At long (long) last, the Men on the Edge anthology from STARBooks Press is available—just in time to get it for all your friends and family who enjoy gay edgeplay smut in their stockings. Men on the Edge features 17 stories, the most important one of course written by my alter-ego Holden Wells. (All the more reason you should pick it up!)

In other news, I brought my iMac to Tennessee—we’re here for a couple days—but forgot to bring the keyboard. Suave, huh? Thank god I threw my MacBook in the car at the last minute. I’m not a fan of point-and-click typing.

Mark has been digging holes in the yard today. If we had a dog that actually thought it was a dog, Mark might have been spared the effort, but our dog stood on the porch shivering instead.

The goats next door were very interested in the goings-on in our yard. (They’re really pretty goats. Pretty and curious.)

Tomorrow we’re going to put sticks in the holes, and maybe one day they’ll turn into trees.

But tonight: Boston Legal! Yay Netflix.

Because I found myself with a couple hours’ reading time and only this book on hand, I’m about halfway through The Art of Racing in the Rain. If it weren’t for those conditions, I would have set it aside 80 or so pages ago. (When I was on page 33, before I knew I’d have that reading time on my hands, I was telling myself, “Well, get to page 50 and see how you feel.” ) I’m just not warming up to Enzo, who is significantly (disappointingly) more human than dog—and if he were human, his voice is such that I’d be grumbling, “Oh, stuff it, Enzo!” after five or six chapters.

As if being sick of the narrative voice isn’t bad enough, I can already see much of what’s in store for the second half, including how it turns out in the end. So…what’s the point?

The only decision now is do I want to spend a few more hours with it, so I can have the satisfaction of adding another book to my “Read in 2008″ list, or would I rather crack open something else?

~ ~ ~

From reading the Amazon reviews just now, I learned that the Drake Hotel in Toronto leaves a new hardcover novel on your pillow instead of a mint. HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT?!

The keys I lost in New Jersey showed up in the mail today.

My $5 Wal*Mart foot pump broke, so Mark and I went in together on a less flimsy pump. I used it for the first time yesterday evening—and promptly broke the valve stem on my rear tire.

Tomorrow Mark’s going to ride his bike downtown, to see how feasible cycling to work is. It’d be a nice gas saver, and he’d roll his commute and workout into one and probably come out ahead time-wise as well as money-wise.

I’m hitting up Hearns Cycling and possibly BioWheels tomorrow—they both carry Bianchis. I want to find out how much it’ll run me, if I decide to get the Volpe, to have its seat post replaced with a rigid one, platform pedals put on (’cause this is going to be the “anywhere, anytime” bike—no special shoes req’d), the All Terrainasaurus tires traded in for slicks, and to have it set up with lower gearing. The gearing’s already lower than on my road bike, but I want it even lower yet. I’m going to be shopping with this bike (with purchases stuffed into panniers, not an Xtraycycle…yet…), and I need all the help I can get hauling a heavier bike packed with groceries up these hills. I’ll probably end up with a mountain bike crankset when all’s said and done.

I finished reading As Meat Loves Salt this morning. I don’t know whether to recommend. It consumed me while I was reading it—well researched, well written, very vivid. When I’d put it down, the characters and their plights stayed with me until I could take it back up. Now it’s painful to think about them. And Jacob…. He makes himself difficult—impossible—to root for. You’ll find yourself increasingly disappointed and exasperated with him, until you finally leave him in disgust.

So what I really recommend is that you should have a cheerier book on hand to follow this one up with.

Now I’m reading The Art of Racing in the Rain, but I keep putting it down every few pages to go cuddle with our one remaining dog. At this point, he’s probably all “What? Again?! LEAVE ME ALONE. I’m gonna pee on that stupid book when you’re not looking. Don’t you have more gay historical fiction to read? Zombie comic books? STOP PETTING ME! YOU’RE WEARING A BALD PATCH INTO THE TOP OF MY HEAD. I hate that book you’re reading. Why couldn’t you have gotten a novel told from the point of view of a beta fish—then you could go bug Charlie instead. GO. AWAY.”

Poor Jack.

Karma must be exacting a little payment from me today. First I went down with my bike—again while not going anywhere. This time it was that my right foot didn’t clear the trunk bag as I dismounted. Why hello thar, driveway pavement!

