Slacking on the old blog... again!

So much for me saying that I was going to try and do a better job of posting...

Well, the good news is I've been busy with some other writing projects that I'm working on (which is why I haven't written much over here). I'm trying my hand at a novella of some sort. Not sure if it'll go anywhere, but so far I'm having fun with it. I'd tell you guys more about it, but every time I get excited and tell somebody what I'm working on, the book decides to stop playing nice with me.

True story. Serious!

Onto something that isn't writing related, I finally saw the movie PROMETHEUS. My thoughts on it? It was an okay movie. Not great, but certainly not horrible. I went into it with low expectations. I just wanted to be entertained, and I wanted to have some creepy/gross out moments. That pretty much happened.

Yep. That's why I don't write reviews any more. Because that's about all I have to say about it!

So that's pretty much what I've been up to. I'll try to post more than once a month... but I think we know how that's going to turn out!

All Prologue (everybody has a story)

(the title of today's blog comes from the title of an episode from HBO's THE WIRE)

My girlfriend and I went to Dave and Buster's on Wednesday to take advantage of their "half-priced games" deal. It's become our new favorite place. For those of you who haven't been there, think of a more grown-up version of Chucky Cheese's (is that how you spell the name of the place? I could look it up, but I'm too lazy right now). They've got games, and they've got booze.

How can one not have fun?

I guess this would be my version of gambling, although gambling doesn't seem as fun. At least there, I'm well aware that all I'm doing is spending money to win tickets. Tickets that I may never end up using, yet I still feel proud when I hit a jackpot.

Anyway, there was this sad looking man who was sitting at one of the games. He was there long before we got there. He just sat there and played the same game over and over again. He must've been in his late forties or early fifties. He had to keep calling the workers over because he'd clean the machine out of tickets.

He didn't look like he was having fun. He looked like a character I'd written about in a short story, In Decline (which also inspired the title for my short story collection). He just sat there and played the same machine over and over again. When his card would run out of points to play the game, he'd simply run over to the re-charge machine and drop some more money on it.

We heard the man say he was trying to win a new iPad. Now, I don't know if there was one in the actual machine, or he was saving up tickets to buy one at the store. Either way, the man must've blown close to a grand or so.

A bag full of stacks and stacks of tickets rested by his feet, as he played the machine more and more.

It was kind of bumming us out, if you want to know the truth. It was just a sad scene. This must've been Dave & Buster's version of a degenerate gambler. My girlfriend wondered if the man had a family, and if they thought he was at work. Maybe they laid him off because he was spending too much time at D&B's. Those one hour lunch breaks turned into three hour lunch breaks one too many times for his boss to stomach.

Maybe he didn't have a family. It could've been that he was trying to win an iPad so he could sell it to somebody. Or, the iPad had become a sick obessesion for him. Maybe it started innocently enough at the start, but then he grew determined to win the blasted gadget.

This is all speculation, of course. But that's what a story teller does. He looks at somebody and tries to think of a back story. What brought that person there and what was his or her motivation.

Everybody has a story. We may not know exactly what that story is, but it doesn't stop us from coming up with one on our own. You don't have to be an author or a writer. It's something we all do from time to time.

Effin' Mondays...

No, I didn't steal this "act" from Garfield... then again, maybe I did. I always have a hard time starting the week, especially since now I'm always doing something fun on the weekend. After two mornings of not having to worry about setting that friggen' alarm clock, it's a grind when the reality sets in that I have to wake up at around 5:30 the next morning.

I don't even really hate the whole day. It's usually the mornings that are rough. It takes me a bit to get used to the weekday, but as soon as it's over then I'm usually good to go for the rest of the week.

While I've always had my dislike of Monday, I think I really only started playing on that fact in public for maybe the past year or two. Why? I dunno. It's fun to gripe about a day that most everybody hates. I already know what I can put up for a status on Facebook, and I already know what my first tweet will be on Twitter.

It even gave me a blog post to write about.

No... I won't thank Monday for that. Effin' Monday...

Pennywise gives it their "All or Nothing"

I became a fan of Pennywise around 2008, I believe. I always heard about them but never really gave them a listen until then. I heard their latest album, REASON TO BELIEVE, and immediately I fell in love with them.

