Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard

Part Six of The Camper

2012-01-30T18:07:00.004-06:00

Lowell watched the stars until his breathing steadied. He scooted forward and swung his legs over the edge of the lookout and gazed down at all the degrees of darkness below. Lowell could make out the path he’d departed from some time earlier as a faint, chalky white line trailing into the valley below.

“I’m here,” he said, speaking aloud. “I am in the mountains.”

He took out his flask of whiskey, growing colder as his hiking sweat dried in frosty patches across his face and the back of his neck. He sipped at the whiskey, enjoying its warmth, and stared at the stars until he felt he could see them moving, as imperceptible as the movement was. Or maybe that was the satellites, the brightly lit satellites. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was here and not anywhere else.

Lowell drank until the flask was empty and he could see his breath in the starlight. He scooted back again from the ledge, suddenly overwhelmed by the long drive followed by the steep hike and tired enough that even the cold night didn’t bother him. He sat with his back against the mountain, the entire mountain, and crammed his hands into the pockets of his fleece jacket. He decided to close his eyes for a few minutes, but the minutes became hours and the cold grew worse and worse, somehow acting like a icy cocoon, and on a submerged, cellular level he began to wonder if he was going to freeze to death.

Then he felt a warmth huddle beside him, passing its heat on to him, and Lowell curled around it as if it were a crackling fire, filled with gladness.

When he woke in the morning, the sky was turning white. He found the raccoon curled between his arms, its round body stiff and no longer warm.

Lowell waited a long time before he started the hike back to camp.

THE END

Part Five of "The Camper"

2012-01-29T17:44:00.005-06:00

Lowell couldn’t imagine what the beast could possibly want from him so he decided to ignore it. He started up the incline once again, listening to the forest for the tell-tale signs of branches snapping or the general lumbering of a territorial she-bear.

After some time passed, how much he didn’t know or really care, the path grew treacherously steep. Lowell found himself scrabbling along on all fours, pulling himself up the hillside by the thick, exposed tree roots that protruded from the soil like the randomly placed rungs of a ladder. He climbed this way for a long time, his flashlight swinging by its loop around his neck, before he realized two things: he’d brought along a flask of whiskey but no water and that he was no longer traveling along the official park trail but had, somehow, gotten off track.

“Damn raccoon,” Lowell said aloud, between sharp intakes of breath. He’d decided it was the raccoon, and its strange, furtive pursuit, that had flustered him into leaving the trail and climbing like an idiot straight up the mountainside. This flustering happened to him at work, also—one of his co-workers would annoy him somehow, with an interrupting sentence or even a weird look, and then he’d find himself staring blankly up into the office’s florescent lights, wondering what exactly he’d been talking about a moment before while a muddled feeling of rage crashed along the back of his mind.

Weary of climbing, his entire front now covered in dirt, Lowell was about to give up and head back down when he arrived at a flat patch of hillside that looked as if it had been purposely stamped into the mountain for weary travelers like himself. He pulled his aching body up and over onto the flat piece of land, which was covered in the thick blanket of lush grass that felt cool and soft to the touch, and rolled onto his back to drink in lungfuls of clean air.

Above, stars filled the night sky, nearly equaling the darkness that surrounded them.

Part Four of "The Camper"

2012-01-26T14:20:00.001-06:00

Lowell raised his hands in the air and stared the raccoon down.

“Hey there, buddy.”

The raccoon chittered some more, more loudly. It was if a raccoon had mated with an angry buffalo and given birth to this wooly beast, blocking his path and his God-given right of passage. Lowell lowered his flashlight so the beam covered the ground between them, no longer shining it in the raccoon’s eyes. The raccoon stopped its chittering and fell silent, sniffing the night air. Lowell wondered if he should just turn and head back down the path, but he’d come here for an adventure, hadn’t he? And didn’t crazy shit like this count as an adventure?

Lowell took a cautious step forward, hands still raised. “I don’t want any trouble. I’m just passing through.”

A low, guttural sound came out of the raccoon’s throat, but it took a few steps toward the right of the trail, as if allowing him to pass.

“Are we cool?”

The raccoon scratched at the ground.

“I don’t want to pass if we’re not cool.”

The raccoon retreated another foot, until its backside touched the bushes lining the path. Lowell started forward, walking along the opposite edge of the path. The raccoon watched each movement he made, its eyes glowing with refracted light, but it didn't charge. Lowell continued up the steep trail, bending at the waist. When he’d gone twenty yards, he looked back down and saw a small, rounded mound scurrying at the edge of the light. It halted a moment after he did, as if waiting for him to continue.

Part Three of "The Camper"

2012-01-24T14:30:00.001-06:00

The path stayed flat for a short while, the pine trees closing in, then inclined sharply. Lowell bent forward at the waist, shifting his weight. The bright, bouncing circle of light generated by his flashlight mesmerized him as he fell into the steady rhythm of the climb, his breathing growing more labored as he processed the clean, sharp air that tasted so differently from the stale office air of his cubicle back home—a cubicle that waited patiently for his return, even now, ready as always to swallow more of his time, his attention, his life.

Lowell’s mind cleared. He listened to the gravel crunch, the wind in the trees. The path flattened for twenty yards and rose again, even more sharply than before. He began to sweat despite the chilly air. He liked the feeling. The sweat.

A pair of glittering eyes appeared in the middle of the path, caught fully in the beam of his flashlight. Lowell halted, straightening as his head swung back in surprise.

“Jesus Christ!”

The eyes belonged to a raccoon, the biggest he’d ever seen in his life. The size of a small dog, the beast puffed out its fur and chittered at him, clawing at the ground as if preparing to charge.

Part Two of "The Camper"

2012-01-23T15:55:00.002-06:00

Only a few fires still crackled as Lowell went through the campground, setting one foot in front of the other. He felt warm though the night was cold—it was September and it must have been less than forty degrees, way up in these hills. The whiskey he’d drunk earlier flowed through his veins like blood and his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, allowing him to keep his flashlight crammed into his back pocket. He was searching for the trailhead he’d noticed earlier that day when he’d pulled into the campground, sick of driving and praying for an empty site.

An ember popped lethargically somewhere in the campground. A car door slammed shut. Lowell studied the darkness encircling the campsite, looking for a break, and finally located the trailhead all of twenty yards beyond the campground’s last site.

The gravel path was designated only by a small wooden sign. Lowell clicked on his flashlight—the sign read SKY TRAIL (4 Miles) and offered no further information. He started down the trail, remembering something he’d read somewhere about a man who’d made a list of people he wanted to kill and then wrote “sky” beside each of their names after he’d killed them. He decided to keep his flashlight on, since he was beyond the campground now and the light wouldn’t bother anyone. Gravel crunched beneath his boots.

The Camper-Part One

2012-01-22T22:38:00.001-06:00

Lowell sat staring into the campfire and imagined a flaming skull staring back at him, poised to open its cinder mouth and swallow him whole.

He’d driven all day to be here, to sit among the dark mountains and watch the stars come out. The road played on a constant loop in his mind, ready to reappear any time he shut his eyes. He could hear voices speaking out in the darkness, other campers huddled around their own fires, but they kept their sentences short and their voices quiet. They’d come out here to get away, too.

The trees rustled as the wind picked up. Lowell closed his eyes and breathed in the pine and dirt and the woodsmoke. The wind dropped again and an owl hooted, brought to wakefulness. Somebody in the campground hooted back at the owl and Lowell opened his eyes, smiling. He raised his plastic cup of whiskey mixed with dirty cooler ice and took a long drink, enjoying the mix of cold and warm it brought to his stomach. He’d decided to drunk as possible as the stars burned brighter and brighter and then he’d go off into the woods, for an adventure.

It’d been so long.

Some Good Stuff

2012-01-15T22:04:00.005-06:00

I'm in a fallow writing period at the moment, having delivered my newest book to my agent right before 2011 ran out. I seriously have no idea, currently, what project to work on next, not even a short story idea, and have a hopefully temporary feeling that I threw all I had into this recent book, about which I have received 0% feedback, as nobody's read it yet. I've been running on a go-to-work and get through dark cold January mode, but now that we're halfway through I am going a little creative stir crazy. So, here's some other good stuff for your perusal:

Here's a link to a good blog post called "You want to write? Don't blow the easy part" by my old Hamline buddy Geoff Herbach.

Here's the newest episode of my podcast with Noah Warren, in which we review Doc Hollywood (1991) with Michael J. Fox and plenty of bad southern accents.

Here's a video of a crow sledding down a roof.

And, finally, here is one of many funny cat cartoons from Simon's Cat!

Shit, here's a second one!

Look At This Here Pretty Sci-Fi Flier

2012-01-13T16:54:00.002-06:00

An entire slew of sci-fi/fantasy Loft courses after Blogagaard's first sci-fi course met with such success last fall (and was the only such offering at the time)?

Coincidence, we think not!

Young Adult

2012-01-07T11:38:00.003-06:00

We here at Blogagaard saw the film Young Adult this past week as part of our lady friend's birthday spectacular. Man, there's something about small Minnesota towns that drives people crazy. Or maybe they make people who grow up within their little boundaries and fiefdoms slightly off-kilter before they flutter out into the world (or never leave) and that craziness just grows and grows for the rest of their crazy days.

I'm not going to review the film or anything here, but I do want to say how I liked A) the tiny fluffy white dog B) the dark wellspring of humor running beneath it all C) seeing Patton Oswalt in a perfect role for him and D) the scene where the main character, YA author Mavis Gary, tries to sign her own books in a bookstore despite the protests of the store clerk, who is worried about returning them to the publisher. This is pretty much how it is out there for mid-list authors-please sign one or two copies, but not much more. You probably won't sell here.

This Is No Time For Subtlety!

2012-01-02T11:55:00.002-06:00

I'm reading A Game of Thrones by George R. R. R. R. R. R. Martin currently after deciding that, if I am to continue teaching a slipstream fiction class at the Loft, I probably should be versed in the most famous/best selling fantasy novel in the last several decades. Also, I found a copy of it lying around my friend's house when I was dog sitting for him and I'll borrow anything that's not nailed down from the place.

I've been worried a long time that the novel would be unreadable, given its immense popularity, but after 200 pages I'm happy to report that Martin is a decent nuts and bolts writer with only a few obvious, jaw-clenching slips:

"'That was a grievous error, Lord Snow,' he said at last in the acid tones of an enemy."

But I suppose this is no time for subtlety. Bad things are brewing! Or, I suppose they are brewing, since two hundred pages has only hinted at some creepies appearing to the north and a big wedding to the south (the wedding actually alarmed me more-there's nothing worse than a long wedding). Mostly, so far, characters have been introducing themselves to each other, many many characters, and now that the northern Starks are visiting the south we're being treated to all manner of courtly wit, snide like jokings that, sadly, remind me of being trapped in one long Renaissance Festival conversation-not just with the paid Ren Fest employees, either, but the droogs that show up every day to hang around in costume garb without even getting paid for it.

But that said, I do like the imp Tyrion and how he hates everybody-I suppose the short lad reminds me of myself, when I'm surrounded by hipsters in skinny jeans typing away on their electronic devices. Grab a sword, hipster! Let me see thou mettle!

Oh no. I'm starting to think and talk in Medieval-ish...

Send me a steed, my lady! And a suit of the finest boiled leather!

Everything is Dope

2011-12-30T22:17:00.005-06:00

Today was a quiet, gray little day in St. Paul. On my chilled yet undramatic walk across campus to my car at the end of a muffled, uninteresting day at work, I started to get the feeling I was a ghost or something, just passing through this world, and this got me to thinking about how we're all just self-medicating ourselves before we die.

If you stop and think about it (a sentence which always leads to a fresh dose of despair in my world), almost every action we preform in our daily lives is some kind of attempt to dope ourselves into forgetting our own oblivion, both now and in the future, when we kick that old bucket. I'm not just talking about booze, drugs, sex, sports, TV, porn, the Internet, shopping, religion, work, or well-planned vacations. I'm talking about basically everything-even writing fiction, dangnabbit. We, as humans, claim superiority over the animal kingdom, yet when you come down to it there's not much difference between my cat staring at the wall all day and my downstairs neighbor ceaselessly watching TV every waking hour of his life (seriously, what the hell? Is he some kind of rich oil baron heir content to live in Midway shabbiness with a yappy moppet of a dog, so long as sweet, sweet TV constantly streams into his mind?).

Writing a slamming choral piece is doping yourself, running ten miles is doping yourself, building a vast city is doping yourself. Having a baby and raising a family is really, really doping yourself, as you will most likely have little chance to come up for air for about eighteen years. I suppose one could exchange the word doping for occupying, but they're pretty much the same thing when you take a god's-eye view of this world. Even someone in emotional pain, for whatever reason, is doping themselves as they sink deeper and deeper into the hurt-they're just getting off in a different way.

I'm not saying all this dope is necessarily a bad thing-what else would we do with ourselves? Stare at the wall like my cat? I simply suggest that, as we venture into 2012, we leave our arrogant, self-absorbed illusions of meaning behind and accept the simple fact that every physical act we engage in IS dope and we're all addicts. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to remember to rise above our various addictions now and again to look around the world with freshly peeled eyes, Zen-style, and truly witness the ghost world we're passing through.

Happy New Year.

Your When Harry Met Fatty Episode Guide, Thus Far

2011-12-27T10:35:00.008-06:00

It seems improbable, but the 15th episode of When Harry Met Fatty is going up this Thursday. When Noah and I started this comedic film review podcast, neither of us knew much about putting a show together, how the format should be set up, or even liked the sound of our voices.

Now, I don't know if any of that's changed much, but I do know we've had one hell of a time recording the show, Noah's worked his fingers to the bone producing it, and we've both had our minds nearly melted on several occasions by these damn "romantic comedies".

Here's an episode guide to the horrors we've endured thus far:

1. You Again-Wedding! Fighting! Old enemies & new love!
2. Life As We Know It-Crying baby! Shut up, crying baby!
3. He's Just Not That Into You-Lots of actors, saying shit!
4. Bridesmaids-Like SNL, but in a movie!
5. It's Complicated-Alec & Meryl, getting it on!
6. Practical Magic-Witchy, witchy women!
7. Smiley Face-A girl, some weed, and you want to rip your eyes out!
8. Crazy, Stupid, Love-How to seduce your face!
9. The Proposal-Sandra Bullock goes to Alaska!
10. Home Fries-Helicopters, Drew Barrymore, and fast food!
11. The Switch-Whose sperm is whose?!
12. Midnight in Paris-Magical France, where the naked ladies dance!
13. Gigli-Ben and J-Lo kidnap a dimwitted white rapper!
14. Friends With Benefits-Why should sex be sexy?
15. Just My Luck-Lindsay Lohan is unlucky & unfunny!

