

I have to agree with the YouTube commenter who expressed anger when he realized that this was just a spoof commercial and not an upcoming reality series. That is, I felt that way until Em & I began our own personal reality series last August when we got here.

If you missed it in the last post, please let me know if you want to read The Best of All Possible Worlds and you haven’t done so in some way already. Eight people signed up on Facebook already. Don’t risk being the thirtieth person on your block to read this book or something. And by “your block,” I mean “planet Earth.”

It’s amazing how important titles are to my work. I have almost never written a post for this blog without knowing the title in advance of laying down a single word. One of the very few counterexamples was my last post, in which I wrote the title between the last words and the hitting of the slightly pretentious “Publish” button at the bottom of the screen. I didn’t know what the theme was for that post until I finished it. Ironically, the theme was themes themselves, or “threads”.

The theme for this post is “Summer Chill”. There are many possible interpretations of that phrase and I would hazard that all of them are relevant to the intended scope of this post. Read closely, pay attention. You may be surprised what you see. Or you may find the theme trite and blase, which it probably is in some ways, and go off to read about Lady Gaga.

I have discerned that Americans very much don’t like to be hot. This is probably because Americans, as a rule and general practice, are overweight. The precise coordination between weight and heat aversion took me a long time to figure out, but has become in the last few years one of those obvious and universal truths, like “donuts are tasty” or “parents have a lot of both direct and indirect influence on their offspring”. It took me longer to figure out this particular truth because it is generally considered impolite in this society to discuss the weight of other people. Thus conversations like this are unwelcome:

“I’m hot.”
“Really? I think it’s rather pleasant.”
“Well I think it’s too hot.”
“Hm. I guess you are a little pudgy.”

Comments on weight are especially unwelcome from people like me who, despite a two-year period of being somewhat overweight in the middle part of this decade, have otherwise been rail-thin. Since I rekindled my metabolism after its premature death at 27, I’ve gone back to being cold everywhere relative to every other human being, including even those who normally serve the role of being the coldest person they know. Ha ha!

Never is this phenomenon more apparent or frustrating than eating out during the summer in the United States. A phenomenon that I swear was predominantly limited to Florida during my youth has since gone nationwide, and now I must never leave my house without a jacket in summer if there’s even the slightest chance I will be asked to dine somewhere before returning home. In LA, in Albuquerque, in Philadelphia, I relied on my Mariners jacket to save me from hypothermic expiration in the bitterly frigid confines of restaurant after restaurant. After the third one, I stopped asking if I needed to bring my jacket. I would hit the swinging-door threshold, feel the blood harden in my veins, and suit up.

What’s ridiculous about the whole thing is that people keep restaurants at temperatures that no one would enjoy at any other time of year. Two in particular, Waffle House in Albuquerque and Los Segundos in Philadelphia, had the thermostat well below 68 degrees. Imagine going from a crisp November night into a restaurant kept in that meteorological condition. There would be literally no business. No one would go. So why does it being summer make it more acceptable? Why does everyone get to presume that all patrons have just run a marathon in their fat suits before entering their building?

Yes, this is part of an absurd class of things rapidly becoming known as “First World Problems” – the complaints only the spoiled of our species could possibly imagine worrying about, the offshoot of a pampered instant-gratification culture centered on the self. A waste of time, probably, but one that is both alienating to experience and hopefully a bit humorous to relate. And also, perhaps, emblematic of that selfsame pampered spoiled society itself, that we have created expensive, energy-wasting cultural standards and practices designed to cater further to our own self-centered obesity. It’s like the whole thing spirals on itself into the stratosphere to the point where to even observe or complain about our society’s missteps has itself become a misstep that presumes caring about the fate of that society. Paragraph summary: we’re in a fine mess indeed.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise and it’s done something that Golding, Tolstoy, Foucault, and Calvino have failed to do in the last month or so: hold my attention. Granted that Tolstoy held my attention about four times as long as DeLillo’s even trying to, so maybe it’s a weak comparison. But he’s also done something else that the other four never approached: scare me. Not because his 1985 vision of the present or the future comes across much like all those movies I’ve seen lately (”Koyaanisqatsi”, “My Dinner with Andre”, “Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y”, “Double Take”) in its prescient understanding of the incredibly insular self-absorption and chaos to come (it does), but because it reminds me of my own book just finished and nearly fully edited, The Best of All Possible Worlds. Not in whole, not overall (yet), but in certain scenes and themes and focal points. And it not only predates the book by 25 years, but I had never read one word or heard one thing about it before finishing my own tome.

This is at once highly problematic and a little relieving. It’s the former for obvious reasons – on a planet of seven-billion willed agents, I constantly fear accidentally rewriting another person’s book that I’ve never had contact with, just because there are only so many ideas or thoughts out there. As a writer whose greatest asset is originality of ideas, this could lead to unmitigated disaster. At the same time, it’s relieving because the publishing world seems very focused on “comps” – equivalent books to the one being pitched to them that they can in turn use to pitch to potential readers, writing such ridiculous drivel on the back of books as “…with the rich landscape of John Steinbeck, the emotional insight of Sigmund Freud, and the quick-paced action of Dashiell Hammett…” I made that up, but you get the point. No one is allowed to be themselves, at least not at first. Everything has to be derivative. And since I’ve never read anything remotely like The Best of All Possible Worlds, it’s encouraging to run across DeLillo just in time to be able to put a comp in my cover letter.

But also scary. Really, really scary, depending on where it all ends up.

I’m back in Tiny House, by the way, mostly just to block everything else out and finish editing before departing again for roadtrips that will lead up to my series of flights to Africa. The editing is about 70% complete, though there’s the second round of it that comes when I transcribe my red-lined notes into the electronic file that contains the work. It’ll take a while, maybe up to five days. But as an only child, I sometimes just need to be alone, especially to buckle down and do work. Once the work is done, really done, I’ll be sending it out to friends and the one agent who wanted first crack at it, then probably hit the road once more.

So, uh, public service announcement: This is your open call to let me know if you want to read The Best of All Possible Worlds. Your odds are better if you’ve already read and commented on American Dream On, though it would be absurdly self-indulgent of me to require this. Honestly, if you’re my friend and want to see it, that’s enough. Send me an e-mail.

And to leave you on a fun fact for the day, so that we can all laugh about the past and be awed by the present, here’s your news: The girl who said she couldn’t be friends with someone who had a blog had a blog. Far more fascinating than that is what she’s spent the last nine years doing, forsaking some of the first-world concerns she seemed to have in 2001 for time in the Peace Corps in Mauritania and working in Sri Lanka before coming back stateside to work for a really cool organization. I would say I’m proud of her, but that sounds really weird and probably obnoxious since I may have had nothing at all to do with it, especially given the way things ended. So, uh, I don’t have anything to say. Yeah.

I’ve summed up homecomings of all sorts with the following lyrical quotation throughout much of my life. It always has this way of being more transcendentally accurate and true than even all the times I’ve utilized it before. Guess what, “Awareness is Never Enough – It Must Always Be Wonder”? You just got to be the sixth category for this post!