This afternoon I was walking down the steps to the French Broad Co-Op’s back parking lot, thinking how pretty that little area is, a garden oasis between two parking lots, and bam—twisted my ankle. First word out of my mouth: “Fuck.” Next: “Ow. Ow.” Then, as I hopped around: “I’d better be able to ride tomorrow.” I think I’ll be okay. I’m more concerned about the heel of my right hand, which I apparently bruised on the driveway. It hurts most when I’m shifting in the car. Can’t wait to see how it feels on the handlebars in the morning. Meanwhile I’m alternating an ice pack between the two owies.

My plan for this morning was to buy Lewis Black tickets as soon as the public on-sale started at 9:00 and then bike down to the tailgate market for yummy fresh produce, but at 9:00 I realized that the on-sale was actually 10:00, leaving me with an hour to…do what with? It was enough time to ride to the market and back, but not enough time to browse all the yummy produce. If I waited till after the presale to ride, it’d be hot outside, and I’d be in a rush then, too, because we had plans for lunch. So I headed out around 9:10, went my usual route to the dead end, then came back and cruised past the mouth of our road, kept going past my previous turn-around spot, climbed a new hill, and came home. In all: 4.1 miles, and I was back in the house by 9:50.

We scored seats in the center orchestra pit for the Lewis Black show in Charlotte. Badass.

After I showered and drank breakfast (mmm banana peanut butter smoothies) and got some reading in, we met Neil for an early lunch at Nine Mile on Montford. The place just opened about a month ago. Jamaican food, tasty, and the meals are very reasonably priced, especially for lunch.

After that, we headed downtown to catch the kick-off of this year’s World Naked Bike Ride. Except it started pouring rain. We got soaked and missed seeing any bikers. We might have been there at the wrong time, too. The website I was going by said 1:00pm; others say 2:00pm.

(Incidentally, I got an email from my step-daughter, who’s interning at SCAD this week, with a link to info on the bike ride and one line: “don’t take dad.” Hahaha. Whoops.)

This afternoon, I finished reading Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own (about writing and working as a housecleaner) and started in on Complete Book of Road Cycling Skills. Mark shook his head about that one. He figures once you get past getting the bike moving without falling over—something both of us licked years ago—the rest comes naturally. He could be right; I don’t, after all, have any plans to start racing. But it’s what I do: “Get into something; read up on it.” So there you go.

After my eyes tired of reading, I lubed my chain and adjusted the front shifter, which I’d been having to push waaaay to the right to shift. Should be better now. I wanted to level my saddle, too; its nose is pointing just a touch upward. No luck, though. I’m probably missing something stupendously simple. Something so simple they didn’t feel the need to put instructions for it in either the bike’s manual or my road bike maintenance book. I’ll mess with it again when my new saddle arrives (I took advantage of a sale and free shipping at Performance Bike this weekend to order a woman’s saddle—it’s a little wider where your sitbones go and has a bit of a cutout where your delicate bits go, which I think my delicate bits are going to appreciate).

Finally, I haven’t been writing, and I should have been writing, but I haven’t. I’ve figured out why, though, so tomorrow I’ll be back at it. The reason I’ve been avoiding working on the Rot rewrite is this: I keep thinking about it in terms of its ability to be commercially viable. Viable, schmiable. For now it’s more important that it be engaging to me. So I’ve tossed that pressure off and will dig in with renewed excitement tomorrow after my ride and before we go see The Happening. M. Night Shyamalan is one of my guilty pleasures.

Tonight it’s dinner with some other couples at La Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz. I’m totally looking forward to the bacon-wrapped jumbo shrimp with coconut rice.

Which of course means they’ll have taken it off their menu.

Best. Line. Ever. (But too much of a spoiler for me to quote it! This is horrible! It’s like knowing a secret!)

And, whew, what a relief—the book was really good. (I worry when a new Chuck book comes out: is it going to be another Haunted, another Lullaby?) Snuff is probbbbbably not for everyone. I don’t see me gifting it to my mom—and even less Mark’s mom—anytime soon. (Definitely not Mark’s mom. Ever.) But if it is for you, wow are you in for some fun!