There, I hope that helps put all this madness is perspective for y'all. We have a good time putting this little lightning bug together each week and thank you for listening!

All is Calm

2011-12-25T16:18:00.000-06:00

A Drunken Dr. Dolittle Christmas!

2011-12-23T16:05:00.005-06:00

Lo, good people of Earth! Behold! We here at Blogagaard shall have ourselves a Drunken Dr. Dolittle Christmas as we mind the small, neglected creatures of this mortal world! Not only shall we be house sitting/dog sitting Ole, a crazy man in his own right, we must tend to our own lovable cat Frenchie, our girlfriend's cat (across town in NE Minneapolis) Nesta, and we shall check in on a kitty named Nebula, whom we have not yet met!

Three of the Four Beasts of Christmas Present:

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a drunken fun time!

Red Pen Madness

2011-12-14T22:42:00.003-06:00

I've been editing a paper (remember paper? Good old paper!) draft of my in-progress novel. This usually entails me sitting/lying/hunching over thirty to fifty pages at a time, red pen clutched in my gnarly old writer's hand. I've discovered the smooth flowing wonders of the Pilot G-2 07, which ran me about 2 bucks at the U of MN bookstore.

I've held for a long time that a paper edit gives you an angle on your manuscript you just can't get any other way, no matter how fancy your computing device or clear your flat screen. I don't know the science behind it (remember science? Wearing goggles?) but all sorts of shit pops out at me when I do a paper draft. I tend to go computer draft-paper-enter paper draft-2nd computer draft after I finish the rough draft of a manuscript. It's madness, I say, red pen madness!

Blogagaard Watches All 200 That 70's Show Shows

2011-12-11T12:42:00.004-06:00

That's right, peeps. I've recently finished watching all 200 episodes of That 70's Show, sequentially, from one to two hundred. This project began as a dream, the dream of a lazy drunk who didn't have anything better to do, and I'm proud to say I saw it through the bitter, bitter 8th season. I was going to do a blog post for all 8 seasons, but then a wave of despair blew through me and I decided to just give a crow's eye view of my thoughts instead.

Season One

Oh, how fresh faced everyone is. Fez hasn't bulked out yet, Jackie looks like she's fifteen, Eric and Donna's romantic relationship is just beginning to develop, keeping us all on pins and needles. We will never be so young again! Best Episode: #7, That Disco Episode. O, Fernando!

Season Two

Lots of good stuff this season. The guys go hunting, Jackie and Laurie fight over Kelso, Eric runs over Donna's cat, Eric loves cake, the guys gets drunk with Red after he loses his job, Kitty and Eric go see Annie Hall on a "date". This is the heyday of Kelso juggling two ladies and Eric and Donna's 1st Love Wave. Best Epsiode: Burning Down the House", featuring a cameo from Amy Adams as Kat Peterson.

Season Three

This season is a little more wobbly. Hyde dates Jackie, a premise that sounds all right but is still kind of strange. There's not a lot of flow between episodes, but it all leads up to the watershed "The Promise Ring" finale, where our great lovers Eric and Donna break up over a little old ring. Best Episode: "Eric's Panties"-Tater nuts! Tater nuts!

Season Four

Some absolutely top-notch episodes this season, which is perhaps the best all-time. The first third of this season is dominated by the fallout from Eric and Donna's breakup, with some sad and poignant moments that actually transcend what this show has set out to be. These episodes are followed by some of the funniest as well, including "Prank Day", "Tornado Prom", and the classic "Eric's Hot Cousin". My personal favorite? "Donna's Story", of course, when Donna and then Eric rip shit up in the school newspaper, fiction-style. "And then he never saw that horrible bitch again!"

Season Five

After a weird trip to California for Kelso and Donna, Eric drives out from Wisconsin, professes his undying love, and thus begins the 2nd Love Wave. This season Fez finally loses his virginity and Eric and Donna get engaged. Jackie moves in with Donna, further pushing the "how few sets can we use in this show" envelope. The gang finally graduates high school, having dragged out more seasons out of it than school years (and I think they were juniors when the show started, with Jackie as a sophomore: "I'm surprised you didn't know that about me."-you could spend a good while trying to figure out the show's real-time timeline. Best Episode: No real clear winner here, but if I had to pick, I'll go with "You Shook me", where Fez has a sex dream about Kelso and Kitty gets drunk at a nurse convention and starts putting little umbrellas in everybody's hair. I like those umbrellas.

Season Six

The gang has graduated and so begins the last three seasons of ennui and drifting as they all try to figure out their lives. Kelso becomes a cop, which actually kind of makes sense if you knew the guys in my school who became cops. Donna and Eric's wedding looms, but Eric ditches her at the wedding rehearsal (because that's cheaper than getting extras and a church for the actual wedding). Eric returns after a brief self-imposed exile and thus begins the Third Love Wave of Eric and Donna (which is by far the most anemic and directionless). Best Episode: "Sparks" in which Eric destroys Donna's wedding dress by accident and the boys get a canoe.

Season Seven

Holy shit, Donna's blond now! Whoo! Actually, I liked her red just fine, but whatever. Hyde's 2nd dad (not including Leo and Red, who act as father figures for the lad as well) is introduced to the show, and this dad is black and owns a record store chain. Adrift now that he's lingered too long in Point Place, Eric lazes about catching butterflies and sells the engagement ring for a year doing nothing, which is a secret dream of all young men. At the end of this season Topher Grace decided not to return for Season 8 and the writers sort of manhandle Eric off the show by sending him to Africa to teach, hastily jettisoning him during the last few episodes while introducing a new goody-two-shoes kid named Charlie, grasping at straws like a man desperate for...straws. Best Epsiode: Till the Next Goodbye (I like how they help push the Vista Cruiser out of the driveway, sending Eric on his way...).

Season EightWhere's Eric?

The 70's ship is going down, but not until we've hit 200 episodes and made enough money. The guy who played Charlie changed his mind about doing this season (and is written off in a rare stab at morbidity-apparently you can die by falling off a water tower), Ashton Kutcher was also desperate to leave (and thus Kelso is only in a handful of early episodes and the series finale) and Eric himself is only a vague, sentimental concept, referred to occasionally for the sake of a joke or to make Donna seem sad. Worst of all, the opening credit montage is no longer everybody rocking out in the Vista Cruiser but instead is a crappy attempt at rocking out in the Circle. I'd forgotten about this sacrilege and had to close my eyes during what had been, for me, a happy time. This season bears witness to Jackie and Fez moving in together (what?) and Jackie finally falling for him (congrats, Jackie! You've now slept with 75% of your male friends!). Also, Donna enters a relationship with Seth Meyer's younger brother, who you kind of want to smack with each slick, joky utterance he offers fourth. Also lost in the carnage of this season is three or four episodes with Mary Tyler Moore as Jackie's boss on a local crappy morning news show. Yet, all this said (why are the worst seasons the most fun to write about and analyze?) I did enjoy "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Misfire", and keep "Yourself Alive". Best Episode: The Series Finale #200, when Eric finally returns from Africa and partially, partially, makes up for Season 8. I suppose the few decent episodes of Season 8 that I enjoyed were worth the ones I endured...

Final Thoughts

The writers did the character of Laurie, played by Lisa Robin Kelley (and then a horrible replacement actress) a disservice by turning her into a one-trick pony, the town whore everyone can score an easy joke off (again and again and again and again....). Had they allowed her to evolve after the first season, she could have carried as much narrative water as any other character on the show. Her absence during the later seasons is like a strange wind always blowing in the background. Kitty even makes a joke about it at one point...

The show had some great guest parts, most notably Jim Gaffigan as the creepy hotel kitchen manager and Tommy Chong as Leo.

I still wonder if Donna and Eric ended up together and happy forever and ever. Did the combined weight of living next door to each other throughout their childhood, followed by the three Love Waves, ultimately doom them? Do they know each other too well by the finale? Are they as bored with each other as the show's writers? Is such a grand and lifelong love really possible, or is it more like a lifelong friendship with benefits? And does such a distinction ultimately matter?

And what of Kitty and Red, backing out of moving to Florida at the last moment and staying in Point Place as the winter of old age creeps upon them? Will they find that Bargain Bob, somehow, has been the lynchpin to their marriage all these years? And will Bob, living alone in a new place, end up drinking and whoring himself to death (Yes!)? And why, Jackie, why? And Fez? What the hell, Fez? You used to be such a nice, simple foreign boy. The writers should have never thrown you together at the last moment, but at least it wasn't Jackie and Kelso.

Okay. I think I've thought about this show enough for today. I suppose what has made me, and many others, such a fan of this show is the simple fact that when it comes on the TV you feel like you're at home with your friends, except they're all much nicer looking.

Blogagaard Gets Up Before...Dawn?

2011-12-03T07:14:00.004-06:00

Here I am, typing away as the blue light of false dawn unable to sleep since 5 A.M. on a Saturday. Jesus. I thought shit like this happened only to people who had kids? Is this what it's like to be old? You can have it, Marcy.

It's harder to go back to sleep knowing I work today, I guess. I've got a new temp job, which is great, but it does include working every Saturday morning, so I guess I have to stop getting up in my fuzzy Sponge Bob pj's and watching cartoons while eating Coco Puffs and begging my parents to buy me things I see in really loud commercials.

Oh well. That's life, I suppose. One day you wake up and you're thirty-two. I guess I'll go sit with the cat now and quietly wait to go in to work. Somehow Frenchie always seems to be both asleep and awake. She's a paradox in her own right.

Note: I washed all the dishes and made French toast around 6:30. And I'm going to take out the garbage, too.

Prologues: Whack, or Bombdiggity?

2011-11-28T16:02:00.003-06:00

I get the sense that there's a lot of strong opinions out there about prologues, at least in editorial circles. I don't know how I reached this sense, but it's there none the less, like the Force (which I WILL tap into someday and use to make shit float around my apartment). Some folks (such as my past writing profs) argue that a prologue is a rather useless appendage, something lower quality writers use in lieu of just getting the show on the road and starting the story properly, with Chapter 1. For example:

Prologue
The horse ate a carrot, but still felt uneasy. Something funny was in the air, rolling toward the ranch like a cloud of evil flying monkeys. Something...not so good.

Chapter 1
Harvey looked out the window, watching the horse dig through the garden. He'd always wondered what horses thought about...

Do we really need that foreshadowing first bit? Can't we just start the damn story without it?

It's true there's a lot of misuse of prologues, especially in genre fiction. What I said in my previous post regarding epilogues, making certain they're really necessary, applies to prologues but times a hundred. Readers will read almost any epilogue, no matter how useless or dumb, because they've come a long way, baby, and aren't about to quit now. But a prologue, well, a prologue is a big neon sign at the front of a novel and if they don't like that, you're pretty much screwed straight off. If it's too expositional, too preachy, too foreshadowy, or, worst of all, in fucking italics, they might just slam that book shut right off and never enter your carefully crafted first chapter at all.

And you want to be loved, don't you?

DON'T YOU!?

What Comes At the End?

2011-11-21T20:36:00.002-06:00

An epilogue, baby! Well, sometimes, at the end of a book, a book full of words and meaning and themes and plot and characters and crazy imaginative shit like that. I don't know how you feel about epilogues (or if you've ever thought about them once, alone and of themselves, which is the sort of fiction-related crap we here at Blogagaard sit around and ponder each and every day) but I've come around to them as of late. I used to to be of the opinion that they were kind of a cheap tack-on at the end of an otherwise compact novel, a sort of unneeded footnote, but I've realized lately that in today's borderline illiterate world a novelist needs all the help he or she can possibly get and that an epilogue is just one more tool in the ol' writer's toolbox.

That said, I think we need certain rules for epilogues. The first and biggest rule, I'd say, is simply THEY SHOULD NOT BE LONGER THAN AN ACTUAL CHAPTER. Otherwise, why not just add them as one more chapter? In my mind, an epilogue should be a relatively swift yet punchy exit from the fictional dream, weighing in between one and seven pages, max. Don't go all Return of the King (film) on your poor, antsy reader.

Second: I used an epilogue in The Suicide Collectors because, above all else, the book had at that point shifted from the point of view of one character (the one and only POV for the entire novel) to a second character. Still, I kept it short as possible, because it was AN EPILOGUE.

Third: Feel free to disregard the two rules above and play with an epilogue when you're punching out those early drafts, but when final editing time comes around, only keep it if you feel the material within will leave a HUGE gap, an EXORBITANT gap, if not included. An epilogue should not be a cheap and easy way to tack on a few more tidbits of information or reveal some crucial final plot twist. An epilogue should be elegant, with more awe than shock.

Next up on Blogagaard: Prologues!

Sad Country Songs

2011-11-12T19:22:00.003-06:00

I've been listening to sad country songs all afternoon. I threw out fifty old rock/country/pop CDs only to find I still have about 375 still kicking around. I love the rock and roll, don't want to think about how much money I've spent on it. I've been listening to Willie Nelson's 2001 release It Always Will Be, which I think he recorded just to break your heart on a November afternoon.

I've also found a cool video of Steve Earle covering "Poncho & Lefty". Don't get much better than this, cowpoke.

Daylight Won't Save You

2011-11-10T13:03:00.007-06:00

Daylight savings happened last Sunday and now, abruptly, the Twin Cities feels like a ghost town on the edge of the arctic circle every day by 5 PM. I mean, Jesus, I think we're all about to be harvested by vampires as they pick us off one by one. I've also been having these sustained panic attacks about money, or not having any. Luckily, the DRC called the other day and next week I start a seven day scoring project. Whooooo! Will the fun EVER EVER END?

On the sunnier side of life, When Harry Met Fatty just posted it's eighth (eight!) episode. This week, we tackle Crazy, Stupid, Love with Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and Emma Stone. It's a must listen, since we help men everywhere dress more fancy like!

You don't want the Minnesota vampires laughing at your fashion sense before they harvest you for their brood, do you?

Born on the 4th of July

2011-11-07T00:07:00.003-06:00

I've been obsessed lately with the Springsteen song "Shut Out the Light". It's about a Vietnam vet coming home and the unsettling reentry process. I didn't know it was inspired by the novel Born on the 4th of July until tonight when I was watching this live 1985 Springsteen performance on YouTube (in which you can tell Springsteen wants all his jubilant 1985 big hair cocaine monkey fans to shut the fuck up and just listen for once).

Here's some Wiki on the novel: "Born on the Fourth of July was written (by Ron Kovic) in Santa Monica, California during the fall of 1974 in exactly one month, three weeks and two days. It tells the story of Kovic's life growing up in Massapequa, New York, joining the United States Marine Corps right out of high school, going to Vietnam for two tours of duty, getting shot, finding himself paralyzed and in need of a wheelchair, and eventually starting a new life as a peace activist.

