In case you haven't figured it out, I've been fighting off a bad depression for several weeks, and right now it pretty much has me where it wants me. I look at my neglected LJ and I feel sorry that I have so few words for the people who helped me, literally, through the failure of the federal levees and its aftermath. But words, even enough to make a blog entry, just feel so ... goddamn ... heavy right now. I'm still trying to struggle along with it, give you some content, make myself find something to say. But more often I find myself posting on Twitter, which people I respect have called inane, lazy, grunting. Maybe it is, maybe that's why I still have the energy for it. How much challenge can there be in 140 characters? Even I can handle that. If you miss me, and God knows I miss so many of you, come see me there:

http://twitter.com/docbrite

marquisdd's 8/29 entry makes me remember writing the last paragraphs of Soul Kitchen days before we evacuated: "How the hell did we ever end up with so much good luck? Rickey wondered. What if something bad happened to balance it out? Then he thought of everything that had happened over the last few months, and he began to laugh. If the balancing hadn't already happened, the world was a crueler place than he was willing to believe."

It sure was, Rickey (I miss you like a brother). One of my silly but self-amusing little conceits of the sort writers tend to cultivate, unremarked upon by anyone as far as I know, is that all three of the extant Liquor novels end with the characters laughing together. Even if I manage to write another someday, I don't think I'll be able to end one that way again.

For nearly two years I could not look at my Authors Guild bulletins at all, and would throw them in the trash as soon as they came. Now their headlines grow increasingly desperate (Spring 2009 issue: "Can This Industry be Saved?"; "The Future of Publishing"; "Keeping Calm in Changing Times" ... ), and I have to confess that I enjoy little thrills of schadenfreude as I flip through it. Not about the misfortunes of writers; I could never enjoy the fact that writers and books have fallen on hard times, but when I think of the incompetent 22-year-old assistant editors and publicists crying because they've lost their benefits package, I must admit I come a little more alive inside.

(From the "Along Publishers Row" column -- and please note that all the Guild's missing apostrophes are sic:

A cartoon by David Sipress in The New Yorker shows a smiling editor behind her desk. Across from her, an author looks shocked as the editor says, "We'd like to publish it, do nothing to promote it, and watch it disappear from the shelves in less than a month.")

Ah, kiddies, I am a bitter old publishing buzzard for sure.

Here's a true one-of-a-kind item: a hand-written piece of perversion by yours truly!

Auction description:

In 1989, Ian McDowell (MORDRED'S CURSE, MERLIN'S GIFT, "Geraldine" in Poppy Z. Brite's LOVE IN VEIN) wrote CRAZY CREATIVE WRITING: STORY STARTERS AND WORD BANKS, a reproducable workbook for teachers of grades 1-4, which was published in 1995 by Carson-Dellosa, an educational pubilshing company based in Greensboro, NC. The book consisted of 30 "Story Starters" -- that is, the first paragraphs of stories, such as "Donna was in her room, playing a game on her computer. Suddenly, a big fat toad hopped out from under the bed and jumped on the monitor. "Give me a kiss, Cute Stuff," it said. "I'm a prince." The reader was then instructed to WRITE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT on the ruled lines following the first paragraph, and use as many words as possible from the provided "Word Bank" while doing so. Each Story Starter was accompanied by an illustration and 12-16 blank lines on which to write, as well as the aforementioned Word Bank.

I'm Ian and will stop talking about myself in the third person now. In the later 90s, I started pestering various professional writer friends to complete a page in one of my contributor's copies of this book. Quite a few complied. NEIL GAIMAN took the story of the Frog Prince described above. POPPY Z. BRITE took the story of Abe, the boy who'd always wanted to join the army, in a VERY perverse direction. Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote a lovely mini-story about Hannah, who woke up one day to find she'd turned into a horrible monster. Kelly Link wrote about Julia and her rapidly expanding cat, turning it into a mini-epic. Other contributors included Mehitobel Wilson, Phillip Nutman, Rain Graves, and Rachel Manija Brown.

