KyleGarret.com

Physical Fitness!

2012-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

About 10 months ago, I discovered the gym or, more specifically, I discovered the glorious sense of accomplishment that came with going to said gym.

Of course, those 10 months ago the gym was this small room in our apartment building that contained a single elliptical machine, a single treadmill, and three of those multi-purpose weight machines. Oh, and there were some free weights and a few exercise balls.

I discovered the joy of going to the gym in the morning. By the time I was awake enough to realize what was going on, I was already on the elliptical. It was fantastic. At the time, I didn't have to be at work until 10:30, so I got up 8:00 to go to the gym. I went four days a week, four days a week straight, from Tuesday through Friday. And the I gave myself a long weekend off.

It was fantastic. My cholesterol level went down. Not that I've ever been overweight, but I actually had to buy new pants as the ones I owned were too big in the waist.

When we moved up to the Bay, going to the gym became much, much harder. For one, I had to be at work at a normal hour, although I got my boss to at least give me until 9:30. My time requirement became longer because I now had to drive to an actual gym. That also meant that I had to get up and go early in the morning -- early on winter mornings. And the cold makes me very, very lazy.

I've done a decent job with it so far. My gym is filled with middle aged people, and there's nothing like seeing an out of shape forty-something to inspire me to work harder. I'm still going because I like how it makes me feel and because I want to lower my cholesterol, but now I also want to prevent myself from becoming completely decrepit as I get older.

That's all well and good, but it occurred to me (as I watched a few minutes of the Golden Globes) that being in shape has never held the benefits for me that it does for those who are, well, actually in shape. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that not being a fat load probably went a long way in getting Nicole to date me. But six pack abs and the gun show have never really been a goal of mine, because the reason for attaining those things has never been a goal of mine.

Which takes me back to the Golden Globes. I have often said that if I had a dietitian, a job that gave me long stretches of time off, a personal trainer, and a bunch of money, I could be in great shape -- I could have those six pack abs. If my lively hood depended upon my physical appearance, then it would be my number one priority, as I'd need the things that come along with looking a certain way.

All this is to say that it's often damn hard to go to the gym, because it's not essential to my life. I would imagine that's the way it is for most people. We don't have the time to be beautiful and we barely have the motivation.

Now I will go back to sitting on the couch and watching TV.

Not in Kansas Anymore

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

I have this reoccurring theme in my dreams. I may go months without seeing it, but when it returns it is ultimately the same as it was the last time I had it. Bits and pieces change, the way that dreams do, but the gist of it remains the same.

I have a reoccurring dream where I go back to college. Not any college, mind you, but Ohio University, the place where I spent both my undergraduate and graduate years.

In these dreams, I see people that I went to college with, although it seems like who those people are changes each time. Invariably, though, they're all in college, and in this world that's where they're supposed to be. There's nothing strange about it. They still have more to do before they can graduate.

But I don't. In fact, the central conceit of these dreams is that I have already left, and I'm now returning. The reason for my return is always the same: I don't know what else to do. I am always going into a PhD program and I always feel like everyone else has been there the entire time I was gone, and that perhaps they have a leg up on me.

It's also very clear that I'm only pursing this degree because I don't want to do anything else, I don't know how to do anything else. I fluctuate between the two, really. Often I even admit as much in the dream, and claim that I could end up dropping out of college once I figure myself out.

Interestingly enough, I'm still with Nicole in these dreams. There's always a bit about having a long distance relationship, that Nicole is back here in California doing responsible adult things while I am back at Ohio University trying to be productive, because apparently it's the only thing I CAN do that's remotely productive.

Don't get me wrong, I loved college, particularly grad school. Those years will always be a source of inspiration for my work. Truly, I've gotten a lot of material out of such a comparatively short period of time. But I don't want to go back there. Really. It may have taken a while, but I've actually managed to grow out of that phase of my life.

But I think that, to a certain extent, I will always romanticize those years. My friend Jay referred to it as the gravy train, albeit one we all knew would eventually come to an end. There was a wonderful simplicity to life back then, one that I don't think I ever fully appreciated, at least not when I was living it.

I suppose these dreams say a lot about where I'm at. I suppose I am still trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with myself. I think it's telling, though, that even when my subconscious portrays me as adrift in an ocean with no north star to lead me, I'm still with Nicole.

I may not know what all the things I'm supposed to be doing with my life are, but I know that one of them is being with Nicole.

Who is this guy?

2012-01-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, I like to remind people just who the heck I am.

Granted, most of you already know me to some extent. Maybe we went to high school or college together. Maybe we have or do work together. Maybe you've interacted with me online. Heck, maybe you've even read something of mine and kind of sort of liked it enough to check out my blog.

That's all pretty awesome.

I've spent the last few days trying to write a 100 word bio for Super Cool Secret Thing (that I hope to be able to talk about soon). It made me realize what a hard time I have describing myself, which is an odd thing to realize, given how often I talk about myself.

I started with the things I would want a potential reader to know about me, like the fact that my first book, "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At," is available now from Hellgate Press, and that it was just nominated for an Independent Literary Award in Memoir/Biography. It's important to get that out there right off the bat, since I want this theoretical reader to know that if they like what they're reading, there's an honest to god book that was not published by me out there for them to buy.

Of course, I'd also want them to come here to my blog, because all of the aforementioned information can be found here in some way, shape, or form. And if they want to come to my blog, they should really check out my Twitter account, too.

All of that was pretty easy to come up with. But it also all felt pedestrian. It didn't really give an indication as to who I am, or even why anyone should care about what I do.

This has always been a problem for me. There's a writer named Peter David who refers to himself as a "writer of stuff," and I always thought that was great. It neatly sidesteps the issue. Asking a writer what they write is like asking a band what they sound like, and I have found myself in both positions.

So what do I do, exactly?

If I'm honest and, I hope, being overly simplistic, I would say that I write love stories. Really. Over and over again I write love stories, I just dress them in different clothes. Add some zombies, add a few wars, add time travel, add a haunted house. But at their core, they are all love stories, because deep down inside I am a horrible romantic.

If you've ever been in love or are thinking about being in love, then I'm the writer for you.

And, really, there could be worse things to be. After all, who doesn't love a good love story?

Here I am at work.

2012-01-12T14:10:00.001-08:00

I've been nominated for the 2011 Indie Lit Awards!

2012-01-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

Well, now, this is just crazy.

First and foremost, look at the books on this list for the award in Biography/Memoir:

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (Penguin)
Bossypants by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books)
I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At by Kyle Garret (Hellgate Press)
Little Princes by Conor Grennan (William Morrow)
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch (Harper)

I mean, that's just insanity. I can't believe my name is side by side with those people. And, as my publisher said, neither of us can believe that Hellgate is up there next to the big boys like Penguin and Harper!

The Independent Literary Awards are entirely grassroots, which gives them a certain sincerity and approachability that you don't really see in awards anymore. I mean, absolutely no one knows who I am, yet I got nominated. That, my friends, is democracy in action! Granted, if/when SOPA passes, I'm sure this kind of thing will be outlawed, but I got in under the wire!

I really can't thank the directors and members enough. It's so hard to get any kind of a publicity at all when you're an unknown author with a small publisher and neither of us is based in New York. I can't wait for more people to read "Pray!"

Thanks also has to go to all of you who are reading this blog. So many of you bought "Pray" and then proceeded to tell your friends that they should go buy it, too. Word of mouth is the be all and end all of publishing these days, and if "Pray" has a long life, it's because of you!

I am mobile!

2012-01-08T22:54:00.001-08:00

While my wife is watching Downton Abbey, it occurred to me that I should see if there's a Blogger app for my phone and, Lo and behold, there is. I'm going to use the bell out of this thing.

As an added bonus, the picture below is my current view.

Top 10 Comics of 2011

2011-12-30T10:40:00.000-08:00

I could probably drone on and on about what a year it's been for comics. I'll spare you all that. I will say, however, that the year was defined, for me, by two things: 1) the DC relaunch and 2) the rise of the creator owned comic. Creator owned books are pushing the 1/3 mark for market share and this can only be seen as a good thing. They are the future (and make up 6 of the 10 books on my list).

For what it's worth, these are not in any particular order.

1) Echoes

In a year of great horror comics, this was the best. It should be no surprise that Joshua Hale Fialkov's star has been rising, or that this book seemed to propel him to another level. It is creepy as hell, thanks in no small part to the work of artist Rahsan Ekedal. The ending actually made me upset, and it's rare these days for me to have an emotional response to a comic book.

2) Criminal: Last of the Innocent

Believe it or not, this was my first foray into Brubaker and Phillips' Criminal, and I was soon asking myself why it had taken me this long to try it. This was yet another book that actually gave me an emotional response. I felt guilty when I read it, as if I was the one who had committed the crime. It was just so perfectly executed that I felt like I was the one who was living with that hanging over my head.

3) The Sixth Gun

The Sixth Gun is a regular on my list of great comics. You would think that, at some point, the shine would fade, but Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt have yet to let that happen. They've expanded the mythology of the series this past year and each new addition has made the book that much better. This is a title that seems like it could go on for years, if only the creators are financially able to make that happen.

4) Sacrifice

Purely from a business standpoint, it would be hard to understate what Sam Humphries did this year. I have no idea if Humphries and his collaborators (Steven Sanders on Our Love Is Real and Dalton Rose on Sacrifice) even broke even on their investment, but the fact that these books got so much publicity and sold out multiple printings was impressive. These books were about as self-published as you can get.

I went with Sacrifice over Our Love Is Real because I think it has more potential. It has the makings of the best of Grant Morrison, combined with the best of Kieron Gillen, funneled through Humphries' DYI sensibilities which, perfectly enough, is exactly what Dalton Rose's art looks like.

5) Daredevil

This book, at least for me, came out of nowhere. I think Ruse was the only Marvel book that I had read all year (not including Criminal from their Icon line). And perhaps it was reading Waid's Ruse that convinced me to follow him to Daredevil, a character I had never really cared for. I took a chance on the first issue of this series and found the best first issue of a comic book I've read in years. It never let up. I could go on and on about how great Daredevil is and how we need more comics like this, but it's been praised to the heavens by basically every comic book web site out there, so I'll leave that to them.

6) Bat books

Okay, fine, I'm cheating a bit here. But earlier in the year we had Grant Morrison on Batman, Inc., Peter Tomasi impressing me on Batman and Robin, and Scott Snyder bursting on to the scene with Detective Comics. I had never read so many Batman books in my life.

Of all the characters that had something to lose with the DC relaunch, however, Batman had the most. I was really concerned at how everything was going to be handled, fearing that all the great work that had been put into the books over the last few years would suddenly be erased. Fortunately, DC decided to keep more or less all of it. The most notable change was this ridiculous "Batman has only been around for five years" idea, which does absolutely nothing but hurt the books. Honestly, I could be the next Kyrax2 on the convention circuit soon, but I'll be dressed as Robin and shouting "no 16 year old would ever wear this!" (Supposedly, in the new DCU, Dick Grayson started being Robin at 16, which would allow him to be 21 now).

Part of what I enjoy about these books lately is the handling of the dynamic between the four, black haired males that make up the Wayne family. It's no secret that I thought Dick Grayson and Damien Wayne as Batman and Robin were perhaps the greatest thing in comic book history, but that interaction has carried over to include Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake.

Granted, that dynamic also serves to underscore the other big mistake in the relaunch of the Bat books: the disregard for Robin #4, aka Spoiler aka Batgirl, Stephanie Brown. I'm not a big fan of the current Batgirl book, which makes Stephanie getting the boot even harder to deal with. I have a suggestion, though: make Stephanie Oracle. Give her a new suit, perhaps heavy on the white, and set her up in the tower. Make her an Oracle that can also go out and kick some ass, if need be. Then bring Black Bat aka Cassandra Cain to Gotham and get Batgirl, Batwoman, Oracle, and Black Bat in a room together so we can see THAT dynamic, too.

7) Wonder Woman

I haven't regularly read a Wonder Woman book in, oh, probably eight or nine years. And before that I don't think I'd ever read a Wonder Woman book every month. Not only have Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang made me interested in the character, they've made me interested in the entire mythology. There's a certain amount of a Vertigo vibe going on in this book, wrapped in Greek/Roman mythology, and so far without a hint of superheroes. I'm actually looking forward to the day when Diana is submerged in the long underwear universe, as I think it will be handled well. I'm in no hurry, though.

8) Butcher Baker

And the award for most bat shit insane comic of the year goes to this gem from Joe Casey and Mike Huddleston. It's not that this book is redefining the genre or changing the medium, but it's giving us the type of kinetic action book that we seem to only get from Casey these days. This is basically conveyed to us in two ways: Huddleston's amazing, constantly changing artwork, and Casey's often bizarre, always intriguing dialogue.

As if the comic itself wasn't entertaining enough, the essays by Casey that make up the back matter are worth the price on their own. If somewhere down the line, Image or someone else decided to collect them into a book, I'd gladly pay for them; they're just that good.

9) Green Wake

Yes, Echoes was the best horror comic of the year, but Green Wake came in a close second. It's a completely different kind of horror comic, though, one wrapped in the supernatural. I'm not entirely sure what Green Wake is; in some ways it's purgatory, in other ways it's not. But I'm fine with that. I'm fine with the fact that I don't understand the rules of this world, because Kurtis J. Wiebe and Riley Rossmo drop enough bits and pieces to keep me interested.

Strangeness aside, the key to this book is the emotional core. Whatever Green Wake is, it seems attuned to those who have had some kind of tragedy in their life, and putting people like that together in a room -- even a strange, confusing room -- makes for good stories.