'I wrote all night long, seven days a week, single space, no paragraphs, front and back of the pages, pounding the keys so hard the tips of my fingers would hurt. I couldn't stop writing, and I remember feeling more alive than I had ever felt. Convinced that I was destined to die young, I struggled to leave something of meaning behind, to rise above the darkness and despair. I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war — to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward — not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence.' — Ron Kovic"

I can listen to the studio version of "Shut Out the Light" over and over again. I just put it on repeat when I'm writing and suddenly an hour has passed. Just another example of Springsteen's lifelong mastery of rock lyrics and the dark chill he can occasionally tap.

Halloween & The Thing

2011-10-30T11:22:00.003-05:00

I've watched two classic John Carpenter movies in the past few weeks for the very first time, movies that every horror nerd should have seen around 12 years old. Somehow, I missed the horror boat when I was a youngster-I think just the covers of horror movies used to freak me out. Hellraiser, Child's Play, The Witches of Eastwick, all those blood curdling horror movies didn't exactly call out to me during my visits to the gas station a block from my house, which was pretty much one of two places in town where you could rent what was called a "VHS tape" and had a selection of about three or four small shelves, with about the same hundred movies on it for years at a time.

I watched Halloween last night, in the spirit of the holiday. I never realized I was just one sharp flight of stairs from sounding like a serial killer escaped from a mental hospital!

You'll get a good, standard chill from Halloween, but if you want a truly kick ass movie about paranoia and the arctic cold and Kurt Russel sporting a feral caveman beard, Carpenter's version of The Thing is the way to go!

Also, the Halloween episode of When Harry Met Fatty is up, and our finest yet! Check it out, yo!

Last Week of October, It Looms!

2011-10-26T10:42:00.005-05:00

I have a new article up on mnartists.org about my two ventures into indie filmmaking-think of it as the origin story for The Hardworking Man from Nebraska & a tale of set design despair for Taste.

Speaking of Taste, voting closes for it on October 31st (Halloween!) so please watch and vote for it now!

Also, I noticed an interesting Atlantic Monthly article about the rise of genre fiction in the literary fiction world. True or not, I love the example of Junot Diaz and the speculation that he must have hidden all that love of genre fiction under the bed of the characters in Drown because he wanted the critics to take his stories seriously. It sure speaks to the idea of writer as critical & societal weather vane.

The Homestretch

2011-10-23T21:08:00.003-05:00

I've entered the homestretch of a novel I've been writing, on and off, since early this year. After spending a lot of time researching the book, building up the setting (both in my mind and on the page), and narrowing down the characters I want to focus on, I've passed 55,000 words, or 220 pages, and I am now on the steep down slope toward the final third of the book.

I don't know how other writers feel, but I usually enjoy writing the last third of a novel the most-especially when you've planned out the ending ahead of time and it feels inevitable (not to mention awesome). In the last third of a novel's rough draft, everything thing you've been painstakingly building toward finally starts paying off as the plot builds to a final crescendo and your characters are put through the action wringer. Hopefully, if you're lucky and you've built a solid fictional foundation, you feel the same kind of amped-up buzz as the reader while you enter that last homestretch of a novel(though it may be tempered slightly by mental exhaustion and the fact that the steep climb of editing and polishing the book still lies ahead).

Whenever I enter this deep into a novel I'm working on, I think about it if I happen to wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back asleep right away-the characters and the trouble I've made for them play like shadows across my mind.

Episode #5 of When Harry Met Fatty is Up!

2011-10-20T11:28:00.004-05:00

This week, our heroes Dave and Noah brave the complicated waters of It's Complicated, featuring Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep! Oh Alec, you magnificent, silverback bastard! Oh Meryl, you silver screen goddess!

Click here to be whisked away!

Some More Writing Excercises

2011-10-19T10:55:00.003-05:00

I don't sew my own clothes, like my mother did (she even had silk gray clothing tags with "Kayc Kline By Design" that she sewed into the collars), but I do create my own writing exercises for my class at the Loft (which has already been renewed for spring! Huzah!). At first, I was trepidatious about creating them, but then I read all the crappy ones out there on-line and such and all worries left me (go outside and write down your thoughts and what you see and BLAH BLAH BLAH) and now I try to top myself each week.

Here's a couple I've come up with so far:

The Unwelcome Guest: Have 2 characters deal with an unwelcome guest (to their house, to their party, etc.) Use their dialogue to reveal their discomfort, confusion, and other emotions as they interact with the guest.

Something's Not Right Here, Dialogue Edition: A family of 4 sits down to dinner. Something's not right here (the house is haunted, the father's cheating, the little girl's a werewolf, etc.). Narrate the dinner conversation to hint at the wrongness without ever having a character come out and say it directly.

The Meeting: Describe the dullest of dull meetings. Suddenly, a psychic phenomena occurs and everybody in the meeting can read everybody's thoughts. Describe the ensuing conversation!

Last Night (based on the 1998 film): The world is ending in six hours (or so). Create a character and describe in detail how they spend their remaining time on earth, keeping in mind that how they spend their time (the details) is also describing their character.

Always the Bridesmaid...

2011-10-13T16:46:00.003-05:00

Episode #4 of When Harry Met Fatty is up! Join our intrepid heroes Dave and Noah as they review Bridesmaids and investigate the banal horror of bridal shower games!

When Harry Met Fatty-Website

When Harry Met Fatty-iTunes

Also, a new review of The Suicide Collectors has mysteriously appeared!

Hmmm. That's right! I did write a book once!

Don't Take This Personally!

2011-10-11T18:04:00.003-05:00

Don't you love how if you say, "Don't take this personally, but..." then you can get away with any kind of mean, crazy shit that's popping around in your brain? Or, at least, it gives you enough courage to just go ahead and start a good argument about pretty much everything?

Well, in a couple of weeks my fiction class at the Loft is going to start workshopping, a strange, slippery descent into the world of not taking things personally. At least, you need to try not to take things personally, because if you listen to every critique, however gentle, and take it fully to heart, a little acidic worm suddenly appears in your brain and starts eating at your resolve to ever write again, much less attempt another draft on the story that's been critiqued (again, however gently).

Nobody likes being told their brain child/story has imperfections. They've created it, they've nurtured it, they've loved it, and now YOU HAVE THE NERVE TO SAY IT MIGHT NOT BE TOTALLY AWESOME? I WILL CRUSH YOU...

Sorry, Hamline workshop flashback. Anyhow, what I wanted to say here is that having your piece critiqued by a class of fifteen or so people is an emotional roller coaster. You need to train yourself to listen to what everybody says while both not taking it personally AND taking what you need from it-really, you want to look for patterns, little points that come up repeatedly that could suggest larger issues in your story.

Then, once it's over, go home and have a stiff drink or a hot bath. Me, I like to drink IN the tub.

Blogagaard Somehow Appears in Lutheran Magazine!

2011-10-08T12:27:00.002-05:00

Well, well, well. Look who's one of the authors featured in this month's Lutheran Magazine...that's right! Blogagaard! The very same loud mouthed deviant who haunts these electronic pages! You go to one Lutheran Writing Festival in Decorah, Iowa and BAM! There you are, in Lutheran Magazine itself!

Ah ha ha hahah haha haha!

The end is nearing, my friends! Strange days indeed!

Most peculiar, momma.

Episode #3 of When Harry Met Fatty Is Up!

2011-10-06T11:04:00.003-05:00

Join us as When Harry Met Fatty reviews He's Just Not That Into You. This isn't just a catchphrase from a Home Box Office situation comedy-it's a full-fledged movie, missy! In this episode, Dave is put to the test, Noah recounts the horrors of a surprise retirement party, and we all find out what it really means to "sell your soul to the devil of crappy".

Notes for Mike Upon Reading His PhD Thesis

2011-10-05T12:31:00.002-05:00

Notes for The Influence of Reading and Instructions and Stuff by Miguel “Tiny” Sanchez

By David Oppegaard, Esq.

Doctor of Philosophy? Oh man, you got the wrong degree (title page).

Your dissertation came out ten years after 9/11. Coincidence, or mental terrorism? (title page).

You forgot to credit Ole and Opie and Master Shake (i)

You can just say “For Rachel” without the word dedication above it. And why the period? Not a true sentence. (ii)

Good use of “salacious”. Gets me in the mood immediately. (1)

I liked when you referenced yourself. (1)

Head mounted eye-tracker? Sick. (3)

Did you take into account whether participants had been struck by lightning previously or lost a house to a tornado? They might hold a grudge against said climatic occurrences and thus be inclined to recall significantly more data (i.e. to help crush their enemies, as knowledge is power).

Nothing like a little combinatorial prereading. (3)

You going for the world’s longest e.g. here? (5)

You want a seductive detail? Boobs.

I once ate a Click beetle for the hell of it. Tasted like chicken. (6)

This seductive detail problem is why I never describe characters too much. Distracts from the narrative flow. (6)

I guess boobs would be of ABSOLUTE INTEREST.

Someday none of the dickwad email kids are going to be able to read for than 120 word blocks of text. You should have done this about twitter or something. (7)

Electrical discharge. Ha! (8)

Ball lightning? We’ve all been there, right?

Are you the Sanchez of Sanchez and Wiley?

“Readers are typically interested in topics that reflect or depict emotionally interesting content involving aspects of the human condition like sex, death, power, and money.” –Duh.

“however, are there other groups of readers that might be similarly detrimented by seductive content?” (15) –Yes. Cow-like Americans grown fat on cheese whiz and corn products. And I don’t think detrimented is a real word.

I love me some good base text. (17)

Extra word: For example, general instructions necessitate that readers examine each sentence in to determine its instructionally designated relevance. (24)

You know, we debate prereading instructions all the time at the DRC.

You used internet sources? Now that’s just good science! (32)

I’ve got an experiment for you: try to get the first person ever to read while INSIDE A TORNADO! And then see what they recall! If they live!

Oh no. This is starting to look like math. But good use of standard deviation! (35)

Why not break it down further to letter by letter? I like “t”. T gets a 6! (36)

A table should have four legs and a top, duh. (40) That’s no goddamn table.

Everybody likes a good head burn. (40)

“For example, witnesses in Maryland watched as a bolt of lightning tore a hole in the helmet of a high school football player during practice, burning his jersey and blowing his shoes off.” –HA HA HAHHAHAHAH!

Would you rather get hit by lightning or get tossed into a tornado? I choose both!

You should have more exclamation points on this page. Spice it up a little. (55)

All caps? You clever bastard! (61)

Ahhh! Calculator shit! (65)

I’d recheck your figures on this page. Something don’t feel right with them there median scores. (68)

“compared to LWMC participants.” (78) –You know, that acronym for stupid people is strangely close to my high school’s acronym LCWM (Lake Crystal Welcome Memorial).

“This experiment had three goals served by these findings.” (80)-Not true! You also got a PhD!

“The observations of the current project, in addition to the large body of previous research, should leave little doubt that seductive details impede readers’ ability to learn from scientific texts” (87)
-Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where did you get this idea?

God. I’m starting to fucking HATE seductive details. (91)

“However, as demonstrated by the current experiment, any comprehensive theory of scientific text comprehension must necessarily account for the processes and products involved when readers comprehend both relevant information that is useful for application to their learning goals, as well as irrelevant information that can damage their understanding of important scientific concepts.” –DOY! And also if they’re drunk as a May squirrel!

Good use of alphabetical order here, but I might have gone with which books/articles were thicker first. (92)

“Hunt, R. R. (1995). The subtlety of distinctiveness: What von Restorff really did. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2(1), 105-112.” –God, I love it when the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review comes in my mailbox! I break out the wine and then read it cover to cover by candlelight.

Too much McCrudden. You shouldn’t use people as a crutch, Mike. (96)

Lightning prereading and test questions
1. What is the meteorological definition of lightning? Thor is mad!
2. How does ice inside a cloud assist lightning formation? It gets it all drunk and shit!
3. How does the movement of updrafts and downdrafts create a lightning strike? What?
4. What causes lightning to become visible? Your eyes, stupid!
5. What produces the sound wave we call thunder? John Bonham, bitches!
6. How does a lightning strike typically form? First, working condition have to be very poor. Second, a leader must emerge with vision and strength. Third, he must corral his fellow workers and unite them. Fourth, they draft an official document or something and WHAM! You’ve got a union!

Tornado prereading and test questions
1. What is the meteorological definition of a tornado? John Randle, hungry for a sack!
2. How do scientists believe tornadoes begin their formation? Too much coffee.
3. How long can the mature stage of a tornado last? It’s can’t be any longer than He’s Just Not That Into You.
4. How does warm, moist air influence a tornado? It makes him put on a condom.
5. Why is a tornado still dangerous during the dissipating stage? Because of high-flying cows still reentering the earth’s atmosphere.
6. How do tornadoes typically form? One day at a time. One day at a time.

Missouri. Of course it was in Missouri. (103)

What? You forgot to put The End (or is it?) (104)

Good work, Mike! The plot lagged a bit in the middle, and I really can’t determine who your main protagonist is, but I think this is still better than Frankenstein Unbound. ..Wait a second…you forgot to mention the implications your findings had for Braille readers!

Vote for TASTE!

2011-10-02T21:30:00.003-05:00

The wickedly beautiful new short film I wrote with Todd Wardrope is up on the ABCS of Death website!!! Please vote for us so we can win this international contest (remember to click on the confirm link in their reply email, too). The top ten vote getters advance to the final round.

Thank you in advance and happy October, people!

Watch and vote for TASTE

Also, feel free to like the film on Facebook!

When Harry Met Fatty #2!

2011-09-29T10:51:00.004-05:00

The second podcast episode of When Harry Met Fatty is up! Click here to download it from our website or click here to subscribe to it on iTunes!

In the game of life, there are no thrones. So stone the crows.

This Katherine Heigl Josh DUHamel venture was a feather in the cap of 2010, and our heroes Dave and Noah valiantly viewed this cinematic work for the benefit of Mr. You.

Download or stream this mp3 and hear tales of Noah's Odyssey of the Mind kerfuffle, David's first kiss in the rain and how Heigl succeeded in this business without really buying...a clue!

Thanks for listening..and knowing the no unknowns.

There Goes A Good Man

2011-09-28T23:34:00.000-05:00

This is A Cool Animated Short

2011-09-26T23:19:00.001-05:00

Blogagaard As Teaching Artist

2011-09-26T15:38:00.002-05:00

Well, tonight's my first class at the Loft. I suppose it's too late to back out and run screaming into the foggy moor-my class is at near capacity, and I've made copies.

Copies, people. Like a teacher makes. With a copy machine. A copier, as they call it.

Jesus Christ! I must be old now. Old enough to take roll, anyhow. To call out a list of names and make check marks. To offer advice on a subject, to possibly instruct! How did it come to this? This isn't my beautiful red pen, this isn't my beautiful one-bedroom Midway apartment...wait, I guess it is.

