So why am I giving away my work for free? Simple, I’m not doing this for the money. There’s not much sense in that unless your name is Dan Brown or James Patterson. (Luv to ya both!) I don’t expect I’ll ever see myself on the New York Times Bestsellers List. What matters is that I’m out there, and someone is reading me. As the story develops and Nick becomes larger and more complex, which he will, oh trust me he will – I think the following will grow. In the next book in the series, Sport of the Gods, I really sock it to ’em … and Nick!

The people at Amazon are pretty great to work with, publishing my Kindle versions as well as the paperbacks via their CreateSpace subsidiary. They have put within my reach things I once thought unattainable. I now have two paperbacks on the market and they’re on Kindle now, too. This is what I’ve always wanted to do with my life. This is what I’ve always wanted to do when I grow up. Does this mean I’m a grown-up now?

Eww. I hope not.

University of the Damned

When I finished writing Grunch Road last summer, it was kinda sad; I so enjoyed the process of writing that I didn’t want it to be over. I guess Moses felt the same way after he was done writing Genesis, and like him, I sought to alleviate this post-partum depression by launching into a sequel.

For my first sequel, I am moving the location out of my native New Orleans East (though it will be back from time to time) to the campus of Arkadia University. My first story in what will be a four-part series (hey, if Moses could write five books, then so can I!) is called University of the Damned where Nick and his friend Ben (the two guys pictured on the cover) are enrolled in college through a Silver Scroll scholarship. They’re both working for the campus newspaper. Nick doesn’t get into a lot of trouble in this outing. Hell, he doesn’t even get beat up! Don’t worry, I’m only being nice to him next year because next year look out … there will be punishment. The draft of the second novel, Sport of the Gods, is now finished and I’m working on the rewrites. It will be a very intense story and some of the imagery gets a little ugly. I have to work on telling the story without getting too gross, and that’s not easy!

To help promote these books, I’ve redesigned by website to turn the right sidebar into my book promotion area, which means I’ve removed the Chorus Events calendar. I don’t think it will be missed; you can always find out what the Chorus is up to at their website, and there’s a link to them in the left sidebar.

Music Notes

A, B flat, Middle C … okay, bad pun. I was a really bad boy and skipped rehearsal Tuesday night to go down to the bar and drink instead. I’m entitled; it was my birthday. I had a great time, got lots of drinks bought for me, and got up and sang a duet of “I’ll Cover You” (from Rent) with my friend Frankie, who really should try out for the Chorus!

What the Chorus is working on now is a new piece we commissioned from Michael Shaieb, who wrote Through A Glass, Darkly for is in 2008) called “Out of My Range and Other Performance-Related Issues” which explores the adventures of a new Chorus member trying to make it through his first concert. We’ll be premiering it in March and taking it to the GALA Chorus festival in Denver.

I haven’t made any predictions this year, but last year I did slightly better than Harold Camping. I was write that the world did not end on May 21, but it sure seemed like it was going to on May 22, when I had my first up-close and personal meeting with a tornado. Auntie Em! Auntie Em! I was right about the announcement that this would be the final season of Desperate Housewives. I still think in the final scene, Mary Alice Young will wake up and it was all a dream, and Wisteria Lane is really a skanky trailer park full of sleazy white trash. I also got one hit on my death list, Harmon Killebrew. Therefore, this year, everybody is on my death list.

And A New Butts!

Another little bundle is on the way to my other nephew’s house, as I’m told Josef and Lisadell are expecting a baby girl any month now, which brings my total number of “great-neicephews” to four, three girls and one boy to carry on the proud family name. The circle of life continues.

Welcome to the family, little man. Welcome to the world.

This isn’t a story about the Grunch anymore; he’s gone from being the subject of the sentence to being an object. The real main character is Nick, who is beginning to take on epic hero status, and making a few enemies who will give him grief later in the sequels.

Swingin’ in the Season

The Chorus is working on its new holiday show, and I really like this one. First of all, it appeals to the atheist in me because it’s totally secular. That’s right; for the first time since I joined the Chorus we are doing a holiday show that does not include any way, shape or form of “Silent Night” and I have absolutely zero problems with that. What we do have is a really fun show with a big-band swing to it courtesy of Xtet, the jazz band from McNally Smith College (someone correct me if I got that name wrong). The highlight of the show for me is the Musicological Journey through the Twelve Days of Christmas. Each day is in a different musical style, starting with a sixth-century plainsong chant through the ages of music with styles evoking Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and finally John Philip Sousa. That in itself is worth the ticket price, and if you’re really good, you might just get a hippopotamus for Christmas!

I saw the doctor yesterday for follow-up on the surgery I had back in August. They’re keeping a close eye on me for cancer now, but he’s hopeful it isn’t going to get that far. He also bought a copy of my book. I hope he likes it. There’s not a lot of medical stuff in it, but I should have him check my medical stuff for future novels that will have doctor stuff. Here’s a sneak peak at the cover to Book I.

