For fries this tasty, I'm willing to risk a little steatohepatitis.

Tuesday, February 8 3:05 AM

Deadline hell, ladies and gentlemen. The good news is that in 24 to 36 hours, I'll have finished the first draft of my next book. The bad news is...well, it's those tricky 24 to 36 hours. Seems like The Universe will expect me to do a bit of work between now and Wednesday, to say nothing of the editors who are out there waiting for the final chapter of the manuscript. I just have this feeling, you know? A part of me hopes that it's going to be like the last three weeks of high school. You know, when all you had to do was show up at school early enough and well-groomed enough to be spotted and recognized by the attendance-taker, and then you just had to convert oxygen molecules to carbon dioxide ones until your ride home pulled up and the Administration took all the chains off of the doors and fire exits.

Of course, this is why contracts are important. I've examined mine carefully and the need to deliver an actual completed manuscript is underscored quite plainly. So I probably can't look forward to a whole lot of fun in the nearterm.

Nor can you people look forward to more blog posts. The soup I find myself in is indeed a culinary marvel. It's a bit garlicky for my taste, but it's possible that I'm just tasting the pang of having gone two days now without showering. Showering is nearly the last thing to go in these situations. I can do without them because of the next-to-last-thing to go...namely, my excursions into the outside world. I'm in The Bunker right now. I'm an experienced freelancer, so I've long-since recognized the importance of forcing myself to go outside at least once a day. Tonight, I commanded myself to get into the car. I swung over to Blockbuster in hopes of snagging a copy of "Ray," one of the few Oscar nominees that I still need to see before preparing my annual Academy Awards package. It was my third such hunt since it came out last week, but still: no joy.

Instead, I rented "Super-Size Me." I saw it in the theaters when the film first came out but I'll need to see it again before I write about it, anyway. In case you missed this documentary completely, filmmaker Michael Spurlock resolved to eat at McDonalds' for breakfast, lunch and dinner for an entire month (saying "Yes, please" every time an order-taker asked if he wanted the super-size the meal). He also eliminated all exercise, limiting himself to taking just 2500 steps a day.

Just to underscore my independent spirit and my determination to not be manipulated by anyone's agenda — whether it comes from the left or from the right — I swung by McDonalds' for a Big Mac Value Meal on my way home. I ate it while I watched the film.

Damned tasty thing, the Big Mac Value Meal. The key to this enjoyment (and I think the filmmaker missed this crucial point) is to savor the meal instead of wolfing it down (good advice no matter what's in front of you); to stop before you feel full, or at least before you puke the entire thing up into the parking lot; and most importantly, not follow it up with 89 more Super-Sized McDonalds meals over the course of the next thirty days. It's also a good idea to take a nice, envigorating walk every once in a while. If nothing else, when you stand up and walk around, it causes the sesame seeds and wisps of lettuce fall off your shirt, leaving you looking slightly more tidy.

Which is not to say that "Super Size Me" isn't a fab film. The "30 Days Of McNight" angle is just a hook...a framework for discussing America's obesity problem. But the film's obvious weakness is that Spurlock never seems to acknowledge how completely codswallopingly insane his goal is. By the end of the film, Spurlock is a broken shell of a man, but by and large the movie serves as a more powerful indictment of reckless idiocy than of the fast-food industry.

Well, it's not my worry. Good food, good flick, I'm now all caught up on email and I've posted something to this here blog just to reassure my Legion of Readers that I'm still alive. And overall, I've killed nearly two hours of the 36 that I'll need to endure before the bell rings, my manuscript is complete, and I can go home to my Apple IIe and try to finally figure out how to snag that damned Babel Fish before it drops down the drain.

(Aw, crap. Once again, I forgot that this isn't high school. The fact that most of the music sucks should have tipped me off. Sigh. Indeed, "Mankind is born unto trouble, as surely as sparks fly upward.")

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"FP It, Please!"

Wednesday, February 16 8:38 PM

Done with the first draft of the book. Much work left to go, of course. Writing a book about a major piece of software that's still in development is like painting a battleship. By the time you make it to the end, you sort of have to start all over again because in the time it took you to finish the job, a lot of the work you did early on is no good anymore.

