Return to Odyssey

I attended the Odyssey Fantasy Writer's Workshop as a student back in 1998. Tomorrow, I'm going back to talk to this year's class as someone who has managed to build at least a modest career out of fiction.

As a result, I find myself in an introspective mood, thinking about what I've learned in the intervening nine years, trying to figure out if I have any useful advice for the current batch of students.

While advice from me may not be as valuable as advice from J. K. Rowling, I do have one nuggets I can share with the class:

The worst book you put onto paper is more valuable than the best book you keep in your head. Twice in my life, I've found myself in positions where I've been asked to show my work on short notice. The first time, Keith Olexa, the editor at Phobos, called me up to tell me I'd won a Phobos Award and asked if I'd written any novels. The year before I'd written "Nobody Gets the Girl." The novel at the time was short, only 55K words long. And, the ending was just dumb, nothing at all like the published ending. Before I sent it to him, I tacked on a new ending that was even worse, in which Rail Blade gets killed when the World Trade Towers fell on 9-11. A few months later, Keith called me back and said they wanted to publish the book, but the ending really needed to change. Knowledge that the book would see print proved a powerful creative force and I was able to arrive at the published ending, which I'm still quite proud of.

The second time, of course, came about when Nadia Cornier went from being an intern with an agency to being a full agent, if she could build a portfolio of clients. When this news reached me via the Codex boards, I was able to send her "Bitterwood," but a much shorter, less developed work than what is seeing print today. Still, while I look back on that version now as being amazingly devoid of setting details and shockingly thin on character development for the supporting cast, it still had the plot, pacing, theme, and energy that the final book has.

Can I write better novels than Bitterwood and Nobody? I think I can. I've got one book in my head that I think may be the book that turns me into a household name. Unfortunately, you can't read this book. I can't show it to an editor, and I've never been able to share more than a brief outline with my agent. It's a book I always feel I need to do just a little more research to write. It's a book I've become intimidated by. And, as a result, my perfect, fantastic book has never been read by anyone, while the good-but-could-be-better books I've published have been (or will be) read by thousands of people.

The jockey lot lives!

My name appeared in the Independent Weekly in an article about the closing of the Jockey Lot. They quoted me toward the end of the article talking about the exotic nature of the place, and how you could take a five minute drive and suddenly find yourself in a South American country. Apparently, even though the buildings are closed, the action is still hot in the tents outside. I seldom went into the sheds anyway. The tents are where the good stuff could be found.

Also, I just posted to my Bitterwood blog an article called "Building a Better Dragon." If you ever worried that playing D&D as a teen will doom you to an adulthood of geekiness, this article should remove all doubt.

Finally, Solaris has just posted an interview with me on their features page. I would like to assure my mother should she read it that I make reference to dirty pictures on the internet purely in jest, and I've never, ever, I promise, used my computer for such a disgusting practice.

Dragon sightings...

Dragons have been sighted here in North Carolina.

First, there's this photo, taken right here in Hillsborough.

This isn't a trick photo. When Joy Marchand visited last month, we were taking some photographs of the water tower in Hillsborough that looks like a UFO (below), and by chance happened to get a snap of this oddly draconian looking creature as well.

Then, of course, there are dragons in my living room and in bookstores. Check out my Bitterwood blog for more.

My goal is to have to buy a new bookshelf

I got my contributors copy of the Prime Codex anthology in the mail today. Last week, I got 4 contributors copies of the UK version of Bitterwood, though I'm still waiting on the US version. My bookshelf is starting to fill up nicely with books that contain my words. Most are anthologies, two are novels. In order of publication, roughly, they are:

Empire of Dreams and Miracles
Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome
Nobody Gets the Girl (novel)
All the Rage This Year
The Urban Bizarre
Modern Magic
Prime Codex
Bitterwood (novel)

Waiting in the wings are the Blood and Devotion anthology, the IGMS anthology, and the Solaris Book of New Fantasy. Not bad, considering my first publication was only 2002.

Jockey Lot no more?

So, apparently the weekend I reported about the Jockey Lot was the last weekend they were open according to a news report I learned of this week. Apparently the buildings were in violation of zoning codes (having been there, I'd say, yeah, probably), so they were shut down by the fire department. But I'm less clear on the fate of the tents and open air vendors. I'll try to journey out this weekend and learn the truth, if I can find time to spare from my work on the Bitterwood sequel.

More reasons to move to Hillsborough

#7, the Jockey Lot. Not technically in Hillsborough, but only a few minutes away, the Jockey Lot is a big flea market on Buckhorn Road just outside of Efland. North Carolina is currently experiencing a major demographic change as an influx of workers from Mexico have flooded in over the last decade or so, working in agriculture, the mills, construction, etc. Take a drive down Highway 70 toward Burlington and you'll find a dozen business that were once empty now occupied by Mexican grocers and restaurants. Spanish language newspapers are easy to find.

The full impact of the Mexican immigration really hits home when you go to the Jockey Lot.

Flea Markets used to be as lilly white a gathering place as you can imagine. Now, walking through the central tent mainstreets of the Jockey Lot has the feel of walking through an open air market in Mexico (or so I imagine, not having actually been to Mexico). Vendors are set up hawking everything from lingerie to bootleg videos to seafood. You can walk past several tents without seeing or hearing a single word of English.

I went there Saturday with Joy Marchand (pictured above), fellow Codexian and culinary artiste. We browsed among stands full of the most amazing fresh vegetables you can imagine. Ripe, juicy tomatoes were fifty cents a pound. Avacados at the perfect peak of ripeness were going for eighty cents each. Limes were ten for a buck. We bought some shrimp that looked like they'd been swimming in the ocean a few hours before, and some fresh cat fish, whiskers and all. Later that day we made salsa and ceviche that rivaled anything I've had in a restaurant, and we chased it down with fresh mangos and watermelon. Yum!

Since the internet has yet developed a way for me to transmit the tastes and smells of the rewards of Jockey Lot shopping, I hope you'll be content with the following photos, snapped by Ms. Marchand, who turns out to be as talented with a camera as she is with a keyboard. Get ready to feel hungry....

Prime Codex is Go!

This weekend sees the debut of Prime Codex! This is an anthology collecting the best published short stories of the Codexwriters group. You can buy a copy at Balticon this weekend, or order from the website linked to above for books that will start shipping on May 30. The title is also live on Amazon. All codexians have published at least one short story at professional rates, or, at a minimum, have graduated from a major workshop like Clarion or Odyssey. You can hardly blink these days without another Codexian selling a novel. Follow this link for a Codex Library.

My story in the anthology is a reprint of my first sale to Asimov's, "To the East, a Bright Star." Of the short stories I've published to date, "Bright Star" is at top of works I'm most proud of, dancing on the head of that pin with "Perhaps the Snail" and "Empire of Dreams and Miracles." It's the story about the choices we make when we are most aware that life is finite--much of the story unfolds in the last fifteen minutes before a comet is going to strike the planet, and our protagonist, a former circus tightrope walker named Tony, is faced with the choice of meeting his destiny the way he's imagined for the last ten years, since learning of the date and hour the comet would strike, or detouring from that dream in order to rescue a damsel in distress. One of the questions I'm faced with most often as an atheist is, why live a "moral" life? In the absence of the reward of heaven or fear of hell, what does it matter if you're kind to your fellow human beings or not? Do the choices you make matter in the absense of hope? This story is my most successful attempt to answer that question.

No reviews yet of the anthology, but you can read a review of my story at Emerald City. My story is the last one reviewed, so if you don't want to read about the entire issue of Asimov's just scroll to the bottom.

Speaking of Codexians, I get to meet one today, Joy Marchand. She doesn't have a story in Prime Codex, but we share a table of contents in Modern Magic and I've read her story in Interfictions, "Pallas at Noon." I can safely report she's insanely talented, writing rich, image-filled prose at a level of talent I can only dream of. If you're interested in Prime Codex and want to qualify for free shipping, throw in a copy of either of the above two anthologies, although if you have to pick one, pick Interfictions, since "Pallas at Noon" is such a strong work. The final scene, and the final line, are amazing (in the context of the story, natch... don't just read the last line and think, "What's so amazing about this?").

Skink in Bed

I came home Monday and found a skink sitting on the end of my bed. Skinks are small, slinky lizards, this one about 6 inches long. They are insanely fast, so, alas, I failed to catch this one.

I feel really let down by my cats. I've been providing them cat food and kitty litter for the better part of a decade now, and, really I don't ask for a whole lot in return. I would say the minimum duty I expect of my cats, though, is to be vigilent in keeping my bedroom free of reptiles.

Now, I'm sleeping a bit lighter than I was, knowing there's a lizard sneaking around somewhere among the dirty socks on the floor. Or, worse, that there's some hole I'm unaware of between the inside of my bedroom and the outside of my house. What's coming in next?