Feeding Frenzy

I just have to wonder about the Republican Party these days. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney are behaving like one is going to ask the other to step outside. Herman Cain’s fuzzy math gives me a worse headache than real math. And Michele Bachmann is … well, she’s Michele Bachmann. I usually despise election campaigns, especially when they get as ugly as this. (And really, these days when don’t they?)

The truth be told, I’m actually enjoying watching them make complete asses of themselves in the debate. It’s going to be an interesting election, and if the Republicans can’t get their act together … and there’s no indication they’ll be able to, it’s going to be a slam dunk for Barack Obama next year. I mean, if the best they can come up with is Herman Cain. we might as well swear in Obama for his second term right now.

Nick Eismann has really gotten under my skin. On the first page of Grunch Road, he’s a relatively happy teenage boy sitting in the front yard of his father’s house. He’s turning into a force to be reckoned with, however, because of all the pitfalls I have thrown into his life. As Book 3 opens, he returns to his studies a changed man, more confident, more cocksure and more assertive.

Now I’m working on Book 3, Mad Science, which is more of a science-fiction work involving time travel, genetic engineering and mind control. I’m not even going to try to match the emotional intensity of Sport of the Gods. Writing it took a lot out of me. There were places in the story where I had to stop writing because I was bursting into tears. Wow. Book four reverses the time-travel angle when a figure from Nick’s future comes back from the future. Who is he? How is he connected to Nick? Well, you’ll just have to read the book, won’t you?

Michele Bachmann is no stranger to going beyond the pale.  She’s gone out there so many times I don’t even think she can find her way back anymore. Her latest salvo in her one-woman war on sanity is her assertion that “God” is trying to tell us something by sending an earthquake and a hurricane to the eastern seaboard in the same week. Aside from being the standard knee-jerk reaction we’ve come to expect from the likes of Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps, it was just plain poor taste when spoken in a political arena. Later she said she was just kidding, as though that would ameliorate the situation, but to be honest it only makes things worse. How can she make jokes about a natural disaster that claimed at least 40 lives that we know of as of this writing? It’s despicable, and unbecoming of a presidential candidate. Hell, it’s unbecoming as a human beings.

Even if Ms. Bachmann is right, this is pretty lame stuff for “God” isn’t it? I mean, the quake was a magnitude 5.8, which the West Coast would yawn at. And by the time Big Bad Hurricane Irene arrived at the Big Apple, she had dwindled away to a Category 1 storm and some doubt she even deserved that rank. Hardly the caliber of work we’ve come to expect from someone who can rain fire and brimstone and make it rain for forty days and forty nights.

How are ya gonna spin this one, Ms. Bachmann? The epicenter of last week’s quake fell within Eric Cantor’s district. You remember him, he’s your buddy who’s playing politics with the disaster in Joplin, Missouri earlier this year. Now it looks like he’s going to do the same thing to his own district. Oh, well… at least he’s an equal opportunity creep. Think maybe “God” is trying to tell him something?

I do have my own forty lashes coming with the wet noodle. Last week I stumbled across a video where Michele Bachmann takes to the state and proudly asks the crowd, “Who likes white people?” Once I managed to pick my jaw up off the floor, I posted the video to Facebook. But there was one thing that had been edited out of that video, I later found out… “White People” was the name of the band that had just played. (Their full name was actually “White People Soul Band” I believe.) So I had totally misinterpreted her statement out of context. So I apologize to Ms. Bachmann for that. If I don’t then I am no better than Andrew Breitbart or FOX News.

So there, I apologized. Now it’s your turn, Michele.

Paperback Writer

Another thing going on is that Grunch Road is now available in paperback, and I’ve been crowing about that. I’m pleased at how the story turned out, but wish I could have made it longer. I suppose I could have padded it out with unnecessary details and salacious gratuitous sex, but I don’t want this to turn into porn. It’s got enough adult content as it is, all the stuff that sells: drugs, sex and violence.

It’s available on Amazon or at my own CreateSpace e-bookstore. I’m promoting both sites, because while my e-bookstore pays a higher royalty rate, Amazon has its name recognition going for it.

I’ve also set up a fan page for Grunch Road on Facebook so that people can go and “Like” it. The next step is the scary part: an advertising campaign. I want to run an ad for it on Facebook and see if that sells me any copies. I learned how to do this last weekend at an internet marketing seminar Jim dragged me to.

Something else I’ve been thinking about is writing a sequel. I like my main character, and would love to get him into more trouble. What I have in mind is sending Nick off to college, but this time I’m going to go the fictitious route and make one up, a small campus out in the Louisiana bayou country that I’m naming Arkadia as an homage to my late friend Johnny Byrne. And there’s going to be lots of weird things going on there from voodoo witchcraft to mad science. I could have a lot of fun with that.

I even found this guy on a royalty-free clip art website and have decided this is the face of Nick Eismann. He’s kinda cute for a high-contrast line drawing. He gets his pretty face mauled at one point in the story, so I also have a scarred version to use in the sequel. Hey, scars can be sexy.