And that wasn't even their best album. I quickly bought every album they had on iTunes after that and they became one of my favorite bands. They're always playing on my iPod now, along with NOFX (who I also just discovered a few years ago--yes, I'm always late to the party on these things, but better late than never!).

I was crushed when I learned the lead singer left the band. After watching the documentary, THE OTHER F-WORD, it seemed like he was burned out and wanted to spend more time with his family. I could respect and appreciate that.

When I heard that they found a new lead singer and they were going to come out with a new album, I had my doubts. I sampled the album when it was free on KROQ for a week or so, but I didn't give it a fair listen. Immediately I thought, "Man, it's just not Pennywise without Jim." The songs were good, don't get me wrong, but I just couldn't get into it.

Replacing lead singers is one of the toughest things bands have to do. Very, very tricky to pull off, but there have been successful bands who were able to pull it off. I just listened to the new Alice in Chains not too long ago, and I have to admit it's a damned good album.

Yesterday, I found out that Jim (former lead singer of Pennywise) didn't leave the music scene after all. He started up a new band of his own. And that's when I realized that he probably was having other issues with the band, and it wasn't only about spending more time with his family.

So what's a band to do? Everybody else in Pennywise still wanted to move on as a band. Jim's happy doing his own thing. And while we'll always love the "Jim" days, there's no reason to hold a grudge against the new guy. Bands have to move on.

I decided to give them another shot. Not only that, but I bought the album. Because I love the band, I wanted to support them. I gave it another listen, and this time I really did keep an open mind.

I'm glad I did.

It's a really, really good album. The lead singer might sound a bit different, but the overall Pennywise sound is still there. I've listened to the album at least three times now, and it just keeps getting better for me.

I know some people out there won't be able to love the new Pennywise. There's nothing wrong with that. But still, give them a fair chance. You may surprise yourself.

The story behind "Dead Things"

I have a little story in a short story collection called, “Dead Things.” It can be found in THE GATE 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair, which was edited by the fantastic Robert J. Duperre. I wrote a little bit about how the story came about at the very end, but thought I’d go into a little more detail in this blog.

When I started out writing at a very young age, I had this idea in my head that I’d write thrillers, action/suspense novels, horror novels, and so on. My early writing sucked because I was always trying to come up with over complicated plots. I was good at fleshing out characters, and I was really good at writing dialogue. But when I would try to come up with a story idea, I’d always fall flat because I was thinking too much about the plot. I started a lot of stories and never ended up finishing most of them.

Things changed at college when I was introduced to Raymond Carver. I remember when we first started reading his stories, I was completely baffled. At first, the ending felt abrupt and I couldn’t see much of a plot. But the stories stuck with me and the more I read, the more I fell in love. As I read more of his stories, I said to myself, “These are the stories I want to write.” You didn’t have to have a complex plot. You needed characters that seemed real. They could be flawed as hell, but so long as you made them interesting enough for the reader, you were set.

I think that’s when my writing really started to take shape. I was no longer bogged down by plots that didn’t work out. I simply wrote about everyday issues with everyday people. Most of the stories were sad. Many of them didn’t offer happy endings. Yet, they seemed to work.

Jump ahead a few years and not only am I writing slice-of-life fiction, but I also find out that I can write dark humor and horror in a form called “drabbles,” which are 100-word short stories. I had a lot of fun with the drabbles, but I also needed a break from them so I could focus on my true love, which is slice-of-life fiction.

I wrote this story a few months back before Rob contacted me and asked if I wanted to be a part of his collection. It was originally called, “Childish Matters,” although truth be told, I was never completely happy with the title at the time. That first title just came about because of a conversation that takes place between a father and his son when they’re talking about an old lady neighbor who is losing her mind. I’d read a story about a woman who wasn’t all there in the head beforehand, and I thought it’d be fun to write a character like that in a story. I knew she wouldn’t be the main character, nor would she be the main focus of the story. But it was a starting point. It started off in my head as an old woman knocking on her neighbor’s door, screaming about zombies.

Then the story focuses on the father and his son. The wife is no longer in the picture. At first, I wasn’t sure why. I just thought that maybe she wasn’t ready to be a mother and just walked out forever. I also knew that these so-called zombies that the old woman was screaming about were actually stoned teenagers on a playground.