“Looking all around the room
I see the clutter and the gloom
I’m not only back
I’m not only numb”
-Gin Blossoms, “Not Only Numb”

If I ever make it, creatively, meaning that I get to the point where I not only am expected to write more for a public audience but that some people consider making movies out of my stuff and I may even get some control over who’s involved, I’m giving first crack at film adaptations to Johan Grimonprez. It’s taken him only two movies in twenty-four hours to earn this honor, dubious as it may currently be.

For the unfamiliar, which should be everyone (Gris?) and would’ve been me a day ago, he’s made only two real films in English as far as I can discern, but they’re both appallingly good. One’s playing at Albuquerque’s barely-breathing Guild theater in Nob Hill by the university district, 2009’s “Double Take”, a film ostensibly about Alfred Hitchcock, but much more about the Cold War, power politics, media, and what’s going on with the planet. My Dad and I saw that last night and had to come home to find his other film, 1997’s “Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y”, which is about 9/11. Except it was made four years before 9/11. But watch it and tell me it’s about anything else. You can find it online; you may still have to pay to see Double Take.

Almost exactly halfway through editing The Best of All Possible Worlds, putting me well behind the expected pace at this point, though that indicates a general enjoyment of this trip that has made it all worthwhile. The themes for the book are finding resonance in all kinds of places, not least perhaps in the Grimonprez movies, all of which means that either the book is scarily relevant or I’ve just got it on the brain. Reality is probably a mix of both, but it’s generated a comfortable excitement for me about the work that has prompted this very lax attitude about actually getting the editing done. I think once I get on the plane tomorrow and head back to the East, it’ll be time to just put my foot down and get work done. If only so you all can have some idea what I’m talking about.

In the last couple months, I’ve found it harder than any prior point in my life to focus on reading one thing. In the midst of watching Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y tonight, I realized that I’ve been carrying around Don DeLillo’s White Noise in my backpack since buying it alongside If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler in Ariel & Michael’s favorite Philadelphia bookstore. All I want to do tonight is start it, setting aside editing yet again and certainly bypassing The Spire and War and Peace and Madness and Civilization. Prior to this year, I don’t know if I’d ever gone more than a week or so reading multiple books at once and now I’m on the precipice of starting a fifth simultaneous book. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I mean, sure, I’ve lost some interest in all of them in one way or another, and maybe that’s the problem, that I haven’t just given up on most of them. What does it say about now or my state or something else that I seem incapable of completing readings while churning out novels of my own? Why am I losing interest so quickly? How will I be impacted when I head to Liberia and have to hole up with books for days on end, according to what Emily has led me to believe about the schedule there?

Speaking of which, it’s the first anniversary of our seven to date that Emily and I have been apart. It’s enormously challenging, but I take some solace in the nice round joy of the sound of seven years. A marriage is forever, but it takes some time for its lifespan to start sounding like something that reflects the permanence and seriousness of the commitment it contains. I’m not sure quite where the threshold is, but seven years seems a lot closer than any of the prior milestones.

Been spending much of this leg of the trip discussing the nature of God with my Dad, working out Jumbles and crossword puzzles with surprising interest and aptitude, downing green chile and old memories in equal measure. Just a moment ago, I landed, and already the plane station looms with its promise to whisk me back away. The tighter I hold on, the more sure I become of the need to step back, relax, put it all in context. Watch my Mom knitting in the comfy corner chair. Pull the threads.

It seems like both a lot and very little has happened since I last checked in with this form of communicating with the outside world. But since I haven’t dialed in for a while, it’s probably good to put out the obligatory “not dead yet” missive.

The car thing from the last post worked out fine. After a truly comedic attempt at stuffing Fish & Madeleine into the Smart Car and then resigning to putting them on the Hertz shuttle, we went to one of the four people working behind the Hertz counter and it was thankfully not the same person who gave me the half-car in the first place. With Priceline already committed to investigate the issue of why’d I’d gotten the wrong car and send me a settlement in the next fortnight, I was hoping someone could possibly actually resolve the issue without me forking over more cash. The guy looked at the mismatch of car I’d reserved and car I’d been given like something crazy had happened, resolving to quickly restore order for free. I refrained from pointing out his crazy co-worker who’d bluffed me into the joke car and ran to get the keys and mileage from same. We spent the rest of the weekend cruising around in a spacious Toyota Yaris. You know, a car with both four seats and four doors!

The rest of the weekend was a great time – hanging out with Fish, Madeleine, Gris, Anna, and occasionally Nagrom as we interspersed discussions of politics, history, and race with Boggle, Yahtzee!, Bang! (one-word and exclam-heavy games only, apparently), tennis, and watching World Cup matches. Also got to see a very little of Jaque and Jenny both at a dim sum breakfast the morning of the wedding and at the wedding before they departed early. Saw even less of DK and Sara amidst their nuptial fervor, though their ceremony was beautiful right up until the officiant made the bizarre decision to pelt us with sexist Red Skelton jokes as we were contemplating the sanctity of their vows and commitment. So it goes. Catching up with both, especially DK and his parents, who remembered all the old crew, was great fun and it seems they’re putting together quite a good life in LA.

Then it was back to Russ’ where we completed our second-ever conquest of the World Cup for Denmark on the ultimate (World Class) level before checking in with the Wilsons in the first-ever conference with all of us in the Pacific time zone. The power of Skype has definitely been impressed on me in the last few weeks, between my video chats with Emily and periodic other conversations over free computer-to-computer networks. Also at Russ’, I saw two movies which probably join “The Corporation” as required viewing for the thoughtful person these days. And as scared as I was that “The Corporation” came out more than half a decade ago, it’s downright terrifying that both of these movies date from the time when I was barely verbal. Anyway, add “Koyaanisqatsi” (1982) and “My Dinner with Andre” (1981) to your upcoming playlist. I have since discovered that the former has two sequels, but they don’t quite have the same power of the original it seems, despite some thematic verve, especially in the conclusive piece subtitled “Life as War”.

Been in Albuquerque since a 7/7 flight where I overheard my two rowmates encouraging each other in their love in America and infinite faith in its power to both rebound and offer infinite opportunity to all. Made some major progress on editing thereon between the eavesdropping, and now stand a little over a third of the way through editing The Best of All Possible Worlds. Given the encouraging feedback that’s been coming in for all sorts of my creative endeavors, I’m really looking forward to hearing what people think of this one as a real departure from my past novels. Also newly reinvigorated to start submitting ADO to agents when I hit the sweltering East Coast once more. Everything’s coming up Milhouse.

Albuquerque has been the usual good mix of New Mexican food (Frontier 2, Waffle House 1, Garcia’s 1 as of this writing), long conversations, and perfect warm weather. The yard is in full bloom and I’m starting to believe all the bees left alive on the planet are actively engaging the flowers in my parents’ well-tended garden. The house is less changed than usual as my Dad struggles with arthritis and my Mom seems to be prone to pulling or straining various things. They’re doing well otherwise, though, in good spirits and with plenty of energy. The new cat, Nesbitt, has also been a joy, though he seems more thoughtful and reserved than any of his species I’ve known in the past.