The stories are short, but they're original pieces of fiction which will never be published anywhere (I'm pretty sure they can't be, as the begining of each story, the part I wrote, was Work-for-Hire and presumably still owned by Carson-Dellosa, who would not be pleased with the decidedly adult direction some of these authors took the material). Neil Gaiman's, for instance, is 150 words long, and like most of the other contributions, imaginative and laugh-out-loud funny. Each contribution is in the author's own hand writing. You can't have a more limited edition, or a more unique collectable (and yes, I know "more unique" is a barbarism) than this.

Here's a link to the item, which unfortunately isn't mine because it should sell for a mint! Ian's a pal, though, and this really is a nifty thing, so I thought I'd mention it.

In case anyone thought otherwise, yesterday's entry was just a bit of silliness; I do not actually judge my characters by the Mary Sue Litmus Test. As greygirlbeast pointed out in a couple of recent entries, the Mary Sue concept is stupid and essentially meaningless outside the context of fanfic. A reader commented on prime_liquor, "I love Lost Souls, but each and every character leans heavily on the Mary Sue level!" Well, maybe not each and every one -- the fun of being, say, Wallace or Ann escapes me -- but every writer puts varying amounts of himself into every character, especially the characters he likes best, and in youthful works like Lost Souls I think it just shows more.

I will say that my feelings about fanfic have changed drastically over the past couple of years. This may have something to do with not writing and publishing, or possibly just with gaining some kind of perspective on life in general. I still don't want to read fanfic or slash, and I still think anyone who would try to make unauthorized money from another writer's creations is a morally and creatively bankrupt scumsucker (hello, Potato Falls or whatever that stupid "controversial" fanfic novel is called), but it is now hard for me to recall why I once saw it as this huge invasion if someone liked my characters well enough to want to make up more stories about them and publish said stories on a free website where maybe 15 people would read them. The older I get, the more I realize that I have not always chosen my crusades carefully enough.

I took the Mary Sue Litmus Test for my earliest and most recent "autobiographical" characters. (I use "autobiographical" not to suggest that the characters' lives have resembled mine in any way, but because they were the characters I most identified with/felt I resembled while writing the stories in question.)

Nothing from Lost Souls:

Your Mary Sue Score: 100 (71 points or more: Irredeemable-Sue. You're going to have to start over, my friend. I know you want to keep writing, but no. Just no.)

Rickey from the Liquor novels:

Your Mary Sue Score: 39 (36-55 points: Mary-Sue. Your character needs some work in order to be believable. But despair not; you should still be able to salvage her with a little effort. Don't give up.)

So apparently I've been guilty of Suedom my entire career, but I have improved some.

So after having had it on my shelf for a couple of years, I finally read Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It's amusing, quite well-written, has an interesting main character, and probably seems exotic to people who haven't read a lot about sub-Saharan Africa, but I was somewhat at a loss to understand the massive literary fuss that has been made over it and the ensuing series. Of course, writers usually can't control whether their books are annoyingly hyped, ignored, or (if they happen to be writing for Three Rivers Press) flushed down the toilet, so I am in no way blaming Smith for this fervor; it's better to see well-written books being hyped than the usual movies and TV shows.

Still, I felt I wasn't quite getting the appeal. Then suddenly it hit me. Duh, it's even in the cover blurb: this is what people mean when they speak of "a charming book." And on the heels of that, I realized with a mixture of sadness and perverse pride that, with all the past holds and whatever the future may hold, I have never written and will probably never write a charming book. An Amazon reviewer called D*U*C*K "cute" (which to me is damning with very faint praise, though they seemed to mean it nicely), but, like The Value of X, it has all that cocaine and buttsex in it.

[Car conversation between me and Chris, discussing a publisher who asked for more rights than I was willing to sell]

PZB: I had to tell them it wasn't my first day at the rodeo.

CdB: It wasn't even your second day at the rodeo.

PZB: Actually, I was on my way out the door of the arena where the rodeo was being held.

CdB: Elvis has left the building.

[pause]

PZB: I don't have a megacolon.

And that seems like a good note upon which to mention that it is now My Official Birthday Month, and that on May 25 I will be 42 and will have the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and that I do have a wish list if anyone should care to glance at it. I told Chris I wanted a hose reel and storage box, but he said that wasn't very romantic. I beg to differ. Good ones aren't cheap, it will make my life easier, and I will think of him each time I use it, which will be almost every day.