10) Vengeance

In a lot of ways, this series felt like Joe Casey's good-bye to the Marvel Universe. Over the last decade or so, Casey has managed to tell his own strange little stories using Marvel characters, and in Vengeance, all of those stories come together. These are characters and plots that no one else at Marvel seems to care enough to touch, to the point of placing them at odds with what's going on in the rest of that shared universe (like, for example, the fact that there's already a team of Defenders, one that was established years ago). This is fine with me, as it's allowed Casey to create his own little Casey-verse. I also can't think of a better artistic partner than Nick Dragotta for this final act. Dragotta makes the overload of story in this series manageable and still beautiful to look at. The new Teen Brigade has real angst, but still looks cool.

There's my top ten for the year. It's interesting to note that, aside from 6 of these books being creator owned, only four of them are superhero titles. Not that I'm the average comic book reader, but I think this is a great sign for the industry. The more quality genre diversity we get, the better.

4 Books and a Writer

2011-12-28T20:39:00.000-08:00

This occurred to me the other day: I'm currently writing my fourth book.

I'm sure a lot of people can say they've written a book, or come close to writing a book, or started writing a book. It is the great cliche of American literature, really. But the fact that I'm on my fourth is either really impressive or really sad, and possibly a bit of both. After all, only one of them has actually been published.

The first book I ever wrote, now called "Through Sheer Strength of Will (and Blissful Ignorance)" started off as a short story. Like with most of my work, I had no idea what it was really about. All I knew is that I was living in an apartment that had been completely refurbished because the guy who lived in it before me had stayed there for twenty years. I also knew that I was still getting his mail. And it occurred to me that someone who lived in this tiny studio apartment for twenty years must have had reasons for it. It also occurred to me that, given how long he'd lived there, maybe he didn't leave willingly. Maybe he'd died there. And maybe his ghost had stuck around.

I started writing that book (which, at the time, was called "Reliquary") in the last few months of 2002. I "finished" it in the last few months of 2003. In my mind, a year was plenty of time to write a book. It was probably too much time, but that just meant it must be good -- particularly given the fact that it had all but encompassed my entire life. Just a few months into 2004, I was already sending off query letters to any agent who was accepting new clients.

Needless to say, I got rejected. A lot. Looking back, it's not particularly surprising that so many people turned me down. The book was no where near ready to give to anyone and I was really just learning how to write in a long form (something I would still struggle with when writing "Pray"). It was surprising, hindsight being 20/20, that two agents actually requested not only sample pages, but then the entire manuscript. Both ended up passing on the book. In fact, I received rejections from both of them on the same day.

Book #2 aka The Only Book That's Been Published aka My Only Non-fiction Book aka "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At" has a long history, but it's one that's pretty well described in the book itself, so I won't go into it too much here. I suppose it's not surprising that it would be my first published book, given that non-fiction is currently outselling fiction like crazy, and the little fiction that does sell is generally YA.

This brings me, funny enough, to book #3, which just so happens to be a YA book. It doesn't really have a title at this point, and I'm not too thrilled about the working title, so I won't mention it. I read a lot of YA, so writing a YA book seemed like a fairly organic idea. It didn't take me too long to write the first draft, either, although I had learned over the years between my first attempt at a book and this one that the first draft is generally awful. I left it alone, then went back and made some changes. I left it alone again and then went back and made some more changes.

Book #3 is currently in the hands of my wife, Nicole. Anyone who has read this blog knows that Nicole is my in-house editor and she's a damn fine one at that. Nicole is a reader, and she knows what makes a good story. She's also an actual editor (albeit for film and television), so she knows what is important to a story and what isn't. The fact that she has it also gives me a handy excuse for why I haven't done anything with it yet.

This all brings us to my latest book. It has a title, but I'm going to keep that one close to my chest for now. I'm five chapters in and it's been the hardest thing I've ever written, at least from a craft standpoint. I wouldn't necessarily call it YA, but there are definitely fantasy elements to it. I think it has a chance of being the best thing I've ever done, which is also making it really hard to write; there's nothing like self-inflicted expectations to freeze you up.

So is it sad or impressive that I'm on my fourth book? I suppose it's sad that I haven't started sending out my first book, given that I've revised it to the point where I think it's actually pretty darn good. But I'm sure it's at least a little impressive that I have a published book out there, one from an actual publisher. And I suppose it's a bit impressive that I've managed to get to a fourth book in just nine years while holding down a full time job for most of that time.

Like I said: It's a bit of both.

Best Albums Released in 2011

2011-12-22T20:53:00.001-08:00

My usual caveat with these things: these are the best albums I've listened to this year that were actually released this year. There are quite a few albums that were released this year that are not on this list because I've yet to get around to listening to them. There are also quite a few albums that I listened to this year more than the ones on this list, but they were released years ago.

Anyway, here's this year's top ten, in order from awesome to most awesome.

"Angle" by the Strokes

10. The Strokes -- "Angles" -- I almost consider this half an album, really. Because let's be honest: half of it is crap. But the other half of it is fan-freaking-tastic. "Under Cover of Darkness" might be the song of the year, and one of the greatest pop songs of the last ten years.

9. Telekinesis -- "12 Desperate Straight Lines" -- A dozen catchy pop songs with a broken hearted tint. Telekinesis doesn't do anything all that new, but what they (he, really) does is great. Sure, "Please Ask For Help" sounds a bit too much like a Cure song, but I'm okay with that.

"The Valley" by Eisley

8. Eisley -- "The Valley" -- It's entirely possible that the most amazing part about Eisley is that they're not all cult members. I mean, how often does a band made up of siblings ever really work out well for anyone? While not as creepy and dark as their best (and first) album, this one has some great songs on it, filled with absolutely beautiful vocals. Eisley has two main singers; Sherri kind of sounds like Jody from Team Dresch and Stacy, who sounds kind of like Regina Spektor. I find nothing wrong with either of those things.

7. Foo Fights -- "Wasting Light" -- The Foo Fighters lost me at a certain point; I think it was the double album. Their music started to get redundant to me. It's not that I didn't appreciate what they were doing, it's just that I was kind of over it. This album brought me back. As soon as I heard the crazy off tempo beginning to "Rope," I was sucked in. An overall rockin' album.

6. Foster the People -- "Torches" -- If there was ever a band primed for one hit wonder status, it's this one. "Pumped Up Kicks" was everywhere this year and, to be perfectly honest, it's not even the best song on this album (that's probably "Houdini"). Fantastic dance music for those of us who don't really dance unless we're really, really drunk.

Office of Future Plans

5. Office of Future Plans -- s/t -- I am something of a J. Robbins aficionado. While no band he's in will ever hold a place in my heart the way that Jawbox does, I've enjoyed everything he's done since, from Burning Airlines to Channels. His latest band is Office of Future Plans and in some ways it might be the best (Jawbox notwithstanding). Robbins seems to have finally found a balance between the intricate, dissonant guitar parts that arrived on Burning Airlines second album (and moved on to all of Channels' catelog) and the hook driven, almost emotionally driven songs that we got on Burning Airlines' first album. He's yet to reproduce the majesty of the latter Jawbox records, but I attribute that to no longer playing with Bill Barbot. And it's fine, really, particularly when we get such a fantastic debut like this one.

"Pedals" by Rival Schools

4. Rival Schools -- "Pedals" -- Full disclosure: I loved Rival Schools. It wasn't so much that their first album was that great (although it was), but their sound is exactly what I would consider the sound in my head to be like. It's rocking, but a bit poppy, and a bit emo. I was beside myself when I heard they had reunited (by fate!) and this album lived up to all of my expectations. If you're looking for examples, try the combo of tracks 6 and 7, which give a nice range of what this band is capable. Both songs ("Shot After Shot" and "A Parts for B Actors") are amazing.

3. Wugazi -- "13 Chambers" -- Good god did I listen to this album like it was going out of style. Okay, fine, some of the Fugazi songs chosen for this mash-up album are kind of obscure, but, nerd that I am, I know them all. Has the Wu Tang Clan ever sounded this good? Okay, probably, but when was the last time they sounded this fresh? Only a crazy person could listen to "Sweet Release" or "Slow Like That" and not find them completely awesome.

"The Whole Love" by Wilco

2. Wilco -- "The Whole Love" -- I'll be honest: I did not see this coming. While I liked the last few Wilco albums, they lacked something. They lacked courage. There seemed to be an emphasis on fairly straightforward song writing, and not a whole lot of experimentation going on. And let's face facts: we listen to Wilco because they are insane people. And that's what we finally got again on this album. In fact, this album is so good it made me realize how low my expectations had become for this band. This is "A Ghost Is Born" level good. If you don't believe me, go listen to "Born Alone" and tell me it couldn't have been on an earlier album. And then go listen to "One Sunday Morning" and tell me they're not insane. But in a good way.

"We Are the Tide" by Blind Pilot

1. Blind Pilot -- "We Are the Tide" -- I liked Blind Pilot well enough. They had a song on "Chuck" and I really liked it and I went out and got their first album and thought it was really good. And when their second album came out, I dutifully bought it. What I got was the best album released in 2011. It's layered and complex, yet at its core made of simple, emotional song writing. It's a guy with a great voice and an acoustic guitar writing imminently relatable songs. And then you add the keyboards and the xylophone and trumpet and mandolin and banjo and the absolutely crazy vocal harmonies and you get a fantastic record. It's poignant and uplifting and it's my favorite album of the year.

So there you have it: ten albums that I would recommend to anyone. Go check them out if you get the chance; they're all worth it.

Where Is My Mind?

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

The other day at work one of my co-workers asked me a question that amounted to "Is it hard being a creative person and doing a job that requires very little creativity?"

A fair question, really.

The strange thing is that just a few hours later, another co-worker, who hadn't been privy to that conversation, asked me more or less the same thing, although she seemed to phrase it more along the lines of "why are you doing this instead of something creative?"

Again, a totally fair question.

I like my current job well enough. It's obviously not my dream job, as that would be writing for a living, but how many people actually have their dream job? But I like the people I work with and I like that I'm learning a lot and I'm happy that I'm no longer as completely in the dark as I was when I started.

And there is a bit of creativity involved. At the very least, I'm forced to at least creatively problem solve.

But what was my response to these two co-workers?

It basically amounted to "I exercise the creative part of my brain at night when I write." This was to say that it was fine with me that I wasn't flexing that particular muscle during the day as it would get plenty of exercise after work.

Part of my difficulty in really answering the question is that I have a hard time when people refer to me as things like "creative." I suppose it's part of the self-doubt that so-called "creative" people have, particularly those who don't actually make a living on what they create. I don't think I really consider myself more creative than anyone else. Weirder, sure. Prone to think about seventeen things in the span of a minute, sure. But more creative? It's a hard label for me to accept.

These questions from my co-workers are not unusual. At every job I've ever had, people have made comments to me about how I'm just there temporarily, about how I'll soon be moving on to something better, something more in line with my abilities. I've always been amazed by this because it's not like I really share my work with many people. I don't know why anyone would think I'm destined for better things.

I don't mean to sound like I have no back bone. I realize that I have certain capabilities that would suggest that I can do a fair amount with my life. But I also feel like I'm a jack of all trades and master of none. I'm an above average everything, but not so far above average that I really stand out.

Fuck me, this entry has gotten really depressing! I don't mean to suggest that I don't think I'm awesome because I do, in fact, think I'm awesome. Maybe that's it, then: I'm just surprised that other people think I'm awesome, too.

I just kind of wish that all these things that other people see in my future would show up already.

Top Search Terms!

2011-12-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

For your enjoyment, the top search terms that lead people to my site, as of 12/08/11:

pointed tits

nolan batman movies cover

"so it begins" lost jack purgatory

bazooka joe/ help i'm stuck at the plant

building porno

kyle garret

kyle garrett kickstand

kylegarret.blogspot.com

pictures from 50's atlas comics

sad nightwing

I suppose if you add that all together, you get me.

Unrequited

2011-12-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

It was our seconddate when the world ended.

Thiswas someone’s basement once. There’s awasher and a dryer down here and if the power were still working I’m sure wecould use them. The fact that the showerupstairs worked was blessing enough. Myclothes might not be clean, but at least my skin smells better.

Sophybrought a few things down from the bathroom. She found a compact. She foundsome make up. It’s still light outenough for her to put it on. She’s justkind of sitting there, compact in one hand, eyeliner in the other. I’d be flattered if I thought she was actuallydoing it for my benefit. She’s not. She’s doing it for her own.

Ibrought a few things down from the kitchen. I found a really big knife, the kind they only sell on the Home ShoppingNetwork. I found some canned goods thatcan be eaten raw. I found some bottledwater.

Isearched every inch of this house and every inch of the garage and the shed outin the yard and I didn’t find a shotgun or a hand gun or anything that could beconsidered a fire arm. In the moviesthey always find a gun somehow. In themovies they always know how to use it.

Iknow she’d rather be sleeping upstairs in one of the beds. But I feel like the rooms are too shut offwith only one exit route. The basementhas a door to the upstairs and a door to the back yard. The floor is concrete and the walls arecinder blocks. I feel secure down here.

There’sa small window, the kind made from a really thick block of glass. I can see the swing set in the backyard. I can see the sand box.

Iremember when internet dating was a joke.

Idon’t know when it happened, but at some point meeting people online became trendy. I guess the ability to screen people wasappealing. You could literally type inthe kind of person you wanted to meet and the computer would spit out results. It was like natural selection with photos.

That’show I met Sophy.

Ithink most people have a list of traits that they look for in a significantother. And I think most people are smartenough to realize that they’ll never find someone with every single one ofthose traits. To a certain extent, weall know that we’re going to have to settle. You trade wit for kindness. Youtrade taste in movies for taste in music. You trade intelligence for looks. Everyone knows that this is how it works and everyone knows thateveryone else does it. You have tosacrifice to survive.

Ididn’t feel like I was settling with Sophy.

Thisholds true for meeting people online. Goahead and do a search for someone who has the exact same favorite movie asyou. I can guarantee that they won’tlike the same music. Do a search forsomeone with a post-graduate degree. Chances are good that they’ll be dull as dirt. When the facts are laid out and pixilated onthe screen twenty inches in front of your face, you learn to pick andchoose. You learn to prioritize.