But the fact remains that there are now a couple of hundred thousand words on my hard drive that didn't exist a few months ago, and so for the immediate future, if someone catches me loafing I can just gesture towards that folder with an annoyed grunt and then continue my dignified progress through the five seasons of "Babylon 5" I've got on DVD.

I'm sort of mainstreaming myself back into the normal beats of human life. By now, I'm pretty desperate to get back on a normal sleep schedule. I'm on Keith Moon time, at the moment...apt to pass out at odd moments and in odd places, only jerking awake learning who I am and what city I'm in only when I hear Roger Daltrey scream that data towards 60,000 stoned-out rock fans. Tonight, I'll go to bed at a sensible time (2 AM...time is relative) and I'll wake up when I wake up, not when my phone rings or when I sense a great disturbance in the Force (which usually comes in the form of an editor who's sitting in an office somewhere in the world, expecting a manuscript).

But each step back towards my normal daily routine is a positive one. Today, I went to my usual sandwich shop for the first time in three weeks. "The usual?" the owner asked me, receiving a Yes in return. Textbook experience. But then he turned to the prep guy and barked "FP!", which sort of threw me. The prep guy repeated the two letters back to him, so I had to conclude that the counter guy hadn't had some sort of siezure.

Time for a little background info. A year or two ago, I got on this vegetarian kick. Not for moral reasons (which are subjective) or even dietary ones (which are pretty clear-cut) but for reasons of taste. See, meat is absolutely fantastic stuff. When you delete it from a dish, it's like when somebody loses their sight: everything else has to compensate for what's missing. So the dressings have to be zestier, the breads more flavorful, the selection of ingredients more ambitious and harmonious.

Plus, I was sort of getting into a rut when it came to ordering food. Thus I made a solid effort to sample from the Veggie section of the menu. After all, travel broadens one and introduces you to new experiences and perspectives. Alas, the World isn't fair, and I lack the vast fortune I would require to just drop everything at the slightest whim and pop on over to Finland every time "Everybody Loves Raymond" is a repeat. So that's out. But I can certainly afford to order a grilled portabello sandwich served with fresh greens and raspberry dressing on rosemary bread.

Nonetheless, when ordering vegetarian meals became a rut of its own, it was time to carefully incorporate the experiences into my life database, announce to the world's cattle, poultry and fish that the free ride was over, and then move on with my life.

But after 280 years on this planet, I've recently twigged that the whole reason why I maintain this life experience database is so that I could conceivably scroll through the list from time to time and figure something out that'll enhance the scant six decades that I have left, before the mothership returns to take me back home.

Viz: the Grand Experiment was completed, I found myself in the usual sandwich shop, sort of hankerin' for one of their veggie specials but eager for something more. And finally, the progress indicator on the Life Experience Processor stopped spinning and spit out its result.

"Hey, could you make me a Veggie Sub," I found myself asking the counterman, "only except for the soy, I want grilled chicken strips. And instead of the sprouts, how about bacon bits?"

No sooner had I completed my order when a guy in a slouch hat and a trenchcoat (who'd been sitting in the corner sort of suspiciously for the past few weeks) stood up with a flourish and revealed himself to be a scout for the MacArthur Genius Grant Foundation. He then handed me an enormous novelty check for $250,000. I swear to God that this actually happened; do a Lexis-Nexis search if you don't believe me.

This algorithm works well with most dishes, but it works extremely well with sandwiches. Go straight to the veggie menu and translate any component that seems aggressively vegetarian into its meatware equivalent. You get all the benefits of vegetarian cuisine (smart, ambitious, snappy flavors) while keeping all of the bullet points — so to speak — of meat.

Okay. Back to the sandwich shop. I've been ordering my personal perversion of their vegetarian sub off and on for months. But I hadn't been there in weeks, and this was the first time the owner had reduced the order to an acronym.

"'FP'?" I asked.

He glanced around a bit and then leaned close. "'F*** PeTA,'" he whispered. "Somebody here said it the third or fourth time you ordered a veggie sub with meat...and now we're pretty much stuck with it!"

I dropped an extra dollar into the tip jar.

Friends, here's where we harness the awesome power of the Internet. If it can make celebrities out of an enormous Cheeto and a less-than-enormous but still-quite-ample man in a skintight leotard, then it can certainly put this sandwich right on the map. The next time you're in a sandwich shop with a couple of decent-sounding vegetarian offerings, say "I'll take a veggie pocket...and FP it, please."