Ungraceful follow up

With my last entry being one about Laura, I've been feeling a little restrained on my next blog posting. I couldn't think of any graceful way to move from a reflection on love and death and memory to a post about current events. So, I've just decided to do it gracelessly.

I am not a republican, and in NC that means I can't vote in the republican primary. Which is a shame, because I finally found someone I could imagine voting for among the major parties--Ron Paul. In the last debate, one of the big news items was how strong Rudy Guiliani came out of it because he had smacked down Ron Paul for daring to suggest that American foriegn policy somehow led to 9-11.

I was barely aware of Ron Paul before the news started reporting what an idiot he was. After the debate, I heard commentators on the radio saying his campaign was probably over now--not that it had ever been alive before. I was vaguely aware he was the only republican running for president who had opposed the war in Iraq from the start, and that he had been the Libertarian candidate for president back in 88. Outside of this, I didn't much care to spend the time to learn his opinions.

I didn't watch the debate, but I've since gone and read transcripts and have to conclude, despite the reaction of the crowd, Guiliani was wrong and Ron Paul was right. Guiliani, Bush, and countless others on the right seem to have the public position that 9-11 was caused purely due to evil. Osama bin Ladin devoted his time and attention to killing American's because he's evil personified, an agent of the devil, utterly without any motivation other than wickedness.

The US, on the otherhand, is incapable of wrongdoing. Sure, we kill a lot of people. Dating back to the first gulf war, we've unquestionably killed tens of thousands of Islamic civilians with bombings, and made life miserable for millions with sanctions and destruction of infrastructure and by funnelling support to dictators in places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This has nothing to do with evil though... it's all perfectly rational and virtuous responses to evil.

Here's the thing: I think that most of our reactions are rational. It's not that hard to rationalize supporting the Saudi's when the world's energy supply depends on stability. It's not so hard to rationalize invading Afghanistan when they shelter terrorists who've successfully struck us at home. There's even a certain logic that can be followed into overthrowing Saddam Hussein and plunging a country into chaos and war for a decade or more, causing the death of hundreds of thousands and economic and political turmoil. The invasion has the same logic as chemotherapy--it's going to cause a lot of pain and suffering now, but in the gamble that it will eliminate a larger threat. And, it's possible to rationalize embracing and supporting the only dictatorship absolutely proven to have developed nuclear weapons and illegally transferring the technology to our enemies--Pakistan--since Pakistan publicly supports us, and in diplomacy what you say overrides what you do.

I'm NOT arguing that US foreign policy is evil. I won't proclaim it virtuous, but I will say that I believe it is designed by men who believe themselves to be virtuous and reasonable and acting for the long-term good of mankind. Of course, I also think this is the basic mindset of terrorists as well. They are certain that they are virtuous, rational, and that their actions are the only long-term hope of mankind.

The opinions in that last paragraph are my own, and I have no idea how Ron Paul would feel abot them. I'm pretty certain Giuliani or Bush or McCain would shout them down. If I were writing these ideas in Iraq or Afghanistan, most republicans would probably feel perfectly comfortable with arresting me and putting me in a cell in Cuba with no hope of trial or appeal. (Side note: Right now, per square mile of Cuban soil, who do you think is holding more people in jail with no trials--Castro or Bush? I don't know the answer, but isn't it bothersome that this is even a question at all?)

So, I salute Ron Paul for being thoughtful, honest, and courageous enough to say what he said to an audience he must have known would be hostile. I don't think he'll win the nomination; I don't even know if he'll be invited to future debates. But, if some sort of mysterious plague strikes and he winds up being the last surviving republican candidate... I could vote for him without holding my nose. I haven't felt his way about a major party candidate for twenty years.

One year

Laura died one year ago today. I remember that morning, driving home from the hospital, listening to "The Coroner's Gambit" on my car stereo, watching the morning getting lighter after an all night vigil at the hospital. My emotions that morning weren't so much sorrow as exhaustion. I had a hard time thinking or feeling anything about what had happened that night. I just wanted to get some sleep, then deal with the grief at a later time.

I have grieved over the past year, but the experience wasn't anything like what I imagined during Laura's final months. I expected to be devastated, to have a difficult time getting out of bed, to be, at the very least, depressed for weeks and months.

But, in the immediate aftermath, I discovered that the predominant thing I felt was busy. There were phone calls to be made and arrangements to be decided on and a houseful of people who had needs that would have to be addressed. Then, once all that was gone, I had a whole different rush of stuff. I had a book under contract I needed to rewrite, I had to find a new place to live, then I had to renovate a house, then move in, then more writing, and then it was Valentine's Day and then Laura's Birthday and now the anniversary of her death and I find myself wondering if I somehow did it wrong. I didn't go out and wear black for a year. I made several trips to Laura's grave and placed flowers, but I didn't sit by the grave and have long conversations the way you see in movies.

I visited the grave today, the photos of the flowers are flowers that Simon and Veronica picked for her yesterday. I bought some vases and arranged the flowers and we placed them at the grave as a light rain fell. Then, last night the rain really came down, and I woke up this morning certain that the vases had fallen over. I drove back out this morning and found that my suspicions were correct and I propped the vases back up and fixed the flowers. My hunch is I won't be the only person to visit the grave today, and I wanted it to look nice.

It struck me that even today it wasn't grief that motivated my visit as much as it was an immediate task, doing something that needed to be done.

I think Laura would understand. Laura was the person who had to face the reality that she wasn't going to beat the cancer. Her main mechanism for coping with the darkness in her future was to concentrate on her present. She couldn't let despair pin her to the bed, because she had to get up to drive her kids to school, then do laundry, then go shopping, and she did these things well past the point where she felt comfortable doing them. A large secret to her living with cancer as long as she did was simple momentum. She just stayed too busy to die. But, eventually, her energy began to wane.

The picture below of Laura on the couch with Yoshi is from March 17 of last year. This is a fairly representative picture of Laura during the last few months of her life. She's stretched out on the couch because she didn't really have the energy to do much else. Yoshi, her cat, really bonded with her during this time. And, you can tell from the smile, she was still happy. She wasn't healthy any more, and it hurt her to walk or sit or lie still or breathe, and somehow she was, on the whole, still happy. Even on the last day I spent with her while she was conscious, she was cracking jokes, and happy to see visitors. She enjoyed her life. She lived each day to whatever degree her body allowed.

A few weeks before she died, she was laying on the couch in a pose much like this. It was on the weekend, mid-afternoon, and she was still in her pajamas. I asked her if she wanted to go get something to eat. She didn't. She really had no appetite at all by that point. She was always dealing with a certain amount of pain, and didn't feel like going anywhere or seeing anyone, but she was also tired of being in the house. So, I told her we could just go drive around in the country and enjoy the nice spring weather. I wanted to see her up and active, for her to feel like she was living instead of just surviving.

She changed clothes and we went out to the car. She leaned the car seat back as we drove up 54 and I kept turning down side roads to take us deeper into the country. There are a lot of roads that go off 54 and I'd always wondered where they led to. We passed countless rolling fields of yellow and blue wildflowers and wound up in Saxapahaw and drove over the river there, a nice little scenic gorge. We later wound up at a fruit stand near Mebane where I went in and bought her a Jarito's mineral water, and on the way home we found a Sonic Drive-in and she asked me to stop so she could get some tater tots.

I know it's crazy, but I don't think I've ever had a moment of such clear and wonderful hope as I did watching her eat those tater tots. She was hungry, and she was happy, and the fresh spring air and beautiful scenery seemed to have revived her, at least for the moment. I knew, I knew she was dying, but I believed in the healing power of weekend drives, and fields of wildflowers, and fresh air and sunshine and tater tots, and I thought we would be making these trips for a long, long time.

It's that day I remember, more than the hospital. It's that day I remember, more than the funeral home, or the church, or the cemetary. It's a drive I've taken several times since, or a drive like it, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. I'll just go out for a drive in the country, and I'll see a road, and wonder, where does that go? And I turn the wheel, and follow the new road, and I watch the fields pass by.

How Cool Is This?

If you go to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me website, you will discover on their May 14 show in the "Not My Job" segment a mention of the book Talk the Talk, written by my friend Luc Ried. Since I mentioned the book here a few months ago, I'll take that as direct confirmation that the producers of the show read my blog and faithfully follow my recommendations. Anyway, that's my version of reality.

Yet more reasons to move to Hillsborough

Back in February, I started a series of blog posts called "top ten reasons to move to Hillsborough," which I stopped at #2 after getting sidetracked with the challenge to post five things that few people knew about me. This shouldn't be taken as a lack of enthusiasm for Hillsborough, just as a statement of how easily distracted I am.