Today just got word that Cliff Lee, one of my favorite and briefest Mariners, has been shipped to Texas in exchange for Justin Smoak and a bevy of prospects. Given the pitching staff and prospects to come, the length of Lee’s contract (ending after this year), and the need to restock our farm, it’s clearly a great move. Especially looking at the 34-51 record they’ve compiled, an inexplicable shock that’s the sum total of bad luck and an abandonment of the very concept of clutch hitting. The team continues to build around the right things, though, and I have to believe that the new GM will be able to continue to work magic that will hopefully lead to a breakthrough. But this season is over and I guess I don’t mind much, since it takes the pressure off going to Africa and feeling like I’m missing something back here.

Other than the friends and family I’m trying to see before I go, there’s just not much to miss.

When Emily was here as an undergrad, she had unlimited printing of whatever she wanted at local computer clusters. This year, for the first time, they implemented limits on printing, which is a big part of why my distribution of American Dream On to friends was electronic, not paper.

Nevertheless, the limit is still sky-high and so she had a few hundred sheets left that expire on 1 July of this year. Today, I decided to use up as many of those as possible, printing a clean single-spaced copy of the most up-to-date versions of ADO and The Best of All Possible Worlds for posterity in case something happens, plus fifty sheets of Duck and Cover blanks in case something doesn’t. It’s always good to be prepared for all foreseeable possibilities.

I am heading to Philadelphia any minute now, then on to the greater LA area to see a bevy of friends and the wedding celebration of David Kunkel. Then finally a week in Albuquerque before returning here briefly only to set out again across the East Coast and then on to Africa. Quite a bit going on in the next few weeks and months, hopefully.

For reference, here’s the Tour image again, still accurate to date:

Feeling generally pretty good. Looking forward to editing TBoAPW, to spending some serious quality time with a lot of friends and family who I don’t see that often. Looking forward to the relaxing, renewing feelings of summer. Looking forward to lots of things.

But as I held the near-ream of paper in my hand, the more than 230,000 words worth of novels I’ve written in the last nine months, I was also looking at now. And for the first time in a long time, feeling good about right now. About the recent past. This feels as much like an arrival as it does a departure.

See you soon.

Today, after watching some thrilling but ultimately disappointing World Cup matches, I wanted to start editing my book and I was also hungry. I considered walking in to town, but a thunderstorm was predicted for the afternoon and my hunger was threatening to derail me on the roadside en route to food. I decided to drive to Zorba’s, a falafel place (I’m sure they have other food, but it’s a falafel place to me) and then take that food to the Princeton Campus Club, a repossessed former eating club just off the Princeton campus.

Zorba’s was doing its usual middling business, but the PCC was a ghost town. The three floors of gigantic rooms were completely empty, though the building had been unlocked. And blasting away throughout was the air conditioning, cooling the outside humid 85 degrees to something more like 70 amid much noisemaking. At least the lights were off for the most part.

I ate my falafel in silence while reading a bit of Madness and Civilization, then threw away the bag it had come in and the wrapper and the chip bag, able to recycle the class bottle of Orangina I’d had. Then I went upstairs to the PCC Library, which was just as cool, and cracked into editing The Best of All Possible Worlds for the first time, completing 5% of it while there.

I spent maybe an hour and a half in the building all told. No one came, no one left. The air conditioning persisted through every room of the gargantuan club, a place that may sit idle for days at a time, though they’re keeping it open till midnight or two in the morning apparently. Just trying to make it comfortable in case someone comes in to enjoy the hallowed halls of what someone built as an alternative to eating with the proletarian Princeton students in the regular dining halls.

There are times when I think that I might be a bit too cynical about the hope for change on this planet. When I might underestimate what one single individual without power or fame or voice can do to stem the tide of immense corporate waste and collective mismanagement. Then there are days like today, when I find myself to be a bit naive, all told, in comparison to the real depth of the state of things.

On my way home, I drove by a dying squirrel, flattened and twitching on its back in the roadway.

Well, it wasn’t three books a year. But two outta three ain’t bad.

Just minutes ago, I completed my third novel lifetime and second in nine months, The Best of All Possible Worlds. It weighs in at 96,070 words (~384 pages), just a bit longer than Loosely Based and well short of American Dream On.

It took me three months and eleven days to write. Like every novel I’ve written on a deadline so far, I finished it about a week ahead of deadline (in this case, 21 June).

The last 142 pages of the book (37% of the total) were written this month, June, the last fifteen days, during which I wrote on every single day except 5 June.

Now, of course, begins what will probably be 2-4 weeks of editing, depending on how intensely I can work on it and how much work it ends up needing. It could actually be longer than that if my concerns from about a month ago persist about some of the book fundamentally not working. I really think I’ve wriggled away from those concerns, however, and feel very good about what I wrote in June rendering those prior concerns moot. It will take at least a full detailed reading to be sure, though.

If you’re interested, drop me a line. I think it should be available for distribution sometime in the last week of July, shortly before I depart for Africa.

I’ve been close enough to the finish of this one for a while that I don’t feel quite the incredible euphoric elation I normally do. I’m sure once I go a couple days without writing, I’ll become a little more convinced that I’ve actually done it. And when I’m convinced it works. But maybe I’m just getting accustomed to this feeling, to this sense that my plan for my life is actually working, or starting to. Maybe the euphoria had built up for seven years and now it’s only had a little time to build up in the six months since I last finished a first draft.

In any event, I’m at least very very satisfied. Happy. Feeling, dare I say it, hopeful.

I wrote twenty-two pages today (or on 9 June, the day just ended), completing exactly a third of what remained to be done on the book at this time yesterday.

For the first time in an extremely long time, I have more days till the deadline than sections of the book left to write. The book has eighty sections, which are not quite long enough to be considered chapters. By comparison to American Dream On, that book holds sixty chapters in 135,000 words. This will have eighty sections in about 100,000 words. So you get the distinction.

I was reading a little about the torrid end to my writing of ADO, largely to see if June was surpassing December of last year in productivity. It’s not, though it must be said that it’s getting competitive. I’ve written 24,288 words in the 9 days of June so far, which equates to 97 pages by the conventional rubric and is nearly 11 pages a day on average. Now of course I was just posting about being elated to average nearly 6 pages a day over 40 days, so you can see how much of that average is getting its steam from just the last week and change. Given that I took nearly two full days off this month, the average for productive days is arguably closer to 14 pages a day. Suddenly my 22-page day isn’t seeming so special.

As far as parsing the reasons for these spurts, it’s hard to discern between deadline motivation and the natural energy that comes from the converging end of a book. At this point, I’m trying not to analyze it too heavily because it just works for me. I’m not going to argue with the results. And my doubts about the quality that can be maintained at this pace have been allayed by the fact that most everyone felt the December-written chapters of ADO were the best therein.

I guess the only question, going into my fourth book when the time comes this fall, is how to maintain this kind of frenzy throughout writing a book. Is it even possible? If it were, I could write maybe five books a year and they’d all be spectacular. But I bet there’s something unique about the close of the tomes that makes this an unsustainable state of mind and work.