Itwasn’t like that with Sophy. She likedthe best movies. She valued wit. She enjoyed getting drunk. She was nearly as aimless as me and just afew months younger. There wasn’t asingle trade to be made. I didn’t haveto pick and choose. Everything lined upthe way I wanted.

Andthen, of course, there were the pictures. As online dating had gotten more popular, more and more attractivepeople were actually using it. I’m sureinitially it was the last resort for the homely and misanthropic, but it turnedinto a veritable potpourri of beautiful people. No matter what your type might be, you were bound to find someone tomatch it. The problem, of course, isthat everyone knew this.

Youget a lot of glamour shots, pictures that seemed to have been takenspecifically for the purpose of having a great online profile. You get a lot of action shots, pictures ofpeople doing something “cool” with their friends. Those are actually kind of intimidatingbecause you’re getting a glimpse of that person’s entire life in onephoto. It’s a world that seems foreignand complete and not a world that needs you in any way. You also get a lot of artsy shots, created tobe mysterious and appealing when, in reality, they’re just annoying.

Sophywas different.

Ifound her by doing a search for favorite movie. We were a match. Her picture wascandid enough (and cute enough) for me to think she had potential, so I clickedon her name to view her profile. Notonly did we like the same movies, we liked the same music, too. It seemed to me that I had every single oneof the qualities that she looked for in a person. It seemed to me that her hobbies paralleledmy own.

Withina few minutes of reading her profile, I’d already fallen for her.

Wemanaged to slide a mattress down the stairs and we took sheets and comfortersfrom the linen closet. It felt weird totake them off the beds. The mattress wasone thing. Sheets made what we weredoing seem too real.

Nighttime is always the hardest. I watch asthe last light from the sun fades away. Sophy crawls on to the mattress and pulls the sheets up around her. I look at my watch. It’s only 6:30. I wonder howmuch longer the battery will last in this thing. I suppose at some point time will cease toexist.

Wesleep in four hour shifts. I know itdoesn’t sound like we’re getting a whole lot of rest, but it’s not as if eitherof us is getting any quality sleep. You’re half awake the whole time, anyway. Part of you doesn’t think you’ll wake up.

Therewas one point when we felt comfortable lying next to each other. I think we preferred it. It was a way for us to stay warm. I liked to think it was comforting, that Iwas just as comforting to her as she was to me. But we’ve been pretty scared lately, too scared to be lying down at thesame time.

“Ifeel like we’re buried,” she says as she rolls over on to her side. She always starts off on her side. At some point she’ll end up on her back. Gently, casually, and sound asleep, she’llroll on to her back, no longer curled up in the fetal position, open andaccepting of the world around her. Ithappens that way every night. It’salmost graceful.

I’vewatched her sleep every night for a week now.

Ilook back out the window. The sun isgoing down and the last bit of light is starting to form shadows anywhere itcan. I try not to let my mind fool me. I’ve got enough to worry about withoutimaging things.

Those trees in thedistance are just trees. They’re notmoving. They’re not headed this way.

Ialmost wish they were.

The rest of Unrequited can be found as a 99 cent eBook, available on iTunes, for the Nook, and for the Kindle, as well as pretty much any other eReader or Tablet. Unrequited can also be found in print, as part of the short story collection, Unrequited and Other Stories.

Something to Forget

2011-12-07T20:07:00.001-08:00

I feel like I'm not allowed to miss Los Angeles. This feeling comes from a number of different sources.

The first and, as always, most prominent, is self-inflicted. Moving up north was a fairly monumental decision, one which I thought I understood at the time, but which I really didn't. This was one of those moments in life where everything changes; it was a crossroads, if you will. I made my decision and I stand by it.

The problem is that I feel like if I miss Los Angeles, I'm undermining the choice I made. It's as if I'm trying to be strong and admitting I sometimes wish I was back in SoCal is showing weakness. And perhaps there's a part of me that worries about what will happen if I let myself miss the life I had in the city I called home for nine years. My over active brain will take that opening and run with it, and introduce the idea that maybe, just maybe, I'm regretting my decision.

Because I have an amazing ability to convince myself of pretty much anything, regardless of whether it's true or not.

In this respect, Nicole is only a minor player. I will admit that I feel like talking about missing Los Angeles will make her think that she's forced me into this move, when it was actually my idea. I know she's having a hard time with it herself, but my wife is much less insane than I am. She also has the very normal ability to process her emotions in reasonable ways, whereas I just bottle them up until I explode, and in the meantime I act moody and weird (or weirder than usual).

And everyone seems to think I should love Northern California. Part of that is that they want me to be happy and they want me to embrace my new life up here, and I appreciate that. I like Northern California a lot. In fact, I actually wanted to move here instead of Los Angeles originally, but fate had other ideas.

Digression: A few weeks ago we had a party here at the house for Nicole's brother. He invited some of his friends over and we cooked out, etc. It turned out that almost all of them had lived in Southern California at some point, and some of them had lived up here, down there, up here, down there, and so on. I mentioned how interesting it was that so many people seem to go back and forth like that.

One of my brother-in-law's friends mentioned that he thought it would be weird at first, moving to SoCal from NorCal, because of the rivalry between the two parts of California. I had no idea that there was such a thing, which wasn't surprising, as he said that he discovered that no one in SoCal is even aware of this rivalry -- it's entirely one sided.

It understandable, of course. San Francisco is a great city, yes, but it doesn't get nearly the amount of air time as Los Angeles. It's almost always warm down there. They have celebrities. You can drive to Vegas. No one ever seems to get older in that town. I could see how that would rub some people the wrong way.

I don't really look at it that way. For me, it's just that Los Angeles was home, and NorCal isn't...yet.

I'm looking forward to the day when I'm more settled in here, when I feel like it is my home. I'm sure that will happen soon enough. In the meantime, I'll have to find a way to get over Los Angeles. Based upon my life experiences, the way I get over a break-up is by drinking a lot and then finding someone new.

I'm looking at you, NorCal.

Hey, I'm Giving Away Books on Goodreads!

2011-11-29T12:06:00.000-08:00

Goodreads Book Giveaway

I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At

by Kyle Garret

Giveaway ends December 04, 2011.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

When Bad Reviews Behave Badly

2011-11-28T10:30:00.000-08:00

Grad school was something of a mixed bag, and at some point I'm sure I'll go into more detail about that. But one of the best things I took away from the two years I spent studying writing, was how to take criticism.

Writing workshops -- particularly in grad school -- seem to thrive upon harsh judgments. There's a pack mentality that kicks in when a group of people are sitting around a table, discussing a classmate's work. It's honestly kind of hard to believe, because it can be so very, irrationally, mean. The idea, it seems, is that by tearing everyone down, no one can be better than anyone else in the room.

Eventually, you learn to take these criticisms with a grain of salt, and you learn which ones are useful and which are just spiteful.

This isn't to say that I don't still have to fight my gut reaction to criticism. My wife will tell you that I have to take some time before I can respond to any comments she's made on my work -- and those are comments I get from someone whose judgment I know and trust.

When my book, "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At" was released, I expect to get some bad reviews. You can't please everyone all the time, and while I think the book has mass appeal, it doesn't have uniform appeal; I expected negative reviews.

I got them and they were understandable. Like I said, "Pray" isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. But I never got a negative review that crossed the line, or that was illogical.

Never say never.

Such a review showed up recently on Amazon. It was actually brought to my attention by my dad, who was up in arms about it. Before reading the review, I just assumed my dad was overreacting, as he was protective of his family. And then I read it.

It was just as bad as he'd indicated. It wasn't just that the reviewer didn't like my book, it was that the criticisms bordered on the personal (some might say "bordered" is too kind of a word). And even the things that the reviewer mentioned that came from the book itself revealed a gross misunderstanding, or perhaps a flat out inability to read.

What bothered me the most, though, was that the reviewer called my nephews "bratty." I go into great (some might say too much) detail in the book of the developmental problems my nephews have for a variety of different reasons. They're special needs children, and calling them "bratty" wasn't just insulting to me, but to them and anyone who has special needs kids in their family.

The silver lining in all of this isn't just that the reviewer purchased the book (although I'll be honest that, under other circumstance, I would feel bad about someone forking over cash for a book they didn't enjoy, but in this case I'm okay with it), but that it was brought to their attention by a recommendation on Twitter. In other words, there's at least some marketing component out there that's working, which was great to read.

Initially, I figured I'd ignore the review in question. Then I considered taking the high road and leaving a comment that was overly nice. Finally, I decided to share the review with others, just to make sure I wasn't being overly sensitive. They assured me I was not. A few of them even came to my defense on Amazon.

In the end, it wasn't really bad reviews that I needed to prepare myself for, it was irrational reviews. And given how much time I spend on the internet, you'd think I would have been expecting them.

Tears for Fears

2011-11-16T21:44:00.001-08:00

A little over a week ago, I wrote a death scene.

This isn't really newsworthy, I know. Thousands of writers write death scenes every day, if I had to guess. And, really, I generally don't write about the specifics of my writing, as they're pretty boring. No one cares about them but me.

But writing this death scene nearly made me cry...and I was totally sober.

Years and years ago, I read an interview with Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, and the guy most people will know as the director of the upcoming Avengers movie. In the interview, he talked about how he locked himself in a room and wrote a scene involving Buffy and Angel, who were, for lack of a better term, star crossed lovers. He talked about how he acted the scene out, right there in the room, and how it devastated him emotionally, because while he was writing it, he was living it.

When I read that interview, I thought it was a little bit insane, which is funny, given that it's something I've always done with my writing, too. Okay, I might not actually act things out out loud, but I still act them out. And, yes, sometimes I get emotionally involved, but those are the moments when I know what I'm writing is working.

Of all the stories I turned in to workshops throughout my college career, only one really seemed to gain any traction with my professors and my peers. It was called "Mercurial" and you can find it in the collection in the link. I cried when I wrote it. I won't deny that. I cried when I wrote it and I think the fact that I was able to get to that place was why it worked, why people responded to it.

I should point out that, given I was in grad school at the time, it is not unreasonable to assume that I was drunk when I wrote the aforementioned story. It's always easier to get to a crying place with alcohol. Side note: I gave that story to visiting professor Francois Camoin. He referred to it as "the story written on drugs," which I should really be using as a pull quote.

I would get choked up here and there, but the next time I would go full on cry was while writing "Unrequited." Writing that story was rough enough, but the ending took a real toll on me. Looking back on that time in my life, though, I would say there's a really good chance I was drunk when I wrote that, too.

My next big moment of break down while writing came when I was working on my book, "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At." The thing about "Pray..." is that it's a true story, so when it came to crying about the subject matter I really didn't need a social lubricate, although I admit that it might have been involved.

All of this, then, leads me to last week, when I wrote a death scene and I nearly broke down into tears, even though I was stone cold sober. Not unlike a psychiatrist, I view crying as a good thing, and the fact that I came close to crying while totally sober just as good. I think I might actually fear for my sanity a bit had I really broken down last week.

And I also think this death scene has power.

In fact, it has so much power that I've now been forced to go back and make all the chapters that lead up to it better.

Here is one of the great insanities of being a writer: making myself cry is the goal, and is the high water mark of success. But, you know, so far all of the stories that have made me cry have managed to strike a chord with those who read them, so it seems like it's a goal that pays off.

At the very least, it's good to know that I'm not just crying in my office alone for nothing.

Hitting a Wall

2011-11-15T12:25:00.001-08:00

Sweet fancy Moses, I can't wait for Thanksgiving.

This isn't to say that I have any real affection towards the holiday itself, as I don't. This is to say that I have never needed a long weekend so badly in my life (note: that might be hyperbole).

I've kind of droned on about how different things are now that Nicole and I have moved from SoCal to NorCal, but lately I've realized that, while I may have been aware of these differences, the changes hadn't really settled into my head like they were real. In fact, the differences don't bother me, it's just that I've gotten this general feeling of weirdness after so much change.

For example, I don't feel like going to the gym is giving me the rush that I used to get. I'm not entirely sure why that is. I'm sure part of it is the fact that I now have to go to a gym where other people work out, so I'm a bit more self-conscious. It's probably also the fact that going to the gym is no longer the hardest part of my day, as I now have a real job that requires real work.

As far as the gym goes, there's also a certain element involving a change in motivation. Living in the suburbs, I've see no shortage of men with the typical middle age physique. I don't think I really even have to explain it to you, because you can probably picture it. There's a certain part of me that now feels like working out is my way of holding off that fate, and thus becomes something I'm doing because I have to, not because I just like the way it makes me feel.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with any of that, it's just different.

Another, even more petty example: I'm not a fan of how the sink in our kitchen is situated. I don't like the size or the set up. If I had been apartment or home shopping, it's the kind of thing that would have turned me off (if we were only renting, at least, and thus couldn't make any changes). But it's what I'm stuck with, at least for the foreseeable future. Is it really that bad? Of course not. But it's not what I'm used to or what I would prefer.

People always talk about Los Angeles being a haven for stunted adults, those who are in a perpetual state of adolescence. And I really can't argue with that, because all of the things that are messing with my head up here are, to some degree, the things that an average adult deals with. But I've never been an adult before, not really. It's like I suddenly have to grow up.

I suppose a lot of it has to do with familiarity. I miss the gym in our old building. I miss the office I had in our old apartment. The office in our house now has yet to really become mine. I've yet to bond with it, which is something every writer can understand -- you have to connect with your work space. It's still really early in the process, but I miss what I had before.

This all makes me wonder just how long it will be before I really process exactly where I am now, and I don't just mean physically.