So, here goes some more items on the list:

#3: Occoneechee Mountain. The photo shown here is from the overlook on Occoneechee Mountain. When I first moved to Hillsborough, I was a little dubious of the claim that it had a mountain, given that I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, which has real mountains. Occoneechee Mountain is something like 700 feet tall... a runt when measured against the mountains of my childhood. Still, my friend Cheryl took me on a hiking trail to an overlook this week and I was forced to admit, yeah, okay, when you have to walk up the darn thing, it's a mountain, and the view from the overpass is convincingly mountainish. I now have a great deal of respect and affection for our little mountain.

#4: Occoneechee Speedway. Continuing on the theme of great hikes, there's an abandoned speedway here that was last used for stock car racing back in the sixties. Since then, nature has reclaimed it, leaving a set of ruins that make for a pleasant walk. Walking up the concrete bleachers, all covered with vines, and walking past the remains of cinderblock concession stands with trees growing out of them gives the place a vibe that is somewhere between the Colloseum in Rome and some movie set of a post-apocolyptic Earth. The Eno river runs along the edge of the race track, so there are some wonderful views of its winding waters. And, unlike Occoneechee Mountain, this hike is mostly flat, so it makes a good warm up hike if you've spent most of the winter sitting in front of a computer editing a novel.

#5: The sausage sandwich at Sonny's Sandwiches. I can't tell if Sonny's is a purely local restaurant or a franchise. They certainly have a purely local vibe... only their preprinted menus have a franchise feel to them. But, the best thing to eat there isn't on the menu. They'll have a board with a daily special posted, and if you ever see the andouille sausage sandwich on the board, you're in for a treat. This thing is a grilled sausage served on a sub roll with sour kraut, grilled onions, and spicy mustard. It's essentially a giant spicy hotdog, and I happen to be a fan of giant, spicy hotdogs. Also, this place has a cheese sub that I used to buy for Laura. She had a lot of trouble building up an appetite in the final years of her life, but she could tear into their cheese sub. There's a subway in the shopping center about four doors down from Sonny's... the fact that they've held on in the face of their much more hyped competition says something about how good their food is.

#6: 3 Gatos. I actually just discovered this last night. Hillsborough has a street festival the last Friday night of each month and among the local vendors I discovered the 3 Gatos table. They specialize in hot sauces and hot foods. My heart went pitter-pat as I surveyed their wares. Unfortunately, I only had one dollar in my pocket at the time. http://www.3gatosfireandrice.com/page/page/4336020.htm is their website. They say they are opening a retail store in downtown Hillsborough soon, and will be at the Last Friday celebration next month. Next month, I'll go with money and walk away with a can of wasabi pecans and a bottle of Magma. Man, I can hardly wait!

Frustrations in the life of the young novelist...

I stopped at a bookstore yesterday and left my phone number with the folks at the information desk in the center of the store, hoping to arrange a signing. I came out of work today and checked my cell phone and WOOHOO! I had a message. Alas, it wasn't from the bookstore. It may be that other writers have vastly different experiences, but my experience as a novelist who isn't yet a household name is that people at bookstores routinely ignore your emails and disregard your phone calls if you're interested in discussing possible signings. I suspect the reality is they are probably swamped with dozens of people on any given day looking to arrange signings. There are probably more novelists in America than there are bookstores. I knew of at least a dozen local writers when I lived in Greensboro. Off the top of my head, I can think of three bookstores. So, the competition is probably pretty fierce to catch the attention of the people who arrange signings.

After I leave a message, I feel uncomfortable about calling back. I hate to feel like I'm hassling people. Fortunately, Bitterwood is still a few months away. I'm not in panic mode yet about unreturned phone calls.

Of course, tempering all this is the fact that I'm not sure that booksignings do all that much to boost sales for new writers. If I happened to be in a store when a reading and and signing of a book and an author I'd never heard of was going on, I might wander over and check it out. But, if I saw a poster about it, and didn't know the author, it probably wouldn't register as something I should go to. The signings that catch my eye are signings by authors I already know about, promoting books I've already heard about or read. It seems like a good way of supporting an existing fan base, but as a way of building a readership, I'm slightly dubious of a signing's value.

Does anyone have any different experience? Have you ever bought a book by an author you had never heard of simply because you heard about a reading at a local bookstore?

I just got back from Ravencon. It was a terrific con with nearly 700 attendees and I highly recommend it for any of you con attending types. You can read a more detailed report about the con at my Bitterwood blog.

Abortion Ruling

The reactions to yesterday's ruling by the Supreme Court upholding the partial-birth abortion ban passed by congress have been interesting. I visit a lot of liberal sites like buzzflash and see a lot of talk about the Supreme Court having outlawed a certain type of abortion. I'd like to point out that the Supreme Court didn't outlaw anything in this ruling... it merely upheld a law passed by congress. And, if democrats are upset by the law, it seems to me the answer is obvious. Now that they control congress and the senate, pass a law legalizing this abortion practice. If the president vetoes it, muster the votes to override the veto. For a congressman or senator to blame the court for upholding a law seems to me to represent a dodge of their own responsibility as lawmakers.

The thing is, I've always thought that Democrats would benefit if Roe v. Wade were overturned. I truly feel like there is a pretty solid majority in this country that supports a right to abortion. Making the issue a court-protected issue instead of a legislative issue meant that Democratic voters could be complacent. It didn't matter if they voted or not, or who controlled congress, because abortion was a constitutional right according to the court. Republicans have gotten very good at hammering out restrictions that have popular support... things like parental notification, waiting periods, and now this partial birth abortion ban. Democrats are scared to vote against these things (though, no doubt some support them because they truly believe in them). But, if I were a Democrat, I'd be introducing pro-abortion legislation that Republicans would have a hard time opposing. A broad-based legislation that states that no woman can every be subject to prosecution for deciding to travel between states to obtain a legal abortion, for instance. (I don't think this is illegal now, but codifying it in law would be a huge symbolic victory.) Or, legislation that guarantees a legal abortion would be made available in cases of rape or incest. Plenty of people would oppose this, but I think it would be easy to brand the opposition as outside the mainstream.

The fact is, it seems like only Republicans have bothered to use the legislature as a political tool to change the law to reflect their wishes. Democrats haven't been introducing pro-abortion legislation that I'm aware of, they've only been opposing anti-abortion legislation. They should pick up some tips from the Republicans and actually pass some laws that support their values instead of always playing defense.

I suspect, if this battle is decided via legislation instead of via court fiat, what we'll wind up with will be laws that make abortion widely available, perhaps even publicly subsidized, but with comprises like waiting periods and parental notification. It wouldn't be a constitutional right... it would be statuatory law that would require constant vigilance to maintian and reflect the will of the public... you know, democracy.

Ismail ax

I read this morning that the phrase "Ismail ax" was a hot phrase for search engines yesterday, for obvious reasons, since the Va Tech gunman had it written on his arm and no one knew what it meant. I also immediately jumped on google to hunt the phrase. Nothing. I also tried to rearrange the letters, anticipating this might have some hidden meaning. Nothing makes sense, though "Islam ax I" should invigorate the handful of folks who want to tie this into Islamic terrorism.

House renovation goes external

My house is fairly bland when seen from the street. The landscaping of my yard is best described as minimalist, with no trees, bushes, flowers, etc. Mostly, just grass and weeds. I want to do a few things to enhance the appearance but I don't want projects that require a lot of time, energy, or money, since I'm short on all these things.

My first project has been to install a flower bed along the side of the house. The tricky part of this is, I didn't actually plant much in the way of flowers... just three azalea bushes I bought for 2.50 each from a Kiwanis' fundraiser in a bank parking lot. They were something of an impulse buy. I'd gone out to by mulch for the bed. My budget for the entire project was $20. I knew I needed about $10 worth of mulch, so encountering the bush sale at such a bargain basement price seemed like a good omen.

I'd bought the curvy brick edgers from walmart two weeks ago. They cost about $30. So, the whole project cost about $50, and took about 3 hours total labor. Hopefully, the azalea bushes will do okay. As the summer rolls on, I'll probably be adding some more plantings. My friend Cheryl said she had some free stuff she could give me from her garden.

Any way, here are the before the mulch and bushes shot and an after shot:

People celebrate the redesign of my blog by breaking into spontaneous dance...

Local weather. And I do mean "local."

When I got up this morning I discovered it had snowed, leaving a light but quite thorough dusting of the white stuff all over my yard. Snow in April in North Carolina is a little strange but not impossible. What is strange, though, is that it only snowed in my yard. Above is a picture from my front porch showing snow in my front yard extending to the street, then, beyond that, nothing. The street is snow free, and the yards across the street are snow free.

I've always thought my house was cooler than most, and I finally have some empirical evidence.

I'm not sure my voice is the strongest selling point for my book...