Hell.

There is water at the bottom of the ocean...

Writing Exercise: The Bounty Hunter

You're a bounty hunter tracking down a murderer. You are on foot and alone. You follow your prey into a major city dump. Describe your search through the mountains of trash, remembering to use all 5 sensory details.

Stop writing when you reach your prey.

Love That Iron and Wine (Cover)

2011-09-24T11:50:00.002-05:00

When Harry Met Fatty Goes Live!

2011-09-22T17:43:00.002-05:00

Thanks to my brave co-host Noah Warren, the first episode of When Harry Met Fatty is now up and available for free downloading on our website:

www.whenharrymetfatty.com

And shall also be coming soon to iTunes!

Whoop!

When Harry Met Fatty

2011-09-20T18:42:00.005-05:00

One of my projects recently, and due to launch this Thursday Sept. 22nd, is "When Harry Met Fatty", an audio "podcast" you shall be able to find on iTunes. To learn more about this strange beast called iTunes and podcasts in general, click here.

Basically, When Harry Met Fatty shall be a radio, or "podcast" show featuring myself and one Noah Warren, my good buddy and creator of The Chronicles of Noahnia, a self-annihilating blog we have all come to love over the years.

Over the course of roughly 23 minutes, Noah and I shall review a romantic comedy film (usually bad, usually semi-recent)from the jaded perspective of the larger man. Join us while we review such masterpieces of schlock as You Again and He's Just Not That Into You, both of us suffering the torments of the damned as we drink our way back to sober once again, striving to somehow find meaning in the meaningless void of these movies!

I'll post again when When Harry Met Fatty goes live with a direct link, but I hope this little preview has intrigued and harrowed your soul!

You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter!

That's A Wrap

2011-09-18T20:46:00.001-05:00

Cave Building

2011-09-15T00:33:00.003-05:00

Ahhhh, so. I should be tired (and I am) but I am also way PUMPED about the short film I'm making with local director Todd Wardrope. A 4 min short for a national horror film making competition, we've spent the last two nights (and T. the last three) building a CAVE SET for our little film, which happens to shoot THIS SATURDAY. Crazy, no? Also, our set designer and assistant designer both flaked on us, so we've been working with a few sentences of directions and good all-American desperation.

We're building our set inside a 10,000 square foot industrial space, in which rests an already constructed wire cage left over from an acrobat show last art-a-whirl. We've spent a lot of time getting to know insulation sheathing and gluey insulation foam and wire ties and climbing up ladders. Tomorrow the painters arrive to make it cave-brown and we're going to wheelbarrow in a ton of dirt for the cave floor.

Awesome sauce! How can crazy shit like this be so much fun?

Blogagaard's Wonderous Cheesy Fries

2011-09-09T22:19:00.003-05:00

We here at Blogagaard cannot remember ever posting a recipe on this here old blog, so let's do it, people...

Blogaaard's Wondrous Cheesy Fries You Should Make If You No Longer Care About Anything but Tastiness

Ingredients:

Alcohol (inside you)
Girlfriend/Boyfriend (either asleep or away for the night)
Potatoes (nice big ones)
Hamburger (lean, fatty, like it makes no difference at this point in your stupid life)
Seasoned salt & Cayenne pepper & whatever else you feel like, seasoning style
Not so fresh garlic that's on your shelf(chopped into little garlics)
Peanut/olive oil
Red pepper
Sliced pepper jack cheese

What to fucking do about these ingredients:

Peel about 2-3 potatoes, chop them into fry-sized bits, enough to fill a lightly olive oil sprayed cookie sheet. Brush fries with oil, not too much so they still get crispy and not soggy. Sprinkle your spices onto the lubed up fries. Don't they look pretty!

Throw cookie sheet in preheated oven (400 degrees). Bake fries for some undetermined period of time, depending on how drunk you are at this point and how crispy you want your fries. Flip the fries over in the middle of this period of time (at least seven minutes, probably way more).

meanwhile, mince some of that red pepper, depending on whatever. Thaw your hamburger, brown it in a pan, add the garlic if you're into that sort of thing. Add the red pepper bits, cook them, too, finally add the cheese slice and let it melt and goo-ify your burger surprise. When the fries are crispy, take them out of the over and throw them on a plate. Add your gooey burger red pepper topping.

Enjoy and try to ignore the shame! I like to use blue cheese for ketchup.

The Writer's Path

2011-09-05T14:38:00.001-05:00

Every few months, I check out a few writing-related books from my local library. You know, stuff about "the craft of fiction" and shit like that. And, not surprisingly, most of these books are pretty terrible, filled with half-baked writing exercises, admonishments, and writing life advice.

But I don't know. Maybe I'm just not the audience for these books. Maybe they're just for fourteen-year-olds with stars in their eyes and sixty-three-year-olds with too much time on their hands. Maybe I'm just too post-MFA, post-publication jaded for the ra-ra tone of these works (or, worse, the knowing, quasi-hip voice in your ear tone) and they do help thousands of people become better writers. If anything, even a bad book on writing causes you to focus and think about the process, which is a good thing, right?

Unless you think too much. And add a stupid character. And everybody hates you! And you're ugly! Ah, suddenly the writer's path has led you to alcoholism, obesity, crushing debt, paleness, antisocial behavior, smoking, black tar heroin, and general wickedness!

AH! THEN THE WRITER'S PATH SUCKS! AND THERE'S A HUGE BOULDER ROLLING DOWN IT, RIGHT TOWARD YOUR FACE! Run, Indy, run!

Frenchie, on the writer's path.

Meet the New Temp-Same as the Old Temp

2011-08-30T20:50:00.002-05:00

I'm returning to the U of MN St. Paul campus bookstore for a four-week temp gig, starting tomorrow, and I had to go to the Coffman Union bookstore on the Mpls campus today for training. Getting to the heart of Minneapolis East Bank campus right now is about as fun as traveling into the heart of Mordor (but with way less meaning than destroying a powerful ring and way more tan girls in maroon sweaters), what with the construction and the construction and the construction, and I had the added joy of riding the bus down the light rail construction of University Ave. to get there.

I'll spare you the expected crazy people, sudden rain, and crotch chaffing the whole affair entailed and skip right ahead to the training-which I'd had before, with the same exact trainer. That's right, they made me train all over again and waste a day of my life because...wait for it...there's a new book rental process, which involves a new form, which was covered in about three minutes of the four hr. training session. And, even more fun, I found myself having to keep explaining that I'd worked there before, which isn't so cool when you're 32 and you're talking to a recent college grad who's working the same gig as you. Yes, it's now reached a point where I'm cycling through previous temp gigs (though this one is pretty fun) like some sort of Rhyme of the Ancient Temp figure, that strange dude who draws you in at parties with a TRANSFIXING GAZE.

And, as our bus crawled back down Uni and these off-the-hook mutherfuckers started making out, crying, then making out some more, I got an email on my phone with the latest editorial pass on my latest book, thus securing my place in temp lore for some time to come.

Do you want that on your student account?

The Spaces In Between

2011-08-25T22:49:00.002-05:00

Having a new cat has made me hyper-aware of my apartment, especially the sounds and spaces I've taken for granted for the past two plus years of residence. Frenchie is like a little kid-everything is new to her, in this new enviroment! Insanely new! She was sitting on my dresser the other day, which seemed normal enough, but when I opened the top drawer she was fascinated by the space behind the drawer (a space which hadn't really existed until the drawer was opened) and sort of crouched down to get a better view of, ah, nothing.

That space, which is sort of an in-between space, reminded me that good writing doesn't just cover the expected terrain in a story, plodding from beginning to end, but retains the patience to veer off into narrative off shoots. Your plot doesn't need to fit a rigid mold, your characters don't need to have the expected emotional reactions, and you don't need to zoom past the good scenic views to check into the hotel on time. Part of the joy of fiction, especially novel length fiction, is the ramble through the fog (Dickens loved to walk for miles everyday with no particular destination in mind).

I've also been re-watching That 70's Show, starting with Season One Ep. One, and I've been amazed at how often the actors nearly break, or actually do break, or cause each other to break, yet the director leaves these scenes in, o so wisely, and they're usually the funniest scenes of each episode.

Inspiration For All!

2011-08-21T11:46:00.000-05:00

Go out there and write your hearts out, people!

Introducing...Fenchie!

2011-08-18T11:12:00.003-05:00

She's fierce! She's cuddly! She embodies the duality of good and evil, the darkness and the light! She's straight out of the Midway, adopted from the friendly Feline Rescue no-kill cat shelter!

New Yorker Cartoon

2011-08-18T00:50:00.001-05:00

A Bucketful of Crazy

2011-08-10T21:33:00.003-05:00

I've having trouble with crazy people lately. Not just with my apartment neighbor, who likes to exit the building and shout, "Fuck!" at the top of his lungs (I mean, REALLY at the top of his lungs) for no apparent reason and who I recently saw chuck an entire huge, open container of baked beans into our dumpster to prove some vague argumentative point to his goth girlfriend (who didn't really seem that impressed-maybe she hated five pounds of baked beans as much as he did? Had they just returned from some particularly volatile family reunion picnic thing with her vampire family?).

No, I having trouble with my own crazy person, my crazy little Jennifer Tompkin, villain of Special. We've gotten three very good-but-no-thanks responses from editors so far, and all three in some way mention her character as "too over the top" and lacking believability. So now I'm left pondering what changes to make, and it's exactly at this point in the writing process I wish I could just bury my head in the sand and fall asleep for about a thousand years.

Sadly, you can't really indulge in such luxuries if you want to sell a novel, so tonight I turned to an old friend for a good example on how to write a terrifying female villain, one Mr. Stephen King, author of Misery:

"'A ways,' she said vaguely, looking off toward the window. There was a queer interval of silence, and Paul was frightened by what he saw on her face, because what he saw was nothing; the black nothing of a crevasse folded into an alpine meadow, a blackness where no flowers grew and into which the drop might be long. It was the face of a woman who was momentarily untethered from all the vital positions and landmarks of her life, a woman who had forgotten not only the memory she was in the process of recounting but memory itself...in that moment he thought that her thoughts had become as much as he imagined her physical self: solid, fibrous, unchannelled, with no places of hiatus."

Okay, well, if you look past the clunky writing (you could do a whole blog of clunky King passages, if you were that kind of bored, mean type of person)but he does have knack for describing (and describing, and describing) a person both believable and believably crazy at the same time.

With that said, I do wonder what a market nervous NY editor in 2011 would make of a novel like Misery if you scratched King's name off it. From a certain angle, you could say the character of Annie Wilkes is one of the most over-the-top villains ever.

Or maybe that's just the devil in me?

Super Sad True Love Story

2011-08-08T14:14:00.004-05:00

I finished reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart this weekend. While it somehow has been billed as a literary novel, it's pretty much straight up dystopic sci-fi with a cataclysm at the end. It's a neat trick, somehow getting cred for being "literary", selling tons of books, AND creating a numbingly terrifying view of the near future at the same time, a future where books are considered nothing but smelly relics (the main character has to spray pine sol on them so as not to offend his young girlfriend) and everyone is addicted to the data streams emitted by their "apparat".

Several times in the book, I wondered who could stand living in this vision of the future, which seems closer and more prophetic every day and involves everyone constantly judging each other by credit, personality, and "fuckability" ratings, but I guess you could learn to live with anything, even check points throughout American cities and a National Guard bought out by Credit companies. Sometimes the bleak world Shteyngart creates is predictable to the point of dullness, and the long diary entries mixed with email entries grows skippable (I'm not a huge fan of missive novels in general-something is always taken away from the plot) but overall I'd say Super Sad True Love Story is a B of a novel, with an A for speculative vision.

Here's an interview with the author about his work.

Blogagaard Gets Back in the Saddle

2011-08-03T20:05:00.002-05:00

I might be a little bruised, and a little sore, and a little stupider, but I'm trying to get back in the saddle with a book project I've paused since March. I originally paused it because test scoring season was beginning and I was ready to put my nose to the mindless workaday grindstone and now it's become the longest pause in writing for since, ah, college? So in ten years, I guess.

Sometimes, when I pause a project, and pause my entire fiction writing life totally, that last page or so (pg. 83 for this one) becomes this huge f'ing deal. I'll go back to it and go back to it and the new words just don't come. It's not writer's block as much as Despair that the Book Will Ever Be Done or Mean Anything and People Don't Read Anymore Anyway So Who Gives a Damn.

Which is a dark liquor to sip, indeed, but eventually I just have to remind myself of my roots, back when I had no intention or real hope of being published and it only mattered that I was having a good time and writing a story that was compelling to ME. Period.

And this new project is fun to write, indeed. A cross between literary, horror, and western, I've decided to throw down in the mining town of Red Earth, Wyoming, 1899. Where nobody can hear you scream, not even your own self-destroying self-censor.

BWAH HA HAHAHAHA!

Yeah. I'm already feeling more chipper.

Birthday Cake

2011-08-02T11:40:00.002-05:00

Here's some birthday Cake for my buddies Noah (whose birthday is today) and Mark (whose b-day is Thursday). Two mighty Leos, such as myself!

A Good Death

2011-07-31T12:36:00.003-05:00

My adopted and much beloved cat Opie died this past 4th of July at the grand old age of 22. For years I feared his death-almost since I started to fall in love with him back in 2007, when we moved to Boise together-and I hoped fervently that his legs would keep working, along with everything else, up until the day he died. Just imagining having to take him into that fucking vet office and have him put down was enough to make me feel a little off-kilter, a little insane, and I could all too easily picture myself breaking down in front of those kind and well-meaning strangers, especially when I handed over my credit card to PAY FOR HIS DEATH.

But that didn't happen. Opie died as he lived-making very little fuss and doing things his own way. He simply started eating less and less, so gradually I didn't even notice, until even raw hamburger held no appeal to him and it was like cradling a kitty skeleton in your arms. And then, one morning, he died on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, his favorite place in the world.

And, like that, he was gone. As good and natural a death as you could ask for.

-------------------------------

Along the lines of the idea of a good death is The Shootist, a novel by Glendon Swarthout and the 1976 John Wayne film by the same name. An aging and famous gunfighter comes to Carson City and confirms with the local doc (Jimmy Stewart) that he has advanced cancer and not much longer to live. He spends his remaining days sipping his last at life's great pleasures (such as flirting with Lauren Becall), stirring up a little trouble, and finally decides to go out in a shootout with the town's three best gunmen, all who seek the glory of killing a famous man. I've never been a huge John Wayne fan, personally, but he is perfect and understated in this, which would turn out to be his final role as well.

I've jokingly suggested that this was how Opie should have gone out, in a blaze of violent glory, and even went as far as to imagine the two of us driving in the Grand Canyon together, like Thelma and Louise. Of course, real life isn't as simple and clean cut as the movies, and each of us can only hope to go out as well as we possibly can.