And then it hit me; what if the father’s wife ended up becoming a drug addict? When I realized that, that’s when it made seeing the drugged-out teenagers even more powerful to me. It had a more devastating effect.

And that’s how the story came to be.

So when Rob asked me to be a part of the short story collection, I was trying to come up with some really complicated horror story. Again, going back to when I was little.

Bad, bad Mikey.

He told me I should focus on what I do best, and that’s slice-of-life. It didn’t have to be a horror story, so long as it fit the theme of the collection, which was “isolation” and “despair.” I told him I had this story that I finished not too long ago. He told me to send it over, so I did.

He loved it. He really, really loved it. And that was a huge compliment, because I really do think it might be one of the best stories I’ve written so far.

Rob fine tuned the story here and there, as editors do. I was happy to see that he didn’t think it needed any major changes, although I was prepared to have an open mind in case if changes needed to be made.

One change he made was the title. He also extended the ending just a little bit, while still staying true to the very last scene I had in my head. When he told me the new title, I fell in love with it. As I said, I was never happy with “Childish Matters,” but at the time that was the best I could do.

“Dead Things” is a much different story for me. While it helped me return to writing what I love, it was a bit different from what I normally write. Usually, my stories are very depressing and don’t offer happy endings for the characters. And while this story is indeed bleak and sad, it does offer a very touching moment. While there are no sure answers as to what would happen in the future, there was a little light at the end of the tunnel and it didn’t end as a downer.

 I wouldn’t have it end any other way.

So, this is how Friday begins for me...

Happy Friday!

That's right... this is how the morning began for me. Two effin' paper cuts at the same time. Even for me, that's pretty amazing. It's a new record, that's for sure!

If you ever wanted to know where I came up with the inspiration for the drabble, "Solution," where a character decides to deal with paper cuts in an extreme manner... well, now ya know!

Although, I don't think I'll take things quite that far.

(and yes, that's an instagram of said paper cuts that you're looking at. that's how I roll)

Something random...

I love to tweet.

I didn’t at first. When I started out, I didn’t have any books out and only a few of my friends were following me. I treated it like a mini-blog at the time. I think I had twenty followers, or something like that. It was small, whatever the number was.

After a while, I lost interest and stopped. I still liked to follow tweets from others, but I stopped tweeting.

When I started publishing books on my own, my friends told me that I should reconnect with Twitter. It can be a great marketing tool. So, I grumbled and forced myself back on. Then, I started getting followed by fellow authors and suddenly I was in triple digits.

Big whoop, I know. But for somebody who only had twenty following him at the time, that’s a pretty big fucking number!

Now that I’ve become more comfortable on Twitter, I find myself having fun on it. Too much fun, perhaps. While I do plug my books here and there, I mostly just write a bunch of nonsensical tweets. They range anywhere from corny to downright random. I’m not sure if I’m really entertaining anybody out there, but I know I’m enjoying the hell out of it!

Maybe the main reason why I love to tweet more than do actual blogging is because I can be random with it. I don’t have to have an agenda for the day. I don’t have to put deep thought into what I’m going to write. I just throw it out there. If it gets a laugh, cool. If not, no biggie. I try not to have my page look like nothing but tweets with links in them. Not trashing anybody who does that. If it’s working for you, groovy. I just know for me personally, I tend to tune out when I see nothing but links and promoting. So I do my best to avoid that on my page. I’ll plug a few times, don’t get me wrong, but for the most part I try to tweet about things that aren’t necessarily tied to my writing and books.

I come off as a goofball… because I am a goofball. And proud of it, dammit!

Twitter is probably a better representation of me than any blog entry I end up writing. When I blog, I feel like I have to have an agenda. That there has to be a reason for me writing a particular entry. And it’s hardly ever random, which is sad. I don’t know why I feel like it always has to be about my writing and books on here when I don’t do the same on Twitter.

After all, you can only take so much when it comes to listening to somebody talk about writing and their current projects. That doesn’t really give you a good insight into the person. If you just went by my blog entries here, you’d think all I did was write and try to sell books when that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Is there a reason for this blog entry? Honest answer? No. I just thought I’d be completely random today, much like I am on Twitter. There’s no reason why I can’t have fun on here like I do on Twitter. The only person preventing that from happening is me.

(for more goofy inane babble, you can follow me on Twitter!)