If you're interested, here's a link to Gail Z. Martin's site for her novel "the Summoner." She has a feature called "Ghost in the Machine," where she'll be holding conversations with fellow authors, and the author currently on deck is me. You can find the link here:

http://www.chroniclesofthenecromancer.com/page/page/3827767.htm

I confess, I'm not sure I come off well in interviews over the phone. I did several of them back when I was promoting "Nobody," and something about the telephone leaves me slow and halting. On the other hand, I think I'm pretty good at conventions on panels. When I can actually see the person I'm interacting with, I'm much better at reading them and listening to them and being able to play off what they are saying. On the phone, I feel more like I'm constantly figuring out what I'm going to say next.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't go listen to this thing... fortunately, Gail holds up her half of the conversation well.

Our Health Care System Makes Me Sick

I have very complicated feelings about the American health care system. I was talking to a friend of mine this week who's been buying health insurance through a COBRA plan that's about to expire. He's willing to purchase his own insurance... except he has diabetes and the cheapest plan he's been quoted--a bare bones, catastrophic plan--is $2000 a month. How many people can afford $24,000 a year for an insurance plan that barely covers anything? And, at least he can get insurance. If he had stage 4 cancer, he wouldn't be able to buy a plan.

I am, at heart, a free market libertarian who opposes government intervention. Toward the end of Laura's life, she was dealing more and more with the government and every single encounter was Kafkaesque. Agencies that were supposed to be geared toward assisting her were consistently staffed by people who seemed indifferent, incompetent, and downright hostile. The thought of the government taking over our health care system leaves me with a heavy lump in my gut. I honestly think they would turn our system into a beaurocratic nightmare.

And yet, as my friend Greg would be quick to point out, has the private system done any better? I recently spent several months dealing with Labcorp, disputing a charge for a test I'd had the previous year. I'd had some tests in December of 2005, gotten some bills in January 2006, paid them, and that was that. At least, that was that until August, when I got a bill for $150 from Labcorp. I called them immediately, wondering what this was, but on that initial call I never got to speak to a human being. They had an automated system, and any sequence of buttons I followed wound up taking me to an answering machine. So, I left my phone # and told them to call me. A week later, with no return calls, I forgot about it. I figured somebody had taken a look at the bill, realized, "Oops, he's already paid this," and moved on. I am an eternal optimist. Of course, a month later, I get another bill. This time I write a letter questioning the validity of the charges and send it back. Then, helpfully, a week later somebody calls and tells me that this charge for $150 was disallowed by my insurance because I hadn't met my deductable and I still owe the full amount. I was, bluntly, skeptical. These were for tests in December... I'm not a heavy user of healthcare, but I was pretty sure my deductable had been met. And, I asked why they had waited to August to bill me for the test. The representative told me that the insurance company could sometimes take a month or two to respond to the claims. I told her that the insurance company had responded to everything in January, and I'd paid anything left over. What had happened between January and August? She again said it took a month or two for decisions to be made. I pointed out that, a month or two would be a bill in February or March. She never did concede that August was anything but a month or two after December.

I told her I would check with my insurance and call her back. Blue Cross Blue Shield proved to be quite helpful. One phone call and I had the information I needed... they hadn't paid this bill, but they had negotiated a new charge... $19.95 instead of $150. They offered to mail me a copy of the paperwork. I said okay, then called back Labcorp. I spoke to someone new this time. I had the name of the rep I'd spoken to earlier, but was told by the new person I spoke to that she knew of no such person and that there was no record of me having ever contacted Labcorp about my past due bill. She told me that the $19.95 was only a rate for people who had insurance. When I pointed out that I did, indeed, have insurance, it seemed to throw her off her game. She said she'd have to call me back.

Then, another month passed and a bill collector for Labcorp called, telling me my credit card had been declined and they were about to pursue legal action for the $150. I was utterly baffled by the credit card claim, since I had no memory of ever giving them a number. (Though, it turned out I had given the doctor who ordered the test a credit card #, and they'd attempted to bill it. Why it was declined, I don't know. The number I eventually saw on the paperwork was perfectly valid. A little too valid, as my monthly statements will attest.) I was also frustrated to again be starting at ground zero, talking to someone at Labcorp who wouldn't admit that I'd ever contacted them before.

Then... well, it occurs to me that this is a long and tedious story. The whole point of the story is what a long and tedious process it was to handle a bill for this one stupid test. But I don't see why I should punish my readers with every blow by blow detail. Let's just say that a lot of faxes were sent back and forth and I eventually found a supervisor at Labcorp who had a name and extension # and I was able to harrass her until they finally sent me a bill for the correct amount.

In January, everything was, finally (I hope) resolved with me sending them a check for $19.95. I suppose it will be August before I really know if this has been taken care of.

Anyway, my point was that the beaurocratic nightmare I fear would befall us if the government took over health care is already here now that corporations run our health care. Mortality statistics tell us that people die of heart disease and cancer and trauma... but I wonder just how many people actually pass away just to avoid the paperwork.

The thing that's got me thinking about this was the news that John Edward's wife has stage 4 cancer. Her diagnosis is almost identical to Laura's after her time of being cancer free. I have an x-ray of Laura's torso with the tiny black tumors circled; I imagine Ms. Edward's x-ray looks pretty much the same. It gives me a personal connection to this story; I've always wondered if Laura had lived another five years if they would have found a cure. Ms. Edwards probably has those five years, so I guess I'll find out. I also always wondered if Laura would have gotten a different level of treatment if she'd been wealthy. I've noticed that there are an awful lot of Supreme Court judges who get cancer and survive it for many, many years. John Edward's is filthy rich, a hell of a lot richer, probably, than any of the Supreme Court justices. And yet, here's my second personal connection to the story: Ms. Edwards has the same oncologist that Laura had, Dr. Lisa Carrey. So, the former senator's wife is getting the same doctor treating her as the former preschool teacher. Maybe money isn't dividing up the treatment as unequally as I thought.

I wish I had some potential solution to offer to the mess that health care has become. Government intervention seems like a path to disaster. On the other hand, the status quo seems to be that you can get decent healthcare as long as your employer is paying for your insurance, until you get too sick to work, at which point you lose your insurance at the time of your life where you actually most need it. On the other, other hand, as horrible as our system is, and as wonderful as a Canada and England and Italy's system is (according to my liberal friends who want the government to take over healthcare), I presume that, with the Edwards' wealth, if better treatment for cancer was available in Canada, they'd be seeking treatment in Canada.

If a cure for cancer emerges, it's probably going to emerge from the horrible, screwed up, unaffordable American system.

I'm up!

I finally figured out the right combination of words to type into google to get an answer on my non-loading sign-in page. I downloaded the newest version of Explorer last month, and apparently its more aggressive security features view the scripts on the blogger sign in screen as potentially hostile code. It never warned me about this or asked if I wanted the script to run. Very annoying.

Any way, now that I'm up, I have nothing to say. Actually, that's not even mildly true. I have dozens of things to say, mostly news about Bitterwood. And yet... not yet. Soon. Right now I'm in the middle of writing two short stories at once, plus reading the latest PDF version of the Bitterwood manuscript. I'm so busy it's even eating into my computer solitaire time. So, keep watching this space. Good stuff coming, I promise.

Please stand by...

For some reason, I can no longer sign into blogger from my home computer, either in netscape or explorer. The sign in page simply never loads for me. I'm trying to figure out why. When I google for this problem, I turn up hundreds of hits for people experiencing the same issue, but I have yet to find a solution. Quite frustrating, given that I have all sorts of nifty Bitterwood news to post. You can find some of this stuff at the Solaris website (a link to their blog is on the side, which will give you a link to their main site). Currently, an shared interview between me and Gail Z. Martin is linked to on their main page. Hopefully I'll figure this out soon. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Things Few People Know About Me #5: The True Origin of Nobody

I wish I could claim that the ten-day gap between my fourth secret and my final one was some attempt to build suspense. In truth, I've spent most of the last ten days immersed in the galleys of Bitterwood, hunting for typos and fine-tuning the prose. If my count is correct, this is the sixth time I've read this novel cover to cover in a year. It's disturbing to think that I'm still discovering mistakes and infelicities after so many passes. Of course, Nobody Gets to Girl made it to print with what I consider a pretty glaring problem in the second chapter. I call my hero by the wrong name on page 17! The protagonist is named Richard Rogers, and 90% of the time I call him Richard, but on page 17 I slipped up and called him Roger. The book was in print before someone pointed it out to me.

This isn't my fifth secret, by the way. But, I've been struggling to figure out a fifth secret that met the following criteria: 1. It should be something I haven't wanted people to know about me. I think this exercise is only of use if I'm pushing the limits of what I'm comfortable revealing about myself. 2. It should be PG 13. My family reads this blog sometimes after all. 3. I shouldn't take anyone else down with me.