If you belong to prime_liquor or nextroundsonme, you may already know that I was asked to contribute to Livejournal's tenth-anniversary anthology. After some foolish angsting about how I wasn't going to get paid for something I do for free in the first place, I sent in my chosen five entries and promptly caught the superflu. When I was finally well enough to check my e-mail, I found that I'd made the final round but had blown the deadline to send back their contract. Happily, they seem to have forgiven me this, and my entry will either appear in the anthology or receive an honorable mention (I'm not sure when I find out which).

As I expected, the piece chosen was "Not OK." I initially planned to submit this one, then almost didn't, then went through fits of agony after I had, all because I worried that it would appear in the book and stupid people would read it and think it described how things are in New Orleans now. Then I regained a portion of my senses and remembered that you cannot make your plans according to what stupid people might think. (And of course, numbers 8, 10, and 13 are still true, along with some of the others to varying degrees.) At any rate, as the sperm said to the egg, it's an honor to be chosen out of millions. Thanks to everyone who suggested other possible entries, soothed my fevered brow, or helped in any of the many, many other ways that people have helped me during the nearly six (!) years I have kept this journal.

One day I may write of something interesting again, like the Chekov-esque saga of my vegetable seedlings (if we have cucumbers and tomatoes this year, they will have been watered by my sweat and tears) or my four pretty good weeks off Cymbalta followed by my one spectacularly bad week (I'm back on the shit now, and have pretty much accepted that I will need to stay on it for the foreseeable future if I have any hope of acting like something human, but I don't like it, dammit). For now, my major ambitions in life are to finish the book-shaped treasure box I was making before I got sick and to maybe get a few things on eBay before the week is out. Please be patient with me.

Looking back at yesterday's entry, my review of Haunted Heart seems a little out of proportion, like using an ICBM on a mosquito (does that date me terribly? Do you young people even know what ICBMs are these days? I hope for your sake that you don't). It's true I did not like the book (and it turns out that I may have been right about the author's remembering a more "upbeat" movie ending to Thinner; again, this is unconscionable given that she was explicitly referring to the texts of the Bachman books), but I should note that I have also felt lightly slimy after reading biographies I did enjoy, such as Elvis: The Last 24 Hours or the Michael Jackson one that told about how he shaved his chimpanzee's ass cheeks. I even felt lightly slimy after writing a certain biography, though I don't think I would go back and do things differently. We live how we have to live, and we don't always get to stay in our ivory towers devoting ourselves to Art.

But I find that I cannot compare writers' biographies to junk about Elvis* or Michael Jackson. My standard is The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr's life of Carson McCullers, which seems to me the finest literary biography I have ever read. While Stephen King has led a more interesting life than he seems to believe (and I don't blame him for wanting to think it uninteresting; after a certain point, writers must start cultivating and craving boredom if they are to get anything done), he has not had the travels, tragic loves, or fascinating neuroses of a McCullers (and a good thing for him, too, sez I). While I can't imagine that The Lonely Hunter was easy to write by any standards, biographies do write themselves so much more readily if the subject has managed to get him- or herself into a lifelong series of big, splashy messes and dramas. I dearly hope that nobody is ever able to make anything of mine. You, there in the back, stop snickering.

*I should admit that anything about the end of Elvis makes me a little sad, as I like his music and a part of me will alway understand how a person could get to that point. However, Albert Goldman's amazing lack of perspective, over-the-top sense of outrage, and willingness to present speculation as dead-to-rights fact all make it impossible for me to take seriously anything he writes.

Before I got up this morning, I lay in bed thinking about Paul Harvey, which led to thinking about Ray Stevens (there is a connection, though only my old chef at Cookies & Company in Athens is likely to get it), which led to thinking about Drawing Blood, because there was a piece of business in the novel about an employee of the Whirling Disk record store in Missing Mile who'd accidentally ordered something like fifty copies of Ray Stevens' Greatest Hits, and at the time this seemed hilarious to me. I still think it's pretty funny, but -- like many of the little in-jokes and cute references in Drawing Blood -- it is totally irrelevant to the story, and as I lay there, the idea came to me that every novelist starts out trying to create something that looks like the front of a beautiful tapestry and ends up creating something that looks -- at least to himself -- like the back of one. You, the reader, may see the carefully stitched horses and kings and Virgins and floral motifs. Or, if you don't like the book, you may not. Either way, you will never share my view, which is of all the messy, incoherent stitching on the back of the tapestry that is needed to create the design on the front. And the farther away I get, the messier it looks.