It’s amazing to realize that one really is capable of the things one thinks one is capable of.

With the session just finished, I am officially eighty percent done with The Best of All Possible Worlds. I have but two weeks to finish it, with the 21 June deadline and the first day of summer looming large in my vision. However, I have almost no distractions or outside obligations to worry about as I approach the deadline and have been writing at a faster clip than perhaps even I realize.

For example, I just realized that I have written 233 pages of the book (it is 305 total at present) in the last 40 days, or just shy of 6 pages a day every single day for forty days. Of course, these days have been punctuated with two- or three-day spells of writing nothing at all, including weekends like the last weekend Em was in town before Africa, the last weekend Greg was hosting people at his late mother’s place, and the last weekend Stina & Dav would be in town before Stina goes to England (two, one, and zero weekends ago, respectively). So even though the average is just shy of six/day, that includes many zeroes, meaning that when I’ve set down to work, I’ve been as productive on this work as anything I’ve ever done in my entire life.

Which is exciting.

Despite a lot of early doubts about whether this book even really “works” in some sense (it’s by far my most experimental effort to date), this last third of the book is convincing me that I have little to worry about in that department. I still think a full reading is necessary to be sure, but maybe not the two I initially budgeted before I’d know. In any case, that euphoric excitement about finishing the project and then being able to actually realize that people will be reading it soon is setting in. Oh baby so tasty.

I’ve been living life too, though sparely, mostly through the aforementioned weekends. I’m going to sum up some of my personal, non-political encounters below in a sort of good-bad dichotomy as follows:

• Recommended: The yellow fever vaccine, which I got a week ago, the first shot I can ever remember having with absolutely zero side effects.
• Not Recommended: The typhoid fever vaccine, which I got yesterday, which has brought me the most intense pain I can remember having in this lifetime.

• Recommended: The movie Following, which I watched via Netflix in a pain-induced stupor from said vaccine above.
• Not Recommended: The movie Please Give, which I watched in a nearly empty theater on Friday and enjoyed before it devolved into a ringing endorsement of capitalist superficiality.

• Recommended: Wise and Otherwise, which we played with Fish, Madeleine, Ariel, and Michael at the latter’s place on Saturday night to endless aching of stomachs from too much laughter.
• Not Recommended: Dungeons and Dragons, which was played most of the weekend in Connecticut, which I found to be a slow analog way of playing about ten minutes’ worth of Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft. The company and enthusiasm therein helped mitigate this, but the game itself was disappointing.

• Recommended: Being able to Skype with one’s wife across the Atlantic Ocean, enabling both talking and a small grainy amount of seeing despite the vast distances between.
• Not Recommended: Still having two months to go before one sees one’s wife in person.

I have long discussed the fact that the goal of humanity, both collectively and individually, is to overcome human nature. That basically everything we consider to be harmful and undesirable is derived from the baser instincts of human beings and that, at the point of sentience, the goal of people should be to stop evolving and to start making mental, philosophical, and moral transformations based on rational thought.

It shouldn’t be a controversial perspective, but it seems remarkably un-universal, especially given the recent surge of belief in science, physicalism, and a reductionist materialist view of the world. So many people now seem to argue that there are great benefits of our human nature and natural instincts, that trying too hard to control or convert the hedonistic nature of our animal selves will create more problems than its solves. Of course, these people tend to put happiness at the keystone position of their ethos and seem particularly ill equipped to explain how humanity is going to make any progress in the fields of moral or rational thought.

I am writing all this now because I recently found one of the most brilliant articles ever on this issue, which makes the case for my perspective more succinctly than I tend to, and in a way more befitting of mainstream appeal. You can read the article here now. Be forewarned, it’s longish, but the details matter and it’s length is sort of part of the point anyway.

The article is more concretely about patience and the ability of people, largely young children, to delay gratification. The case constructed by the psychologists in the various studies profiled in the article is that people’s willpower and ability to distract themselves into changing their own motivations – the essence of self-control – is perhaps a larger factor for success in humans than intelligence itself. And that where intelligence feeds self-control and vice versa, the most essential building blocks to fulfillment and self-actualization are to be found.

I have been telling a lot of people lately that the difference between my ability to write multiple novels in a year (not done yet, but looking awfully promising at this point) or hold down jobs while impressing my employers on the one hand, and being homeless and destitute and an utter failure on the other hand, is entirely because of my ability to fabricate meaning for deadlines in my own head. I mean this statement completely sincerely – the most important skill I have devised in my life has been the ability to believe in an arbitrary date and accord all the significance in the universe to it. Throughout high school and college, I never missed a single deadline for a single class (except for the one I deliberately failed, of course, but that was its own little experiment with self-control), because I convinced myself that doing so would lead to immediate failure, expulsion, and possibly death. I played an extensive eight-year game of chicken with my consciousness, starting papers later and later, studying less and less, but I still turned everything in the minute it was due, without fail.

This has of course translated into me being able to motivate myself for artificial deadlines (imposed by self or others) at work and especially in my new free-form writing life. I thrive on deadlines, at least when they’re realistic. I feel a great deal of adrenaline around the approach of a deadline, the elation of getting things done, and every successfully met deadline has worked as an extra bulwark for both the need for me to continue making them and as a positive motivation from the pure euphoria I feel when they are met.

I don’t think I ever deliberately tried to create this spirit about deadlines, but the article above corroborates my thesis that this trait alone has kept me off the streets and in a relatively stable place in society. But the most important aspect of the article is the evidence that this can be taught. What’s frustrating about the article is that it then starts to raise doubts about the idea of teaching this kind of self-control and willpower, even though most of the article makes it abundantly obvious that this can be learned, and pretty easily, especially at a young age.

The article also relates the issues of self-control and willpower to drug use and overeating, which are pretty obvious correlations. The fact that I’ve been able to live my entire life without alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, to control any impulse to try them even once, to be able to rationally evaluate the decision and overcome impulse, is highly linked to the deadline thing. And all of these things are truly essential skills for living a fulfilling life, especially if one is also prone to addictions or falling into long sustained periods of inextricable obsession.

The most disturbing aspect of the article, though, is that it still pays homage to the materialist demons that haunt every aspect of the modern psychological community. The researcher who pioneered the study of willpower through the use of marshmallows, whose thinking has led to such important conclusions about humanity’s struggle to overcome its base nature, is most excited at the moment about… brain scans. He wants MRI’s to spit out little illustrations of the self-control fold in the brain so he can give people drugs or surgery to shortcut them to it.

And here is where I have to part ways with the nature of the experiment. It may be that there seems to be a physical reflection of the phenomenon of being able to believe in arbitrary artificial self-imposed deadlines. And it may not. If it is, it’s still putting the cart before the horse, for the fact is that these things can be taught and that would change the folds of the brain. The entire problem with the materialist approach is that it tries to do things backwards, tries to manipulate people as bodies without giving them the understanding of what they need to change that will build a lasting commitment to the new approach. Even if you could surgically create the folds, there’s a larger chance that they’d just change back and re-alter their brain afterwords. This is why so many people who get major life-changing weight-removal surgeries tend to end up putting the pounds back on, while people who actually train themselves to approach food differently can lose weight and keep it off.

