Vote on the cover of my next book!

Well, my next eBook, anyway.

Some of you (and judging by the sales numbers, that's not many) have read "Unrequited," as it was the first story in my collection "Unrequited and Other Stories."  Well, I've decided to jump into the eBook game, so I made a few revisions to "Unrequited" and commissioned my very talented friend Roger to come up with a cover.

He sent me the three covers you see below.  So my question to you is this: which do you like best?  Please note that there are actually SIX options in the poll.  I'd love to know what those who have read the story and those who haven't think.

So here they are, the three covers...

#1

#2

#3

Post-Potter Depression

"Percy Jackson would kick Harry Potter's ass."

I make this comment to my wife every few months or so.  She generally ignores me.  The other night, though, she actually defended her beloved Potter.  This only made sense given that a) my wife loves all things Harry Potter, b) we were at dinner before going to see the final movie, and c) she was drinking a cocktail that the restaurant called the "Elder Wand."

This is not to say that I dislike Harry Potter, because I don't.  I did introduce the books to my wife, after all.  Basically, I just like to pester her.  Besides, she knows that there are other books out there that are just as good (actually, she'd probably say "nearly" as good).

I should also point out that I know I'm being something of a sellout with this blog entry, as there are millions of "what you should do now that Harry Potter is over" columns on the Internet these days.  I'm also a bit of a hypocrite because I kind of hate these columns.  It's not that I don't think it's great that people are giving exposure to books that perhaps readers have glossed over while in their glazed eyed Harry Potter trance, it's just that writing such things after the final movie came out is kind of silly.  I mean, Harry Potter actually ended years ago, so recommending other books to check out now is kind of late.  Recommending other movies would make more sense.

But far it be from me to stick to my principles or only do things I approve of.  So here are a few awesome suggestions for you YA fans out there.

Los Angeles, Part 1

Most people who decide to move because of a girl do so for that girl -- I did so despite her, or even to spite her.

I landed in Los Angeles on June 9th, 2002. I had never set foot in this city before that night.

The plan, months earlier, had been for me to join my then girlfriend in Los Angeles.  She was moving out here ahead of me and would get us an apartment.  In the ensuing months, however, that relationship ended, and I batted around the idea of simply staying in Atlanta, even though I had already given notice at my job.  Why would I move to Los Angeles for a girl I was no longer with?

I realized, however, that the idea of moving to Los Angeles was easily just as appealing (if not more so) without her than it was with her.  Before I'd graduated from Ohio University, I considered moving to two cities: Atlanta and Los Angeles.  I'd spent two years in Atlanta and was ready for a change.  I had planned on that change.  I was looking forward to it.

And, you know what?  I wasn't going to let that girl stand in the way of that.  I wasn't going to let her determine what I did with myself.  I almost thought of it like staying in Atlanta would be admitting defeat.

The Waiting Game

"I am a patient boy, I wait I wait I wait I wait..."

-Fugazi, Waiting Room

I am sure that this comes as a surprise to no one, but I'm not famous.   I'm not even well known.  My life long misanthropic tendencies have probably made it so that fewer people actually know me than, say, the average person in America. In other words, the number of people who are going to hear my name and become interested in whatever it is I'm doing is going to be pretty low.

My grandfather isn't famous, either -- not yet, at least.  This was my biggest problem when shopping "Pray" around.  Publishers and agents didn't want to invest in a book by an unknown writer about an unknown person, because that combination equals no sales.

All of this means that I have to build a reputation from the ground up, and the only way to do that is by word of mouth.  I need word of mouth and positive reviews in hopes that the audience for "Pray" grows.  And so far I feel like I'm moving in that direction.  But it's going to take time...a lot of time.

It's going to take time for those who have my book to read it, and for those who care enough after having read it to review it.  It's going to take time for people two, three, four degrees of separation away from me to discover the book, and then even more time for the aforementioned reading and reviewing.  Getting the book to professional reviewers doesn't help much, either, as they have piles and piles of books to read.

Perhaps more frustrating is the fact that this throws a wrench in going out and promoting the book, other than doing it online.  Book stores agree to have you make an appearance if they think you can bring people into the store, and right now the only people willing to go into a store for me are those who already know me, and I've tapped that well dry.

Even if doing appearances was an option, I'd still find myself in the position of trying to sell complete strangers on a book they know nothing about.  Granted, I can be pretty personable from time to time, but it's going to take more than that.

I need that one good review to come in, that one person to discover "Pray" who can spread that message far and wide.

In the meantime, I have to wait, and hope that slow and steady pays off.

A nerd by any other name

When I was growing up, I was a dork.

Through the 80's and into the 90's, if someone wanted to insult me, their go to label was "dork."  I played Dungeons & Dragons in study hall, my bookshelves were lined with books with the words "Dragonlance" or "Forgotten Realms" on them, and every week I rode my bike (and later drove) to the comic book store for my weekly haul.