And now it’s time to rank Chuck’s novels from best to less-than-best (in my opinion; Dres loves Lullaby, so apparently everyone has different tastes. Whatever. Here they are:)
Continue reading

Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book, Snuff, came out yesterday, and the UPS guy delivered a copy to my front porch. Unfortunately, I had work, a work-out and writing to get out of the way before I could crack it open, but I did start it last night.

Mark’s going to be glad to see me finish it—it’s one of those books you do a lot of chuckling and sniggering through.

I <3 Chuck’s books.

My favorite thing when I get a hold of a new Chuck book is the “Nuh-uh” game:

Chuck book: To keep the Aryan bloodline pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, [Hitler] commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle.

Heather: Nuh-uh!

Google: Sho’nuff!

At this point, I’m only playing the Nuh-uh game ’cause I’ve always played it—Google always says “Sho’nuff!,” you know? And I know Google’s gonna say “Sho’nuff!” So yeah, at this point it’s all about keeping tradition—

—and making sure I look totally suspicious to the FBI.

I’ve had this post by Janet Reid on the “Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room” blog (link) open for six days now with the intention of posting about it here. Janet’s post speculates on how book buying might be different five years from now, and much of it is interesting, but not of much interest to me:

…you’ll walk into a bookstore and see shelves of books, face out. You’ll see video screens above the shelves. You’ll hold the book up to the screen and a menu about that book will pop up. Author interview, book trailer, other books by the author, blurbs about the books, maybe a couple minutes of the author reading from the book.

Five years from now I’ll probably be walking around with a device even more awesome than the upcoming second generation iPhone, and I’m already planning on being able to use this second generation iPhone—especially once AT&T works out the kinks in their “free wi-fi to AT&T iPhone users in Starbucks and Barnes & Noble” dealio—to pull up Amazon reviews, etc., etc., on my phone while I’m standing there in the store (and at the same time see how much cheaper it would be to just go ahead and order it online and wait two days for it to show up at my door—sorry B&N).

What I am interested in, though, is Janet’s “bookspresso machine:”

…if you decide to buy a book, you’ll take it to the register. The clerk will scan the barcode. Then she’ll keep the book and hand you a receipt…. In ten minutes your book will arrive from the basement where it was freshly printed on a bookspresso machine. Maybe it’s delivered to you in the coffee shop. Maybe it’s waiting for pickup after you shop at other stores in the mall.

OMG THIS WOULD BE SO COOL!!! I could order a book then enjoy a cup of coffee (and the requisite fattening pastry to wash it down with) while I wait.

What would be even cooler would be to not end up with a physical book at all—I want something I can read on my iPhone, or whatever awesome device I’m carrying around five years from now—but I get that others get a kick out of the actuality of printed-on-paper books. The bookspresso machine sounds like a great way to make the printed book business a little greener, which I’m all for, and hey, I’d totally use it for gifting books to people.

And while I’m on the subject of bookmaking—learn how you can become your very own bookspresso machine at The Anatomy of a Book. (I wish I were patient and detail-oriented enough to do this sort of thing. Unfortunately what I’d end up with would look more like an eighth-grader’s rushed school project, done while eating a messy peanut butter and jelly sandwich and with one hand in a cast.)

And while I’m on the subject of the upcoming new iPhone…OMG CAN IT BE JUNE 9TH NAO?!?

There’s a new ebook reader on the market AND IT’S THE WORST THOUGHT-OUT THING EVER!!! The BeBook, yours for just 329.95 EUR ($510.67), has no way to connect to the Internet and download books, which, okay, neither does Sony’s Reader—but the Sony Reader is cheaper, not more expensive, than Amazon’s Kindle, which does have that feature. Hello BeBook people? You went the wrong direction with your pricing.

The important thing, though, is that an ebook reader be able to open your ebook files. BeBook handles .doc, .txt, .rtf, .pdf and .html files.

Erm…

What about the formats most of the ebooks I buy come in—eReader? Mobi? How about DRM’d PDFs? Sure I have some .txt, .html and DRM-free PDF files, but the majority of my ebooks come from places like booksonboard.com, ’cause I’m on a buying things kick rather than a pirated downloads things kick, and although booksonboard.com offers DRM’d PDF as an option, I always go for eReader (first choice) or Mobi formats instead because if we’re talking just text, eReader and Mobi give me a far more enjoyable reading experience than PDF. I’m good with Plucker, too. In fact, I love how Plucker measures your progress not by screens but by percentage. What I’m saying, though, is BeBook can’t handle my ebooks, so what the freak good is that?