The last criteria is a real stumper. Because, so much of the stuff I don't talk about is stuff that happened between me and someone else. I've been divorced twice. There are dark and juicy mines of secrets in both those past relationships. I could conceal the identities of my fellow students from college twenty years ago with fake names, but fake names wouldn't really work in concealing the identity of my ex spouses, since there are only two possible candidates.

Still, I think I'm going to break the third criteria and reveal something that very few people know about the creation Nobody Gets the Girl. I owe this novel to the collapse of my second marriage. In the fall of 2000, I'd been married to Anjela for about five years. Our marriage had been through many rough patches prior to that fall, but, still, around October things were taking an especially dark turn. I won't go into the details of what was going wrong with the marriage since I would like to respect Anjela's privacy at least a little in all this. But, during this time, I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. I actually went to a doctor about my insomnia. And, when I did sleep, I would sometimes have the most vivid dreams. Some writers really mine their dreams for inspiration. I seldom remember enough of mine to find them useful, and the few I do remember seem too incoherent to shape into fiction.

One common thread of my remembered dreams, however, is that they are usually set in the same house. This house is no place I've ever lived, but I know it well... it's my dream house. It's a big, Victorian mansion, full of secret passages and hidden rooms. It sits alone in a field, with no neighbors in sight. The layout of the house is nothing I could ever sketch out in my waking moments, but, in my dreams, its a very tangible place, and I move around in it with a certain familiarity.

But, one night in October of 2000, I had a very vivid dream about a woman wrecking my dream house. The woman wasn't Anjela, or anyone I could immediately identify. But she was moving through the house, reaching out with fingernails like swords and ripping the walls. The strangest detail of the dream was that she was traveling along a heavy iron rail, wearing elaborate wheeled boots that had long iron spikes shooting out from the ankles. I remember in the dream chasing this woman, watching her tear the house to pieces, until suddenly the whole front half of the house collapsed, leaving what was left of the place looking like an enormous dollhouse.

In retrospect, it's easy to interpret the dream as my fears about my own house falling apart, at least metaphorically. At the time, though, when I woke up, I took the time to jot down some notes about the dream. Due to my having sought medical help for my insomnia, I was keeping a sleep log of when I woke up at night. The following day, I held on to that strong and strange image of the woman with swords for fingers and spikes on her heels. I began to think about who she might be and what her story was.

Also, it was around this time that, grasping at straws, I decided that the reason Anjela no longer seemed to be in love with me was that I had stopped writing. When we met, I'd been at a very productive and creative stage in my life. I'd finished my second novel, a very bad book called Dragons. And, I'd started my third novel, a much more promising book called Bitterwood. The first year we were together, I was writing all the time, churning out chapters and stories at a rate that I look back on with a certain degree of envy. Of course, back then, I could crank out story after story because I didn't really have a sense of what was a good story and what was a bad story. I would just take any cliched idea, pop in some cardboard characters, drive them toward a twist ending, and call it a story. As I grew as a writer, I found my output slowing. It took time and thought to write a good story, not just an afternoon's whim. I went from writing a couple of stories a month to writing a couple of stories a year. So, in October 2000, I felt like the reason Anjela had lost interest in me was that I wasn't the person I'd told her I was when we met. I'd told her I was a writer, but I'd evolved into someone who was only tinkering with the craft. I worried I was a poser, and she'd found me out.

So, I decided that I'd win her back by writing another novel. And I wouldn't screw around with this and drag it out for years like I had with my previous novel efforts. It was November. I'd finish my book by the end of December. I told people at the time that I was doing it in honor of the new millennium. If I started a book in November and finished it at midnight of New Years 2001, I could claim I'd written the first novel of the new millennium. But, the real drive behind my writing was my desperation to prove to Anjela that I was still the same creative writer that she'd fallen for a few years before.

I had plenty of ideas for novels when I sat down on November 15 to start writing my next novel, stories I'd thought about for years, and put a lot of planning into. But, when the actual typing started, I decided I'd tell the story of the girl who'd destroyed my dream house. The woman became the character Rail Blade. My protagonist was a wannabe stand-up comic who never was quite brave enough to quit his day job and chase his true dreams.

There was some good news/bad news with my plan to make Anjela love me again. The bad news, duh, was that it didn't work. She moved out sometime in December without having read a word of the book. To this day I'm not sure if she ever read it. The good news is, before that novel, writing had always been a very intellectual pursuit for me. Suddenly, I was writing in a state of high emotional stress and it all comes out in the pages of the book. I felt like my life was being taken from me by forces I had no control over... which was, of course, the same problem that Richard Rogers must confront as his entire life gets erased by a time machine accident. All of my existential angst found a voice in Richard.

There are other hidden parallels, things that no one probably ever suspects are drawn from real life. Right before Anjela left, we had a cat named Easter put to sleep. Easter had long had serious health problems. We were there with her as the vet slipped a needle into her veins and put her down. A night or two later, I wrote the scene where Dr. Know kills Rail Blade with a syringe of the same poison. Dr. Know is crying in the aftermath, claiming he killed her because he loved her and didn't want to see her in pain anymore. I know that Dr. Know is sincere, even if Richard doesn't believe his motivations in the book.

As fate would have it, a few days later I arrived home and found Anjela packing up her truck. The doors of the house were wide open so that people could cart off her furniture. I walked into the freezing house as an icy rain was starting to fall and found that the furnace was only blowing cold air. She drove off with me sitting in the rain removing the cover from the exterior furnace trying to figure out what was wrong. I didn't solve the mystery of the broken furnace. I eventually gave up and went inside broken home and wrote the next scene in my book... the scene that had given birth to the whole novel to start with, the scene in which a woman with spikes on her ankles rides a rail through a house and destroys it.

On that cold December night, it sucked really bad that my cat was dead, my furnace was broken, and my wife had left. Still, I wrote that scene that night, and the next scene the next night, and kept going until my book was finished. The whole time, my brain felt full of lightning, like the story was an electric current and I was merely its conductor. It was a deeply satisfying creative experience, worth the price I paid for it.

And, once it was on paper, I slept like a baby.

That's it, the fifth thing almost no one knew about me. Thanks again to Eric James Stone for tagging me. Now, it's time for me to turn this over to five people. So, Nancy Fulda, Oliver Dale, Vylar Kaftan, Rick Novy, and Gail Z. Martin... tag! You're it!

Things Few People Know About Me #4: My Most Regreted Words

I worked late tonight. It was almost dark when I left, pitch black a half hour later when I arrived at the graveyard. I placed some tulips on Laura's grave. It was a little tricky to find in the dark. If it weren't for the little trinkets placed at the marker by her friend Anke I would have had to resort to attempting to read the little placards by the light of my cell phone.

I didn't stay long. It was dark and cold, and I had the galleys to Bitterwood in my car waiting to be proofread. I've told my publisher I'd get my notes to him by next Monday. I keep hearing this ticking clock in my skull now. I went to a restaurant and ate some hot wings while I proofed another two chapters. All of it had a very familiar feel.

Because the last time I spoke to Laura when she was awake, I had a copy of Bitterwood in my hands. This was back in May; Solaris had told me in March they wanted the book but it needed to be expanded. I waited a few months while the details of the deal were hammered out, but at the end of April I printed a copy of the book and started a read through making intensive notes, trying to figure out where I was going to put 40,000 new words into my tightly plotted novel. Of course, right around this time was when Laura started getting really, really sick. Every other day there was some new crisis. So, I hadn't made much progress when we made out last trip to the emergency room. I took along the copy of the manuscript. My hospital experience was that there would be long hours of waiting while they had Laura off for x-rays and exams. We went to the ER at night. They checked Laura into a room after midnight. They were having trouble getting her oxygen levels to a safe zone. Then, they put her on an oxygen mask and she started improving. I went home that night and slept, then went back the next morning early and spent the day sitting in her hospital room. It was a nice room, one one of the upper floors of the hospital, with a terrific view. The room was also private, unlike the last room she'd had which she'd shared with a person with a very concerned, and very large, and very loud family. We joked that the room was better than some of the hotels we'd stayed at.

I spent a lot of that day reading Bitterwood. Laura's friends and family came by in a steady stream. I'd sit in the corner and read while people talked. My focus that day was really more on the book than on her.

Around 6:30 that night her friend Cheryl came buy and planned to stay the evening. Laura seemed to be doing pretty well. She hadn't eaten anything all day, but her oxygen levels were just barely below normal; it seemed like the oxygen mask was going to make a difference. I wanted to leave. I had spent all but maybe 7 of the previous 24 hours in the hospital. I told Laura I was going to go eat, take a shower, get some rest. They had actually offered Laura the opportunity to be discharged that night, since her vital signs were okay. It seemed like the immediate crisis had passed. She decided she'd feel better if she stayed one more night in the hospital, just to be sure the oxygen mask was doing the trick. I told her I'd come back in the morning to bring her home. She be on oxygen from then on... it would be an adjustment, but it wasn't the end of the world.