In the end, this whole episode has left me feeling as if I've been touched (again) by some brand of terrible and powerful magic that hasn't left me yet-is that what death really is? Magic? Now you're here, now you're not?

Blogagaard As...Teaching Artist?

2011-07-25T16:04:00.002-05:00

That's right, world! I'll be teaching a class this fall at the Loft Literary Center! Fall registration is now open for all Loft classes!

Here's the class description, guaranteed to blow your mind!*

Grounding the Fantastic

A multigenre course open to all levels of students interested in literary, fantasy, horror, and science fiction, this class will focus on creating a realistic story that grounds even the most unusual tale in a recognizable world. Inspired by authors as varied as Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison, this class will discuss several multigenre craft topics and use in-class writing exercises to further investigate these storytelling methods. Then, using what we have learned, we will read and reflect upon one another’s stories in a workshop-style discussion facilitated by the teaching artist. Together, we will go down the rabbit hole of slipstream fiction and discover the multitude of possibilities waiting on the other side.

*Please note guarantee is not actually guaranteed.

Summer Ennui

2011-07-22T13:51:00.004-05:00

I'm back from Michigan and feeling it, feeling that old mid-summer ennui. I like a good, warm day at the beach, but July and August in the Cities are kind of ridiculous, what with the humidity and road construction and roving clouds of killer bees. Also, I have both a head cold and queasy stomach, both which began almost at the very beginning of the trip, probably from dirty ice machine ice at a Motel 6 in Iron Mountain, MI. I did see a fully grown black bear 20 feet up in a tree, though, and toured a cool abandoned copper mine that reminded me a little of The Descent.

So today I watched a good film to accompany summer ennui-The Atomic Cafe, "a disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety". The Atomic Cafe is a nice little clinic on editing a film and digging up insane and freaky footage, and it'll remind you of just how lucky we've been to survive our political leaders (so far).

Also, I'm reading the graphic novel Black Hole by Charles Burns. It's plain awesome-read a review here.

Alright...hey, what's that in the sky?

Duck and cover!

Going to Michigan

2011-07-14T23:01:00.003-05:00

I was planning on writing another dispatch from the MN state shutdown, one involving me being chased into the Dubliner Pub on University Avenue by a pack of wild dogs and drinking with Governor Dayton, but suddenly the shutdown looks to be ending and frankly, the whole thing bores me.

Tomorrow is the last day of the test scoring season. Hopefully an hour after that, M. and I will be zooming down the highway into Wisconsin, through the Michigan's UP, and shall reach the lovely shores of Lake Huron by late Saturday afternoon. We're going to chill with her family for a few days, cabin-style, before backtracking into the U.P. for several long awaited days of camping.

See ya in the funny papers.

Rage & Happinese

2011-07-11T21:05:00.003-05:00

As a special treat to celebrate my last week of standardized test scoring for the 2011 season (only 3.5 months, but felt like about 2,000 years) I give you an excerpt from an essay I read this very day and transcribed word for word, errors and all. It features an 8th grader talking about how he answered a want add for a theater company, thinking he'd be making costumes, but actually ended up playing the part of Elmo in some kind of interactive show for tiny tots. Think Bukowski meets Camus .

"I was angry, but I took the job anway. The costume was huge, red, and furry.As I laid it out the character was elmo.However, I put the costume on and it was horrible. It had big chewed gum balls inside of it in it was very stinky..."

(The kids are unleashed on the costumed characters for fun time.)

"Children, I thought. The children ran to me with rage and happinese. I was scared for my life. The children was huge, agressive, loud, and bad.My job was to calm them down, but I seemed to fail. I hated those children, they gave me the creeps."

I could only smuggle so much out on sticky notes, but our intrepid narrator then describes "getting angry" and quitting before the end of his first day. I've been there, bud. I've been there.

Day #8-The Bachmann

2011-07-08T21:54:00.004-05:00

Day 8 of the Great Minnesota Shutdown. It was a scorcher today in St. Paul, somewhere around 120 degrees in the shade. As I retrieved my recycling bin from the curb (at least we can still recycle during the shutdown. That's something, anyway, goddamn it!) I saw this floating skull hovering above Thomas Avenue. The skull was surrounded by flames, of course, and grinning like a jackal after heavy collagen treatments. As I watched in astonishment, the skull grew long brown hair and wide, icy blue eyes that pierced me to my very soul.

"No...no!"

"YES, BLOGAGAARD. I HAVE RETURNED," the flaming devil skull said, in a voice like gravel coated with bullshit.

"But you're dead! My voodoo doll was guaranteed to work!"

"NO, YOU FOOL. I AM ONLY CAMPAIGNING IN IOWA. YES! I SHALL BE YOUR NEXT AMERICAN WARLORD."

"The fuck you say!"

"THE FUCK YOU SAY, BLOGAGAARD. YES. I SHALL MAKE A RAINCOAT OF YOUR VERY SKIN. I AM THE BACHMANN, AND I WILL NOT BE STOPPED."

A cold wind of Evil passed through me and I trembled all over-yea verily, like a newborn lamb. I looked around for a rocket launcher, but this wasn't DOOM. This was real life, Midway-style.

"WHAT IS THAT BLUE BIN YOU HOLD?"

"It's called recycling, bitch. I'm saving the environment."

"HA HA HA. YOU'RE CUTE. YOU'LL MAKE A FINE RAINCOAT FOR THE BACHMANN. YOU AND I BOTH KNOW THE 'ENVIRONMENT' IS A MYTH CREATED BY GAY PEOPLE."

"Actually..."

"JUST LIKE DINOSAURS! ANOTHER MYTH MADE BY GAY LIBERAL SCIENTISTS."

"No!" I shouted, flinging the blue plastic bin right into the Bachmann's grinning maw. The blue-eyed skull shattered into a thousand bees, which screamed with their tiny bee mouths before scattering on the wind.

"I'LL BE BACK," the gravel/poop voice whispered in my head. "I'M NOT DONE WITH MINNESOTA YET."

And lo, a dark cloud passed upon this once tranquil and verdant land, the land of the Loon.

Day #2-Hello, Tim

2011-07-02T15:10:00.002-05:00

Day #2 of the MN government shutdown. A pink dawn, like tender raw meat from a lamb with pink eye, and with it 20,000 Minnesotans without power, having barely survived an apocalyptic thunderstorm with winds reaching 100 miles per hour. Yes! High winds! Winds of evil!

The night before, around 9 PM, I think I saw a cow flying past my apartment window, hoofs up in the air as it bellowed frantically. But I couldn't help it, of course. Not with the shutdown. Not with so many state workers now unemployed, released to the July purgatory of their up north summer cabins and all the family time they can stand. And so, unable to help the cow, I drank to its health and brooded in my living room, forgetting to turn on the light as darkness swallowed St. Paul whole. Yes, I fell asleep in my recliner after I downed an entire bottle of peach schnapps and eleven wine coolers, unaware of passing time as I mused.

Without a state, what is a man? Without law, we are savages. Flying cow watching savages.

But then, around noon today, a brief moment of hope! A knock on my apartment door! I answered it quickly, hoping it was FEMA with a gift basket (government cheese!), but no, just former MN governor and all around smiley guy, Tim Pawlenty. He was dressed in a Hazmat suit with its own silk Hazmat tie.

"Hello, ass face," I said, "Have you come to gloat over the devastation you so happily wrought?"

"Dave, Dave, Dave," Tim replied, his teeth gleaming like little tiny white lightsabers. "You've got me all wrong, dude! I feel as bad as you do about how I fucked this whole state over!"

"You do?" I asked wearily, eying him from askance.

"Yeppers. And I've come to make it up to you. To you and all of MN!"

"How's that?"

"With a great big Tim Pawlenty hug!"

And with that, the son of a bitch hugged me, enveloping me in his crinkling hazmat suit that smelled like the dry side of a big condom. And, for one brief moment in time, the world was right.

But then I remembered I might not get my $1,000 MN rent refund check at the end of the month and lo, my great rage returned ten-fold.

Day #1 of MN Government Shutdown

2011-07-01T20:34:00.003-05:00

All is chaos. We have been abandoned by those we elected to lead us, to tend to our roads and zoos and state parks, as they themselves have been blinded by stubbornness and stupidity. Cast adrift, we the citizens of Minnesota can only fight for scraps as the dogs of war snarl among us and our babies go hungry.

Today I killed a man with a spork. I didn't want to do it, but I felt impelled to act, to seize my destiny instead of eating it...with a spork. Our hands brushed briefly at the local KFC (yes, brushed) as we both reached for our respective eating utensils, goofy looks of longing plastered upon our faces, and suddenly I couldn't take it, couldn't take this damn state shutdown one moment longer! So stab, stab, stab, you know the old story-suddenly there's blood and chicken everywhere and I'm out on the streets again, sweating like a demon straight out of a Richard Simmon's jazzercise video, running as fast as my legs could carry me. And o, o so hungry.

Luckily, there's no law anymore. At least not in Midway, where the extensive, soul sucking light rail construction site lies empty for twenty city blocks, a veritable charnel house of ruin and scavengers, while I dwell here in the House of Cain.

Yes, that Cain. Sometimes we play Scrabble and I let Cain win because, let's face it, that dude is CRAZY.

Stay tuned for more MN shutdown updates!

Man, How I Once Loved my Old Game Boy

2011-06-29T01:36:00.003-05:00

I had one of the first Game Boys, right after Ninetendo came out with them in the late 1989. I begged and begged my mom for one, and goddamn if she didn't come through with it on Christmas Eve 1989, even if they were sold out everywhere and cost over a hundred 1989 dollars. I wasn't allowed to own a Nintendo gaming system in the house (very smart-may have made me a writer), but through some non-TV loophole a little old Game Boy was ok (?). In retrospect, a Game Boy was an even more addicting form of video game infusion, as I was able to take it everywhere with me and not interact with others at family functions (sound like today's cell phones, anybody?).

One of my favorite games was Zelda: The Legend of Link's Awakening. This game was profoundly in-depth by 1993 standards, and took forever to finish, and I loved every minute of it. I played it in that pea-green original Game Boy shade (by the time color Game Boys came out, I was already on to either Sega game Gear or college). I did have the Game Boy Pocket as well (later on), but that unit was still just black and white.

Click to Play!

How to Give Up on Reading a Book

2011-06-26T20:44:00.002-05:00

We here at Blogagaard Inc. have given up on finishing our fair share of novels in the last few years. It didn't always used to be this way-in high school and college we used to read and read, no matter how horrible or bored we grew, because back then we felt that finishing a mediocre or bad book was a matter of honor, sort of like how America likes to get mired in wars we cannot possibly win. I mean, we read the entirety of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, for Christ's sake! SO BORING!!!

But we have grown older and wiser since those heady reading days, and our tolerance is much weaker. Life is short, is it not? Why read a book you don't really enjoy when there's a fuckload out there to read? Unless maybe you're trapped on a plane with it and you paid $25 at the airport gift shop. Then you should lap up every putrid word of it, airplane monkey!

My formula for giving up on a book is based on a number of factors. Is it just a book I picked up at random from the library, and can easily be returned with nobody harmed? Have I heard a lot of buzz about this book? Does it in some way tie in to my own sphere of writing? Was it heavily recommended to me by a trusted source? Then, depending on these factors, I might give a book anywhere between 2-100 pages, with the longest leash to date given to War & Peace, which I set aside after 500 pages with about as many to go (I was starting grad school at the time, and keep telling myself I'll go back to it. Uh, someday.) Overall, however, I'd say I give most books about 50 pages before I chuck them violently across the room, weep in defeat, and eye my Xbox gaming system with a lusty eye.

MY TOP THREE REASONS FOR QUITTING A NOVEL

1. Lame ass/no discernible plot. You'd think editors would have an eye out for this pretty obvious problem, but the lamely plotted novel happens more often than the writing community would like to admit. Literary fiction is the prime perpetrator of this crime against your brain.

2. Characters you don't give a shit about, even if they are "fully realized". I'm looking at you, Franzen.

3. Flat out bad writing. You can't see the forest for the stilted word trees.

And the wildcard factor: how many pages are left of this piece of shit, anyway?

Author's Note: It's okay, dear reader, if you quit one of my own books early (I'm looking at you, relatives). I just hope you gave me twenty pages of rope to hang myself with first. That's all a poor scribbler can ask for in this mixed-up, multimedia world.

Gotta Love That Arcade Fire

2011-06-24T23:05:00.005-05:00

Arcade Fire recently won a Grammy for Album of the year for The Suburbs, but apparently lots o people somehow still haven't heard of them. Even a collection of hipsters didn't go full-throttle with them on The Suburbs, but I love the album and feel it rewards repeated listening (imagine that! Having to work to like something! One of many lost arts of the modern age, really, along with letter writing and patience.) I think it threw some fans off that they went a little quieter after the semi-rocking Neon Bible, but I have a soft spot in my heart for artists who pulls stunts like that, having followed up The Suicide Collectors with the semi-quiet (at least for me) second novel Wormwood, Nevada. I'd argue that Wormwood, Nevada rewards a second read, and a certain mood, but who the fuck has time for that? Cram that media in my mouth NOW.

Arcade Fire performs "We Used To Wait" on Sound Opinions from WBEZ.

Watch the full episode. See more Austin City Limits.

Their more rocking side.

A good fan, tripping balls.

My Newest Dark Passenger

2011-06-21T22:34:00.003-05:00

This week my agent and I have started submitting my latest dark passenger (if I may lift the phrase from Dexter) to editors for publishing consideration. It was four years ago this June that I sold The Suicide Collectors as part of a two-book deal, and I think it's about time for another sale, eh?

The new novel is called Special and here's the rough synopsis, which I wrote to help move it along:
SPECIAL
By David Oppegaard
Unable to live alone in a world he doesn’t fully understand, thirty-year-old Freddy Tompkin, a grown man with a special, child-like mind, has remained at home his entire life, sheltered by his parents as their once-thriving Detroit neighborhood has grown increasingly isolated, the homes around them abandoned and the field behind their house left undeveloped. When Freddy’s parents are killed in a car accident, his older sister, Jennifer, a former interrogator for the U.S. Army, returns to Detroit to supervise Freddy, carrying a chip on her shoulder as well as a budding lust for violence. Soon the screams of Jennifer’s victims fill the once-quiet Tompkin household as Jennifer turns their father’s basement workshop into a torture chamber and their backyard fire pit into a makeshift crematorium.

Freddy, confused, frightened, and intimidated, eventually decides to fight back against his older sister, rescuing Jennifer’s latest victim and setting off into Detroit’s urban interior. Freddy finds himself squatting in an abandoned building with a strange, beautiful cutter, teaming up with a trigger-happy drug dealer, and hiding for his life in urban prairie. Finally, Freddy returns home again, where he confronts his greatest fears, his family’s dark past, and, most terrifyingly of all, Jennifer.