I've been working out this equation lately:*

I'm at work (including lunch break) for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week = 45 hours.
If I'm good, I'm able to spend about 10 hours a week writing, or doing something writing related.
I probably spend 4 hours at the gym and another 4 hours in traffic during the week.
We're at 63 hours so far.
Let's optimistically say I'm in bed for 8 hours a night, which might actually be true if I make up time on the weekends. Now we're at 119.
Add 1 hour each weekday for breakfast and dinner, 2 hours for all 3 meals on the weekend. That's another 9 hours.
I watch 8 hours of TV, on average, most weeks (don't judge me).
Now we're at 136.
Now say I spend, on average, 4 hours a week on domestic duties, like running errands and household chores. And let's add in another 4 hours for socializing, which would more be weekly average, as I'm not really all that social.
We end at 144. There are 168 hours in a week.
This means that I have 24 hours that aren't accounted for.
I have 24 hours to do whatever I want.
So the question, really, is what am I doing with them?

I think when I figure that out, I'll start to get a grasp of this whole situation.

*No, seriously, I have done the math on this in my head like half a dozen times in the last two days... because I am a crazy person.

The Post About YA Books

2011-11-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

About a year and a half ago, I sat down to write a YA book ("Young Adult," for those who might not know). It took me three months to write the first draft. It's been revised a few times since then, and is currently in the hands of my fantastic, live-in editor, Nicole.

This wasn't the YA book I thought I was going to write; I had another idea that got pushed aside by this one, but that I hope to come back to down the line. Unfortunately, I have two other ideas that seem to have more potential, so I've moved on to those.

But I've never had a problem with ideas; it's the execution that gets me.

I decided to write a YA book because, aside from perhaps comics, YA books take up the bulk of my reading list. I've also basically been writing YA books in my head for most of my life, I just never realized it. In some ways, my education in creative writing was something of a hindrance, as I was under the belief that I needed to be writing serious literary fiction, and that all of my crazy ideas about superheroes and dragons had no real value.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy serious literary fiction. But it's a fickle mistress that doles out far more pain than pleasure, although I suppose that's why the pleasure is so great.

...wow, that was a bit of a un-YA diatribe there...

As I said, I read a lot of YA books, and I've come to realize that there are, more or less, two distinct genres in the YA category: angst and fantasy.

Angst would be something like Twilight, of course. The focus is on interpersonal relationships that are intensely emotional and overly dramatic, but in some way relatable to the audience. I would imagine that books in this category generally skew a bit older, perhaps to high school kids.

Fantasy would be something like the Percy Jackson series. Plot is foremost, and that plot demands a certain level of detail, complexity, and creativity. Sure, the interpersonal stuff is in there, but it's not the central focus of the story. It's there to add depth. I would imagine these are the books that skew both younger and older, the books that middle school kids and their parents read, because neither group is too concerned with angsty teenagers.

The two genres can mix, of course. Harry Potter is a great example of this. That series began as mostly fantasy, but by the end it was equal parts fantasy and angst. The genius of Harry Potter is how it evolved from book to book, taking the readers along with it. For all the credit JK Rowling gets for her creativity, it's her vision of the big picture that I found most impressive.

Lately it seems as if the "angst" group has been mostly made up of post-apocalyptic and vampire stories. This make sense, of course, because both areas lend themselves fairly easily to angst. Sadly, it's resulting in a flood of books that are mostly about being melodramatic. It feels like this group has reached its saturation point, but I'm not sure how it becomes any better.

On the flip side, "fantasy" books have yet to find a pattern. Sure, most feature protagonists who are roughly the same age as the target audience, but beyond then there's been no set criteria for success. It would have been very easy to see a ton of books featuring wizards after Harry Potter changed the book world, but that isn't the case. There's a such a great variety of subjects in the "fantasy" group that it's ultimately the more interesting of the two categories.

Then again, I say that as an adult reading young adult books. In fact, maybe the "angst" group is the better of the two, the one that will last the longest. It certainly seems to have the most rabid fans.

Let's just hope the market for YA doesn't dry up any time soon: I've got 5 different series in my head, and it would be nice if someone paid me for them!

"Call it fate, call it karma..."

2011-11-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

In July of 2010 I made a choice, an illogical, fairly desperate, possibly awful choice. At the time, I was working a full time job that came with benefits, and while it didn't pay all that well, I had the opportunity to make more through commissions. Really, given the economic climate, who could ask for anything more?

Me, apparently.

I was miserable at that job. It was in property management, which is an industry I loathe yet was trapped in for years. I had no respect for the people who ran the company. And I worked in downtown L.A. -- not the hip, renovated part, the part that was a block away from skid row and the methadone clinic. Every few months our street would be shut down by the police for something like a stabbing or a jumper.

Nicole and I had a lot of other reasons to be miserable back then, too. The job just felt like the last straw.

So after a year at that job, I left, and took a job that was part time, no benefits, and even less money. The Midwesterner in me couldn't believe how irresponsible I was being. Nicole, who had seen me beaten down by this job, gave me full support to go.

Aside from the horrible decisions I've made involving relationships, this was the first time I'd really made a move based entirely upon my happiness.

Less than a year later, Nicole and I made the decision to move up to the Bay area. It was a pretty big deal, considering our lives were fairly entrenched in Los Angeles. But it was a move that would make Nicole happy and, ultimately, would make me happy -- besides, a happy Nicole often equals a happy Kyle.

Nicole left behind a pretty substantial career and a good amount of money. But we made this decision to be happy.

The company I jumped ship for isn't a large multi-national corporation, but they have purchased a few other companies that still maintain their offices. One of those offices was in the Bay area...and I happened to have been working for them, but in SoCal, this entire time. So when I told my bosses I was leaving, they told me that I should stay, but just transfer up north.

Suddenly, this incredibly rash decision Nicole and I had made to quit our jobs and move north wasn't so rash. I don't even know how to calculate the odds that the company I work for has an office 15 minutes from where we moved. It's almost impossible to wrap my brain around.

Nicole was going to face an uphill battle finding work. Most film editing jobs are in Los Angeles. The pie in the sky, of course, was working at Pixar (or even LucasFilm). But it could take her months to find a job, and maybe years to make the connections needed to get a job there.

But tomorrow is her first day at Pixar.

The timing was perfect; they just happened to have an opening within a month of our arrival. Nicole loves the hell out of Pixar and loves what she does. It's surreal, to be honest.

So perhaps Bill Murray was right. Perhaps everything does happen for a reason. I'm just too blown away by it all to really get beyond that.

Blog About a Song: Everything In Its Right Place

2011-11-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

My second job after graduating from college was at this company that handled all sorts of real estate transactions. I got the job through a temporary agency. I'm assuming they thought I was qualified because I had a reasonable grasp of the English language, so I must be able to write.

The job was writing abstracts of commercial leases, a skill I would, hard as this is to believe, later use as an independent contractor, putting together a lease for a friend of a friend. It was horrible, tedious work, and I struggled to stay awake every single day that I was there.

It was also my first real exposure to the corporate world, or at least the "Office Space" world. I don't know that I'd ever worked in a cubicle before this job, but I would certainly work in one after it. There were a few offices in rows that served as makeshift walls for the vast expansive of cubicles within. One of the important people in an office made all of his calls on speaker phone, even though he was the only one on his end. I learned more about commercial real estate than I ever wanted to know.

I had to get up relatively early for this job, because it was out in the suburbs of Atlanta, or OTP -- Outside the Perimeter. The perimeter was a highway that ran around the city, so everything outside of that was considered the suburbs.

Honestly, I never went OTP other than for that job. I really never left my neighborhood if I could avoid it, and my neighborhood had everything I needed. Even when I had friends who lived OTP, I would try to convince them to come to me.

I have never been a morning person, and remember that this was only a few months after I graduated from college, so getting up in the morning had yet to become a regular thing. While I like coffee, for some reason I decided to make a change, so instead of filling my travel mug with java, I filled it with Lemon Zinger tea.

I don't know which came first: listening to the above song by Radiohead as soon as I got into the car in the morning or drinking this tea -- because the two are strangely connected. Listen to the song. It's pretty bizarre.

The song is fairly depressing and that probably seems like an odd choice for the first thing I heard as I started my commute. But I need time to wake up, and I don't have the energy for anything upbeat. To this day, my commute mixes start with a few relatively slow songs, building into more upbeat fare.

I worked at that job for three months, ten years ago, and every time I hear this song I think of that drive.

Where I'm From

2011-10-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

I've always been proud of the fact that I'm from Ohio. I feel like it grounds me. I like being from the Midwest. Aside from the amazing inability to really process anything, the Midwest -- and specifically Ohio -- has given me a lot.

I'm also strangely protective of Ohio. I will mock my native state to death, but if someone else does it -- someone else who has never even set foot there -- then I take it personally. I'm allowed to make fun of Ohio because I love Ohio and all the shit it's put me through. Far more good than bad came from spending my first 24 years there.

It also became something of a calling card for me. Just as I had become "Kyle in Los Angeles" to so many people back east, in Los Angeles I was the guy from Ohio, or at least the sadist who cheers for all the Cleveland sports teams. For every time I might have been insulted because I was from the Midwest, there were at least three times that I felt really sure of myself because of it.

So here's the strange thing: I'm no longer Kyle from Ohio. I've suddenly become the guy from Los Angeles.

It's weird just typing that.

Now, to a certain extent I'm happy to be the guy from Los Angeles, usually if it's within the context of the fact that I now live in the suburbs. I'm at least a little happy to have a distinction made that this is not my normal environment, so perhaps I should be forgiven for my lack of suburban etiquette.

At the same time, it's somewhat unflattering, because people from Los Angeles are...well, I'm sure you know. I realize that Los Angeles doesn't seem to have the hive mentality that people in New York or Chicago have, they don't have a shared identity because of their geographic location. But it is there, at least a little. And after nine years in that city, I know it's rubbed off on me.

At a certain point, I will no doubt stop putting "the" in front of the highway numbers. I suppose that will be the first indication that I've assimilated. Buying a mini-van will probably be the second.

Anyway, it's just strange to me, that I'm now associated with Los Angeles. I suppose it one final way for that city to hang on to me, like an STD you discover a week after a short, torrid affair.

Now back to my Jack Daniels and writing, two of my constants, no matter where I call home.

On a Sunday

2011-10-23T18:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in my office, trying to do some real writing for the first time since we moved. Nicole is taking a break from trying to organize the kitchen to make brownies.

I still feel like we're going to go back to Los Angeles at some point, as if we're just visiting. And I have to say, given that I have to go to work every day, this is a horrible visit.

I actually kind of wonder when it will all hit me. There are moments when one thing or another will kind of knock me upside the head, but I haven't had a moment when all of the changes settle in. I went from going into an office 3 days a week, to going in 5 days a week. I'm no longer an anonymous worker drone. We went from a two bedroom apartment to a house with at least three times the space. We went from living in the city to living in the suburbs. And that's just the big things -- innumerable smaller things have changed.

Is this how it happens? Do we make these huge changes to our life and never really absorb them because we're too busy trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy?

I think it will hit me when we go back to Ohio. Being away from what is my new home will make me appreciate it, I'm sure. I'll be happy to come back, happy to be home. Distance will help me process just what we've done.

Not that life has settled down. There are still a lot of things going on, they're just very different things than they were before.

The people at my new office say "dude" a lot.

It's also interesting to see how much more structured my life has become, or perhaps it's only like that right now, as structure gives me something to hold on to. I no longer live in a building with a gym, so now I have to actually get up and drive to one. Suddenly I'm figure out my daily morning routine down to the minute. Suddenly my writing schedule becomes more rigid. And suddenly Thursday nights have become really exciting for me because I know the next day is Friday.

I can feel time slipping by and it worries me. I see all of my energy diverted towards things I don't really enjoy and it worries me. I see all these unfinished stories, these scraps of ideas, and it worries me.

One of my worst habits as a writer is writing lines in triplicate, like I just did above, and like I did in the paragraph before that, too. It's a habit that took me years to break, and even then I still revert more often than I would like. There's a nice cadence to that three line structure, though. There's a certain sense of weight that comes with it.

I find myself waking up on Sunday mornings and looking forward to sitting on the couch and watching football. I don't even know how that happened.

I say all this with the complete belief that it will get better, not that it's bad now. I will get comfortable and find my rhythm, my cadence of three lines. Tonight I write. Tomorrow I go to the gym. Friday I get new comics in the mail. These are the things that are me.

And I'll start blogging again.

Did I also mention that I'm doing all of this with my favorite person in the world?

So I've got that going for me.

Which is nice.

Eve

2011-10-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

I have a thing for eves.

Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, All Hallow's Eve -- even the eves that don't get official designations, like birthday eve or anniversary eve or, in this case, moving eve. The night before means almost as much to me as the following day...sometimes more.

It's amazing how location can define you. When I told a friend of mine I was moving he found it hard to believe, and just said to me "Kyle lives in Los Angeles." Because that's who I've been -- I'm the guy who lives in Los Angeles.

Part of that is my own making. Living in Los Angeles is something of an oddity for people from Ohio. New York and Chicago are generally the big cities of our choice. I found that whenever I returned home and told people where I was living, they were genuinely surprised. In a lot of ways it became my defining characteristic. Word got around. I became the son/grandson/brother/uncle/friend who lived in Los Angeles. And I'll fully admit that I took some pride in that, as if it made me special, or at least unique.

This isn't to say that being associated with Los Angeles has always been a good thing. Sending out query letters and submissions to agents, publishers, and literary agents has always concerned me, because I felt like my address undermined my ability. I felt like being a writer living in Los Angeles made it seem like I wasn't serious, because everyone in Los Angeles was a writer, even if they were all writing screenplays. I felt an imaginary bias against my location.

The part of me that's still in his 20's doesn't want to leave Los Angeles. The part of me that turned 36 today is ready for the next step.

Ready or not, Danville, California, here I come.

Finality

2011-09-30T23:44:00.000-07:00

I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself.

This is more than likely the last time I will write in this apartment. Oh, I might make some notes here and there over the few days we're still here, but as far as actually sitting down at my computer and writing, this is probably it.

Given that writing has ultimately dominated my life, and that I am, by my very nature, melodramatic, this all seems very important. Since that's the case, I'm having trouble deciding what, exactly, it would be appropriate for me to write tonight.