So now the goal of humanity is to not only overcome our human nature, but to ditch our desire for a physical solution to every problem. We’ve long recognized that the human mind is the most complex and fascinating aspect of our world. We should offer it the respect and due diligence it deserves, not try to play Frankenstein to its monster.

I’m still here and still thinking things and still have stuff to write about. But most of it is going in the ever increasing pages of The Best of All Possible Worlds.

I’ve posted about this before, and probably not too long ago. Maybe even on a May 17th before, in this exact place in the universe, looping back ’round to it again. Here we are. It’s not a new concept or a particularly hard concept, but it’s one I feel the need to revisit. When the tide is high with the creative process, lots of writing, a surprising about of reading for how much writing there’s been, then other forms of writing, the chaff, this blog, take a direct hit.

The corollary in the other direction was long obvious – that this blog would get the most attention and care when I was at a low tide creatively in the rest of my life. The times when my job was tugging at my soul and the commute was eating my time would give birth to long flowy metaphorical examinations of my real life in the moment. It was fun, and at least one of you thinks it’s way better than the non-chaff meaningful stuff I try to produce now. It will probably come again sometime, but it is not the time for it now so much. And that’s good.

This is largely because the life itself is relatively unnoteworthy. Sure, stuff happens – Em and I went to a AA baseball game today in Trenton and played bocce ball with friends on the lawn of our military-barrack-trailer-park complex. The sun shone, people bid each other a pleasant summer, embarked for new adventures. Em and I watched two of the four series we’re following on Netflix. We made more plans for the summer to come. But these are the undulations of life of the everyday. And the rest of my time makes these times look fascinating.

Because the rest of my time is extremely unreportable, the most of the mundane. I sit down at the computer at a designated time, aiming for 2-3 sessions each day instead of the normal single overnight session because of the time crunch I’m facing and what a washout April was. I play Tetris, trying to imbue myself with the mood appropriate for quick, magical writing. At a certain point, I stop, having formulated the first sentence to two paragraphs. I switch over to Word, enter my trance, and go. Anywhere from 30 to 150 minutes later, I stop, usually suddenly on a particularly sharp conclusion for that section. I come up for air quickly, surveying practical considerations like how many words I’ve written and whether I’ve overlooked anything intended for that section. Sometimes a quick review, but often not – there’s plenty of time for editing the month after the deadline. Then I start to meditate on the next section and do something mundane like eat or sleep or read.

That’s my life. And when Em departs for Liberia in a week and a half, it will be without those other preliminary things like baseball games and bocce ball and Netflix. It is hard to envision as mundane, because it feels like the most vibrant and important part of my life I’ve ever lived. Every moment carries the sense of purpose that’s so effectively eluded most of the uses of my time. Every day feels deliberate and worth living. But talking about it? Explaining it? Highlighting some quirky thing to capitalize into a post here? Forget it. To the outside observer, writing is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

I guess there are a good number of breaks, though, and this is where the conservation comes in. I did go down to Baltimore for the two Mariner losses in their three-game set with the Orioles early last week. I saw two old friends and ate in two different Waffle Houses a total of three times. I could write the better part of a novel about the third game alone, probably the most objectively exciting game I’ve ever seen, with the final out recorded on a play at the plate that would’ve tied the game. But I don’t have the juice to, because it’s all going to the novel right now.

So maybe it’s not my life that’s any more mundane, for day jobs and commutes are awfully mundane too. It’s probably just about the energy, the focus, the dispersal of creativity leading to blippy vignettes, while extended intense concentration that saps everything else is required to produce the 100,000 word novel.

Let one thing be clear in all of this: I am not complaining.

I am a pretty lucky guy.

It’s nice to get reminders of this, lest I begin to give in to consternation with any given personal quest or quandary at any given time. Though the below-announced “tour” is not a book-signing tour, yet, or anything of that ilk, it is a hearty reflection of how great my friends are, how many of them I am blessed to be able to see, and how fortunate I am to be in a position to contemplate some serious world travel as well.

Coming off a non-weekend weekend spent with the Philly crew, playing endless Wii Mario Kart and real-life tennis (6-4, 4-6, 6-5* over Fish in a reaffirmation that we are just as evenly matched as we were in the ill-fated Spring 1995 intramurals), I cannot express sufficient excitement about the summer ahead. More than anything, my visit just now was marked with exceptional depth and breadth of conversation, the greatest gift we humans can give those we are personally tied to. To have so many old friends with whom I can converse about such an array of topics at a high level makes me even luckier than I know I am.

*We didn’t do the proper tiebreaker thing because both of us forgot how to score it and we were exhausted already.

It is with this incredible fullness of heart that I announce my complete summer plans – possibly the most ambitious and wide-ranging itinerary I’ve ever undertaken. The “theme” is of course related to the thread that runs through these summer plans, work on my third novel (second this year), The Best of All Possible Worlds. The summer kicks off on the actual first day of summer, which happens to be my deadline, and will take me straight through the week of the first debate tournament of next season. I am preparing to be overwhelmed.

Here we go:

If we haven’t made specific contact about spending time on the tour in the above places and times, please send me an e-mail and we can sort things out. Some of this may be subject to a little tweaking, especially the dates that revolve around driving on the Eastern Seaboard rather than booked plane tickets. I may release an edited draft of this with some of those Eastern cities more specified before it’s all upon me.

Now the focus is making sure I can hit that deadline so everything else is viable.

Who would’ve thought that a day in, I’d be almost missing April?

Since writing my last post, I have:

• Had a migraine, making April’s total fourteen.
• Developed some strange but persistent non-migrainous pain and possibly swelling in the soft tissue over my right ear.
• Gone to a “Prom” held for students in Emily’s program.
• Watched the M’s cough up a game where they had the bases loaded with one out in the bottom of back-to-back extra innings.
• Judged the 102nd Harvard/Princeton/Yale Triangular Debate, specifically a Princeton-hosted match against Harvard.
• Written 17 pages of The Best of All Possible Worlds.
• Finally bought a new batch of coffee to test my bad-batch theory for the April Migraine Spike.
• Run – almost literally – into my second girlfriend on the street in Princeton. Yes, that one. No words (or blows) were exchanged.
• Discovered that said girlfriend and her husband have been living less than a mile and a half away since we moved here.
• Watched the film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which I loved and Em hated.
• Finished reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a novel which is neither about 2666 nor is finished.

I think it can all best be summed up in four words:

My head is spinning.

It’s probably no mystery that debate has been my primary focus this month, at least during the time that I’m not feeling surreal and/or migrainous. Between driving 7 hours to a tournament the first weekend, hosting our tournament the second, and attending the 3-day National Championships the third, it’s been a month dedicated largely to APDA.

Nationals was nothing special – in fact, much of it was an unmitigated disaster. In their first three rounds of competition, the Rutgers team faced the #1, #7, and #8 ranked partnerships in the country, who went on to place 2nd, 1st, and 8th in the Championship respectively. While they acquitted themselves largely admirably, such match-ups were enough to remove at a chance at the elimination rounds and the rest of the tournament became a tune-up of particular cases for next year. Next year still looks quite bright for the team, as no one who placed at a tournament this year is graduating, while this year’s senior class is quite top-heavy on most other teams.