Alrighty. Happy Summer Solstice! It just gets darker from here...

Sparrow Road

2011-06-19T11:42:00.004-05:00

Sparrow Road is a new young adult novel from Sheila O'Connor, a former professor of mine at Hamline University and all-around positive force of nature. If you're not writing, or if you're lazy writing, Sheila will definitely let you hear it. Which is why, of course, I've been sharpening my knives in anticipation of reviewing her newest book (her last Where No Gods Came was released around 2003, so I had to wait a good long while) and repaying her the favor of dicing up HER work for once.

Sadly, she's written a strong, hard-to-attack novel in Sparrow Road, which is a about a twelve-year-old girl who spends a summer of mystery and intrigue at a writer's colony on a rambling country estate, the kind of bucolic place every writer longs to visit, with writing sheds and a code of silence until dinnertime (a pretty transparent fantasy there, Sheila!). Anyhow, Sheila doesn't need me to add to the accolades (check out this review and the several beneath it) but I would like to say that I very much admire her clear, smooth prose, which has nary a hitch, and the patient way O'Connor allows her story to build one stone (or clue) at a time.

So head to Sparrow Road, my little sparrows!

Sticky Notes As Self-Defense (Part II)

2011-06-18T11:43:00.003-05:00

When the world is collapsing, surf the despair!

Three souls set out for a fun air balloon jaunt, not yet knowing tack hill loomed!

The baby sea turtle swam for his life in an indifferent world...

The city alienates another lost soul.

All God's slightly deformed creatures. Is that a dog or a huge rabbit?

Fortress of solitude, expressly drawn to take up as much time as possible in its creation. Drawn block by block, it rose from rubble to grandeur to take on a corrupt empire in a time of darkness.

Sticky Notes As Self-Defense (Part I)

2011-06-15T21:26:00.005-05:00

Scoring the same essay prompt two hundred plus times a day is boring, real boring, and I have to check myself constantly so I don't score too many tests too fast and stand out of the crowd, even if I'm very accurate, because a test scoring center loves stable, dull numbers more than anything else, including excellence. And so, to help slow myself down and to just amuse myself in general, I doodle on this green sticky note pad throughout the day. Here are five that made the cut to this very blog:

This is the famous Battle of the Xs and the Os. Two armies meet in combat, only to find a shark infested river betwixt them!

I escaped for a good five minutes drawing this, pretending I was road tripping through Montana again.

The Aquateen Hunger Force/Unit Patrol, of course, including their trusty danger cart. They spell it right, actually, and I spelled it wrong.

A strangely quiet piece for a Blogagaard doodle, perfection was reached early on and I let it be.

An obvious, externalized cry for help as I cling to sanity along the cliff of despair. Night draws near and the stars come out.

Trapped in Walmart!

2011-06-14T20:39:00.003-05:00

On Sunday, I was trapped at the Rochester, MN super-Walmart with my girlfriend as we waited for their "tire center" to put a new tire on my car (my Honda blew a tire just as we rolled into Lanesboro, MN for a wedding). Why Walmart? Because it was a Sunday and I just wanted a new goddamn tire and I thought everything else would be closed. Little did I know, the apparent convenience would not only be a mirage, but would also cost me a cross-section of my very soul.

The tire lady, who looked like a friendly creature from Where the Wild Things Are, told us it would take about two hours to put a new tire on, due to the five blowouts that had preceded us there. Whatever, I decided, too hung over from the wedding the night before to think rationally, though all I wanted on the planet Earth at that moment was to return to my bed quickly and sleep for ten years straight. And so our Old Testament-esque wanderings in the desert of capitalism began, not with a roar but with a who-gives-a-fuck.

The new, modern day desert is shiny. It beeps and has a Subway and a grocery store and video screens built into the ends of several aisles, video screens that advertise products just like Blade Runner and every other dystopic sci-fi movie has promised us. It has three different video game systems where you can try out video games much harder to figure out than your old video games. It has greeting cards and fat people too lazy to push their own cart and who instead ride around on those lawn mower/scooter things with baskets on them. It has everything you need to ease the pain of modern existence, including lawn chairs, but after about twenty minutes I felt myself fading. By forty minutes I'd had it, by sixty minutes I tried to pretend I still wanted to buy the shit I'd picked out, and by eighty minutes I was playing Angry Birds out in the lobby on my cell phone, wedged between a belching old lady and a pretty young lady spending a good half hour of her life picking out a one dollar Red Box DVD rental.

Finally, we ambled back to the tire center, though the promised call to my cell phone had not been made. By all appearances, my car had been ready to go for a good while and the clerk made no apologies for not summoning us. Instead of delivering a good strong slapping, I merely paid my bill in silence, 75 bucks for their cheapest goddamn tire, and we headed back to I-35, exhausted and stunned by the whole shopping ordeal. My girlfriend, who'd only bought a bag of pretzels the whole time, took over driving from me and let me sleep in the passenger seat with a blanket over my head.

She may have saved my life.

Staring at Dostoyevsky, Trying to Believe

2011-06-09T22:10:00.006-05:00

This handsome feller is one Fyodor Dostoevsky. Well, an artistic rendering of said feller. This very poster hangs above my toilet in the bathroom, so I've stared at it every time I've taken a piss, dead sober, dead drunk, and all points in-between. I bought the poster in Staraya Russa, in the gift shop in D's old summer house, where he worked on The Brother's Karamazov and The Possessed. I visited this locale over ten years ago and the poster has seen better days. That dark ribbon is from some kind of bathroom-related water damage and the huge tear started as a small tear after my ex-girlfriend (Erika) thought it'd be funny for some reason to glue a tampon to it and of course the poster ripped when I tried to rip it off. Somehow, Erika and I still talk occasionally and remain friends.

The Big D believed in God and died in 1881 with a copy of the New Testament on his lap. Sometimes, I wonder if it would help my own literary career if I believed in something, though I suppose it would depend on what I believed in. Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon, as is Orson Scott Card, and their god seems to be bringing in the big bucks. And those two Left Behind shitheads, they're money-based God seems to have kicked some serious ass for them. Does my own work suffer from my searching agnosticism? Or is it a strength? Do agnostics buy as many books as Catholics bought tickets to see The Passion? Probably not. Jesus, as I type this Jason Kidd just said on TV his faith in God gave him the strength to hit a three pointer tonight against the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the Finals.

Maybe I should get on this religious crazy train!

"He suddenly remembered Sonya's words: 'Go to the crossroads, bow down to people, kiss the earth, because you have sinned before it as well, and say aloud to the whole world: 'I am a murderer!' He trembled all over as he remembered it. And so crushed was he by the hopeless anguish and anxiety of this whole time, and especially of the last few hours, that he simply threw himself into the possibility of the wholesome, new, full sensation."

-Crime & Punishment

Okay, time for us here at Blogagaard to have a drink in bed! Whoop!

The Cat Days of Summer

2011-06-04T10:50:00.002-05:00

I'm about to take my cat in for a follow-up appointment at the vet. Always a fun time, complete with constant meowing in the car ("Fine! You pick the goddamn radio station!") and a visit to a vet who baby talks to Opie like he doesn't understand a goddamn thing about this hollow and wicked world. Let me tell you, vet lady, I know you mean well but this son of a rascal is old enough to drink in human years and doesn't need any coddling.

Sadly, Opie seems to be running down, like a watch that can only tick for so long. He's lost two pounds, as of a month ago, and that's like if I suddenly lost 50 pounds for no apparent reason. I'm having more trouble getting him to eat his cat treats and dry food and doesn't seem to care about drinking water as much, either. I know animals do this-I've read short stories and poems about the gentle ebb of life and shit like that. But Opie is too cool to go out like this-I always expected him to go out in a blaze of glory, just like I expected the TV show "Deadwood" to end. Instead, it was canceled too early and we never got to see how the original, wooden framed Deadwood actually burned to the ground...

But it's not over till it's over, Opie!

Bubbling Brew

2011-06-01T21:01:00.004-05:00

I'm crossing a sort of a no-man's land in the old writing department these days while late spring buzzes around me and a new test scoring promises to swallow June up like a mad, temperature-controlled ogre, but plenty of my compadres have achievements and projects bubbling up to the surface, and when your friends are making good that gives you a whole other high.

Today, my brilliant girlfriend Melissa Kelley passed her oral prelim exam, which means she's officially a PhD candidate in U of MN History program. Also, my old pal Mike Mensink (aka Miguel "Tiny" Sanchez) has (pretty much) wrapped up his PhD at the U of MN in Educational Psychology. Thirdly, my cousin Steve Norman has achieved some kind of master's degree in communication I only vaguely understand, also from the U of MN. Kudos, brainiacs! Somehow I have put up with all your grad school craziness this far!

Also, budding film maker Eve Daniels has started working on a film project that examines niche business in the Twin Cities. Visit MN Niche's Facebook page here.

Author Aaron Wilson has a new story out in eFiction Magazine called "Lily Pad".

My former Hamline prof and all-around awesome writer Sheila O'Connor has a new YA novel out called Sparrow Road. I'll be posting a review of later this month, but as far as I can tell she needs another glowing review like America needs Donald Trump to be president.

Last but not least, my old buddy Geoff Herbach has a new YA novel coming out himself called Stupid Fast. It's guaranteed to be a hilarious emotional roller coaster of teen angst and adventure.

Goddamn, you people make me proud sometimes.

The grad student, seen in his natural habitat. They like to come out at "happy hour" to drink beer and eat gravel from the road-it helps them digest all that book learning.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

2011-05-29T12:07:00.004-05:00

I've been fighting joining up with Twitter for a long time. The concept itself seemed ridiculous to me-jotting down stupid little thoughts and then sending them pulsing into the ether. But I also fought getting a cell phone until I was 27, and now I just got a fancy new LG Optimus T with Android technology (I got it free since I haven't upgraded my phone for four years). And I've been blogging for over five years, not to mention my author website.

So why fight Twitter anymore? Why not go tweeting gently into that tweet night? What the tweet, you know? We're all up tweet river without a tweet paddle, so I might as well say tweet it and go with the tweeting flow. The birds outside my apartment are singing right now-maybe they've subtly influenced me into doing this, joining the last of the Internet Monsters that slowly gnaw at our brains. Maybe Hitchcock's birds have regrouped, gone to community college, and now have a whole new high-tech plan of attack.

So, if you've already joined the Twitter borg, you can find me at DavidOppegaard

Funny, the Twitter bluebird doesn't LOOK evil...

The Battle of the Cute

2011-05-28T12:44:00.003-05:00

We here at Blogagaard have decided to lighten up the blog for this cool and debaucherous Memorial Day weekend and hold the First Annual Battle of the Cute. This year's contenders are a mother and child feline team straight out of cuddly-ville and a ravenous, ceaseless vigilant of the land otherwise known as the sloth. Let the Battle of the Cute commence!

Meet the sloths from Lucy Cooke on Vimeo.

Cast your vote now!

Springtime for Poetry

2011-05-25T11:52:00.003-05:00

Whenever I start feeling down about low sales numbers and money worries, I can always cheer myself up with the thought that at least I'm not a poet. Poets have it rough these days, have had it rough since the days of wealthy patrons back in the Renaissance, have had it rough for a good long while. Poets are definitely not in it for the money-even Homer had to wander relentlessly around ancient Greece as a traveling bard, and he was freaking blind.

Poetry itself seems to appeal to a minor part of today's population (I know, I'm Captain Obvious). If novels and reading in general have taken a sucker punch to the stomach in today's multi-media frenzy, poetry has taken it on the chin. Few people other than other poets and writers seem to read poetry on a consistent basis, with the vast majority of our fellow Americans either scorning it outright or regarding poetry only as useful for either a funeral or a wedding (which is almost as bad as outright scorn, and has led to the same terrible handful of poems being repeated endlessly to a sea of mute, confused faces, which hasn't exactly led to a boost in poetry's popularity-I never come back from a wedding with a burning desire to tear into a collection of love poems printed off the Internet).

So what's gone so terribly wrong for poetry? As far as I can tell, in my very limited survey, the quality of poetic output is as good or better than it's ever been. Has the public's attention span shrunk so much it can't handle twelve to sixteen lines of verse? People still love to buy 700 page thriller/crapfest novels, so you'd think they could still handle the occasional poem. Does poetry ask too much of its modern readers? Here, sit quietly for a minute and think. Really think. Think about this distilled moment in time and feel what these words are trying to convey. No. Shut up and listen. Ah, fuck you, then!

I don't think the nature of poetry has changed, but something in the collective cultural consciousness has. The more we've learned about the world, the quicker information has been poured into our minds, the harder it has become for the average Joe and Jane to reflect in a deep and meaningful way. It's easy and fun to think about a cooking show or a home makeover, but pretty hard to admit that everything around you will one day be dust. Poetry, at its beating heart, is a subtle and not so subtle reminder that time is fleeting, that we are mortal, and that the best thing we can do, the best we can hope for, is to capture the beauty and life around us while we still can.

I can understand not liking poetry, though I'd like to think even the greatest detractor just hasn't found the right poet for him or her yet. I can also understand being intimidated by poetry in a way you cannot quite express (like I used be, before I read a lot of Bukowski and got it out of my system). There will never be an art form that pleases everybody, but that's probably part of what makes that art form great in the first place.

I'm reading Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins right now. I love how he writes because it serves as a good reminder that a poem doesn't have to be a big deal to be beautiful:

"Bar Time"

by Billy Collins

In keeping with universal saloon practice,
the clock here is set 15 minutes ahead
of all the clocks in the outside world.

This makes us a rather advanced group,
doing our drinking in the unknown future,
immune from the cares of the present,
safely harbored a quarter of an hour
beyond the woes of the contemporary scene.

No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives
from tending the small fire of a cigarette,
from observing this glass of whiskey and ice,
the cold rust I am sipping,

or from having an eye on the street outside
when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,
rain running off the brim of his hat,
the late edition like a flag in his pocket.

Musical Squares

2011-05-22T22:41:00.003-05:00

Through the magical chain that is the Internet I came across this cool musical squares/tone matrix by somebody named Andre Michelle that gives a physical appearance to musical tones. You can play around with it endlessly and it shall enliven even the most moribund soul, until lo, you are frolicking around the room.

Not that we here at Deep Thoughts with Blogagaard condone frolicking. We do not have health insurance for that kind of thing, even as springtime overwhelms us.

Get Your Snake Oil, Here!

2011-05-20T21:38:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow I'll be hanging out at my friend Todd's studio as part of the Art-a-Whirl weekend extravaganza in NE Minneapolis. He's graciously invited me to share his space and try to sell a few copies of The Suicide Collectors and Wormwood, Nevada.