Anyway, I've worked that simile quite enough, and I am here to offer you news of a book, not to maunder about books in general. I'm happy to announce that Small Beer Press will be publishing a paperback "omnibus" edition of The Value of X and D*U*C*K, titled Second Line: Two Tales of Love and Cooking in New Orleans. (OK, much of D*U*C*K takes place outside New Orleans, but Two Tales of Love and Cooking in New Orleans and Opelousas would make for an unwieldy subtitle indeed.) "Second line," for anyone who doesn't know, is the New Orleans term for the crowd of revelers that follows a large parade, or for a smaller parade that usually takes place in a poor neighborhood, features brass bands, and often happens after a funeral, in order to celebrate the life of the deceased. There has been no actual death connected with the Liquor novels except the blessed passing of my relationship with Random House, but I think the title fits the book well, since TVoX and D*U*C*K are smaller works attached to the three "big" Liquor novels.

I am very excited about this project because it will make two books I like a lot more affordable and widely available, and also because I admire what Small Beer is doing and am pleased to be working with them. I believe their target publication date is October '09, so I'll have more on this as we get closer to that date. Sorry, I won't be touring or anything like that -- a book tour would be an utter impossibility for me right now -- but I do hope there will be some interesting interviews and other press for Second Line.

Here's me presenting T. Jefferson Parker with the key to the city at Octavia Books last night:



TJP is one of my favorite modern writers, which caused me to do dorky things like call one of his novels by the wrong title (Where Serpents Lie; I called it The Shapes of Snakes, which is the title of a very different mystery by British author Minette Walter) and, after giving him my card, loudly announce "BUT I'M NOT TRYING TO HIT ON YOU!!!" He couldn't have been nicer, but I was still smacking myself in the forehead by the time the signing ended. Chris was busy with restaurant stuff (see chefcdb for news of his upcoming project) and didn't go with me, but when I told him about it later, he asked me, in a nicer way than I am currently able to phrase it, why I still geek out around writers I like when I know perfectly well that most writers are just boring dweebs like me. (And I say that with the utmost love for my boring dweeb writer friends, who know the truth of this all too well.)

It took me until this morning to come up with an answer that satisfied me: Even though I'm aware that writers are just regular folks, words are still the best magic I know about. Put in the right order, they can excite me, comfort me, and take me out of myself like nothing else can. Without the books by the writers I love -- hell, without books in general -- I have no idea how I would maintain even a vestige of sanity. I could live without music, visual art, dramatic performance of any type, or even sports if I had to, but life without books is totally out of the question. The people behind the books are just people, but they impress me because I know how much I owe them. On some level I must have already known this, since I've always tried to be kind to the people who geeked out, cried, or otherwise seemed embarrassed by their own behavior at my signings, even though I privately thought they must be, you know, a few noodles short of a casserole to get so worked up over a boring dweeb like me.

(On the other hand, it's always fun when I get to be good enough friends with a wonderful writer that they are just human to me. "Oh, Gaiman? He's a great guy, but he really needs to learn to keep his sunglasses away from my flamingo." But they, too, turn into magicians when I read their books. It's said among writers that the highest compliment you can give to a book by a friend is that you became so immersed in the writing, you forgot your friend wrote it. I don't entirely agree, but I understand what it means.)

Today is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers and of yet another historic New Orleans church closed by the archdiocese.

The first of the blank books goes out tomorrow -- to Spain, where my books have been before, but I have not. I've finished the second and third books in the three-book St. Francis of Assisi series and will probably put them up tomorrow. The first one is already up, along with the lovely black and red Goth Deluxe journal. (That translucent, veined red paper slays me. I must return to the store, a craft zombie, for more of it.)