Perhaps more infuriating than my team’s horrendous draw was my treatment as a judge at this year’s title tourney. Despite having the most overall judging experience and among the best debate credentials of anyone in attendance, I was not invited to judge rounds 4, 5, or the elimination rounds. Perhaps more amazingly, this was during the same weekend I was elected to serve as Tab Director for next year’s Nationals. The discord between general sentiment/presumption about my judging caliber (especially among many of the successful teams, who were just as curious about my exclusion as I was) and the decision-making of the small team of graduates running this year’s tab room was marked. While this really bummed me out for a while, I was ultimately able to be pretty Zen about the whole issue in realizing that next year, I’ll be able to demonstrate what an objective tab room looks like. Nevertheless, it prompted some disconcerting questions about whether I’m simply too old to be hanging around the college debate circuit, at least according to some folks.

And yet, one of my few roles at this year’s Nats was to explain the history behind APDA’s two awards named for deceased debaters, both of whom (as I noted in this year’s remarks) were younger than I am now when they passed. In 2007, I was asked to speak about Jeff Williams and declined, largely because I still hadn’t quite made peace with my difficulties on-circuit with the individual and there were other of our contemporaries present who seemed more sincere candidates for the job. This year, I was really motivated to explain Jeff’s positive qualities as a way of atoning for our acrimony, as a way of putting to rest any bitter tastes from competition now nearly a decade in the rear-view. I can’t much imagine Jeff would be pleased to hear that I was speaking for his memory, but I hope I pleasantly surprised him all the same.

Of course, I wasn’t speaking just for personal reasons. The larger point was to illustrate the importance of institutional memory in general, to remember that these awards to honor year-to-year excellence also honor the excellence of those who went before and are no longer around to discuss their legacy. And I guess the question arises as to how much stomach for such memory this debate circuit has. I was struck during the senior speeches by how generally positive and heartfelt they were. Almost no one called anyone else out. The two or three misanthropes in the league were lightly chided while most others were warmly lauded. I never envisioned during my last years on the circuit that such speeches could ever amount to such a lovefest. It was truly wonderful to see.

So maybe the memories of past rivalries and strife are unnecessary. Maybe APDA reinvents itself untethered to the past. Maybe my role is not to guide or advise or judge this new generation, but merely to coach my team, to try to build another rising program from the challenged ranks of the previously unheralded. Then again, of course, the election as Tab Director seems to belie all these misgivings. A whole other realm of the circuit, from tournament to tournament and in creating the 2011 National Championship, seems to appreciate my willingness to be both old and devoted to the circuit.

Ultimately, it’s probably best not to put too much stock in any one tournament. Even if it’s Nationals.

I have a whole summer to think about all this, of course… our last debate meeting is Thursday and we’ll part ways to regroup in September ready to tackle a year brimming with possibility. Meanwhile, I’ll be transitioning in a hurry back toward writing as the primary focus. While I haven’t exactly shelved my project this April, I’ve let myself focus on it less in exchange for the knowledge that I’m going to block out most everything else once debate is officially over. It’s been good to let parts of the book simmer and incubate and while the original May 17th deadline is starting to look truly unreasonable, I’m excited to take the best shot I can at it anyway.

Many people, meanwhile, are asking questions about different aspects of my summer, and beyond trying to finish The Best of All Possible Worlds by mid-May (or probably mid-June), everything’s up in the air. Emily still doesn’t have an internship locked down yet, and a great deal of my schedule depends on hers, though we will probably open her internship spending the most time we’ve spent apart since we started dating almost nine years ago. I don’t relish this thought, but I am eager to see as much of her internship locale (hopefully in Africa somewhere) as possible once that gets underway, even if it’s after a month or so of separation. As we get more information, the dominoes will start to align and fall and I will probably have a whole schedule of the summer ready to go. Until then, though, limbo.

Which is exactly what April feels like. What April always seems to feel like. And not the limbo of backbreaking stick-walks or even weightless space travel, but the limbo of its original use: purgatory. I am suspended in a kind of uncomfortable gray silence, processing the past and anticipating a foggy future still taking shape. Maybe it looks like ash, maybe like shaken earth. Maybe it looks like nothing at all. Were shaky, uncertain, somewhat miserable Aprils not so predictable, they would scare me. They probably did in high school, before I’d figured out the pattern, they felt like the end of the world. Now it’s just the world that feels that way. For me, April’s just being April. The cruelest month. When streams are ripe and swelled with rain. Fools. Showers.

Mayday. May Day.

From time to time, I feel the need to post a rambly cattle-call of happenings in my life and links around the web. I should start designating a day to do this and making it something like a regular feature, but that would probably require me approaching this blog with the discipline of a professional columnist.

• It seems I don’t write much about politics here anymore, largely because of the twin forces of Duck and Cover and TMR getting first crack at my political musings. I almost cross-posted this commentary on Obama’s lack of Socialism here, but instead I’m just linking it. Enjoy.
• As promised yesterday, I recently put up the APDA Nats brackets for 2010, complete with results of submitted brackets from current APDAites. (Those distant from debate should note that this is not how APDA Nats is actually structured, but a hypothetical based on the NCAA basketball tourney.) This hasn’t generated as much discussion that’s gotten back to me as I expected, but I’ve heard rumors that people are still enjoying it from afar. Given that I’m on a bid to become Tab Director of Nats 2011, this will probably be the last of these I do for a while… it seems a little weird for people involved in the Nats tab staff to publish a ranking of debaters partaking at that tournament, which is why I didn’t do one in 2007.
• The last two M’s games have been amazing. I missed the Tuesday game because I was doing prep work with the Rutgers team for Nats, but yesterday’s was a real gem. I am a huge fan of the new additions to the team, including the fact that Milton Bradley seems to be happy and ready to produce for this team. But Chone Figgins is threatening to become my favorite Mariner. Between the steals and the walks, he reminds me of Rickey Henderson so much it’s ridiculous. And I loved Rickey Henderson. But he seems to have even less of an ego than Rickey, which was the latter’s one annoying trait. Then again, Chone isn’t exactly contending for the all-time steals title.
• Did, in fact, get our taxes in on-time, yesterday. We do owe both states a little money, and TaxAct scammed us out of more money than they should have. But it’s done and the Feds owe us a lot.
• I wonder if the West will characterize this bombing as “freedom fighting” while everyone else utilizing these methods are “terrorists”.
• My mental state and health have continued to be somewhat subpar in recent weeks. The main issues seem to be a general feeling of dissociative malaise and surreality that may just be endemic to April, and also migraines. I’ve been averaging about 4 migraines a week, an astounding spike in frequency that seems inexplicable when observing normal triggers and factors. This combines uncomfortably with this dreamlike sense of reality that’s overtaken much of my last 2-3 weeks, which may partially be related to the subject matter of the current novel I’m working on. (Though I haven’t been working nearly as much as I’d like, but I’m mostly doing plot work to enable really cramming on output in the next month or so.) I feel largely like I’ve been looking at my life from 30,000 feet, or at least 30 feet, watching myself live instead of actually being in a first-person view. It’s strange and makes me sound completely nuts. I’m not completely nuts. I just feel more like I’m living through a filter than that I’m actually fully here. I sort of feel that this reality is all illusory anyway and that life’s core realities are a little like our souls playing a video game (but with meaningful consequences) on this planet, so maybe I’m just more aware of that reality.
• The other explanation for the above issues, of course, may be that there’s something seriously wrong with my brain. I’m inclined to think otherwise, but it’s good to keep all the possibilities in mind. I’ve told Emily to keep an eye out for me behaving really erratically or out of character, which would be indicative of a possible brain tumor. I’m not actually that worried, though, because the migraine symptoms have been so classic. (Though such symptoms also mirror those of tumors and aneurysms somewhat.) The other factor that I entertained was that I was somehow drinking decaf coffee – that the batch of Folgers I’m working through is either mislabeled or contaminated somehow. Because honestly, foggy worldview, increased tiredness, and more migraines could all be explained by caffeine deficiency too.
• Debate Nationals this weekend – always one of the most exciting times of the year. I’ve attended 7 of the last 11 nationals prior to this one and this weekend will make 8 of 12. For all that I probably should feel a little strange about being so old and having seen so much on APDA, I really feel nothing of the sort. I think I’ve been in the work world long enough to understand just how meaningful and valuable I find the APDA community to be, to treasure how rare its intellectuality is. I’ve been thinking a little about how much work I’ve put in to the Rutgers team, all unpaid, and realizing that I don’t see any of it as a chore. I think this is what it would be like to really love one’s job, because I do it all voluntarily. I’ve worked for organizations I truly love before, but never felt this way about the actual work. If the writing doesn’t work out, I need to figure out a way to swing professional debate coaching. Possibly in Africa.
• 