I'll be at Todd's multimedia studio starting at noon, having forgotten I was actually supposed to be there tonight, thanks to my current brain-drain temp job scoring high school essays (what's your favorite place? Huh? HUH? TELL ME OR DIE, FUCKNUTS!). It'll be interesting to see how many copies I can sell, as I've not exactly been the greatest self-marketing guru on the planet, at least so far into my writing career. Which seems strange, since I used to sell $280 eyeglass frames with $400 lenses without so much as blinking. I guess there's something about pouring your dark and twisted soul in a book, your whole existence for a long period of time, basically, and then being expected to cavalierly carry it around like it's a fucking pumpkin or something and sell it for cash money.

Thought, I have generally noticed that writers who are the best at promoting their books are usually the most superficial/lame writers around, so at least I'll have that feather in my cap as they lower me into my lonely pauper's grave.

New Interview About Writing and Stuff

2011-05-17T22:23:00.003-05:00

Here's a new interview/email discussion I did with Jeff Smieding that just went up on his cool writerly site.

Here is a picture of Opie guarding a draft of Wormwood, Nevada a few years back:

He likes to perch on things. Not a lap cat, but the dude likes to elevate.

Is TV Rotting Blogagaard's Brain?

2011-05-14T20:34:00.003-05:00

I watch at least an hour to two hours of TV a day. As a red-blooded American, watching TV is basically ingrained into my cold and lonely soul. I've sucked at TV's teat since I was a young lad in the early 80's, watching Sesame Street and He-Man and The Golden Girls. I've watched a lot of M*A*S*H, a lot of That 70's Show, a lot of The Office. I've been blown away (mostly) by more recent cable shows like Deadwood and The Wire and The Sopranos. I'm working my way through the 4th season of Dexter and every MSTK3000 episode I can find online.

So much enjoyment, but at what cost? TV must be fucking with my writing, there's no doubt about that. I can pretend it's honing my dialogue skills, and keeping me "in tune" with the current world, but that's all bullshit, of course.

I'd like to meet an alternate universe Dave, one who's never watched more than one hour of TV a week, at most. He's got to be much more well spoken, thoughtful. He probably has one of those...those...attention spans I've heard so much about. He's also probably a little weird, in that weird way non-TV people are. What do non-TV people do, anyway? I don't just mean the Amish, either. Do they listen to more NPR? I bet they garden a shitload. And exercise. Non-TV Dave would probably weigh forty pounds less and have no memory of Michael Jackson's mid-afternoon funeral. Non-TV Dave would have read even more than TV-Dave, who still manages to read a lot because he doesn't have kids.

I don't know. Maybe non-TV Dave is a hipster asshole who knows nothing of the bliss of watching The Trailer Park Boys late into the evening. Maybe some questions should not be pondered too much.

Mattie Ross & First-Person Narrators

2011-05-11T21:37:00.000-05:00

I'm reading the novel True Grit by Charles Portis. The story is told in the first person through the eyes of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl who has set out to avenge her father's death. She's the sort of brilliant "I" voice every writer dreams of creating:

"He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you. He could have taken an old piece of harness and made a nice leather strap for it. That would have been too much trouble."

In Mattie Ross, Portis created a steely eyed avenging angel cloaked in the body of a slight tween girl. Armed with the righteously clear sense of right and wrong normally reserved for the young and the hypocritical, her great strength is also what gets her into life-threatening danger. Her voice, as she tells the tale of her manhunt, is as much the story as the tale itself.

Mattie Ross is also a prime example of a brilliant point of view choice. As you read, you can't imagine the tale being told by anyone else. Even Rooster Cogburn (aka John Wayne, aka Jeff Bridges, aka Eye Patch Guy) would not be able to pull off the tale in such a fine way. If Portis had decided to tell the story in third-person, I'm pretty sure True Grit would have been lost in the flood of hundreds of other similar western novels-the story itself isn't that original, that action packed, that deep.

The writerly trick is, I suppose, knowing when a first-person narrator's voice is compelling enough to carry an entire novel. Writers talk about hearing character voices in their heads, as if this alone is reason enough to spend a year or more writing stuff like, "I had to get a drink of water" and "I had to find the nearest bathroom, immediately!". Myself, I've only written two novels (out of eleven) in first-person. Once it didn't work so well (my master's thesis) and another time it worked reasonably well (my recent YA fantasy novel). All I know is, be damn sure you want to go down that first-person road, because you'll live and die by it.

Mother's Day, 2011

2011-05-08T11:47:00.002-05:00

Today is the 11th Mother's Day since my own mother, Kayc Kline, passed away after a long and sleepless struggle with cancer and its insidious attendants. In my previous post, I quoted a passage that spoke about how time slowly erases pain, pain great and small, and today I find that it's pretty much right on. I still miss my mother, how funny she could be and how wise and how she was capable of great kindness, kindness that was as natural to her as sarcasm is to we here at Blogagaard, but the shimmering and sickening pain of our loss seems to have faded away to a dull roar.

I was at a party recently that had a high percentage of oldsters in attendance. I was sitting outside in a lawn chair during the party, watching them help each other shuffle in and out of the house as they came and went, and I could not help but feel that this would be the last time I would see most of them alive, that they were actually spirits flitting into the living world for a little party and a little pasta salad before they flitted back again to the Other Side. And some day, at some distant party, some young dude would watch me shuffle out to my car and think similar thoughts about me as well. The idea that life is short is often mentioned, but rarely does it seem to take hold on either the listener or the speaker. I suppose it's too much to chew on, ultimately, and we can only nibble on the edges of our own mortal impermanence. If you tried to swallow the whole life is short cookie in one large gulp, you'd most likely choke, or run screaming into the woods to masturbate yourself silly, a la the movie Into the Wild.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying states: "Look still deeper into impermanence, and you will find it has another message, another face, one of great hope, one that opens your eyes to the fundamental nature of the universe, and our extraordinary relationship to it.
....
Think of a wave in the sea. Seen in one way, it seems to have a distinct identity, an end and a beginning, a birth and a death. Seen in another way, the wave doesn't really exist but is just the behavior of water, "empty" of any separate identity but "full" of water. So when you think of the wave, you come to realize that it is something made temporarily possible by wind and water, and that it is dependent on a set of constantly changing circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every other wave."

Time Travel Is a Wash

2011-05-03T16:27:00.004-05:00

I honestly haven't thought a ton about time travel, besides the occasional plot brush with it in the Back to the Future and Terminator franchises (why do Terminators need to be naked when you send them back in time? They're filled with tons of non-organic material! They're freaking cyborgs!) or, of course, Quantum Leap, which posited that not only could you go back in time and change the course of events, you were downright obligated to do it.

But I have come across an interesting, time travel-based novel called How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe by Charles Yu. The narrator in this novel tells us that the events of the past cannot be changed, no matter how badly you wish they were, and that any attempt to do so can only create problematic rifts in the space-time continuum (which the narrator, as a kind of time travel handyman, must fix). The following passage from Yu's novel is interesting not only in its own right, but in light of recent we-killed-Bin Laden events:

"...it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter."

Footage from the 2011 White House Correspondants' Dinner

2011-05-01T23:47:00.001-05:00

Crazy thing is, the whole time Obama knew he was on the verge of catching Bin Laden!

Goodbye, Michael Scott

2011-04-28T18:05:00.008-05:00

Tonight Steve Carrel's character Michael Scott is leaving The Office. This feels like a watershed American TV moment, reminding me of when Topher Grace left That 70's Show, another favorite comedy of mine. And while The Office has generally declined since Season 2, it's still had more than enough brilliant moments since to keep me watching (though a part of me died during the episode where Pam and Jim had the baby, and during every baby moment since, and whatever made them ever think the cast should actually burst into song in certain episodes is fucking beyond me).

But it has been a fun and humorous ride, good sir! Here's an article on The Atlantic Monthly claiming the American version of the show surpasses the British, and here are some of my favorite Michael Scott quotes of all time:

"Dwight gave a great speech. That's the word on the street, anyway. And I entertained Dwight to no end with my bar story, so I captivated the guy who captivated a thousand guys. Can you believe that? A thousand guys."

"Nobody likes beets, Dwight! Why don't you grow something that everybody does like? You should grow candy."

"People ask me, would you rather be feared or loved, um easy, I want people to be afraid of how much they love me."

"I have Country Crock."

"BFD. Engaged ain't married."

"Sometimes you just have to be the boss of dancing."

That's what you said, sir. That's what you said.

The Star Wars of Despair

2011-04-27T17:52:00.002-05:00

What IS Healthy, Mr. Franzen?

2011-04-18T21:52:00.003-05:00

I've joined a softball team this spring. We've had two practices now, and from each I emerge in a little more sore (the day after a our first practice I staggered around the test scoring center I'm working at, moving like an old man crossed with a gimpy zombie) and a little more interested in becoming "healthier". So, I've of course turned to the renowned health geru and budding novelist Jonathan Frazen for help. Here's what I found in his essay "Scavenging" in his 20032 essay collection How to Be Alone.

"It's healthy to adjust to reality. It's healthy, recognizing that fiction such as Proust and Faulkner is doomed, to interest yourself in the victorious technology, to fashion a niche for yourself in the new information order, to discard and then forget the values and methods of literary modernism which older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate in your work and which younger readers, bred on television...are almost entirely deaf and blind to. It's healthy to stop giving yourself ulcers and migraines doing demanding work that may please a few harried peers but otherwise instills unease or outright resentment in would-be readers...Likewise healthy, almost by definition, to forget about death in order to live your life: healthy to settle for (and thereby participate in) your own marginalization as a writer, to accept as inevitable a shrinking audience, an ever-deteriorating relationship with the publishing conglomerates, a retreat into the special Protective Isolation Units that universities now provide for writers within the larger confines of their English departments..."

Jeesh. Makes me feel better about huffing and puffing after running the bases, anyway.

Another Jack City

2011-04-14T22:06:00.002-05:00

So, my car was broken into last night across from Sweeney's Saloon in St. Paul. The desperado, who I'm sure has been involved in many high-profile, Ocean's Eleven-type capers, busted my driver's side window to abscond with my backpack, which had 1) my beloved baseball glove and 2) my dirty, yet brand new Nike cleats. He did leave me a glittering, sticky mess of bluish glass, however, and about one hour to get to Menard's and buy some packing tape, which my helpful friend Mikey Sanchez and I used to create a makeshift window for the night.

A surprisingly decent, 80% see-through window that made it to my temp job in Woodbury intact. From there, I made some calls and had an auto glass place come out to the parking lot of my workplace and fix that broken fucker right there. Did you know they did that? It's actually the standard, auto glass practice, I guess. My insurance, which I changed to liability after getting hit-and-run two months ago and having my car "totaled out", did not cover one speck of it, so I'm out $183 for the window as well as my damn baseball gear and my favorite hiking backpack, which I actually bought in Vancouver several years ago, to replace another backpack that was stolen from my car as it sat in the hostel parking lot.

That packing tape window sure rattled around seventy miles-per-hour. It was like I was half-car, half-boy-in-the-bubble for about twenty minutes.

Damn thieves!

Pu-239

2011-04-10T23:00:00.006-05:00

I watched the movie PU-239 tonight, a good movie based on a exceptionally brilliant short story by author Ken Kalfus. Especially interesting in light of the recent radiation scare/disaster in Japan.

What would you do if you were exposed to so much radiation you would die within 2-3 days so your company could cut costs? How hard would you try to provide for your family? To get revenge?

Honestly, I would burn the whole motherfucking house down, if I could just figure the angle.

PS. This movie gives a whole new meaning to the term "nuclear family".

Spider Web Trees

2011-04-05T16:08:00.002-05:00

Spider web encased trees in Pakistan. How is cool is this shit? My brother Nate posted this link on Facebook, which he got from a friend, using something called the World Wide WEB....

The Desert of Boredom

2011-04-04T21:16:00.003-05:00

So I've finished with Mr. Jacob De Zoet and am now well into Five Skies by Ron Carlson, an author who is in many ways the opposite of the flashy magician-like David Mitchell, but easily his stylistic match. Carlson's prose is what you'd call Hemmingway-esque, minus the bad Hemmingway stuff, and gives you a crystal clear view of whatever he's describing, be it some clouds or Idaho desert or welding the pieces of a big broken road grader blade back together. He describes scenic Idaho so well I'm having myself some sagebrush flashbacks myself, and somehow he's making three men working on a 10 week construction project in the middle of nowhere an interesting drama.

That's the true test of a writer's skill, isn't it? Taking something most people wouldn't think was exceedingly exciting and drawing the reader in for an entire novel. Perhaps that's why literary critics and writers are so uppity, and perhaps this was the last great challenge David Foster Wallace was setting for himself in his unfinished novel (out on April 15th) The Pale King-how can you make working at the IRS in the eighties both as unbelievably dull as it actually would have been and still something worth reading about?

Because that's life, baby! Dull as shit, most of the time, with sudden, intermittent bursts of pleasure that allow people to carry on.

In totally unrelated news, I start test scoring again next Monday out there in Woodbury.

Mo Money Mo Writing

2011-04-01T12:01:00.003-05:00

I don't read much historical fiction, but right now I'm reading The Thousands Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. It's a good book, written beautifully, and you can tell he's done a ton of research for it (how much do you know about Japan in 1799? About the Dutch trading port there? Do you know what a shogun is?) and he writes so beautifully you're pretty much whisked away into the story, even if you want to barf after reading the jacket's over-the-top copy "A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousands Autumns...is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author".

Yes, this a book that screams money, in the sense that Mitchell must have had a ton of money to finance his research and the free time to spend years working on the book without worrying about temp work or buying groceries. Which brings me to the question: how much do finances play out in the creation of the average book?

I'd say a lot, generally. Everybody needs some money, and to get money, you usually need to trade your time (even prostitutes trade their time along with their body, even thieves spend time casing their target, even tenured professors have office hours). Yet, to write a novel, you also need time, as it's generally a pretty ambitious project, involving months and years of time, and chances are you won't be paid for your time until long after that novel is completed, and that's only if you're very lucky, and the book actually sells thousands of copies.

THUS!
To write a novel, even a bad, non-luminous one, you better have a lot of A) Money or B) Time. A lot of students in grad school today, especially non-scholarship programs like Hamline, are actually PAYING to create the TIME to write the novel they always wanted to write.

Which makes your head hurt, if you think about it too much.