Right now I'm downloading episodes of MTV: Unplugged. This is mostly due to the the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana's "Nevermind." I spent the weekend listening to Nirvana's entire library which, of course, involved their "Unplugged" session. And it made me wonder if I actually had digital copies of all the episodes of "Unplugged" that I had watched back in the day.

Turns out, the only one I have is by Pearl Jam. So I went digging for R.E.M. And then Soul Asylum. And that's what I'm doing right now.

For the record, the unplugged version of "Somebody to Shove" is pretty sweet.

I have a couple of short stories and at least one book in the works. But apparently I've decided that the best way to leave this apartment is by blogging. I can't argue with that.

I mentioned to Nicole earlier that it looks like we just moved in. There's nothing on the walls. The shelves are empty. All but the essential clothes and kitchenware have been packed away. The cats are thrilled to have so much space in the closet to sleep, not knowing that it's a precursor to days of torture for them as we drive them six hours north and introduce them to a new home.

My normally cluttered desk is disconcertingly clean, save for a small stack of paper, my headphones and MP3 player, some bills, my wrist braces (which I should be wearing) and my Cleveland Indians hat.

Now I'm really digging this R.E.M. unplugged. Lord knows I could devote an entire blog to this band, now that they've called it quits. That reminds me that I should e-mail my brother, which in turn reminds me that I should e-mail my grandmother, not to mention my parents.

I have a strange affection for endings, made all the more stranger by the fact that I have such a hard time coming up with them. These are important moments. This is the time to take stock, the time for quiet reflection. Ending a chapter means starting a new one and I am a fan of both.

I think I'm going to go work on that book now. I should probably go out the way I came in: fighting the good fight.

And so it begins...

2011-09-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Part 5: Why You'd Want to Live Here

2011-09-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

Somehow, when I wasn't pay attention, Los Angeles endeared itself to me. This has been something of a shock.

There was a point, roughly two years in to my stay, that I thought about moving. I'd spent two years in Atlanta before heading west, so two years seemed to be a good run for a city. Besides, I'd always felt some kind of strange kinship to the Pacific Northwest. I began doing research on moving to Seattle.

Then I met Nicole, and since Nicole works in the entertainment industry, she needed to stay here, so I stayed here.

Strangely enough, over the next seven years I found a lot to really like about this city, and even a few things to love. Oh, I'm not saying I didn't find plenty of reasons to dislike living here, because anyone who tells you they love everything about Los Angeles is a filthy liar. But I'll admit that I've grown surprisingly attached to this town, and for the strangest reasons.

For example, there's something appealing about living in a city whose baseline creative output can best be described as below average. I'm not saying there aren't some works of genius coming out of the City of Angels, but let's face facts: Hollywood generally produces crap. And it all comes from Hollywood. The television shows, the movies, and the books by celebrities or people who know celebrities -- it all comes from the same place. But the fact that this town regularly produces awful material is oddly comforting, as if the bar is so low that someone like me can jump it.

There's also something appealing about living in a town that exists to monetize creativity. I realize that might sound awful, but ask anyone who engages in any kind of artistic endeavor, and they will tell you that actually making money from what they do seems incredibly daunting. And I know that there are a lot of sharks in the water in Los Angeles, but there's also a system in place, a mechanism that can take a project and find a way for people to pay for it.

Combine those first two points and you have a city where you can come up with a really crappy idea and make a ton of money off of it. It really lends itself to a rags to riches fantasy. Because of this, of course, everyone and their dog walker has an idea, a screenplay, or a head shot. The disregard for quality by much of Los Angeles is counteracted by the sheer volume of people trying to cash in. In fact, if I lived in any other city, I would probably be less hesitant to refer to myself as a writer, but here I don't like the connotations that such a title brings with it.

There's an entire class of people here that are "creative professionals," a title that baffles me because I have a hard time reconciling that those two ideas are compatible. I suppose this is more a reflection of my own creative process than anything else, but still. To live in a place where you're surrounded by people who make a living being creative (regardless of how good or bad what they create might be) is pretty exciting.

And, honestly, living among such a diverse group of people is just as exciting. Our building is made up almost entirely of twentysomethings and older Russians. I've interacted with the people from dozens of different countries, endless background, and various orientations, socioeconomic statuses, and political views. I have never lived in a place as diverse as Los Angeles and I doubt I will ever live anywhere that comes close to matching it.

Combine those last two points with the constant rhythm of this city, the drunks stumbling down side streets when the bars close, the ghetto bird shining its light down upon as, the parades for pretty much any occasion, even the crazy homeless people who yell inspired, otherworldly poetry as I walk past them. Los Angeles is sensory overload of the best kind -- the kind that makes you want to create.

These are the things that I will miss about Los Angeles itself, at the least in the broadest terms. I'm sure the specifics will come out in the near future.

Dude, What the Hell?

2011-09-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

Where oh where have my regular blog updates gone? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

Aside from being out of town for the holiday weekend, I have a surprising amount of non-paying writing to do. I'm also suddenly busy at work, which cuts down on how much I can get done during the day.

So what the heck am I doing with myself?

Well, in a week or two the "Unrequited" eBook will be available pretty much everywhere. I will, of course, keep you posted on that one.

I'm preparing for a virtual book tour. Basically, a bunch of blogs that do book reviews are going to post reviews of "Pray" on specific days. Some of them also ask for guest columns by yours truly and possibly interviews to boot. So that's a whole thing, as you can probably imagine.

And I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I've been more involved with writing about comics. I've met a few nice, talented creators recently who have been so nice as to show me some work in advance and ask for my comments. I've also been chosen to co-write the What Looks Good column on Comics Bulletin which I'm really excited to do. It's a new venue for my comic book ranting and raving!

I've got this other thing which I've been making mysterious comments about that isn't a HUGE deal, but is incredibly appropriate for me. I'm sure I could probably talk about it, but I'm waiting until everything is signed off on so I don't jinx it.

Also, it's short story season once again! The vast majority of literary journals are connected to universities in some way, shape, or form, so September 1st has become the defacto start of short story season, when schools are back in session and accepting submissions. Given that I've had nearly as much success getting short stories published as I have getting books published, this is always a challenge for me. So it's re-write and submit over and over again.

Finally, there's the new book I'm currently working on, which requires more world building than anything I've ever written before and, in turn, is really slow going. It's difficult, because I know this book can be great, to the point where I'm almost scared I'm going to fail it.

Needless to say, all of this has left me little time for blogging, but I'm going to try to get back to it. And, today's my Friday, so I should have time, yes?

Send Help! I'm Trapped in a Bubble Gum Factory!

2011-08-31T15:13:00.000-07:00

The above title comes from a comic strips that came with Bazooka Joe bubble gum (do they still do that?). It stuck with me all these years because of it was equally funny and potentially horrible. In my little kid brain, I could picture a reality in which some guy really was trapped in a bubble gum factory, and his only way to get a message to the outside world was to put it in the packages that were being shipped out.

There are times when I miss being that blissfully naive.

Anyway, this popped into my head because I'm currently trapped in a cubicle and it's slowly driving me insane.

Nicole and I refer to the nights before I have to go to work as "school nights." And I NEVER do anything on a school night. This isn't even really because I have to work, it's because I get up before work and go to the gym. I once had a drink or two on a school night and even that upset the balance of my universe the next morning. I'm sure I would have been fine had I just been going to work, but like I said, that's not the case. So I am chaste on school nights.

But last night was the midnight sale for the new DCU at Meltdown Comics here in Los Angeles. That sentence probably didn't make any sense to some of you. Basically, one of the largest comic book companies in the country decided to start over from scratch with all of their titles, and last night was the beginning.

Honestly, I wasn't entirely interested in picking up the comics; I could have waited until the next day. But it was also the last day of work for my arch nemesis Chris, who I have an ongoing friendly feud with. Turns out, however, that Meltdown was only allowed to sell the comics published by that one company just after midnight, which means I have to go back again today, anyway. And Chris is actually working all day today. In other words, I went out on a school night for no real reason.

That said, it's always good for me to go out and be social, even if it's not my natural tendency. It's always been hard for me to muster up the energy to socialize and even harder for me to maintain that energy. It's sometimes hard for me to realize that socializing is a necessary part of life, and that everyone needs at least a little bit of human interaction.

And I did have a good time, even if my feet hurt from standing for much longer than I normally stand. That and the fact that I'm barely managing to stay awake today have underscored at least one thing: I'm not as young as I used to be.

With that, it's back to trying to keep my eyes open as I stare at this computer screen.

Something Different

2011-08-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

I think I've been going about this whole blog business wrong.

I approach this and my other blogs as if I'm writing a column. I think of ideas that could make a good entry, then set to task writing something that's relatively complete. This can be difficult because I don't always have the time to write a full blown column, and sometimes I just don't have the motivation; you should see all the blog posts that I've started, but never finished.

But this isn't a column, it's a blog. And the big key to blog success is frequency.

So instead of my usual, rather time consuming blog posts, I'm going to start doing shorter ones that are, well, more conversational in nature -- less column-like. Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to do the longer ones because I have a lot of things I'd like to rant about. But I'd like to update this site more often, so longer entries every time out just aren't realistic.

At the moment, I'm sitting in my half-wall cubicle at my day job. I've been fortunate to have married a woman who not only makes plenty of money, but also wants me to succeed with my writing. Basically, this means that I can work part time without financial strain. These days I only come into the office three days a week, but work from home a few hours here and there.

It's a crazy arrangement, really, and one that I can't imagine having in the future. I don't make anywhere near the amount of money on my writing that would justify working part time, but Nicole is okay with that (it helps that I make a very small amount of money per hour here, so we're not really leaving much money on the table anyway). She's okay with it, in no small part because in a few weeks our situations will reverse.

When we move up north, I'm going to have to get a full time job, mostly because I'm the one of us who has varied work experience. Nicole has plenty of work experience, but it's all in one field, so finding a job in that field is going to take some time. I, on the other hand, should be able to find something fairly quickly -- in fact, the company I'm with now has an office up north, so I might just end up transferring.

Long story short: the gravy train is coming to an end soon.

And I'm fine with that. Nicole has been pulling the majority of the weight for the two of us for a while now. I've written two books while working a full time job in the past, so it's not as if I can't keep up that schedule, too.

No, the strangeness isn't going to be leaving this schedule behind, it's the idea that I still have this schedule for a few more weeks. So now I feel as if I need to get as much done as possible before the clock strikes midnight. I need to cram as much into these next four weeks as possible.

Like updating my blog more often.

Los Angeles Part 4

2011-08-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of August, 2006, Nicole and I moved into an apartment on Martel Ave. in Los Angeles. It was still a one bedroom apartment, but it had a balcony, air conditioning, a dishwasher, underground parking -- the little things that make your life so much easier.

I had a friend recently tell me that she considered my neighborhood to be in the heart of Los Angeles which, now when I think about it, is probably a good description. Our address is Los Angeles. We don't live in Hollywood, even though we're five minutes from Hollywood and Highland. We don't live in West Hollywood, even though we're just a few blocks from a very nice strip mall that is called "The West Hollywood Gateway." We're half a block from Sunset, and maybe a mile from the Sunset Strip.

From this building, I can walk to Meltdown Comics, Guitar Center, and the 7th Veil strip club.

I say "this building" because Nicole and I still live on Martel, albeit in a different apartment, but I'll get to that later on.

I mentioned how this move would usher in a new era of maturity for the two of us, although Nicole was probably farther along than I was. Apparently, my new found adulthood made me cranky, and as I had no lawn for which children could play on and I could then yell at them to get off, our downstairs neighbor would have to do.

In my defense, the guy was an ass hat.

We were actually kind of sandwiched by problems. Our apartment was below the pool on the floor above, and anyone who jumped in and hit the bottom of it invariably made a thumping noise on our ceiling. Even worse, the pump for the jacuzzi was, apparently, situated right above our bedroom. In theory, this shouldn't have been a problem, since the jacuzzi had hours of operation. But try telling drunk twentysomethings that they can't use the jacuzzi at three in the morning on a Tuesday.

Actually, I don't need to try; I did it. A lot.

I won't go into the story about the two naked Russian girls who asked me to join them (actually, that's pretty much the whole story), but I will say that I actually met a lot of people by going up to the roof and asking them to shut the hell up. When Nicole and I switched apartments, we ran into a number of them, and Nicole was surprised at how many people I knew in this building. It's entirely because I'm that guy who gets up at some ungodly hour to yell at the kids on his lawn.

Needless to say, the jacuzzi pump and the pool were reasons why we eventually moved.

I also had an ongoing feud with the ass hat who lived below us, a guy we referred to as Abercrombie. We called him this because, late, late one night, he was talking on his phone while standing on his balcony. Now, all the balconies on that side of the building face inward, so anything you say while on said balcony carries to all the apartments around it, particularly when you're saying it in the wee hours of the morning and there's no other noise to drown it out.

Abercrombie was informing some young lady that he was on a billboard somewhere in an ad for, you guessed it, Abercrombie and Fitch. And, let's face facts, if I needed a reason to dislike the guy, that would have been enough. But he was constantly loud, with complete disregard for his neighbors. Be it music or loud phone conversations on his balcony at ungodly hours, he had no idea that anyone existed other than him.

Eventually, our property manager arranged to move him into another apartment, that's how bad it got.

I should also point out that the girl he was on the phone with that first night was someone he'd met online. I guess Abercrombie didn't have a lot of information about this girl, as after a half hour of hitting on her over the phone, he asked her how old she was. I didn't hear her answer, but I heard his: "Thirteen??"

Aside from my descent into grumpy old man territory, I made an actual big step towards adulthood when I (someone would say finally) asked Nicole to marry me. The story of our engagement is, of course, rife with eccentricities, but I'll leave that for another blog entry, if anyone's interested. Needless to say, it was a pretty big deal.

Here's the thing: Nicole and I have always talked about the future. Part of the reason we moved into a one bedroom when, really, we could afford something larger, is that we wanted to save money for a house.