I left... and went to my Writer's Group, which always met Wednesday's at 7:00. I didn't tell Laura I was going to the group; I told her I was going to eat, then go home. It seemed okay to tell her I was leaving because I was hungry and tired. It seemed shameful to tell her I was leaving because I wanted to go hang out with other writers and talk about writing for a few hours rather than sit around in that hospital room for another evening. It wasn't a straight-up lie, only a lie of ommission, but it currently stands as the thing I most regret saying, or not saying.

It's not that Laura valued me for my honesty. I think, really, I was often useful to her when I was there to lie to her. Doctors would come in with bad news and once the doctor left the room I'd be able to spin it into good news. The doctors would tell her that a tumor had grown by 2 millimeters, for instance. I'd show her how tiny that was; if her tumors only crept along at millimeters per month, she had a long time left, I assured her. There was a long line of medical report over the years that kept telling her, in more clinical terms, "You're screwed!" I was there to read the same reports and look Laura straight in the eye and say, "You know, they are paid to be pessimists. This really isn't bad news at all. You're going to beat this thing." And sometimes, I meant it. Sometimes, I believed it myself. But, a lot of the time, I knew she was losing the battle, and I still chose to tell her she was winning. I don't regret those lies at all.

But, I wish I'd stayed that night. Or, I wish I'd just said, "I want to go to my writer's group, then I'm going to eat, then go home. " But instead I acted on my own hidden agenda, ashamed that I had something I wanted to do that evening more than I wanted to spend time with her.

I know, intellectually, that no matter what I did or said that night, Laura still would not be here to share this Valentine's Day with me. But, on a deeper level, I really wonder if I could have changed things, if I'd stuck around and held her hand through that night, and told her everything would be okay, if maybe she would have pulled through, probably not this long, but maybe a few more days, a week or two more, a month. I'm told that she got very frightened that night, that as her vital signs started to decline she was scared, asking if there was hope. I wished I'd been there to tell her yes--even if there wasn't. I wish my last lie to her had been one I could be proud of.

Things Few People Know About Me #3: I'm Damned

There's an article that just went up at World Net Daily that is so cringingly blasphemous even I feel bad about it. Read it here, if you dare. The short summary of the article is that a science student named Samuel Hunt has "proven" the literal truth of the creation account in Genesis and that, quote, "the construction of everything in the universe begins with a) the Holy Spirit (magnetic field); b) Light (an electric field); and c) that Light can be created by a sonic influence or sound." The article then goes on to talk about sonoluminescence, which is a real scientific phenomena, in which soundwaves moving through water can create light, and since Genesis starts with spoken words, water, and light, viola, the absolute truth of the Bible has just been created under laboratory conditions!

All of requires so many mind numbing leaps of logic I don't even know where to begin with arguing about it. Yes, if you shout at water loud enough under the right conditions, you can get a little light. I'm not sure, however, that there's been any corresponding demonstration that you can shout at the water and get a planet out of it, or shout at clay and have it come to life as a variety of creatures. Wake me up when they get that into a test tube.

The sad thing is how badly certain people of faith want the scientific stamp of approval. It's almost a confession on their part that science equals respectable and believable. Rather than admitting there's a tension between science and the Bible, they turn to science as proving the Bible true. As a former fundamentalist, this just seems sad. If you want to base your world view on the Bible, just do it. Dedicate yourself to the proposition that every word within its pages is 100 percent true and tune out or reject any evidence to the contrary. It's really not that hard, there are plenty of people who manage to do this. If you have to go outside the Bible to find evidence of God, you've already let in that little sliver of doubt that's going to doom you come Judgment Day.

What does this have to do with something that few people know about me? After all, I've publicly stated my atheism many times, and publicy talked about my fundamentalist upbringing. There is, however, a pivitol moment in that upbringing I don't talk about much. When I was was 12, in Sunday School, the teacher introduced us to the concept of the unpardonable sin, blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. It come from Matthew 7:31.
"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men." This turns out to be a highly debated Biblical passage, since Jesus isn't always the best person at defining his terms. But, my Sunday school teacher wasn't into debating meaning, he just told us that if we called the Holy Ghost a mocking name, we were damned. Game over.

So, of course, my twelve year old mind instantly thinks something like, "So, if I call the Holy Ghost a pig, I'll be damned." Then, I froze, mortified. I'd just thought about calling the Holy Ghost a bad name. And, in Sunday School, they were real big on the idea that just thinking about a sin was the exact same thing as doing it. So, for instance, if you wanted to murder someone, really played out the scenario in your mind, it was exactly the same, sin-wise, as actually killing somebody. By thinking of an insult, it was exactly the same as saying it.

I was 12 years old, and I was damned.

This isn't a problem I find that most people can really sympathize with. There really aren't that many people in the world who take the Bible as literally as I did when I was 12. But, I honestly saw no way out back then. I couldn't even go and talk to people about it. I assumed my family would disown me. I assumed the church would kick me out and tell me never to return. I really had no choice but to suffer in silence for a couple of years until I went atheist. Suffer is really the right word here. Obsess is also accurate. There wasn't a moment of my waking life where this wasn't on my mind for those years. Really, even up until college, I would wake up in the middle of the night and be afraid to open my eyes because I knew, just knew, that one day I would open my eyes and the devil would be there, ready to take me down to Hell and just skip the whole Judgment Day thing. The whole point of life, as I understood it from my church, was to be born damned and learn the truth about the world and accept salvation then remain vigalant until you died, so you could go to heaven. If you short circuited that process, well, there really wasn't a whole lot of reason for you to go on living. I was never suicidal, but, in a lot of ways, there was no point to suicide. I'd already killed myself spiritually with a stray thought at the age of 12.

I'd planned to include my damned status in my list of five things, making it my fifth item, since it's really the single most important secret I've ever kept. I thought it would be the climax to to the list. But, the article led me to bump it up a notch. Because, the 12 year old fundamentalist that still dwells inside me cringes, just absolutely curls up into a little fetal ball, to read a statement in which someone tries to say that the Holy Spirit is a magnetic field. I mean, what? That's in the Bible where, exactly? Redefining the Holy Spirit to fit into your flakey little quasi-scientific mumbo-jumbo seems much more blasphemous to me than anything I imagined.

Anyway, that's it. That's my darkest secret. Maybe five people in my life have ever known this about me.

Hopefully my last two secrets will be easier to explain....

The second item on both lists....

It occurs to me I can combine the number two slot on my list of ten good reasons to move to Hillsborough with my number two slot on the five things few people know about me.

Reason to Move to Hillsborough #2: The Wooden Nickel Things Few People Know About Me #2: I take pleasure in pain, at least in food.

The Wooden Nickel is a pub located on Churton Street, right in the heart of Hillsborough. It's intended to be more bar than restaurant by it's owners I think, but they have a wizard in the kitchen that makes the food the main draw for me. And, the food out of the kitchen... when you first walk in you are likely to notice all the peanut shells on the floor. They give you buckets of unshelled peanuts and you just throw the husks wherever they may fall. I'm not sure what's different about these peanuts from your typical Planters, but whatever brand they use they are really, really good. Maybe they are just always fresh. They must go through a hundred pounds a night.

Good items on the menu: An oyster po' boy, tater tots, and an "egg burger" which is a hamburger with a sunnyside-up egg on it, an unusual condiment that turns out to work really well on a burger. But, when you go in, look at the chalkboard behind the bar before you bother with the menu. They rotate through a lot of specials that are only available on random nights, a really broad range of stuff from cheese sandwiches with tomato soup to steaks. But the rotating item to watch out for is the fried banana peppers. Oh my god, these are good. They are cut into rings and batter fried and they taste something like a fried pickle but with a kick to them. They are my favorite side dish of any restaurant anywhere and are so good and so obvious I can't believe they aren't available at every fast food joint in America. But, the Wooden Nickel is the only place I've ever seen them... this alone is worth a dozen trips to Hillsborough until you arrive on a night when they have them.

But the star of the Wooden Nickel is the buffalo wings. I go with the wings known as "nickel hot." These are pretty darn hot, but they heat comes from chipoltle instead of the more typical cayenne based wing sauces, which gives them a smoky flavor to go with the heat. They are still hot enough to cause you to sweat and open up your sinuses, but not so hot that you can't appreciate the other flavors you discover in the sauce, the smoke and the salt, and even the chicken is still present, and they use good chicken wings, big, fat, meaty things that make six of them an actual meal.

