I interviewed Gene Simmons on January 28, 1996. You can read all about the confusing, stressful lead-up to the interview in my book In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians. There’s a reason the book has been in print for twelve years: It’s good. And the reason it’s good is because the interview subjects…
Volume Two of the Ghosts Trilogy available
November 22, 2013
Chasing the Last Whale is now available in paperback. It’s Volume Two of the Ghosts Trilogy. An e-book will follow. Maybe several. The Ghosts Trilogy is—as far as I know—a unique literary attempt in that it consists of a memoir, a novel, and a diary that share the same themes and characters. It began with…
Nothing bores me more
November 19, 2013
Don’t try to engage me in a discussion on the battle of the sexes. Nothing bores me more. Men and women are different; men and women are both human. The end. Someone just made the most obtuse statement I’ve ever read about my writing. Though I won’t repeat it, here’s my reaction to it. I…
Accuracy is evil! Shut up!
November 10, 2013
A plurality of the people interested in military history are terminally unpleasant. I keep having that realization rammed into my block-of-oak head. They believe that accuracy is evil. My latest dust-up with a very unpleasant, truculent military buff was over my statement that a certain book contains many historical inaccuracies. I won’t copy and paste…
Is female beauty in fiction really a problem?
November 5, 2013
The novelist Adelle Waldman—author of The Love Affairs of Nathanial P.—recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker titled “‘A First-Rate Girl’: The Problem of Female Beauty.” In it, Waldman says the following: You’d think it would also be a rich subject for fiction writers—after all, our attitudes about beauty and attraction are tightly bound…
Bigotry can cost you a lot
November 3, 2013
I just tried to win two postcards of German flamethrower pioneers of World War I. It turns out the dealer blocks addresses in the US. The cards were extremely valuable for two reasons: They showed the machine-gun platoon of a flamethrower company, and they proved my theory that machine gunners in the flamethrower regiment wore…
Optimizing the Website
October 24, 2013
Today I learned about optimizing the Website. The reason my Website is invisible to search engines is because certain things have to be done to make search engines happy. Why? “Because that’s the way it is.” As a child I got that answer from my father whenever I’d ask why we had to do something…
Ghosts and Ballyhoo album
October 18, 2013
The Ghosts and Ballyhoo album has been released. Drummer Steven Menasche, guitarist Ron Kukan, keyboardist Jai Young Kim, and Scott Thunes have created six tracks of improvised jazz based on the book. I know, I know: improvised jazz? You’re thinking this, right? Nope. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to that. Music like that has its…
Grady Harp review of Ghosts and Ballyhoo
October 17, 2013
Grady Harp has reviewed Ghosts and Ballyhoo on Amazon. Five stars! Thank you, Grady. I was going to write a post about how Mom’s death has left me in a state of hyper-irritation. Most of what I see and hear strikes me as unbearably trivial. The radio spews out the same set-piece political bitch-fests that…
Collapsed by the community
November 24, 2013
You may have noticed that I don’t allow comments on my posts. I’ve been told that an unmoderated comment section would increase my traffic dramatically. I doubt it. That applies to political blogs, but the people who like my books aren’t the type who visit blogs all day to either support or oppose the latest…
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