(You then register your surprise that the shop has never had that sort of order before. Apologize, explaining that you've just moved here from that big city that's famous for creating runaway best-seller sandwiches, and gosh, every incredibly-profitable sub shop sells FP's. And then you should outline the substitutions you desire.)

It's a Big Win for you: again, vegetarians are by their very nature thoughtful and careful people, and thus they really know how to season and flavor stuff. And it's a Big Win for society in general, because every time you order it, the FP Sandwich meme will grow in strength and stamina, spreading across the country slowly but steadily, introducing more and more meat-eaters to a new and wonderful taste treat. And if the Bad Vibes make it even marginally more difficult for PeTA's self-serving antics to divert resources and influence from the people out there who are, you know, working to actually do something about animal suffering, well, that's a good thing, too.

But I stress that FP Sandwiches are double-plus-tasty and your motives for ordering them should be wholly selfish ones. The Evil component will just come on its own. Don't worry about Evil; it's big and strong enough to take care of itself.

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If I can convince just one potential competitor to stay out of the market, my work is done.

Friday, February 18 9:45 AM

I'm champing at the bit to begin the intense but wholly satisfying process of making the final edits and revisions of my next book. Alas, the chapters are still in the hands of the publisher, and I'm told that they won't be sending me the edited manuscript until next week.

So I'm sort of treating this time as a vacation. I finally managed to unpack and set up the Sonos ZonePlayer music system that arrived a few weeks ago. It's one of those products that takes the music files on your PC or Mac and distributes them throughout the house. I must say that I'm very bigly impressed with it so far. Instead of needing to keep a computer at arm's length, or arming yourself with a remote that offers you only the most rudimentary navigation through tracks, albums, and playlists, the Sonos system comes with a custom wireless controller that looks like a cross between a color PDA and an iPod. And man, this is the only way to travel. I sat on the sofa with it and I was sort of in the mood for quiet music. Within fifteen minutes, I'd selected 141 individual songs from my 12,000-track iTunes library and dumped them into the player's queue.

I love the little touches. The controller's sitting on the cushion next to me right now, its screen dark to conserve power. I picked it up to get the name of the album I'm currently listening to. What did I have to do to wake the controller up? Nothing. It has a motion sensor and it was ready to serve as soon as my fingers found it.

So at the moment, I've got an ample supply of tunes, and a mechanism by which I can surf through them without doing anything drastic or foolish, such as getting up off the sofa. For the past two or three days I've been free to write just for fun again, which is a core pleasure that I've had to do without for the past couple of weeks. I've got about half a notebook's worth of handwritten story that has been awaiting transcription for over a month now, and the silver lining of not having any edited chapters to revise is that I now have time to work on these little project where there are no deadlines, no editors, and (alas) no likely audience or forthcoming paycheck.

But when I can no longer write things just for fun, well, that's the day I quit the NFL for good.

Speaking of writing for fun, I was visiting one of my favorite blogs yesterday morning. Making Light is the blog of book editor Theresa Nielsen Hayden. It usually cruises in a loose orbit around the topic of writing. Check out "Slushkiller." TNH encounters a website where translucently thin-skinned aspiring authors gather to describe the (profound) traumas they suffered when they submitted something (quite brilliant) to a (rude and ignorant) publisher and they got a rejection slip instead of a cheque, if you can imagine such a thing. She uses this as a springboard for describing the haystack-sized pile of blind submissions which squats somewhere in the offices of every publisher, and the Herculean, soul-sapping duty of editors to keep their chins up and their lunches down and dive right in to the pile, hoping to unearth a manuscript that makes the trip worthwhile.

The piece is not entirely encouraging to anyone who's trying to break into the market, but it's entirely entertaining to anyone who's trying to kill some time on the Web when they should be working. All I can say is that it made me feel sorry for editors, which is quite an achievement when you consider that I've had over fifteen years' worth of experience with that particular species.

Anyway, she made a plea to the blog's readers: encourage a friend of hers to finish her first novel. I posted the following in response, which I now reproduce for your...well, let's just be optimistic and refer to it as Amusement:

Dear Lucy:

We've never met. In fact, we've double-never-met, as I've never even met the person who's just urged me to email you. I am therefore only a Stranger Once Removed. But my medium of non-meeting you was the Internet, and as such I'm allowed — nay, morally-compelled — to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong, and involve myself in situations which I am only vaguely familiar.

