Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Muffin Man Research

Took a little road trip this weekend to check out county courthouses, jails and sheriff departments for my work in progress, Muffin Man. We spent Friday night in San Antonio. On Saturday we hit five small county seats:

  • Hondo, Medina County
  • Uvalde, Uvalde County
  • Leakey, Real County
  • Bandera, Bandera County
  • Kerrville, Kerr County

We had lunch in Utopia due to my conversation last month with Karen Valby, author of Welcome to Utopia. We capped the day off in Fredericksburg at the Lincoln Street Wine Market for wine, cheese, fruit, a cigar and live music. Highly recommended.Then a late night drive home to sleep in our own bed. Over 300 miles in 15 hours on Friday, with stops to take photos and such. Over 400 miles in 30 hours for the whole trip. Check out the map to see where we went.


View Muffin Man Road Trip Oct 2010 in a larger map

Blog

Literary Lone Stars

Occasionally I emerge from my bunker and venture forth into the metropolis to engage other citizens on matters of great import. This evening I attended the Writer’s League of Texas event called Literary Lone Stars, primarily to hear Joe R. Lansdale, whom I recently began reading. In the course of the evening, I heard three other authors, Doug Dorst, John Phillip Santos, and Karen Valby, read and talk about their work.Valby started off and got my attention with Welcome to Utopia, a book about a small Texas town relatively isolated form popular culture. I was seeing all kinds of parallels and contrasts with Welcome to Fred, although Utopia, small though it may be, is much larger than Fred. Then Dorst read some selections from Surf Guru about reptiles that were hilarious and riveting. I’m aching to get to his book, but it goes in the To Be Read shelf along with dozens of other worthy candidates for next book to pick up. Johh Phillip Santos read a selection that opened with a sentence that nailed me to the wall: “The mind and the heart leave no fossils.” Wow.Lansdale completed the evening with some readings and extemporaneous stories of his childhood in East Texas, a resonant chord for a Fred, Texas ex-patriot. Reviews of his books I’ve read this year to follow in the coming months. Mucho Mojo.The takeaway for me was the sheer joy of being able to hang with writers, not just the presenters, but other writers at all stages of development, and just soak up the vibe, something I didn’t have access to in Honolulu, paradise thought it may be. I dropped $100+ in retail-price books simply because I wanted to support what these people are doing. I also got autographs on them. Maybe they’ll be worth something one day after I read them. Heh.Programs like this give me a reason to excavate my gnome-like frame from the bowels of my solitary unibomber isolation and inflict myself upon the greater population. Joy abounds. Woohoo.

Blog

The Blue Umbrella

The Blue Umbrella, Mike Mason, 2009When I sat down at a table at the Christy Awards this year, mainly there to hear Lisa Samson speak, I skimmed through the list of finalists and read, with fear and trembling, in the YA category, the title The Blue Umbrella by Mike Mason. I immediately scanned the room, wondering if he was there. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to have a chance to shake his hand and tell him how much his writing has touched me, particularly The Mystery of Marriage, which exploded my brain when I read it, and The Gospel According to Job, which was invaluable when I was writing Escape from Fred.At that moment Donna Kehoe, the force behind the awards, happened to walk up to my table. I jumped up, pointed to the entry, and asked if this was the Mike Mason. She confirmed that it was. I then asked if he was present. Sadly, he was not.I didn’t even realize Mason had written a novel and immediately upon returning home I ordered a copy, along with some non-fiction books by Mason that had escaped my notice.If you’ve never heard of Mason, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Mystery of Marriage post haste, regardless of whether you are married or never even plan to be married. In the mid 80s I ran across it in a bookstore and read the preface. I was so astounded I bought it on the spot. The rest did not disappoint. In fact, on my first website, constructed way back in the 90s, I posted selected quotes from The Mystery of Marriage to convince others that they should read it immediately. Obviously it worked, because it’s sold over 200,000 copies and has been translated into 20 languages. Need I say more?Regarding The Blue Umbrella, I’m not sure what I think at present. I’d like to hear the thoughts of others. Give it a read and drop me a line.

Blog

Writing on the Air

Occasionally I am a guest on a program called Writing on the Air on local radio station, KOOP. (Listen at 91.7 FM or koop.org.) I’ll be on tomorrow, Wed 7/28/2010 from 6-7pm CDT, reading excerpts from some works in progress and talking about writing stuff, in general.I also discovered they have my last appearance in the archives. Also, I sat in on Daniel’s appearance on Jul 7.

Blog

I Write Like

Kelly hipped me to I Write Like, a website that applies a Bayesian classifier algorithm to the text you key in to match it to text from the 50 writers in its database. It’s mainly based on vocabulary, sentence length and punctuation and doesn’t account for style, voice or tone, so it’s basically useless, but entertaining.I pasted in Chapter 0 of my current work in progress that is in need of a good title. It came back with Stephen King. Interesting. Chapter 1 came back as David Foster Wallace. Hmm, never heard of him. I went back to Endless Vacation draft 3 and analzyed each chapter separately, all 46 of them. (Yes, I know I have no life. So sue me.) It came back with 15 authors: Arthur Conan Doyle, Chuck Palahniuk, Dan Brown, David Foster Wallace, Ian Fleming, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Joyce, JK Rowling, Kurt Vonnegut, Mario Puzo, Raymond Chandler, Stephanie Meyer, Vladimir Nabakov, and William Gibson. The winner was David Foster Wallace, for 17 of 46 chapters, Brown and Chandler trailing with 8 and 6 chapters, respectively. Then I went back to where it all started, Welcome to Fred, again all 30 chapters. This time only 9 authors, but a couple of good ones that weren’t on the EV list: Arthur C Clarke, Chuck Palahniuk, Dan Brown, David Foster Wallace, HP Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Stephanie Meyer, Stephen King, and William Gibson. But Wallace was still the winner with 11 out of 30 chapters, Lovecraft trailing with 6 chapters. Evidently a third of my work uses the same vocabulary and sentence length as Wallace. I guess I’ll have to check him out.I wish he had the list of authors in the database. I’m guessing PG Wodehouse isn’t in there, or Christopher Buckley.