Which leads to the second thing few people know about me: I'm a food masochist. I'm drawn to a lot of foods that just flat out hurt me. When I go into restaurants, I usually find out what the hottest thing is on the menu and order that. I'm almost always disappointed. Over the years, I've perverted my sense of taste to the point that only the most extreme foods satisfy me. The level of heat where most people call it quits is barely enough to catch my interest. I make a chili that I normally heat with a couple of different heat sources, usually starting out with habanero as my base heat, cayenne as my "high note" heat, and fresh jalapenos and onions soaked in lime juice as my last second topping "kicker" heat. This chili is, to many people I know, inedible. It is the equivalent of eating kerosene and lit matches. You don't so much break out into a sweat while you're eating it as a steam. And, the funny thing is, I'm usually thinking, "this is okay, but I wonder what it would be like if I doubled the habaneros?"

I do have limits. I occasionally find hot wings where they are so hot they have no flavor at all, they are simply pure heat, and these tend not to be my favorite. For instance, the Wooden Nickle has a level of hot beyond "Nickle Hot" that is so hot that it blots out all the subtle flavors that make their hot wings so special. I can eat their hottest wings, but it's not a pleasurable as the next step down.

I also frequently will make compromises with my chili depending on my audience. For family gatherings, I usually avoid the habaneros.

Now, it could be argued that my love of hot food isn't really something "few" people know about me. Probably, hundreds of people know it about me. But, what "few" people know about me, a legitimate secret, is my chili recipe. I've never even written it down before. So, here it is, the key to my award winning pain stew:

James Maxey's So Good It Hurts Chili

Two to three pounds of stew beef*
Three habaneros**
One big red onion
One big can of stewed tomatoes
One big can of dark red kidney beans
One pound of ground beef
One regular sized can of stewed tomatoes
Cayenne powder***
One big white onion
Three or four fresh jalapenos
A couple of limes.

Start by searing your stew beef in a tiny bit of oil, then throwing it and the habaneros in a big pot with enough water to cover the meat by an inch or two. You don't need to do anything fancy to prep the habaneros, just toss them in. Also at a few teaspoons of salt. Bring everything to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer. Scum the surface a few times during the first two or three hours of cooking. Once it seems like all the scum is gone from the beef, chop your big red onion into quarters and toss it in, add some black pepper, then put the lid on the pot and walk away. The key now is that you will let the beef, habanero, and onion cook for 24 hours. This is going to spread the flavor of the habaneros completely through the beef. The reason you don't need to do anything fancy to the peppers is that, after a day of cooking, they just fall apart. You might find the stems, but usually even these vanish. The meat after 24 hours is mostly mush. If you did a good job of searing the meat, a few of those seared bits usually still hold together. Drain your kidney beans and pour them into the mix, and also pour in the large can of stewed tomatoes. Stir everything up. At this point, what you have looks a whole lot like chili, and tastes pretty good. Habeneros are among the hottest of hot peppers, but by cooking them with the beef for a full day, the heat is really spread out. You can get the beef into your mouth without a violent assault on your tongue by the habeneros. Instead, the heat sort of spreads slowly with each chew.

Yet, this isn't where the chili ends. Now you are going to break out a big cast iron skillet and start frying your ground beef. Season it with salt and pepper and put in a tablespoon or so of cayenne powder. Also, chop up about half of your big white onion and throw it in. In normally cook this until all the meat looks done and the onion is translucent. If the ground beef was really fatty, I'll drain it, but I like a little fat to still be in the pan for the next step. At the spice level I like, the fat is noticeably red, colored by the cayenne. Now, I turn the heat up high and pour in my regular sized can of stewed tomatoes. I know you aren't supposed to cook tomatoes in cast iron, but if you've got a good level of fat down the tomatoes won't hurt your skillet. Cook everything on high, boiling off most of the water in the tomato juice, until the tomato juice and beef fat combine into a thick red sauce. After a few minutes, the mix should look like hotdog chili. It tastes a good like hot dog chili as well, with a noticeable cayenne heat and a good meaty taste. If you've burned the beef a little I find that this gives the whole mix a little complexity.

If I'm making hot dogs, I use this as my final product. But, for my big chili, I now mix together this cayenne flavored, ground beef chili with the habanero flavored stew beef chili. I cook everything together on a low heat for a few minutes. I do a lot of last second tweaking with salt, pepper, and cayenne. If the mixture looks too thick, I might add a second small can of stewed tomatoes, drained. I also sometimes add more beans. If it looks too thin, I just cook it on a medium heat until it thickens up. I'm usually making this chili for some big event, so frequently at this point the event is still a day away and I will place the whole mixture into the fridge for the night. This lets the flavors meld together. Then I just heat it up slowly the next day for an hour or so on a low heat. The mix is really easy to burn, so patience is the key to reheating.

The final touch is a salsa made from fresh jalepenos and the last of the white onion. I typically seed the jalepenos--the white pithy part of the jalepeno is where the real heat is, and at this point I don't want to make my salsa the dominant flavor. There's still plenty of heat in the seeded jalepenos, especially if you chop them into very tiny cubes. Give the white onion the same tiny cube treatment. Mix them together in a dish and begin chopping limes and squeezing the juice over the mix. You want enough juice that the whole thing is close to the moisture level of restaurant salsa.

Spoon this fresh mixture onto a bowl of the chili. Now, when you take a bite of the chili, you should have three heat experiences. First, the mild but sharp hit of the jalepeno relish is going to hit your nose and tongue and really wake up your senses. Then, your tongue is going to get a nice spanking from the cayenne. Finally, as you chew, the habenero is going to start coming out of the beef fibers and give the whole experience a very satisfying lasting burn that should spread through your whole body.

Keep telling yourself that whatever doesn't kill you will make you stronger.....

* The actual cut of the beef isn't that important, since after you cook it 24 hours it all turns into strings. I usually buy based on price. A good chuck roast is my most frequent cut, but the last time I made this I actually used two pound of beef heart which cost, like, fifty cents a pound, and was really pleased with the results. I'm guessing this would work well with beef tongue, but I know the food wimps in my life would chicken out if I told them they were eating tongue.

**The number of habaneros is up to you. These are insanely hot peppers, but you are diluting the flavor through a couple of pounds of beef. So, the more peppers, the more heat. If I'm making this at the beach and know that kids will be tasting it, I only use one. If I'm doing it for work and know it's all adults, including some fellow heat lovers, I'll go with three or four. I've also sustituted a half dozen jalapenos when I couldn't find goodlooking habaneros.

***The cayanne powder can be swapped or mixed with various other dried chili powders. I've also gotten very satisfying result with a can of chipoltles at this step. Be warned, though, that if you go the chipoltle route you will wind up with a level of heat that only the most rugged chili eaters will be able to appreciate.

Finally, I have one last optional ingredient: Cactus. The big green pickled strips you see in jars in the Mexican food section. Napolitos I think they are called? These are basically cactus pickles. They have absolutely no heat, but, since they are big long green strips, they provide an interesting visual element to the chili. A lot of people mistake them for some sort of big green pepper. If anything, they actually help fight the heat, since they have a vinegary taste.

Okay, one last finally: I know that some people are opposed to beans in chili. I actually wasn't a fan myself, but I think that the whole chili turns thicker and even meatier with their addition.

Five things few people know about me, #1

I've been "tagged" by Eric James Stone on his blog (www.ericjamesstone.com) and now have to write five things that few people know about me. I normally don't do stuff like this--it strikes me as sort of a chain letter--but I'll play along. These aren't going to be five short, funny things about me, though. These are genuine secrets, or near secrets, things I normally have to trust a person pretty well before revealing. So, it will probably take more than one blog entry. I know, I know, I just started a list of 10 Reasons to move to Hillsborough, and now I'm starting a list of 5 Things Few People Know About Me. I promise that both lists will come to fruition soon.

My first secret involves the most premeditated act of cruelty I've ever committed. I've probably done crueler things than this, but usually they've been casual cruelties, even accidental cruelties, or cruelties that simply spring up from the circumstances of the moment. But, there was one instance where I just decided I was going to really cause somebody a little psychic pain and wound up getting results better than I even dreamed of. So here goes:

Five Thing Few People Know About Me #1: That Guy We Killed

There was this guy in college I'll call Bravo who a lot of people hated. Bravo had been in the army and had this mini-Rambo thing going on. It wasn't so much a macho act as it was an exaggerated sense of his own competence in everything. He honestly believed he was the best at anything he set down to do. If you played chess with him, he would warn you up front he was an unbeatable chess player. If you played cards, he'd tell you he never lost at cards. He was, in fact, fairly mediocre at just about everything... his bravado was unwarranted and really got on people's nerves (although it probably would have gotten on our nerves even worse if it had been warranted).

On the second to last day of the semester, right before Christmas break, there were only a few people left on campus, those of us unlucky enough to have exams scheduled for the last day. We few stragglers were playing cards. We started talking about Bravo and everyone agreed he was really annoying. We thought it would be cool to get him into a poker game and take all of his money, especially since he liked to talk about how much money his dad had. One flaw to this plan was that we didn't have any money of our own to gamble. The second was, we really didn't know that much about cheating at cards. So, I proposed a second plan to take his money... a plan that involved murder.