Thus armed with a powerful mandate, I want to talk to you about this novel of yours.

You are, no doubt, now being browbeaten by dozens of people with a view towards getting you to finish your book. My advice to you: Resist. Buck. Follow the fine example of the five-year-old kid whom I encountered the other day at the supermarket. When her parent issued the girl a directive with which she desired to show a vote of unequivocal non-confidence, she immediately threw herself to the ground, hitting it on the very first try, and then she proceeded to stage a tantrum whose scale and passion was so epic that it caused the local barometric pressure to drop by fourteen millibars for the entire afternoon.

Why resist, Lucy? Well, clearly you know full well why. You seem like a sensible woman. But I'll explain it for the benefit of anyone who is (naughtily) looking in on this highly personal and private discussion between you and me: if you finish your revisions, then your novel will be one step closer to being published. And we certainly can't have that, now, can we?

You and I know better. If your novel is published, terrible, terrible things will happen. The specific wording of the incantation that breaks the seal on the Army of the Damned's barracks and floods our earthly plane with the Forces of Darkness is lost to the ages, but historians note that it's supposedly a simple phrase of eight words. If your novel is like most of the ones I've read, it's considerably more than eight words long. It's therefore quite conceivable that it inadvertently contains the Phrase That Must Never Be Repeated. I pray, Lucy, that you stick to your guns and take no chances. I have a small wager on the outcome of the Academy Awards and I'm keen to live long enough to see how that works out.

Even in the unlikely event that the publication of your novel will not, as you so rightly suspect, set alight the Curtain of Pain and lead to the subjugation, torture and execution of all human life, would there be any benefit to putting this novel of yours behind you? Of course not. Editors keep nudging you to finish it only because they're selfish, selfish creatures. The more books they move through their offices, the more comp copies they receive, which means more titles that they can sell off at yard sales and online auctions, and more money that they can spend on the highly-specialized roasting pans and utensils with which they cook and eat the hearts of innocent children.

You certainly don't want to be a part of that, do you?

No, your plan is much, much better in the long run. If you finish your novel, you'll only have to start writing another one. Remember how hard it was to get the first one finished? Hell, think of how hard it was to even start the bugger. Plus, once you've finished and published the second one, you run the risk that your work would develop a devoted and passionate following. What happens then? Yup: these so-called "fans" of yours would only demand a third book. A third opportunity to accidentally loose hordes of emotionless bloodthirsty demons upon the land, more comp copies that will fund your editor's pursuit of his or her unholy appetites...no, no, no. The madness ends here. It's a vicious cycle and you're wise to jump off at this early stage before it even really starts spinning.

Besides, there's nothing more satisfying than being one of those writers who go to dinner parties and are fond of saying — repeatedly, thoughtfully, and without any provocation — that They're Working On A Novel, No, It Hasn't been Published Yet, They Haven't Really Finished It Yet; You Can't Rush These Things, Can You?

Unfortunately, you've made a common rookie mistake: you actually completed a first draft. Which is completely unnecessary. See, the great thing about being One Of Those Writers is that the people you meet will never actually demand that you show them a sample chapter. It does help if you can say "Think 'The Hunt For Red October' meets 'Rendezvous With Rama'" if you're pressed for a general impression of the alleged work, but that's just insurance.

No, usually, the people you'll meet are impressed enough with your thoughtful, writerly expression, you see. It's a terrific labor-saving device. You want to know why P.G. Wodehouse was forced to write nearly a hundred novels? He had a social-anxiety disorder that kept him inside the house most of the day. Wanting to describe himself as a Writer, but lacking an audience for the Thoughtful Expression that he'd spent much of his late teen years cultivating, he had no alternative but to actually sit down and write the damned books and then have them published. Sad, isn't it?

And what did that get him, I ask? Only a huge personal fortune, a knighthood, an international reputation as the greatest writer of humorous English fiction and as a key influence of untold generations of writers, and the satisfaction of having created a fictional character equal to Sherlock Holmes and Superman in terms of immediate worldwide recognition, even eight decades after its creation. You can't take that to the bank, can you? Except for the first thing, which any Buddhist will tell you is more of a Karmic burden than the average soul can bear.