Submitting Short Stories

2011-03-25T11:39:00.003-05:00

I've never had much luck submitting short stories to literary journals for publication, thought honestly I haven't tried very hard or submitted very many since I was in college. Strange to say, I've published more novels than I have short stories. I once had a story come in as a finalist for the Indiana Review and Iowa fiction awards, but that's about as far as I got with even that story. There are a dozen factors in getting your story published in a journal, from how good your story is to the taste of the editor (or assistant) that reads it to the overwhelming competition to place a story in general. For several top journals, and even mid-tier journals, the acceptance rate can hover around 1%, or less. For every novel that gets completed, there are probably a hundred or a thousand short stories written, many in workshop programs that can only fit in short stories due to the unwieldy nature of an entire class trying to workshop a novel.

If you're interested in submitting short stories for publication, I found this Manuscript Formatting document on William Shunn's website. I'm pretty sure I did some, but not all, of this correctly back when I was submitting regularly, and having an official looking submission can only help your chances. There's also Duotope's Digest to help guide you in your submission process.

Or, if you don't care about placing your stories somewhere and just want them out there for public consumption, you can just go the route I've taken and put your work up on scribd.

Good luck!

Sit Down, Shakespeare!

2011-03-23T14:54:00.002-05:00

I recently read/perused a book called The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook, which really isn't a handbook at all and more like a series of questions about writing, answered by around fifteen writers, most of them pretty big names like Rick Moody and Haruki Murakami. I noticed two main things in the perusal of this book: everybody's process is different, and almost everybody has trouble sitting down to write.

This includes we here at Blogagaard, as well. You'd think after eleven novels and such we'd be automatic sit down machines, ready and eager to start jotting away each fine day, but, alas, this isn't true. Oh, we'll sit down alright, but only to check our email, or surf the net, or to play a video game. When it comes to actual writing, a portion of our brain flees from laboring and distracts us any way it can. In his book The War of Art Steven Pressfield calls this urge to distraction Resistance and tells us that Resistance doesn't give a shit your project, your creation, and will prevent you from creating something by any and all means necessary, and that each day is a new battle with Resistance and you will only win by sitting down and getting to work.

I think that idea blows away a hundred interviews with a hundred famous authors, and that the real secret miracle is that anything beautiful is created, ever. I mean, shit, I could barely sit down long enough to write this blog post!

You Shall Laugh!

2011-03-19T21:09:00.004-05:00

A renegade dog sprints onto the pitch of a Gaelic football match and plays his heart out! My word, he shows some joie de vivre!

Click here for the video.

"He's being chased by the dog and the Australians!"

Now that's quality announcing.

Michael Jackson & Joan Rivers, Part 2

2011-03-19T15:46:00.003-05:00

Well, I've lost some steam for this pop culture comparative analysis in the last few days. Yet, perhaps this is a good thing. What would it really say about me that I was really into analyzing shit like this? That I should go work for E!?

Well, I'll give it the old college try, anyhow. The Joan River's movie, A Piece of Work, shows us the autumn/winter of a lifelong entertainer's career-Rivers is not going down without a fight, but, inevitably, one wonders exactly what she's fighting for. She circles around the question several times in the film, trying to answer it directly, but none of the answers ever seem satisfactory (at least, to me)...

Screw it. I don't care.

Have a good weekend!

Michael Jackson & Joan Rivers

2011-03-17T00:22:00.001-05:00

In the last few days I've watched This Is It and A Piece of Work. Both were movies I chose utterly at random at my local branch of the St. Paul library (Merriam Park, after all the good "fiction" movies had been checked out), both were documentaries (kind of) about famous American pop culture icons, both of whom had an amazing, disfiguring amount of plastic surgery done, and both of whom possessed a supernatural amount of talent and drive, with a capital DRIVE.

Let us start with Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael. Good lord, has there ever been a human being both so blessed and so cursed at one time? Do you remember Thriller? Do you remember the motherfucking moonwalk? Jesus Christ. At one time, this dude was GOD, and then god got a series of face lifts, and then god tried to save the earth, and then god tried to recapture his childhood in really, really ill-advised ways...

You get the picture, Icarus. You fly to close to the sun, then your wax wings melt. Or your wax face melts. And then suddenly you're fifty years old, every dumb mutherfucker out there "tweets" and the people EXPECT you to lip synch, their youthful shock over the exploits of Milli Vanilli notwithstanding. You're old school, you were in the fucking JACKSON FIVE, but you still want to push the limits. You're a showman, a true showman, through and through, and you want to give the groundlings one last show they'll never fucking forget.

And then you die, a week before you start a run of 50 sold out shows in London, before one last comeback tour that might have destroyed every concert sales record since my man Bruce S. showed up on the scene. And your cohorts were left with nothing but a bitter taste in their mouths, a lot of work wasted, and a movie called THIS IS IT, about a tour you yourself labeled THIS IS IT, before it really was...it.

Okay, in hopes of wrapping this up before I get too drunk to type (hey! St. Patty's day started a half hour ago!!! What a holiday!) I will now list my observances of THIS IS IT in numerical fashion:

1. Who is this middle-aged Asian businessman?
2. Why is he dancing?
3. Oh, that's MJ!
4. Is this Arsenio Hall's old band?
5. Did that drummer really say the word "booty" to MJ? I think he did!
6. Uh oh. Mj's gonna snap soon and go all shithouse on these plebs.
7. This IS why we have rehearsal!
8. I hope his concert is all new stuff.
9. He spent millions of dollars on ONE outfit for ONE GODDAMN SONG?
10. Please don't include "Black or White".
11. Oh no. Where's Macaulay? I guess all your friends do abandon you, in the end. The rear end.
12. What time is it? I have been drinking and watching MJ almost snap for a long, long time now.
13. I hope he doesn't sprain something.
14. His director really has a big belly. But that's cool.
15. Wow, MJ's dancers not only have taken the kool-aid, they might have injected it into their veins, heroin style.
16. Can we really save the world anymore, and make it a better place? For you and me and the entire human race?
17. Who cares! Someone give my an iPad or something.
18. Jesus Christ, this is some pretentious shit. It takes a lot to make Rush seem gritty and minimalistic, you know?
19. Fuck, the man can still dance. Can you really become the greatest entertainer who ever lived and STILL not live up to your potential? Well done, cruel universe, well done.
20. Too soon, MJ, too soon.

(Note: one of my very earliest memories involves "Thriller". They would play the song on a "record player" at my daycare, after pre-school or whatever I was into back then, and every soul in that place, from infant to fat middle-aged despot, would dance like there was no tomorrow. Even the bullies would dance, and L.C. had no shortage of those.)

To be continued...

Science Fiction Invades Reality Once Again

2011-03-14T18:01:00.004-05:00

A lot of people scoff at science fiction, in its various forms (such as movies and books and comics and whatnot) and view it as a kind of bogus play land that has no place in reality, or at least in their 9-5-pick-up-the-kids-from-soccer-practice-and-make-dinner-reality. We all know people like this, people who only read non-fiction and listen to political talk radio and usually go to sleep around ten o'clock and get up around five.

Admittedly, science fiction makes little to no attempt to reach out to these anti-fan boys (except perhaps in summer blockbuster movies, like the Terminator franchise) and often, very often, veers wildly into crazy, unbelievable plot lines, canned dialogue, and other things easily found in the original Star Trek series. Of course, science fiction doesn't care about the people it doesn't reach-its carved out a healthy niche of its own and today, in 2011, the products produced that involve sci-fi have the luxury of playing to its own fan base, not giving a damn about the outside world much as the costumed fans at its own sci-fi conventions don't give a damn about being taken seriously.

Yet, occasionally, reality and science fiction collide, and when they do, the fabric of both worlds seems to warp a little. What I have in mind as I write this are, of course, the surreal and horrifying events occurring in Japan right now. If a month ago I had written a novel foretelling a 9.0 earthquake erupting off the coast of northern Japan, an earthquake powerful enough that it actually shifted the earth's crust to affect the earth's rotation, making one earth day a microsecond shorter, that then created a powerful tsunami with ten foot high waves that ripped across the northern Japan mainland, obliterating almost everything in its path, killing thousands, so many thousands that now thousands of broken and drowned bodies are now, days later, washing back onto Japan's shoreline, creating a corpse removal crisis, while a nuclear power plant has suffered major explosions and is still now trying to avert full-meltdowns in four separate nuclear reactors, using of all things seawater to cool the reactors, and over 350,000 Japanese citizens have been evacuated and forced into homelessness, without enough food or water, and all these events still hang in the balance, would you have believed that book I'd written to be anything more than another unlikely sci-fi romp, and not worth a non-sci fi fan's time?

Yet, here we are, with science fiction invading reality once again, with the fanboys shouting "I told you this could happen!" and the non-fanboys uneasy, the bare bones reality they've come to rely on and love shifting, like the ground itself, beneath their feet.

A Day of Rest

2011-03-12T12:48:00.002-06:00

I've been rewriting a novel after getting feedback from my agent, in the hopes of getting it ready and sending it on the publishing rounds. I wrote this novel last fall/early winter and hope to have it making the rounds while the YA fantasy novel I wrote last spring also makes the rounds to a different set of editors, my thought being that casting two fishing lines doubles your chances of getting a bite.

This edit involved deleting two full chapters, writing three new chapters, and flushing out all three main characters. The rewrite process, for me, seems to take on a pretty standard pattern-I get my feedback from Jonathan, I agonize and mull it around in my mind for a few days, and then I start cutting like there's no tomorrow, slashing and burning every passage, sentence, and word that seems not good enough, not anymore! Then I start rebuilding, adding some new passages and tying them into what already stands, and then I slash through those passages as well. It's an exhausting and time consuming process and, after a while, you have to let it go and just pray the new draft is significantly improved.

So I sent the new draft to my agent last evening and now I have decreed today (and tomorrow) as a DAY OF REST, meaning I'm allowed not to think too hard about anything and I can sail as far away from my keyboard as possible (though I'll always return, ready for more insanity).

Richard Bausch Comes to Town

2011-03-07T20:47:00.002-06:00

I've just gotten back from a public interview at Hamline University with Richard Bausch, acclaimed short story writer and novelist, whose newest collection is titled Something Is Out There.

It was a great interview session, with Q & A afterwords, and has left my mind bubbling and a bit foggy. I think you can tell you've just seen something interesting when your first instinct is to go home and do the dishes (or some other meditative task). I usually have trouble focusing on lectures or any other kind of public forum (which I blame on having to go to boring church services growing up and watching Lethal Weapon 2 about five hundred times around the age of twelve, which undoubtedly killed what little attention span brain cells I possessed) but I was able to stay tuned in for most of Bausch's session.

One thing Bausch talked about that sticks out to me now is that so-called "entertainment fiction" and so-called "serious fiction" can be differentiated by the idea that something, in the end, can be resolved by an action (the space men finally kill the evil alien-my example) or not (Rambo's mother dies. Who does he shoot?-his example). An elegant differential, is it not? Think of Alice Munro or Ray Carver stories-something happens at the end, usually, but nothing can ever truly be solved, or resolved, because that's not what life is like.

So you have "entertainment stories", which play to the audience and our love of seeing things resolved, one way or another, because such resolution is rarely found in our own lives. A major part of us, that little kid part of us, really, really digs the idea of happily ever after and doesn't want to think about our heroes growing old, and sick, and cheating on their great loves, and finally dying. That sort of darkness, which is much less absolute than an evil villain and actually more gray-ish (again, more like our own lives) is the arena that "serious" or literary fiction plays in.

Thus, if you'll allow me to take this a step further, one can argue that your average fiction reader can be found somewhere along this fictional taste spectrum, with those who only read for escape and fireworks as one end of the spectrum and those who read to have a credible fictional world reflected back at them-something they can use as a sounding board and emotional reflecting pond-as the other end. If this is true, then I would see my first two novels as not only straddling genres, but as straddling the fictional taste spectrum. With The Suicide Collectors I leaned towards entertaining, with a dark reflective undercurrent, and with Wormwood, Nevada I leaned the opposite way, allowing a sharp kind of realism to seep into the characters and events of a strange, escapist kind of environment. And, while neither path led to best seller status, they satisfied the urge I felt to cover all the bases-why step up to the plate if you're not going to swing as hard as you can?

Note: Bausch also noted that both "entertainment" and "serious" fiction need to be entertaining, a very important addendum, if you ask me.

Guest Post #10-The REAL David Oppegaard

2011-03-02T13:13:00.003-06:00

Hello Blogagaard,

Long time reader, first time poster. For you see, while I am David Oppegaard, indeed, I wear you, Blogagaard, like a mask (sometimes a very thin mask, but a mask all the same). You, Blogagaard, are the very best and very worst of me, the interesting parts of me, not the guy who sits around writing all day (okay-about three hours a day) and drinks Mendota Springs mineral water and cleans up cat puke and actually gets excited every time he hears the mail being delivered out in the apartment building hallway.

You, Blogagaard, are a mad visionary, a great, cursing devil of the Internets, a demi-god who strolls willy-nilly through the electronic age while I, bland old David Oppegaard, sit around St. Paul coffee shops waiting to either be evicted, sell a third novel, or finally run into Scarlet Johansson and just flat-out dazzle her with my comedy stylings, so that we can become friends, really good friends who give each other long, lingering looks at grill out parties or in co-ed saunas but alas, can never be together, not only because of our other loves, but because of our careers, both of which are just too important, too integral to the progress of society itself, to risk destroying in such a high profile courtship.

But I digress, Blogagaard. These past two weeks, you've hosted an array of wonderful, talented writers, guest posters who've pondered many a thing about literature and writing, and now, as the guest posting concludes, I could not help but throw in my two cents about writing as well...

When I was about seven years old I started writings stories about A.L.F and ninjas and a non-fiction piece about a blizzard that hit Lake Crystal, my hometown. I scrawled and scratched and illustrated these pieces myself, filling little Gingham print journals to the brim. Was it already here, at such an early age, that I knew I'd be a writer when I grew up?

Or perhaps it was around the age of twelve, when I said something that must have sounded pretty weird and my father turned and asked me, in all sincerity, "Dave, are you on drugs?"

Or perhaps it was in middle school, when I wrote a ten page short story for my English class called "Deadly Forces" whose hero, Axel Gibson, made his way through a perilous and haunted castle in search of an amulet (or something like that). I read the story out loud in front of the class at the request of our teacher and as I read, I could tell my hyperactive classmates were actually paying attention to me, listening to my story, and when the bell rang to end the period, for the first time in our collective memories no one bolted for the door-they stayed to listen to the end of the story, one and all.

Well, I'm certain that by 15 I knew something was up. One day I sat down at our old black and white Mac computer not to play Crystal Quest or Shuffle Puck Cafe, no, but to write a short story that continued to grow and grow like some kind of nuclear waste generated beast, ending in a heavy 400 pages that my mother gamely printed out and had bound at Kinko's, much to my surprise, and when I first held that son of a bitch in my hands I felt a surge of happiness, of completion, and it seemed to me that a heavy manuscript like that might be something I could use to beat back the dark things of this world.