One of the people in on the plan was a guy I'll call Cowboy. Cowboy also had a mini-Rambo thing going on. He carried a Rambo knife (you may remember these... they were a foot long and had a hollow hilt filled with survival items like matches and fishing line), dressed in fatigues, and always had a fake handgrenade clipped to his belt. (All things that would get you kicked off a campus these days, I'm sure.)

Cowboy went to Bravo on that second to last day of the semester and confessed a terrible secret: He was in bad trouble with a drug dealer. He owed the guy $500, and the dealer told him if he left town for Christmas without paying, he'd track down Cowboy at home and do something bad to him or his family. Could Bravo loan him the dough? And, would Bravo come with him to the deal that night, to serve as his bodyguard? After all, Bravo had combat training, and was the only one Cowboy could trust with this important mission. Bravo, of course, stepped up to the job.

That night, just before midnight, Cowboy and I meet Bravo at the checkpoint. Bravo is in full combat mode. He's wearing fatigues and has camo-make-up smeared all over his face. He's carrying nun-chucks. And, he says, he might need them... because his Dad would only loan him $50. Cowboy says that, between Bravo's $50 and what I've chipped in, he hopes he has enough to buy some time from the dealer.

We drive out into the country, up mountain back roads until we come to this darkened church. We sit in the parking lot and wait. Soon, a big black car pulls up in the lot above us and flashes its light.

Cowboy tells us to sit tight. Don't make a move unless he yells for us. He goes back to the car and starts talking through the open passenger-side window. We have our windows down, but can barely hear what they're saying. Then, the dealer starts shouting. Apparently, he's not happy with the partial payment. Suddenly, a hand pops out the window, holding a pistol to Cowboy's gut.

Before Bravo can react, Cowboy springs into action, knocking the gun aside and grabbing his rambo knife. He plunges the knife into the open window and a scream cuts through the night air. Then, he jumps back and pulls the fake grenade from his belt and throws it into the car. The driver of the car bolts out and dives to the ground as Cowboy runs back to our car. He jumps behind the wheel and tosses a bloody knife into Bravo's lap.

"I stabbed him in the heart!" he yelps. "I killed him!"

By now, the driver of the car has realized that the grenade is a dud. Cowboy peels off down the back country road as the driver gets back into the black car and goes into pursuit. For a lot of the chase, we seem like we lost him. Then, he catches up. Cowboy drives even crazier down the mountain road, gaining distance, until, nearing a gas station closed for the night, he flips off his headlights and skids to a halt behind the dumpster. Twenty seconds later, the black car flies past.

We head back to campus. I repeatedly tell Bravo, "We can't tell anyone. Cowboy killed that guy. We have to keep this a secret. If anyone finds out, he'll go to prison." Bravo swears he'll never tell.

We drop Bravo back off at his dorm and go back to Cowboy's room, where we meet the "dealers." The whole thing, duh, was a set up. We had choreographed the car chase to the last curve... though, it turns out that the dealer driver almost blew it at the start by spinning his car 180 and nearly putting it into a ditch, which would have been tragic, since it was my dad's car. But, he recovered, and the chase ended as scripted. The combat scene had been close to flawless. It was very convincing when my friend Greg (name not changed, I have his longstanding permission to tell this story) pulled the 99 cent toy pistol. It was Hollywood flawless when Cowboy stuck a fake knife into the car and grabbed the real knife sitting in the cup of stage blood in Greg's lap. We took Bravo's fifty bucks and went and had dinner at an all night diner. We had money left over to divy up. Fifty bucks could actually by something in 1983. All in all, we were feeling pretty good.

We got back to the dorms still laughing, and in the middle of the night, the phone rang. It was Bravo. He was crying. He'd gotten back to his dorm... and he'd lost his keys. His RA had to let him into his room. Bravo was freaked out because he had blood all over his clothes.

I felt really, really lousy at that moment. We'd had a lot of fun, but Bravo was a wreck. The right thing to do would have been to tell him the truth.

I told him to try to get some sleep and reminded him not to tell anyone.

The story doesn't end there. The whole scam actually lasted several weeks past the Christmas break. We discovered, on returning from break, that Bravo had told his girlfriend and at least one other person about the murder. We dragged on the whole murder story for a long time, feeding them little clues here and there about the vast drug ring on campus, as well as the undercover cops, and honestly, it's still really hard for me to believe they bought it, yet they did. Bravo continued to look haunted, his friend seemed excited about being privy to this amazing adventure going on around him, and only the girlfriend showed the occasional sign of suspicion.

The final humiliation came when the scam was revealed. It was a Friday afternoon and Bravo had gone home to see his folks. We were sitting in the lounge, getting ready to feed his girlfriend a little more elaboration on the drug ring and undercover cops, when I confessed. I just came out and explained the whole scenario. I was sick of the lies. And, it turned out, I was also just plain sick. There was a flu outbreak. An hour later, I realized I had a fever. I wound up spending the weekend in the campus health center, along with a crowd of other vomiting sickos. By Monday, I was feeling a little stronger.

Then, Bravo burst in. His girlfriend had called him with the truth. "Maxey!" he yelled. "I know what you've done! I went to the cops and they're on their way right now to arrest you for contortion!"

The whole sick ward grew quiet.

I sighed. "First of all," I explained, "contortion would be me sticking my foot behind my head. The word you want is extortion. And, I'm not guilty of extortion, I'm guilty of fraud!"

Bravo just sagged. His one opportunity to put a little fear into me, and he'd blown his lines. He left in defeat. The cops, as I expected, never arrived.

Twenty-five years out, I can tell this story, and it's a funny story with a funny puchline. And, twenty-five years out, I can still find myself standing at that dorm hall phone, listening to Bravo absolutely freaking out about the blood on his clothes, knowing I was responsible for that freak out, and knowing that I possessed the one piece of information that would have calmed him down, or at least changed his fear and panic into anger. It's even possible if we'd all gone over and yelled "gotcha" that night, he would have been laughing about it the next morning.

The sense of warm satisfaction I had when I hung up that phone still gives me the occasional sleepless night.

Solaris Books Now Available

I've caught my first real cold in ages. I used to get colds all the time, but my last few years with Laura I somehow managed to avoid them. Since she had a weakened immune system most of the time due to chemo, I was just much more careful during the winter time, washing my hands constantly. And, if encountered people who were sniffling or said they felt sick, I got away from them as quickly as possible. My vigilance paid off. Alas, I've slowly been letting my guard down, and last week I had a sore throat that just stuck around. Monday night, the sore throat went away and I started sneezing. I went to work yesterday but left after a few hours. I've spent about 18 of the last 24 hours asleep.

In the time I have been awake, I've been lying in bed reading the new releases from Solaris. Solaris is a "new" publishing house from Britian. I put "new" in quotes because Solaris is actually a new imprint of a larger publishing empire, Games Workshop. It's being run by people who actually know a thing or two about publishing books and getting them into bookstores. And, sure enough, when I went to Barnes and Noble last Saturday, they had several face out copies of each of the first two releases from Solaris. The first is a novel called the Summoner by Gail Z. Martin. I read the 40 pages or so this morning. Quite promising, fast paced, set in a fantasy world I didn't feel I had to work too hard to understand. I read some of the reader reviews on Amazon and a few people were rating it poorly for being built on cliches. But the cliches they mentioned (a prince being robbed of his rightful throne, or magic having a dark side and a light side, for example) strike me not so much as cliches as archetypes of fantasy. If every story that has a prince or a princess as a protagonist gets labeled unoriginal, then pretty much the whole fantasy genre has to take that hit. Admittedly, I'm just 40 pages into a book that's over 600 pages long, but so far the slightly familiar feel of some of the characters (the tom-boyish sister, the happy-go-lucky bard, the stern and skeptical soldier) just helps me to orient myself in a book with a plethora of characters and subplots. Quickly knowing who the characters are and what their agendas are likely to be makes the book more readable.

My one complaint so far is that, amid a long list of purely made up names, Martin's named the villian Jared. Jared seems like a pretty sinister dude and I think he'll live up to his villianous potential, but I still can't help but see him as the guy from the Subway commercial.

If you want to read a sample before you go out and buy a copy, go to www.solarisbooks.com. They've got the first chapter there as a pdf for you to read.

The second book I picked up is the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. This is an anthology that so far has gotten nothing but good reviews. I've only read two stories so far, both solid little SF tales. Unlike the anthologies Phobos attempted to launch with full of new writers, this anthology is full of new stories by well established pros. Brian Aldis, Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, Mike Resnick, David Gerrold, and Ian Watson to name a few.