Today is a little like Christmas, or my birthday before I got old, or going to Disneyland, or going to see a Mariners game.

Today I get to tab a tournament.

For those outside the debate world, “tabbing” is the magic system by which debate tournament staff determine which teams shall face each other in any given round. There are very particular rules and processes to determine this, as guided by custom and refined over time, with fairness and competitive advancement of the tournament as ultimate goals.

The means used are either new computer programs that never seem to work properly or good old index cards, markers, and pencils. As the prior sentence indicates, I heavily favor the latter.

Even those of you familiar with debate tournaments and their culture may be confused at why getting to tab a tournament feels more like visiting a theme park than just doing some work or having a regular day. Sure, having a certain amount of control and ultimate knowledge about the tournament is entertaining. But that’s not really what makes tabbing special. Rather, it’s some combination of my affection for some relatively basic concepts: applied statistics, sorting, order, and competition.

It doesn’t hurt that I’m pretty good at it and pride myself on making tournaments run on-time. Tab is the single biggest factor in whether a tournament runs close to time (rare) or lags well behind schedule (common).

The tournament in question is, of course, our own tournament – the Rutgers tournament, the last tournament of the year before Nationals. For all but one of our teams, this will close the debate season, put a cap on probably the most successful year Rutgers has had in its modern incarnation on the parliamentary circuit. It’s important for it to be a good experience. We have lots of entertainment and food and a decent number of competitors, though late flakiness is reducing our size just a little.

Size matters not, though. It’s going to be a good time. I have my index cards and markers ready to go. And, perhaps more importantly, I get to teach a whole new generation to love tab. One member of each class returning next year will be in tab with me, learning the trade.

I can’t wait.

New image up top. Refresh the page if you can’t see it. If you still can’t see it, well, here it is below:

One of the subtler overall changes on the page, going with a relative simplicity that reflects my effort to refind some focus. I’m not that far off, not all over the place, but still not quite as centered as I’d like to be. Ever since I got back from Virginia (all of 48 hours ago), I’ve felt a bit foggy, rather dissociative. As though this is all a big dream I’m about to snap awake from. Not all of it, as in the last 30 years, but all of it, maybe most of the last 48 hours. It’s odd.

Of course, in part, it’s April. Every April, I get to thinking and hoping that maybe it won’t be so bad, so strange, so despondent. Most Aprils, I have to remember that there’s a reason I have this whole time-is-a-place theory going. This time round, at least, I have two insanely busy debate weeks back-to-back to keep me distracted. And then it’ll be time to enter the home stretch of a book that feels like it’s not quite off the ground yet. This month may yet prove to me that two books a year is a more reasonable expectation than three.

But I’m still hoping otherwise.

This past weekend was pretty debate-heavy as well, if only because it takes about 13 hours to drive round-trip to and from Charlottesville, home of one of the better campuses in its absolute peak time. Arriving in Virginia under an 88-degree sky was pretty much just what I needed at the time and I thoroughly enjoyed the tournament there, in no small part because of Rutgers’ great successes. Not only did Dave break for the second straight weekend and the third in the last six, but our newest novices were second novice team and both made the top ten novice speakers. And Dave & Chris managed to establish that they own 7th place, having finished exactly 7th all three tournaments they attended together. One could do a lot worse, especially for a junior-freshman duo. The tournament also just managed to be a bunch of fun, I got to judge many good rounds, and everyone was generally in high spirits. Although the less said about Friday night the better – suffice it to say that it’s easy to block out the worse parts of college over time and thus even harder to when they’re re-presented to you.

The only good thing about April, consistently, other than debate Nats I guess, is the start of baseball season. And what a great start it was today, with the M’s almost coughing up a win only to demonstrate they might have enough offense this year after all. Watching Chone Figgins and Casey Kotchman come through so consistently was great. I am going to have a lot of fun watching this team run this year. It was all almost enough to make up for the heartbreaking NCAA Finals, though that itself was such a great game. And both of these were big uppers compared to the amazing but horrifying video that Russ has up on TMR.

That video was on its way to sending me into quite the tailspin. If you don’t want to make the jump or want to know what you’re getting into first, it’s basically 40 minutes of American military chatter about 11 unarmed civilians that were slaughtered in a 2007 incident the US denied knowledge of until very recently. This is followed toward the end by a triple-missile attack on a building that also seems filled with civilians. It’s perhaps the most chilling piece of video I’ve ever seen in my life. As bad as it is to watch 11 people killed (and trust me, one sees them shot and killed), it’s probably worse to hear the live reaction from the people committing the murders. In some ways it feels like a vindication of all the things I say about people in that situation, but I’d really rather just be wrong. Perhaps most compelling of all is the vision of the blurry lines between video games and reality for a whole generation of American soldiers. The whole situation, from the dialogue to the monochrome target-screen, has the look and feel of a sophisticated first-person shooter (I mean, think about that phrase as a genre of video game on face there for a second) and one gets the sense that the people killing can’t quite get over the psychic break between the surrealistic setting and the fact that what they’re doing is all too real. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking; maybe they know full well and are just that awful and/or manipulated.