I have had, and continue to have, tremendous fun making these books. Yesterday I was talking with a painter friend who has also written a book. Writing is easy and fun, she says, but it's hard for her not to look at painting as work. Funny how that happens. I started off writing Liquor totally for my own enjoyment, because writing had become largely joyless. I told myself it was fun, disposable crap and I didn't care if I ever finished or published it. Somewhere along the line, though, it started to matter, and then I was told I couldn't possibly do it and it started to matter in a different way, and by 2006 it mattered so much that I had written four novels, a novella, and a bunch of short stories about the characters. And it had hardly ever stopped being fun; the things that derailed me from writing had little to do with my characters or subject matter.

Anyway, so far, making these books is play for me. I'm trying to improve my technical skills and make them look as good as possible. A couple of them, I think, even express something beyond aesthetics. But if it stops being fun, I'm going to stop doing it. Until then, I hope people will continue to look, bid, and enjoy.

Oh, and I made the tag "blank books" because I feel like an asshole every time I use the "art" and "books" tags on these entries. In fact, I think the "art" tag can go away altogether.

I know several of you on my friends list are already following or posting about this, but it's fucked up enough to deserve wider attention.

1. Writer/editor Steve Berman (mroctober), in a brief LJ rundown (not even a review) of the anthology Unspeakable Horrors, makes the one-line comment on the story "The Portico Angel" by author Kevin W. Reardon: "[A] bad opening crippled this story for me plus the various relationships felt off." He receives a long, butthurt e-mail from Reardon, replies politely, and puts the whole thing aside, as any professional would do.

2. A couple of weeks later, Berman posts about his depression over not writing. The entry receives an anonymous comment urging Berman to commit suicide -- typical troll spew, but more disturbing than average because of its coherence and seriousness of intent. It's the kind of message that makes you think it might push a certain type of depressive toward actually harming himself. In a later comment, the anonymous poster again urges Berman to jump from his window, this time suggesting he take his cat with him (naturally, that was the part that really pissed some people off).

3. Of course it turns out that the anonymous poster is butthurt author Kevin W. Reardon, a.k.a. Cole A. Adams. Upon being exposed, he claims he thought Berman knew it was him all the time, and yet again reiterates his desire to see Berman commit suicide, freely admitting that his animosity is based on that one-line comment by Berman on Reardon's story and that he would, in fact, be thrilled if he had managed to cause Berman harm. When Berman's friends point out that urging editors to kill themselves is not the best way to build a career, he responds that he isn't in it for the "career"; unlike Berman and the rest of us money-grubbing, award-chasing hacks, he is Only About The Art.

4. As of last night, Steve Berman reports that Reardon/Cole has threatened his life. (Yes, he has contacted the police.)

5. These soap operas, made possible by writers' and editors' accessibility online, are entertaining until they happen to you or someone you care about. I don't know Steve Berman*, but I know he has done good work and doesn't deserve to be harassed by some wingnut wannabe artiste. He wouldn't deserve it if he had said Reardon's story was the worst piece of shit he'd ever read and he hoped Reardon would never write another word. It's called criticism. If you publish your work, you will experience it. It will not always be nice. Sometimes it may make you gnash your teeth, rend your garments, and/or fantasize about doing terrible things to the critics in question. If, however, you respond by sending the critics hate mail and threatening their lives, you will admittedly solve your own problem, as you will be extremely unlikely to ever get anything else published and thus will never again have to bear the sting of a bad review.

*I don't know Kevin W. Reardon either, or his writing, but just the fact that he is apparently a gay horror writer would have made me kindly disposed to him if I'd heard about him under other circumstances. See how this stuff works?

I made three. So far I have kept two of them.

1. Stop worrying/making excuses for not writing - YES. If my current life path leads me back to writing, I'll be thrilled. In the meantime, I'm doing other productive things, and I refuse to keep talking about not-writing as if it is some sort of chronic disease I've contracted. I also refuse to listen to other people when they do the same. Don't get me wrong; I miss the work and (especially) the characters, and I'm glad others do too. But I'm not going to make it happen by agonizing over it not happening ... and neither are you, people who have exhorted me to "JUST WRITE." I mean that in the kindest way, but I do mean it.

2. Forgive all the bad food - YES. I have stopped bitching about those same old chefs. This doesn't mean I'll soon be eating at Bayona, Jacques-Imo's, or Restaurant August (I doubt they want my business at this point!), but if I am tired of hearing myself complain about them, I can only imagine how the people around me must feel. Also, my vitriol cannot possibly create good will for Chris in the restaurant world. These are the main reasons I've stopped posting on the local food boards; I dine out too seldom these days to have many new opinions, and I know everybody is sick of my old ones.