But this is Los Angeles and houses are really expensive and take a long, long time to save up for. And when you add in the aforementioned (very very aforementioned at this point) disturbances, staying in that apartment for the amount of time necessary to save for a house would have been counter productive to my quest for sanity.

It was also becoming clear that I really couldn't write in our bedroom and, honestly, I don't think Nicole wanted me writing in our bedroom. I tend to make a point of submerging myself in the moment when I write, and doing so in a room that had duel purposes was difficult. Not impossible, mind you, but less than ideal. Also, I think Nicole wanted to be able to go to bed whenever she wanted and not wait for the muse to pass me over.

Interestingly enough, Nicole had 2 surgeries while we lived in this apartment, both for her sinuses, although the second was a bit more involved. That second one also happened to fall just a few days before we planned on moving. Fortunately, we just moved up a floor, to a penthouse in the sky. Okay, not a penthouse, but a glorious two bedroom apartment, which gave me an office and Nicole a bedroom.

Honestly, moving out of the one bedroom on Martel and into the two bedroom stuck with the theme of stumbling into adulthood. A one bedroom apartment seemed like the kind of thing that a couple struggling to get by would live in. It wasn't an apartment that we could really stay in for any length of time. It was only half of a grown-up apartment.

It was an oddly transitional apartment, and I think the fact that I liked where we ended up makes me like it more than it might deserve.

And now, as always, a few choice songs that were on heavy rotation in that apartment:

Los Angeles Part 3

2011-08-15T12:47:00.000-07:00

My apartment on Edgemont would end up being a fairly constant battle.

Not long after I moved in, just six months or so since we'd started dating, I asked Nicole to move in with me. I fully admit that I'm a man of extremes and I was (and am) in love, so this seemed like the move to make. Nicole, who has always been the more rational of the two of us, said yes, and a few months after that she was moving in with me.

I had obviously known that this was going to happen at some point down the line, which is why I had Nicole get so involved in the apartment search to begin with. Since I'd only been there a few months, it didn't seem like Nicole was moving in with me, at least not completely. The place was, at the time, nearly as much hers as it was mine.

These are the important things to know about that apartment: it was on the 4th floor (top floor) of a building built in the 30's. It was on the back corner and had a lot of windows, which was good, since it had no air conditioning and heat, as you probably know, tends to rise. It was a one bedroom apartment, but when you walked in the living room was to the left and the bedroom was to the right. It really could have been a college suite with a shared kitchen and bathroom, the way it was set up. There was a spot in the living room where a Murphy bed used to be, which conveniently held my really junky TV stand and everything that went with it. The bedroom originally had no closet, but at some point whoever owned the building decided to add one by basically just adding a box and sticking it against the wall. My desk was in the bedroom, which means that if I was writing, Nicole had to be in the living room.

Also, the entire apartment angled toward the center, like it was a sinkhole. Things constantly rolled off counter tops and tables.

The building had a really old elevator, the kind you see in movies that have that thick, metal door you have to push open yourself. It was also very small, which meant we had to move pretty much everything up the four flights of stairs.

Just thinking about it makes me tired.

We also lived just a few blocks away from Los Feliz Village, specifically the strip that contains Skylight Books and numerous restaurants and bars. Being able to walk to that strip was easily the best thing about that apartment.

We also didn't have parking -- we had to find spots on the street, at least until a few months before we moved, when we finally moved up the list and got a spot behind the building.

The parking thing is important only because Nicole was working nights for a big part of our stay. This meant she'd have to park pretty far away from our building, as all the street parking close by would taken by the time she got home. It also meant she'd have to walk back to our place in the wee hours of the morning, and I was not a fan of that.

So early each morning, she would call me when she got to the apartment, and I would go downstairs and get in the car with her, and then we'd walk back to the apartment together. And I'd go back to sleep for a few hours before getting up for work.

The apartment was a battle because it was the hard period of our relationship. There's a point, I think, after the honeymoon phase wears off and before the bond solidifies that you are both trying to figure each other out, trying to figure yourself out, and trying to figure out how those two things can coexist. You're merging leagues, but only some of the teams are going to come along. There's a certain degree of destruction in that, whether we like to think of it that way or not. There is a life, good or bad, that was fundamentally different than this one, and we have to break it down so that it fits and can come along.

It was not easy. It was very hard, actually. The absolute crazy thing about it was that, for some unknown reason, Nicole and I never gave up. Honestly, I think most sane people would have said, hey, this is way too much work, I'm just going to walk away now before I get in any deeper. But Nicole and I were determined, which, to be perfectly honest, is one of the main things we have in common. If either of us sets our mind to something, then we go at it full speed ahead. If something is important to do, then we do it.

I know for a fact that we came out of that apartment a much stronger couple than when we went in.

This apartment was also where we lived when I started writing my book, "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At." My grandfather's death would be the first real tragedy that Nicole and I would weather as a couple. It would certainly not be the last, and in some ways it was the easiest. Being with someone as they grieve forms a certain bond, and that bond began between Nicole and I in that apartment.

I turned 30 in that apartment. Nicole and I spent a week in New York to celebrate.

It was Nicole, of course, who pushed for us to move. We were both making decent money and we could certainly afford luxuries like parking and air conditioning.

And so, on August 25th, 2006, we began moving into our new apartment on Martel, a building we would live in for years, although we'd later switch apartments.

For all its strife, I do miss that apartment sometimes. It seems to me that each new apartment has moved me along the maturity scale. As difficult as living on Edgemont might have been, it seemed simpler. It still felt young.

Our next apartment would not be like that at all.

Here are a few choice songs that were on heavy rotation for me during my time at the Edgemont place:
(I've also gone back and done the same for the first two parts of this series, if you're interested. Here's part one and here's part two.)

The Week That Was

2011-08-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

Last week was another fun filled one here at Kyle Garret HQ, so here are some handy dandy links for all the action:

Over at the blog for "Pray," I posted another installment in the "Making of" series.

I talk about the two most glaring problems with the DC relaunch on the Destroying Comics blog.

Of course I had to talk about the Indians difficult week over at Ray Chapman's Revenge.

And, finally, this site saw the second installment of the story of my life in Los Angeles, as well as some insights on how comic books influence my work.

I've already got a few pieces in the pipeline, so hopefully this output of content will continue.

The Comic Book Connection

2011-08-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

I don't write comic books.

It's not that I haven't tried; I have a bunch of spec scripts and even a few original creations. But 99% of my time is spent writing other things.

This probably seems weird (particularly to my wife) given how much time (and money) I spend reading comic books. And, to be honest, they're my number one source of inspiration.

A big part of it is tone. Because comic books are a visual medium, they can create tone much faster than prose. Tone is big for me. I'm not an intricate plotter and I'm not a super genius, so I rely on things like tone to keep people interested. Right now I'm working on a book that has a very specific tone, and to prepare myself I'm re-reading Sandman, Starman, and All-Star Superman, because they all evoke variations on the tone that I'm going for.

There's also something to be said for the fearlessness of comics. The comic book audience comes with a certain ability to suspend disbelief in ways that a prose audience doesn't and won't. Comic books are a language that not everyone speaks, so the audience is specialized, so much so that certain things can be left unsaid. Since everyone can read prose, the requirements change. In some ways, this causes writers to take fewer chances, because those chances can fail in big ways.

My evolution as both a reader and a writer has lead me to embracing just how essential comic books are to me creatively. I have my issues with short stories. I enjoy a good novel from time to time. I read a lot of YA books. But the one staple is, and has always been, comic books.

It's kind of a hard sell, too. I do a lot of things for the sake of my writing, all of which my lovely and talented wife puts up with. But it can probably be hard to believe when I tell her I need to order more graphic novels because I'm working on a new book. It's like saying we should buy a bigger TV or an Xbox for my writing. It's a particularly hard sell given the current economy; spending money on comics seems excessive. But the fact is I get more out of comic books than I do out of any prose material.

I like to think I'm taking a comic book aesthetic and applying it to a prose world. This isn't exactly groundbreaking by any means, but that's what interests me. In a world where our bookstores are filled almost exclusively with non-fiction and YA, a little magical realism goes a long way.

If I look to comic books for tone, I look to prose for style. Hopefully the resulting hybrid is something people enjoy.

Los Angeles Part 2

2011-08-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

There are things in your life that are nearly unexplainable in their significance. Generally, these are people, parental figures, heroes, or that special someone who changes your life. Being the romantic that I am, I have quite a few of these things in my life. Heck, I wrote an entire book about such things. Actually, I've written more than one.

My unpublished novel, of which every writer must have at least one, is basically about my apartment at 373 S. Cochran Ave. in Los Angeles.

I moved into that studio apartment on November 10th, 2002. I would move out on March 28th, 2005. A lot happened in those two years and five months and, to be perfectly honest, I'm kind of surprised that I didn't live their longer. It seemed like a big chunk of my life was spent in what was basically one, big room.

I moved up the ladder at my job while I lived in that apartment. In fact, I worked for the same company before I moved in and still worked for them when I left, which was saying a lot for me at that point in my life.

I wrote a lot. I wrote a novel. I wrote "Unrequited."

I found confidence in that apartment; I found self-esteem. Sanity would come later, but an idea of my worth permeated the walls and surrounded me at night. I awoke each day knowing who I was.

I dated. I was never a person who really dated and it's probably a stretch to call it that, but I came as close to dating as someone like me can. I dated and the act of dating itself was enough for me.

Until I met Nicole.

Funny enough, Nicole loved that apartment, even though I don't know that I ever really cleaned it the entire time I lived there. It was, in fact, thoroughly cleaned at one point, but that was by this indie film crew that was using it for a movie. They cleaned the hell out of that place.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would think that one of the things that Nicole loved about that apartment is that it was so completely me. Walking into that studio was like submerging yourself in Kyle. And I think that, given that she was introduced to my apartment at the very beginning of our relationship, it was exciting for her. In a lot of ways, that apartment said more about me than I would ever willingly share.

I can't imagine it was more than, say, 500 square feet. It was one big room, more or less. There was a hallway that lead to the bathroom. That hallway contained the sink, in as the bathroom was just the toilet and the shower. It was an odd feature to me, but I kind of liked it. The kitchen was separated by a counter, but was ostensibly a part of the large room. The far wall consisted of a really large window that basically ran the length of the apartment. It had vertical blinds and there was an AC unit just below it. Honestly, that AC unit was plenty for me, as the place wasn't big enough to need anything stronger.

I had one wall painted "Blue Moon." I had a bookshelf which a girl I dated for a few months bought me for my birthday. I had a TV that sat on a precarious entertainment stand that has since fallen apart. Oh, and it was a TV/VCR combo -- I had to be the only person in 2002 to actually buy one of those, but all of my old episode of Buffy and Angel were on VHS. I had a desk and a computer and a futon that I bought from the #1 Futon Store. I eventually added a folding table and two chairs.

And that was it. That was my apartment. That was my life. And it was all I needed.

Don't get me wrong, I was as angsty as they came when I lived in that apartment. My life is far better now than it was back then. But there's something to be said for how simple that life was. There's something to be said for having everything right there in front of you. It was a sanctuary.

It was also something of a prison.

I would have spent the rest of my life in that apartment, I think, or at least far longer than I should have. I found a certain level of contentment there. I found security. It was a place where I could shut myself off, where I could be completely alone and free. But there was always a ceiling. There was always a limit to how far I could go, how truly happy I could be, if I stayed in that apartment. I couldn't keep hiding.

It's not surprising that Nicole was the impetus behind my move, just as she has been the motivating factor in nearly all of the positives decisions I've made since I met her. By the time I met Nicole, I was making more than enough money to actually afford a bedroom, yet I'd chosen to stay in that studio apartment. I'd chosen to stay safe.

I moved a good distance away, but by that point I owned a car and could drive to work. I moved to a completely new neighborhood, one that would bring its own pros and cons. I made sure that I moved into an apartment that was "Nicole friendly," as I called it. I wanted her seal of approval on any place I moved into.

It's amazing for me to look back on that time and think about how Nicole helped me come out of my cave and into the light. She walked me through every step, whether she knew it or not. And, appropriately enough, the move would be a big step for both of us.

I owe a lot to that studio apartment. I hope it knows that.

Here are a few songs that were on heavy rotation when I lived in the studio on Cochran Ave.:

The Week That Was

2011-08-01T01:39:00.000-07:00

It was a busy week at Kyle Garret HQ, so here's a quick recap in case you missed anything:

On KyleGarret.com:

I opened voting on the cover of my next book.
I also made some suggestions for post-Harry Potter YA literature.

On Ray Chapman's Revenge:

Reaction to the Tribe being no hit, followed by reaction to the big trade.

On Destroying Comics:

A long overdue review of the first Batwoman collection.

And on ComicsBulletin.com I have a "slugfest" review of the latest issue of Detective Comics.

Busy week with more to come!

Vote on the cover of my next book!

2011-07-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

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

Post-Potter Depression

2011-07-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

"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.

This is the aforementioned series starring Percy Jackson, "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." It may be simplistic, I refer to Percy Jackson as the American Harry Potter. While Harry tends to lean on the angsty side, Percy tends to lean on the "blow things up and figure it out later" side. While Potter author JK Rowling tends to give a lot of background to her stories (sometimes more than necessary), Percy author Rick Riordan zips through these books at a fast and furious pace.

There's also something of a Huckleberry Finn feeling to Riordan's books. While Rowling generally keeps her cast at a fictional location or some vague, real world spot, Riordan loads his books up with specific places, and a lot of them. Percy Jackson travels most of the United States over the course of his adventures, following in a grand tradition of American teenagers hitting the open road (or river).

Riordan is also a prolific writer. He got his start writing mystery novels and came up with the Percy Jackson books because he wanted to write something for his kids. For those of you who have spent years waiting for each new Harry Potter book, Riordan currently has not one, but two series being published, with a book for one series released in the spring and the book for the other series released in the fall -- and this comes after his original, five book Percy Jackson series.