But alas, Nick’s a straight boy. I wanted to have mass-market appeal, so he likes girls. Eww. At least I’ve come up with a good girlfriend for him, and gave the girlfriend a gay brother who, of course, has a crush on Nick. For a little added atmosphere I’ve created a tiny little town near the campus and populated it with colorful cajuns and creoles. Ethnic dialogue can be a lot of fun to write, it’s almost like writing in another language. Turn spellcheck off.

I’m probably going to have some fun with time travel here, too. First I want to send Nick back to Pompeii where he warns somebody about Vesuvius and saves his life. The fun part is that he only has two years of college Latin under his belt and he’s trying to speak it, and probably getting it all wrong. The trick there is to use Google Translate to convert my correct English dialogue into Latin, then reverse the process and translate the result back.

The other fun time travel idea is for Nick to travel forty years into the future. Since my story is set in the early seventies, that means he comes forward to the present day and learns about stuff like the Internet and 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina… and the Saints winning the Super Bowl in 2010, but nobody back in his own time would ever believe that one.

Back To School

The Chorus will be starting up again in a couple of weeks. This will be a bittersweet season, as Stan will be leaving us at the end of the year. We’re also going to be commissioning a new work to bring to GALA next year. It’ll be great to see all the guys again and sing again.

Meanwhile, Jim has found more trouble to get into, and he wants me to get into it with him. Come to the dark side, Matt… it is your destiny… He wants me to help him with a “pay per click” advertising operation but I don’t know… I’ll give him the technical help he needs and see what happens. Better yet, as his first project, I want him to help me promote Grunch Road.

Something else Jim has been wanting to do is take a Bahamas cruise he bought. I have my passport ready, but I’m really glad we opted not to do it this week. The east coast just can’t get a break this week, it seems. First the earthquake earlier this week, and now Hurricane Irene. Gee, what’d they do to piss God off? Right now we are in the prime season for hurricanes, mid August to mid September, and we’ve already marked a couple of big anniversaries, like those of Camille and Andrew. Next Monday will be six years since Katrina, and September 9 will be the 56th anniversary of Betsy. New Orleans isn’t out of the woods for 2011 yet, either.

I’m surprised the end-of-the-world doomsayers aren’t speaking up. Maybe they are, and I’ve just learned to tune them out.

I’ve been getting asked a lot what the surgery was all about. It’s kinda personal and kinda gross, so if you’re got a weak stomach you might want to skip this part. The procedure was something they call “excision and fulgration of an anal condyloma.” I speak doctor from my days as a medical transcriptionist, so I’ll translate that. A condyloma is just a fancy doctor word for a wart, but it’s a big ugly wart. Actually, I don’t know that it was ugly, since I’ve never seen it because of where it was. Though I did find some examples on Wikipedia, and after seeing those I really don’t want to see it. Excision is just a big word for cutting something out, and fulgration as defined by Wikipedia is “a procedure to destroy tissue (such as a malignant tumor) using a high-frequency electric current applied with a needle-like electrode.” So they knocked me out, cut off as much of that thing as they could, then burned the rest away with a little electrode. Fun, huh?

Okay, the icky part is over, you can start reading again now.

I was off in La-La Land throughout the procedure, as I insisted on general anesthetic. That way, I just blink and it’s over. The last thing I remember was them putting an oxygen mask on my face while the radio in the background was playing “Relax” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. After what seemed like a blink, I was waking up in the post-operative recovery room. They brought me some graham crackers which I gobbled down ravenously. Since I couldn’t eat or drink after midnight in preparation for the surgery, I was starving.

I have a weird stress reaction at times like this: I make jokes. Like when the anesthesiologist came in to talk to me, I asked him, “Where’s your club?” They always ask me if I feel safe in my home environment, I told them I’m fine unless we’re in the car and Jim is driving.

They called Jim to come get me. I wasn’t able to drive home because I don’t have a pilot’s license. I was flying pretty high from the Vicodin and the lingering after-effects of the anesthetic. Then I had him take me somewhere to eat because I was hungry enough to eat one of the nurses.

They gave me dressings that look kinda like Stay-Free™ napkins and gave me a prescription for Vicodin. This morning I went over to Rainbow and bought a package of Depends and actually it turns out they’re quite comfortable.

Recovery has been a pain in the ass – literally. I can’t do any heavy lifting and with the pain meds I can hardly stand up sometimes. Dr. Willis, the surgeon, estimates that I’ll be down for about two weeks. Sitting’s not a lot of fun, either, as I’m sure you can guess. I had to buy a special cushion to sit on. It’s not one of those cliché donut-shaped pillows you see on TV… the doctor says those are a bad idea. The cushion will come in handy later this year when the Chorus goes on retreat. The chairs we sit in to rehearse there are ghastly uncomfortable.

The Chorus will be starting up again in a couple of weeks, by which time I hope to have Grunch Road out there on the market. It’ll be on Amazon and available to book stores. I am so excited at having this first work published that I already feel the sequel coming on. A series of them, actually, set at a bizarre college of my own fabrication. This will be a departure from Grunch Road, where all the locations were real places from my childhood. Right now I am compiling subplots to weave together. Hoping to have this one out next summer, and have it actually be long enough to be considered a novel.