Meanwhile, for decades, the neighborhoods and playgrounds near his publisher's offices were curiously free from the sound of children. The guilt gnawed at Wodehouse, even though he surely didn't know any better. He did not, after all, have the benefit of my reassuring words. Perhaps if he'd followed the same advice I'm giving you now, he'd have lived to be 100 years old, instead of being snuffed out at the green age of 93, the terrible burden of his guilt having taken hours, or even days, off of his natural lifespan.

Stick. To. Your. Guns. Lucy.

That manuscript of yours of much, much more use to the world sealed up there on your hard drive than it would be if it were revised, edited, typeset, proofed, printed, bound, boxed, and distributed to bookstores and readers all over the world. You know it and I know it. So don't let these thoughtless jerks wear you down.

Your Pal — A.

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Ihnatko breaks into yet another market

Saturday, February 19 6:45 AM

I was leafing through a copy of "Reader's Digest" at the grocery store when I encountered a feature that the magazine had apparently added recently. Or at least at some point in the eleven years since I used to read it at my grandparents' house. They still run jokes that were sent in by readers, but now they also print a really lame one and solicit a better punchline. Email an improvement to the magazine and you've got a shot at a hunnert clams.

This month's problem child:

Q: How is an elephant like a tomato?

A: Neither one can wear a wristwatch!

Well, bravo to the RD. Yes, they remain the unapologetic mouthpieces for the international Freemason conspiracy to add fluoride to the money supply, but they know sucky comedy when it bursts from the chest of a crewman and starts killing Colonial Marines after a bafflingly short gestation period.

I jotted down the email address. When I got back home, I sent them my improved version:

Q: How is an elephant like a tomato?

A: They both create a big, red, pulpy mess when you throw one at somebody.

And then I ordered $100 worth of books and DVDs off of Amazon. In retrospect, I might have been a bit hasty. It's important for any freelance author to know one's market, after all; I'm not sure how well this joke will play when it's read in the bathroom of a recreational vehicle.

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I think I'll make a great deadbeat dad, some day...

Thursday, February 24 3:40 AM

I got to spend part of today at Divorced Dad Fantasy Camp.

To explain: when you were a kid, did you ever dream of becoming a middle-aged man with one or more failed marriages behind him, a series of ill-chosen and highly-caustic unions whose sole positive impact on your life was the production of one or more offspring? And did you burnish this fantasy with the foolish prayer that if, against all odds, you ever were so lucky to actually become a divorced dad, that Fate would further smile upon you and make sure you had a really crappy divorce attorney, and that you only got to see your kids a couple of times a month?

No, me neither. But I got to live the dream today regardless, with two nephews left in my charge temporarily. Stop One was a visit to The Outer Limits, an extremely highly-regarded comix/sci-fi/licensed geekery shop in Waltham. Comics were purchased and a big tub of loose action figures was eagerly pawed through, and then after nearly two hours of such fun, I happily paid for nearly fifty dollars' worth of merchandise and then I went back to the car to check on how the kids had been getting on while I was in the store.

I am a funny man. No...naturally, this was a team effort. Afterwards, I took them to lunch at a genuine 1949 Worcester Lunch Car Company diner. It's not often that a fifth-grader gets to order a ham-and-fried egg sandwich with a side of fries (not at an independently owned-and-operated venue, anyway) and I was thrilled to introduce the lad to the experience.

So by now, the kids are back home, and the absence of any sort of hysterical, sputtering phone call from their parents indicates that I succeeded in finding that cozy safety zone between Showing The Kids A Good Time and Not Showing Them Such A Good Time That One Of The Kids Wants To Quit School And Become A Bass Player. Or it might simply indicate that their parents failed to find the small stud that now pierces the elder child's left earlobe.

A programming note: Sunday night I will indeed be hosting my annual live blogcast during the Oscars, so tune in to this selfsame URL during the telecast for breathtaking ongoing commentary. I am still desperately hoping to have my annual Oscars package written and posted on Friday night, but a major book deadline lands on noon of that day, and another one on Monday.

So let's just hope that the Academy Awards doesn't get squeezed out in the pinch. At minimum, I'll post a base-bones list of Oscar picks.

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