Fablehaven is, perhaps, one of the greatest basic ideas I've come across in the YA genre. The gist, without giving too much away, is that, across the world, there are havens for fables -- animal preserves, if you will, for fantastical creatures. It's a wonderful idea, rife with potential, and Brandon Mull makes the most of it. It's actually such a great concept that I wish we got more than just the five books that make up this series.

Mull is an intricate plotter and has a knack for taking seemingly random, fantastical moments and connecting them to something later on. Like Riordan, and later Rowling, he's also a fan of the quest story, so his characters are often trying to find or solve something. He's also written "The Candy Shop Wars," which is pretty great in its own right. The first book in his new series is called "A World Without Heroes," although I'll be honest and say that it doesn't hold up the high standard that Fablehaven established, which isn't Mull's fault -- Fablehaven is a singular concept.

And now for something completely different...

Forget the horrible movie they made of the first book in this series, "The Golden Compass." This trilogy by Philip Pullman is, as they would say in his native England, completely mental. The fantastical elements of this series will surely keep most readers engaged, but most of the younger readers will probably miss the theological issues that are raised. Pullman's biggest achievement (aside from putting in some insanely controversial ideas) is that "His Dark Materials" takes place in a completely different world -- it's not the world we live in, not even a slightly modified world we live in. Yet he's able to make it feel real, to make us care about these characters, even though they are completely foreign to the audience.

Did I also mention that it's completely insane?

It's hard to saying anything new about a book that is so well known. The first book in this series is absolutely incredibly, just gut wrenching at every turn, complete with a well earned and fantastic pay off at the end. The rest of the series...well, the bar was set really high, so it's not unexpected that the later books would fail to reach the mark. Like Pullman, Collins does an amazing job of getting us to care about characters in a world that is vastly different than our own, but similar enough that we can connect to it. There's also a lot to be said for the fact that Katniss is a real heroine. She doesn't wait for others to make decisions for her. In fact, she's probably the most proactive character on this list. Her life is too frantic, her choices too important, for her to sit idly by.

There you go, four YA series perfect for anyone who enjoyed the Harry Potter books, and probably for those who didn't. Lord knows I have more YA books on my shelf, but these are the big, multi-book runs, and should keep you busy for at least a few months.

Los Angeles, Part 1

2011-07-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

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 rest of that plan held true: I moved into the apartment that the now ex had gotten for us. It was a one bedroom.

Over the last nine years I have told this story quite a bit, and almost every time I tell it, people jump to the conclusion that my time in that apartment with my ex was spent being very un-ex like. And I have to explain to them that they're wrong. Said theoretical people are always surprised at this, probably because the idea of sharing a one bedroom apartment with an ex over four months seems like it would lead to tricky situations.

But I just turned my Midwest on.

It's weird, looking back on it, to think that I was able to completely shut myself down while I lived with her. But I did. I suited myself in impenetrable armor and there was never a chink.

I was jobless for three months, living off of out standing bonuses coming from my last job and, of course, my credit cards. I spent my days writing and looking for jobs, although more of the former than the latter. I went for walks around my neighborhood, Little Armenia. I used the fax machine at the copy place just a block away from the Church of Scientology.

A week after I arrived, I watched the U.S. play (and defeat) Mexico in the World Cup. I thought it was fantastic to be in a city where such things actually mattered to people. I watched the game at a friend from high school's house and we drank Coronas. I think I've only seen him once since then.

The ex worked as a receptionist at a hair salon in Beverly Hills and I started getting my haircut there, even though I couldn't really afford it. I felt as out of place as could be.

Those first few months were not particularly fun for me, but they were adventurous. I eventually found a job that wasn't remotely close to where I was living, which meant I had to take the bus. The Los Angeles public transportation system is a bit of a disaster, mostly because the city is so spread out. The trains don't really go where you need them to go and the buses are always over crowded because of this. Every morning, I would wait for my connecting bus on the corner of Santa Monica and LaBrea and watch the transvestites on roller blades glide past me.

My favorite, most often repeated story about riding the bus in Los Angeles is this one: One day, a fairly old looking homeless man got on. He stood at the front of the bus and announced to all of us "Today is my birthday! I am 45 years old! And I've been smokin' crack for 20 years!"

All things considered, that's probably a pretty amazing feat.

The lease on our apartment finally ended. By this point, another friend from college had been staying with us (on the couch), and he and the ex found a new place for themselves. Since I still didn't have a car, I made a point of finding a new place close to my job. I managed to find a studio apartment that was only a few blocks from where I worked, which meant I had probably the shortest commute in all of Los Angeles.

That apartment on S. Cochran Ave. would have a huge impact on my life, and give me something of a fresh start. It would also lead to a lot of changes in my life.

And here are a few songs that were on heavy rotation over the first few months that I lived in Los Angeles:

The Waiting Game

2011-07-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

"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

2011-07-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-07-02T00:22:00.000-07:00

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?

Incognito

2011-06-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

Kyle Garret isn't my real name. Not really. My name is Kyle, yes, and Garret is my middle name, although it's spelled Gerrit (you can thank the Dutch for that). But my actual last name is no where to be seen.

This has been a point of contention among some in my family, particularly as my work has become more available. When I had a small Q&A session at the library in my home town recently, someone specifically asked me why I have a pen name.

My wife, Nicole, chimed in with the obvious answer, that really only applies to "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At" -- the book is non-fiction, and the story centers on my family, so using my real name might come back to haunt me in some way. As Nicole pointed out, people can find pretty much anything on the internet these days. They could probably find my real name, too, but why make it any easier than it already is?

My answer was split into two parts. There's the simple answer, which is that my real last name is a mouthful, with two hands worth of letters that are easy to mispronounce. I joked that I someday hope to publish a book that has my name in big letters on the front, and my real last name is too long for that.

Then there's the hard answer. In a nutshell, I like having a distinction between my writing life and my non-writing life. It would be insane to say that the two don't inform each other, or aren't nearly identical. But it's essential for me, when I sit down to write, that I'm able to remove myself from my own life.

That might seem kind of strange for a man who just published a book of non-fiction and whose fiction is largely based on things that have actually happened to and around him. All the things in my life since the day I was born until right this very second influence my writing. But no matter how much of that might make it into my writing, I still need to be able to step away from it, to look at it as a writer, not as the person living that life.

There's a saying out there somewhere about how each day brings you new life lessons or some such new age sounding wisdom. I don't think that's true. I don't deny that most people probably change, at least in small ways, over time. But I don't think those changes happen automatically or even on a regular basis. I know the person that I am will evolve over the course of my life, but I don't know how quickly.

On the other hand, I think every single time I sit down to write, I evolve as a writer. It might not be in bold, perceivable ways, but I know it happens. It's not unlike going to the gym, really, in that exercising my writing muscles only serves to make them stronger.

There's also a certain level of pride of ownership when it comes to my writing life. It is mine in a way that nothing else is. My friends, my family, my wife -- they might influence my work, but at its core it's something that I create and that I alone create. There are people in my non-writing life who gave birth to me, raised me, befriended me, taught me, and guided me. I'm the sum of my life. But in my writing life, I'm the driving force. I'm paramount.

Wow, I drifted into pretentiousness there.

Now I just need to decide if I need different pen names for different genres...

Home is where the heart is (and where they buy your books)

2011-06-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I returned to my home town of Kent, Ohio. I moved away from Kent, initially, when I left for college almost 17 years ago (wow), but left for "good" when I moved to Atlanta in 2000. I go back once or twice a year.

My entire family lives in Kent, more or less, and I still have very good friends there. So when the release date was set for "Pray," it was clear that I needed to have a book release party in my home town.

Since this was going to be fairly early in my life as a self-promoter, I decided to step outside my comfort zone, and set up not just a book signing at the book store in Kent (Last Exit Books), but also a reading at the library. That was putting myself out there an awful lot, but I figured if I couldn't do it in a town where I knew a lot of people, then I probably couldn't do it at all.

The start of the book release party.

So on Saturday, June 11th, I arrived at Last Exit with a few boxes of books in tow. The local paper had run a feature on me that morning, so word had gotten around. Coincidentally, there happened to be an event going on downtown, which is where the store is located, so we probably got better foot traffic than normal.

The signing only last two hours, but there was a strange kind of ebb and flow to it. I would say that the first half an hour and the last half an hour were not unlike a ghost town, while the hour in the middle was just a constant stream of people -- most of whom I hadn't seen in probably over a decade.

Nicole and I got so caught up in things that we actually forgot to take any pictures, something of a theme for our trip. She managed to take a few here and there, but we never got a good shot when things were really busy -- so you'll have to take my word for the adoring throngs!

That night was the release party, again in downtown, but this time in a bar, because that's how I roll. This was for close friends and family, mostly, and went on long into the night, and into the early hours of the next morning. While I'd been pretty focused on the signing earlier in the day, this was the first time I was able to really spend time with those closest to me to talk about the fact that I had a freaking book published! Honestly, just typing that is still surreal.

Thankfully, I had Sunday to recover before the reading at the library on Monday. The reading...well, the reading didn't end up being much of a reading, to be honest. Only a few people showed up, so instead of standing at the front of a room and reading to them, we formed a circle of chairs and I took questions. It was actually an interesting experience, which hopefully prepares me to do it again some day. I really hadn't expected many people to show up -- after the previous events, I didn't think there was anyone left who hadn't already been to see me! Regardless of the turn out, it was a good experience.

Anyway, it was a good trip and a nice way to start this new part of the "Pray" journey. We'll see how it goes from here...

(Cross posted to Iprayhardest.com)

Carnival Barker

2011-06-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

Over the span of 10 days, I had two book release parties, a signing, and a reading. They all went very well. Nearly all were well attended and I sold a good number of books.

They were also kind of terrifying.

It was an adjustment to be the focus of attention. This might sound strange to some people who know me, but I'm generally pretty scared of doing things in front of people I don't know. The fact that I'm out there trying to convince them to buy something that I put a lot of myself into makes this even worse. There's a certain amount of trying to gain acceptance that comes into play. Couple that with a certain necessary amount of salesmanship, and you have something out of a nightmare.

Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy those signings. That's actually not the issue, really: I had a great time. But it was hard at times. It took a while for me to become free and easy, and a few times I never even managed to get to that point.

It's an interesting dichotomy, really, and one I would imagine most writers deal with. I know that I can be incredibly self-absorbed, to the point where I can spend large chunks of time thinking about nothing other than myself. In my defense, I also spend large chunks of time putting parts of myself into what I write, and I'm almost always thinking about writing.

At the same time, we don't like being forced into public situations. I had a great time at my wedding, but the ceremony terrified me, not because I was scared to get married, but because I didn't want to stand in front of a group of people and share something I considered to be very personal. The same goes for my writing. Even if it's fiction, I still consider my work as a part of me, so throwing it out there for the world to judge is frightening.

But we don't operate in a vacuum. People need to buy my book if I'm to be able to keep writing, or at least keep writing instead of going to a day job every day. And I think I'm slowly getting better at talking about my book in a way that's at least somewhat engaging. It was probably smart for me to have my first few signings in towns where I have a lot of family and friends; these were like dress rehearsals.

It also helped that there were drinks involved.

At some point this summer, though, I'll step into the world of real, honest to god, no safety net, no one knows me from Adam signings. I'll be sitting at a table in any book store that will have me as complete strangers walk past me, trying to avoid eye contact so they don't feel bad about ignoring me. And I will try to strike up a conversation with whoever will listen, most likely sans liquid courage. It's going to take a lot out of me.

But this is what being a writer is these days, when there are so many of us and an audience made up of fewer and fewer people who all generally read the same thing. This is what happens when most publishing houses are run by a bare bones staff because the money just isn't coming in anymore. This is what you have to do to get your work out there, and get it read.

So that's what I'll do.

And I'll probably be terrified while I do it.

Booked

2011-06-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

The other day, Nicole and I were talking about how we're not particularly materialistic people. I mean, don't get me wrong, we like to have things as much as the next person, but it's never really been our sole focus. I would guess that part of that is due to the fact that I don't buy any Apple products, so my inherent male need for gadgets is relatively stifled.

But there was a caveat to our discussion, which I put this way "except for my book problem."

I love owning books. I have stacks of books that I haven't even read, yet I'm always buying more. Even worse, I have no genre boundaries; I will buy anything if I think it's good. The amount of money I could have saved in my life time by simply going to the library is so large that I try not think about it for fear of driving myself to drink (more). Our book shelves are bursting at the corners.

I have, however, recently taken the plunge and bought my first eReader, the Barnes and Noble Nook Color. I've actually had my eye on it since it was released, mostly because it's in color. I looked at it as being entertainment on the go: plays music, plays video, stores books. Later, they upgraded it to include Android apps, which meant now it has its own e-mail app, as well as applications to do a wide variety of things (like play Angry Birds).

And I love it. I love reading on it, which has been something of a shock to me. I wouldn't have gotten it if I thought reading on it was going to be a problem, but I never thought I would enjoy it this much. Not only is it easy to read, the pages seem somehow...well, more digestible, I guess is the way to put it. Each page seems to be formatted into neat little bites, and before you know it you've read dozens of them. And I never thought I'd say this, but not being able to visualize all the pages I still need to read is pretty great. It can make getting through a book less daunting.

I find myself buying books on the Nook that would I consider to be expendable. They're not books that I feel so strongly about that I need to own physical copies -- because those still exist. As great as the Nook is, there are still certain books that need to be held in my hands.

This is kind of funny, though, given that physical copies are easily more expendable, because they can be destroyed. Sure, a digital version can be destroyed, but there are back-ups, back-ups which are usually free to re-download. You could go so far as to suggest that the most important books are the ones you should have digitally, but I would say that they're also the ones you need to own physical copies of, particularly if you can find nice, high quality copies (or if you own a beaten up paperback you bought with your allowance twenty years ago).

I should really own both.

I think this whole "owning both" philosophy is also the only way book stores are going to survive.