Did these guys develop this in a dark closet or what? CHECK YOUR CALENDARS, GUYS! IT’S 2008! I mean…fuck! It doesn’t have one cool new or innovative feature. Not one. It’s nothing more than an exercise in overpriced redundancy.

Curious, I added up what I spent on books¹ through Amazon for the past six months. It comes to nearly $260. Not a fortune, but a decent chuck of change. Then I realized I spent about the same amount on ebooks over at Booksonboard.com (way cheaper than Fictionwise.com—why does everyone use Fictionwise?), plus $100 at Target.com (Christmas giftcard from my mom—I like to turn those into books. I believe, however, that buying books through Target.com is exactly the same as buying them through Amazon.com, except without free shipping). That puts me at around $600 for half a year, just on books. (The other half of the year is probably half that since $300 of the $600 came from Christmas giftcards. But still. That’s $900 in books a year!)

(…and worth every cent.)

¹Just books. If I added in everything else I ordered through Amazon…yikes! We won’t go there. DO NOT WANT TO KNOW!

ETA: I just had a thought—maybe I should stop giving books away when I’m done with them. I could hoard them instead and build a retirement home out of them thirty, forty years from now. At least I’d always have something to read on the toilet….

ETA2: The reading hobby, it occurred to me, is nothing next to my concert-going hobby. Yeesh. If for some reason you know how much I spend on tickets, gas, hotel rooms, meals out and merch, do not freaking tell me. Some things I prefer to remain in the dark about. THIS MEANS YOU, CREDIT CARD STATEMENT.

I mentioned this before, five or six weeks ago, but here’s a reminder: GO READ FREAKANGELS, the new weekly web comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. It’s up to episode 6. It’s worth your time.

“Why am I reading Livejournal posts every day that I can’t post comments on (because LJ equates OpenID user with anonymous user and therefore if an LJ has anonymous commenting turned off, I can’t comment)?”

I like to participate; it’s no fun to have to sit on my hands, but at the same time, I’m not getting an LJ account. Not.

So apologies to anyone I’ve been reading who has anonymous commenting turned off, but I’m taking you off my OpenID f-list. If you change your settings, let me know, I’ll toss you back on.

Started reading No Country For Old Men tonight while waiting for the food to arrive at Asheville Pizza & Brewery.

OMG.

In another news, we’re a week into Biffno (Band Fiction Novel(la) Writing Month) over on Rockfic.com, for which I’m writing the temporarily titled “Beneath,” original bandfic with a post-apocalyptic feel. I’m averaging just under 1,000 words a day, and this is a big’un; I expect to be writing it through May.

I have yet another book percolating in the dark reaches of my backbrain, but there are so many things, story-world-believability-wise, that would need to be worked out to my before I could consider it as anything more than “that thing I amuse myself with at night as I wait for sleep.” Like wings. Have you thought about wings? Let’s say you had retractable wings. We won’t even get into how wings large enough to carry a human in flight could retract into that human’s back; I have even more basic concerns. For instance: people with the retractable wings, would they just go through a lot of shirts and jackets? Or do they have clothes with vents in the back that allow the wings to slide through? Or do they just walk around shirtless all the time?

And let’s say we get past the wardrobe problem…. Hips, ass and legs are heavy. Gravity is more than a vague theory. Two and two….

(I obviously don’t read enough books with flying humans in them; I’m sure other people have already worked these problems out.)

But the sound of those large, black, membranous wings, flapping slowly in the night—whoosh. whoosh.—heard only by a guitar player as he lies awake on a tour bus, knowing that what’s up there is cruising just above, just waiting to get at him…. It’s so tempting.

I’ve developed a thing for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, so it makes my day to learn that six stories—by Elizabeth Bear, M. Rickert, Cory Doctorow, James Van Pelt and Richard Kadrey—from the anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse—are available free on the book’s website (actually, it made my day just to find out the book existed; getting to read some stories before my copy gets here is just extra icing).

Book description: Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of speculative fiction—including George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King—Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon.

Go click an author’s name to read a story.

Speaking of things that start with “apocalyptic,” I just ordered my tickets to Apocalyptica’s Atlanta show.