In any event, I’m still struggling with it. It’ll be with me for a long time. It’s encouraging to know that there are people who would post it, who would make it available, who would spread it around, though part of me almost feels like it’s an Orwellian exemplification of how much can be gotten away with. Still mulling.

The cat’s sick and we took her to the vet, who knew no more about why she was sneezing and wheezing than they do about my migraines. But they gave her some medication, just like me, and wished her the best. There was a lot else on my list to do today, but I only did about three other things. My brain refuses to be still and yet won’t move quickly either. It’s pickling in a jar, just for a time, letting itself soak up the brine between the folds like some grimy spa catharsis. As though to gird itself for April and all it entails. As though to make the push into the depth of where I need to go to really fulfill The Best of All Possible Worlds.

I don’t like pickles.

Please note that, despite the timing and the strange headline, this post is not in fact related to April Fool’s Day.

Also, please note that I discuss reviews of the first 5,000 words of American Dream On below. I try to avoid spoilers, but tread a little lightly if you want to read it and haven’t yet.

Just got done reading my feedback from ABNA and I couldn’t be much happier. No, they didn’t make some mistake and fail to put through my submission despite its glowing reviews. But the feedback was so positive on what I need it to be positive on and the negativity was either (A) innate to the contest or (B) innate to the fact that American Dream On is hard-hitting and bleak.

So I thought the excerpt would be judged largely on hook and, when it didn’t advance, I was concerned about this. Needn’t have been:

The flow of the story is easy to follow and to connect with. The words fly off the pages impacting the reader. American Dream On tugs at the reader’s heart and conscience. The characters’ pain and determination to get their message or action across is experienced by the person reading. The things that once mattered now seem almost as though it was a wasted thought.

How about character development?

The strongest aspect of “American Dream On” is the author’s ability to create a character. This excerpt has great character development.

Whew. So why didn’t it go through?

The tone of the story needs to be worked on. The negative aspect of American Dream On is overbearing. When writing a sequence of bad, unfortunate, or even dismal beginnings, there has to be some sort of light to take away the effects of the darkness.

While some people (my own mother, for example) agree with this assessment, I think this is largely a problem with the contest. Number one, I don’t think Amazon Vine Reviewers are largely comprised of people who read dystopian works or critiques of their society. But more to the point, they probably assumed that they were reading the first 10% of the novel, not the first 3.7%. My work was one of the longer ones submitted, and very few seemed to be over 100k words, with ADO weighing in at 135k words. Indeed, one of the two reviewers went on to say:

I would like to note that I strongly suspect that the excerpt is from a short story collection rather than a novel. If that is the case, then “American Dream On” violates the submission rules for the ABNA contest. However, to be on the safe side, I am reviewing this excerpt as though it is a novel consisting of three independent stories interwoven together.

This makes one of the most damning aspects of the contest the failure to provide the pitches with the excerpts. I simply cannot comprehend the failure to do this, but for three years, they’ve done it the same way and it seems to be a deliberate choice. They wouldn’t print a book without a back jacket flap, so it befuddles me why they insist on making readers judge excerpts without any context. Of course, there are 5 threads in this novel and only 3 are introduced in the excerpt, so it’s no wonder people came away from the experience confused. If only they could’ve grasped the breadth of this work.

They didn’t fail to grasp its bleakness, though:

“American Dream On” is the type of novel you wouldn’t want to read if you are already suffering from depression. It may drive you to attempt suicide. Written in a morbid style that varies in degree from one character to another, this novel may turn your American dreams into American nightmares.

Wow. Talk about impact. This is actually the kind of comment that makes me elated, not because I’m sick or morbid or want people to be suicidal, but because I can see that I’m really affecting people. Two total strangers read this work and both came away distressed. The paragraph above the one just posted above called it “provocative”. Bingo. This is what it’s all about.

I wonder how many times Orwell got comments like this:

The writing style creates a depressing mood that never relinquishes. The reader can’t help but wonder if the entire novel is an emotional downer. Isn’t there enough sadness already in the world to create more?

Clearly, this contest was not a match for this novel. But I’m really energized by the nature of the critique of the excerpt. No one thought the writing was bad or failed to be engaging. People reacted to the characters, drawn in by their pain and even driven in one case to “hatred”. The work is emotionally vibrant and jumps off the page, grabbing people. A lot of them don’t like the experience, don’t want to go there. That’s fair enough. But there’s serious writing and then there’re feel-good stories. One of these prompts people to change their life and one of them makes them go to bed assuming everything’s just hunky-dory.

Now if only I can find a publisher who isn’t looking for the feel-good story of the year…

I’m someone who is fairly accustomed to winning things. Debate rounds, scholarships, jobs, contests. Not NCAA March Madness pools, perhaps, but a lot of other things.

Late yesterday, it was announced that I will not be winning the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. American Dream On missed the cut of the top 250 books to proceed to the quarterfinals.

It feels like a bigger setback than it should. Until I found the contest, shortly before the entries were being accepted, this was never even on my radar. My approach was going to be to try to find an agent. Of course I got complacent about that process once I was chugging along in the contest, starting to feel a sense of destiny or serendipity about the whole thing. So now I’m back at the drawing board and not getting a gift feels like a loss.

Of course there’s also the sting of the rejection, although I don’t know yet the grounds for said rejection. The pitch that I threw together on the last day somehow was deemed in the top 20% of pitches, which fueled my confidence that the actual excerpt, which every reader so far, even the person who hated the book overall, have found to be exciting and something that draws the reader in, would be deemed in the top 25%. Didn’t happen and I want to know why. The pain of anything negative is reduced greatly by understanding its source reasons. It is not knowing why something goes wrong that will drive a person crazy. So I’m a bit in the throes of that until I can grapple with the reasons.

At that point, the reasons will either make sense and give me direction for reworking things, or they will be things endemic to the contest (for example, I do have a bit of a fear that the first 2.5 chapters make the novel seem like it should have been entered in the “Young Adult” category, even though ADO is certainly not a Young Adult work on the whole), which will not bug me too much, though I will regret that such technicalities kept me from a shot at getting someone to read the whole book for this contest. It’s impossible to speculate. It’s even possible I got one rave review and one pan, which would likely not have been enough to put me in the top quarter of books. In which case I can use both the pitch and the rave review to move forward.

Moving forward. That’s the main thing. Getting to a mindset where I don’t even remember this contest as anything other than confirmation that I wrote a good pitch statement, the thing I was least sure of in this whole process. It will take some time, like getting over anything, but I’m not too concerned. The main thing is to not generate a series of misgivings from this process, to not take the opinions of one or two people as more serious than everything else people have confirmed about the quality of the book. To not let this make me take people missing the main allegory of the novel too seriously. To trust my instincts, my work, my efforts. And to keep having fun with the current project.

So it’s all fine, ultimately. I guess the real dream or thrall of this contest was getting to avoid some of the business side of writing. Not having to deal with agents and the monetary side as much. Not having to deal with capitalism’s absurd tentacles infecting the one thing I’ve felt unfetteredly good about doing with my life. But so it goes. Better to face up to the reality now than have it sneak up on my later. I guess.