I am, by no means, denying the label.  I even embraced it.  I was proud to be a part of that subculture.

But then, in the late 90's and into the 2000's, I became a geek.

I'm not sure when, exactly, this happened.  In some ways, I suppose it was society's attempt at preparing for the upcoming X-Men movie (2000), which ushered in geek chic.  But I remember being called a geek even before X-Men came out.  Perhaps the pop culture consciousness of the moment saw what was coming and decided that "dork" was a term that the mainstream wouldn't like.  "Geek" seemed a bit more acceptable, and "geek chic" rolled off the tongue and could be used to describe almost anything.

So I became a geek when I was once a dork, even though I hadn't changed anything about myself.

"Geek" seemed to have staying power.  "Geek" seemed like it would be the go to term for everything remotely fantastical.  People began attaching the word to web sites and avatars in an effort to distill their essence down to one word.

Bu then, a few years ago, something strange happened: I became a nerd.

Again, I'm not really sure when, exactly, this took place, but as the sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero genres continued assailing pop culture, society once again decided that the prevailing term for someone who enjoyed these things wasn't user friendly enough.  The aforementioned social consciousness looked at anyone who had formally been called a "geek" and noticed that many of them were really smart, and many of those smart people worked on computers.  So if "geeks" were smart, and smart people were called "nerds," then we could just make a neat little swap.

I don't mind being called a nerd.  It does have a better sound than dork or geek, and isn't also a term for male genitalia or a guy who bites the heads off chickens.  No, the only thing I find weird about it is the fact that I'm really not all that smart.  I might be slightly above average, but that's only because I read a lot.  And I have little to no computer skills.  For a guy who grew up calling actual, certified geniuses "nerds," being called one myself seems dishonest.

But "nerd" is easy for people.  It's non-threatening.  It's even comforting, in some respects.  And it's amorphous, so it can be applied to almost anything.  If you're obsessed with rocks, for example, you could be a "rock nerd."  As the subculture has expanded into the mainstream, the mainstream has adapted how it describes us so that it doesn't feel like it's letting the riffraff in.

I can't help but wonder what's next.  What will I be called ten years from now?  What happens when the nerd revolution sputters and dies?  If the process is reversed, then perhaps I'll downgraded to geek, before being dropped back to dork.

And I still won't have changed.

This has all happened before.

I drink when I write.

That's an exaggeration.  I don't always drink when I write.  If I drank every time I wrote I'd either have the world's only indestructible liver or I wouldn't be here to type this.  It is entirely possible, if not entirely necessary, for me to write sober.

But there are times when a drink really helps.

Part of this comes from the fact that I have the attention span of a Cocker Spaniel, and alcohol tends to let me focus on one thing at a time.  There's also the fact that alcohol breaks down inhibitions and, in my case, breaks down my defenses.  If I need to get to a place that's raw, a place that's exposed, I'm not going to do it willingly.  A few drinks grease the hinges of that door.

But, again, these aren't regular issues.  I'm not always writing something that makes me cry.  And when I have large chunks of time, I can manage to get a decent amount of writing down even if I am distracted by whatever shiny thing catches my eye.

There is a moment in my writing when I will always have a drink: when I start something new.

I've come to realize that the translation from my head to the pixelated screen is sometimes difficult.  I can roll around in an idea in my head, but as soon as I'm typing it and watching the letters form words form sentences on the monitor in front of me, the feeling of submersion begins to fade.  It's changed from a liquid to a solid and its properties are different.

But I need to find that feeling again to keep writing.  I need to be able to submerge myself again.

Alcohol is how I make that happen.

I have a writing habit -- I have a lot, actually -- where I always finish a session of writing at the beginning of a new section.  It might be a paragraph, it might only be a single sentence, but I always start a new section before I knock off for the night.

I do this because it gives me an automatic starting point when I start up again.  I leave myself a door back into that world.

This is all to say that I have had a few drinks at this point in the blog.  I actually started this blog a few hours ago, as a way of warming up to writing.  It's actually a decent trick and one I suggest to anyone writing -- warm up with something like a blog or a journal.  It gets the writing juices flowing without the added strain of having to be overwhelmingly creative.  You can just write about yourself.

I have had a few drinks (whiskey, my drink of choice, this evening being Jack Daniels) because tonight I started a new...something.  I'm leaning towards book, but I'm not entirely positive that's what it will be.  I'm probably just hoping it will be a book, because the only alternative I can think of is a novella, and we all know that novellas are the kiss of death (and, sadly, kind of my preferred format).

Anyway, the new thing is really not like anything I've ever written before, so a little liquid courage was necessary for me to begin to translate my brain pictures into an actual story.

Besides, starting a new book is terrifying.  I know what I want it to be, but I'm not entirely sure how to make that happen.  I am small in the face of my own great expectations.

But aren't we all?