3. Resume weight training at the gym - NO. In my defense, I must point out that getting arrested, arraigned, etc. are time-consuming activities, but I know my back will feel better when I start doing this again, and there's really no excuse not to.

I dreamed of Hell. I don't really believe in Hell, but I'm afraid of it anyway. In this dream, I was back on painkillers and sick from not having any, and Chris was out of town for days, and I realized (in the dream) that my Hell would be junk-sickness and loneliness with no hope of reprieve.

On that subject, may I just remind the gentle reader that I have not touched opiate painkillers in months, feel sick at the thought of them, and hope never to take one again? I keep coming across references -- often fake-sympathetic ones -- to my "addiction," and while I certainly was an addict, and pretty much asked for that kind of shit by openly discussing it here, I am telling the truth when I say that for the first time in ten years I don't feel like an addict anymore. There's no attraction there, and no way I can adequately describe the sense of relief I feel at being out from under that awful attraction. The physical pain is still there, and it's a separate issue, but at least I'm no longer caught in that trap. I have no idea what caused the turnaround -- theories range from the OLGC prayer list to near-liver failure -- but I am grateful for it and pray that I stay this way.

I also keep getting asked, by old friends and by people who have only recently heard that I am a writer, what I'm working on. It's too complicated to explain that I've spent the last two years tearing myself apart (with a little help from incompetent governments and publishers) and am now, well, working on putting some semblance of a human self back together. That's my work in progress ... well, that and the garden. I can only hope it leads me back to writing something, someday. And I guess I can feel glad that some people still want me to.

Until today, due to Internet avoidance issues, I hadn't looked at my gmail account in about two weeks. I'll try to get to the many messages there soon.

One of the things I was avoiding was a post-Frankfurt Book Fair e-mail from my agent about the French launch of the Liquor novels, and how my publisher Au Diable Vauvert would still like me to come to France. It's hard to explain without sounding ungrateful to people who have faith in me that, at this point in my life, it would be impossible for me to go Be The Author at the bookstore down the street, let alone overseas. Sometimes I barely remember how to act like a human being, let alone a Famous Writer. Now that I'm cruising at least somewhat sanely after the craziness of the past three years, culminating in the series of horrible, dangerous choices I made last winter, I'm not going to force myself into anything. I'm going to help keep vigil at the church and tend my garden and read a lot. If I take a notion to spend a week by myself in Amsterdam in January, well, I just might do so. But a big splashy public week of interviews and signings in beautiful, delicious, kind, but (to me, always) utterly terrifying Paris ... I wish it weren't out of the question, but for now, it is.

txtriffidranch probably depressed the shit out of most of his friends list when he posted this. (Sample quote for the linkphobic, because the only thing I hate more than a friends page full of mysterious links is a friends page full of YouTube videos: "Carrie Kania, who heads the Harper Perennial paperback imprint at HarperCollins, says that while classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird remain popular, she has seen a drop for what she calls 'the middle backlist,' a book that came out 10 years ago that isn't in the news, that's a little off the radar. 'You might have an author with 10-12 books and it's harder now to get people to go for that fourth or fifth book,' Kania said. 'People are being more careful now. They aren't going as deep into an author's work.'") His actual entry and the accompanying comments are pretty depressing too. But because txtriffidranch is the type who likes to share a little joy everywhere he goes, he should be know he awakened a small, fierce, glad flame in my heart at the fact that I do not have to try to sell a book any time soon. To write one might be nice, sure, but then there would be agents and editors and contracts and the humiliations of publicity ... or, worse, there wouldn't.

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to be writers.

In other news, a huge-ass Borders is opening in the old Bultman funeral home on St. Charles in early December. How much harm will it do our several excellent locally owned bookstores before going bankrupt? Tune in next month!

[ETA: And after posting this I click back to txtriffidranch's entry, and from there I click through to lord_whimsy's journal and read the first entry, where I find the following, breathtakingly simple but luminous comment from someone called commonreader:

"I look at it the other way around: big publishing has done everything possible to kill print, and yet, it's still there. It will stick."

This is so true I could cry, and almost did.]