Yes, I love book stores. I love everything about them. I love the people that get paid very little to do a taxing job just for the joy of being around books and people who love books. I love that no two independent book stores are the same. I even like chain stores, if only because they're spreading the gospel of the written word (and corporate profits, but that's another blog entry entirely).

Book stores are not going to survive in the future as just book stores. I don't think anyone can really refute that. They're going to have to sell things other than books. Expand in whatever you direction you want, from pop culture to education to whatever. But a book store that just sells words on a printed page are going to die out soon, with only a few exceptions.

Those exceptions will survive on the collectors' market. Cheap paperbacks will be the first format to die off during the eBook revolution, because the prices are the same and paperbacks are disposable. Hardcovers are going to be harder to kill off. The number of books I own in hardcover that I originally bought as paperbacks is insane. But I wanted high end copies that will last a long time...and that look nice. Say what you want, but the secondary benefit of books is that they're great for decorating. A bookshelf packed with fantastic hardcover books is better than the fanciest furniture.

But if book stores are going to move into the collectors' market, they need to follow in the footsteps of records. The local music store has a large selection of vinyl, records released in that format for people who collect them. Those records also come with a code that allows the buyer to go online and buy digital copies of the songs on the record. The buyer gets the best of both worlds: portable versions they can take anywhere, and a great collectible that with invariable have sentimental value down the line, as well.

Granted, this could be harder for books, at least in their current form. Records are sealed in plastic, so you actually have to buy the record to get the code. That seems like something books could work around, though, particularly if it only applies to hardcovers.

I hate the fact that book stores are dying, and it doesn't make me feel any better that I'm playing a small part in that. And that's why I'm hoping they'll start to evolve so they don't go the way of the malt shop.

Hurry Up and Wait

2011-06-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

I have found that I'm becoming more and more impatient.

Understandably, the release of "Pray" has become nearly all I think about. If I go an entire day without doing something to promote it, I feel as if I've failed. I want people to buy it and I want them to read it and I want them to review it and I want them to get others to buy it. I want these things to happen and I want them to happen right away.

But they can't. Not really.

Books -- particularly those by an unknown author -- take time to reach an audience. This isn't a movie or a TV show or a song or a web site. This is 200+ pages of words. Even those who already have a copy might not get to read it for weeks. There is going to be a period of time where I'm just hanging out while people read.

Books are made or broken by word of mouth. How often do you see a TV commercial for a book? They're pretty rare. Magazine and newspaper ads are far more common, but those cost money, more money than a mid-size publisher and a first time author have available. But the internet is (relatively) free. Conversations are still priceless. Letters (both electronic and physical) are never more than the cost of postage or a chunk of internet time.

But these things all take time.

The problem, for me, is that I've waited so long to get to this point, that I don't want to stop moving forward. I don't want this partial fulfillment of my ultimate goal to be all there is. I want to -- I need to -- turn this success into another and another and another. There is a way these things work, though, and that way requires time and patience and I have difficulty with both of those things.

I also find myself having strange debates with myself. For example, I have two other books that are relatively ready to be seen by an agent or publisher. I'm currently writing query letters for them. The fact that I've managed to get a book published will help me a great deal. Being able to say that it's on its second (or even third) printing would help even more.

Again, I find myself anxious to move forward, but having to slow down. "Pray" has been out for two weeks; I've sold maybe 30% of the initial run. It's entirely possible that I could get to a second printing, but that could be months down the line. It might be in my best interest to hold on to those queries letters until then. It's certainly in my best interests to hold on to them until more people at least know about the book. And so I have to wait. Again.

At some point after someone realized they could make money from books, someone declared that writing a book was the easy part; it was selling it that was hard. On one level, I disagree; selling is easier because it doesn't take as long. At a certain point, the movement is there or it isn't. The push either works or it doesn't. Writing a book is never that clear.

So I here I am, riding the wave, hoping it takes my far enough that I can keep the momentum going. Here I am, waiting, hoping that every person who reads my book will do me the kindness of spreading the word.

I'm not a patient boy, but I'm trying.

Welcome!

2011-06-02T23:15:00.000-07:00

Hello! Welcome to KyleGarret.com. I'm your host, Kyle Garret, and this is my little corner of the internet.

As you might know, I'm a writer. My first book, "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At," is available now from Hellgate Press and fine bookstores everywhere. If you're curious about how the book came about or want to read some behind-the-scene anecdotes, please check out the "I Pray Hardest" web site. I'll be heading out in promotion of "Pray" soon, so expect some travel logs and pictures to go up soon, too.

I also published a collection of short stories entitled "Unrequited and Other Stories." You can find the handy Amazon link for that over on the right side of your screen.

My short fiction has appeared in a few places, but online you can find it at the Ginosko Literary Journal and Children, Churches, & Daddies. There's a handy link to the left for some print versions.

I'm something of a pop culture enthusiast, or at least a nerd culture enthusiast. I write reviews for Comics Bulletin. I tend to rant about the comic book industry a lot, but I've moved all of those blog entries to their own little corner of the internet. I'm also supposed to be blogging for Pop Matters at some point, when I find the time.

Aside from "Pray," I've written two other books that are currently looking for homes. One is an as of yet untitled YA book. The other is my first novel, "Through Sheer Strength of Will (and Blissful Ignorance)." I'll probably mention both of those a lot over the next few months.

So there you go, my writing life in a nutshell. Feel free to stop by on a regular basis -- I hope to keep you entertained! And you can always find me on Twitter.

And someday I'll be a REAL boy!

2011-05-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

I had a very writerly day yesterday, which is only odd in that a) I don't really have days like that and b) it did not involve any actual writing.

I have a day job, but I've managed to whittle down my hours so that I only have to go into the office three days a week, those days being Tuesday-Thursday. This gives me an extra long weekend to do,well, things related to writing. And I actually have enough of those things to fill that long weekend, which is nice.

But yesterday was an office day, so not exactly the type of day that would scream "feeling like a writer."

It started off when I received a few e-mails from people who had read my book. Some of them are related to me, so their praise was taken with a grain of salt. But one was from someone who did not share any part of my family tree, and the review she sent was absolutely glowing. She managed to hit on all the things I really worried about with my book and made me feel like I actually accomplished what I set out to do.

Not long after that, I confirmed a book signing in my hometown. I have to think that's a milestone for pretty much any writer.

Later, I came across the latest column from writer Jason Aaron over at Comic Book Resources. He mentioned how the hardest part of writing was coming up with the ideas, while the actual sitting down and typing things up was much easier:

"The actual act of putting pen to paper is the fun part. It's all the mental gymnastics you have to go through to get to that point that's the real work."

Since I follow Mr. Aaron's Twitter, I sent him a little message, saying that perhaps that relationship is different depending upon the format you're working in. I can see how the act of putting pen to paper for a comic book script would be a blast, because the big beats are already in your head. It doesn't matter what your panel description is, because only a handful of people are ever going to read it (assuming it's not so bad that your artist can't figure it out).

Prose, I suggested, is a different thing all together. I labor over every single sentence to the point of inaction. Ideas are easy for me. I have too many of them, quite honestly. If I could spend half as much time writing as I do thinking about writing I'd have written dozens of books by now.

I had a moment, then, after sending my Tweets, after making a comment to a writer about writing, when I got a little giddy. My comments came from my own experience as a writer, and now I had an actual book to point to as an example. I think I used some variation of "when I wrote my first book..." Because I did. I wrote a book (I've written a few). And next week it's being published.

I felt like a writer.

Later that day, I would have another moment involving my writing. It wasn't necessarily a positive moment, but it was a telling one. Without going into specifics, it involved making decisions about my future based upon my need to be able to write. It came up again this morning and the word "sacrifice" was thrown out.

I have never defined myself as a writer. In fact, I spent years keeping that information to myself. In college, it was impossible to hide, but after I graduated I don't think I really told anyone. I would be hard pressed to think of anyone in Los Angeles who knew I was a writer unless they dated me, and even then I only let them know so much.

I've never really thought about the sacrifices I've made to do this.

There are the obvious things, of course, like my complete lack of anything resembling a career, somewhat troubling given my advanced age. It would be easy to point to the carpal tunnel syndrome in both of my wrists as the physical manifestation of how writing has done me wrong, but I would suggest that my overall fragility has the same root cause. You can only spend so much time indoors before you turn into the Bubble Boy.

I would go so far as to say that I've sacrificed more than one relationship to the alter of writing.

The list could go on for a while, particularly if I start talking about my various personality quirks, mental eccentricities, emotional extremes, or social difficulties. Granted, these...issues...probably existed before I let writing pull me under, but I'm sure they were exacerbated by it.

I kind of find myself in a position where I am defined by my writing, just as I'm realizing that everyone I know has labeled me as such for quite some time. And I'm not complaining -- honestly, it still freaks me out to even use that word in connection with my name. In a lot of ways, I feel like I still haven't earned it (contrary to yesterday's experiences).

But I've suddenly realized how it's shaped my entire life, and how it still does. And, yes, any decisions about my future will be influenced by my writing. I don't have a choice; it's what I do and who I am.

Admitting that is weird, like I'm an alcoholic giving myself over to a higher power.

I suppose that's just about right.

"My Name Is Kyle, I Wrote a Book..."

2011-05-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

"...would you like to read my book?"

That quote comes from my friend Matt. It was generally said with a bizarre accent that I would be hard pressed to place (Matt does not normally have said accent). I'm not sure, but I believe the joke stems from the horribly long process of trying to get someone of import to read my book.

Funny enough, this isn't even a reference to "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At," being released on June 1st from Hellgate Press (plug plug plug). The book in question was the first book I ever wrote and I am, in fact, still trying to find someone of import to read it (in my defense, I haven't tried in quite some time).

It's interesting that the joke will never be outdated. Even now, when I have a book coming out from an actual publisher, I find myself having to work to get said book into the hands of, well, if not people of import, than people who will review it, and ideally tell the world they love it. I have two more books (the aforementioned first book and a YA book) that I'm going to have to pitch to anyone who will listen.

And it doesn't just apply to books. I've spent years trying to get people to give my short stories a chance. While I don't write as many as I would like, I'm also regularly pimping out my comic book reviews at ComicsBulletin.com. And, of course, there are these blog entries, that I would imagine are hit and miss for most people unless they are me.

It can be difficult, in the modern age, to get attention, or even just get a chance. While the internet might be a wonderful tool for getting the word out, the sad truth is that there are millions of people doing the exact same thing, and the signal to noise ratio is not in your favor.

I'm always amazed at people who have online followings. I understand how some of them do it: become an authority on a very specific subject. But there are a lot of people with large followings who write about fairly general, mostly pop culture related things.

I suppose a huge factor is the ability to update your site on a regular basis. I have found this pretty hard, mostly because I have a) other writing to do (across many formats), b) I have a day job, and c) I have 4 separate blogs that I'm trying to maintain (well, I've been maintaining 3 of them, at least). But from what I've read, the best way to be successful with a blog is to be conversational about it, to let the reader have a glimpse into your regular life so they can form a connection with you. Which, I guess, is how you create a loyal following.

Ultimately, though, it all boils down to brand building. You have to roll one project into another project and do so by bringing your audience with you, regardless of where you're going. That's a lot to ask of people. Heck, that's a lot to ask of the writer. But it seems like a great relationship, once it's created.

I suppose that, then, is the trick: building your brand without becoming a brand. Building an audience that's not just for the sake of consumption.

I think I'll start by using a crazy accent and saying "My name is Kyle. I wrote a book. Would you like to read my book?"

Chuck 4.24 (spoilers)

2011-05-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

This was a great finale and I'm excited by the possibilities for next season.

But...the ending. No...just...no.

I loved this episode up until the very last moment. I'm holding out hope, though, that it's a mislead, and the first episode of season five will wipe it clean (Josh Schwartz is notorious for doing this with his shows).

What's the problem?

Season one of Chuck, we see his college professor explaining to Bryce Larkin that Chuck's test scores were off the charts.

Season three we see that Chuck actually uploaded an early version of the Intersect into his head when his dad wasn't looking. His father was stunned by it, calling his son "special."

Season four we meet two agents that have had the Intersect put in their heads, but clearly can't handle it. When they get it removed, one of them comments "that poor bastard Bartowski."

Chuck isn't the Intersect by happenstance; he is the only person who can hold it in his head, the only person who can use it. In fact, the speech by Decker at the end of the episode really underscores the fact that Chuck isn't the Intersect on accident.

So giving the Intersect to Morgan is...it's awful. It undercuts everything this show is about, not to mention belittling what Chuck is.

But Morgan did nothing that would indicate that he actually knows kung fu. There was no noticeable flash and he certainly didn't actually USE any kung fu. It's entirely possible that Morgan simply saw some of the images and jumped to conclusions.

And, honestly, the "guys, I know kung fu" joke is wearing thin. It was so great when it first happened, but they need to let it go.

Update: Now that I've calmed down a bit, I'm just going to operate under the assumption that it was, in fact, a joke. Like I said, Decker's comments just moments before emphasize the fact that Chuck is special, so undermining that would be pretty bad writing. Besides that, picture the opening of season five with Morgan claiming he knows kung fu and Casey handing him his ass.

Update 2: Well, now I'm full blown annoyed. According to Chuck co-creator Chris Fedak, Morgan will have the Intersect next season. And now I have visions of Battlestar Galactica's final season in my head. This could be the second worst story decision on any show I've ever watched.

On the Other Hand

There was so much to love about this episode. Honestly, there's almost too much for me to cover in any way that justifies it. I'll just stick to talking about the culmination of the episode and the season.

Chuck saving the day was great, and the way he did it was perfect for the character. The troops from Volkoff Industries was a bit over the top, but a nice bit of foreshadowing, which more than makes up for it. As soon as Chuck opened that envelope, I knew what it was (flashbacks to the season four finale of Angel!) and thought it was a brilliant solution to everything that had happened. I also didn't see it coming at all.

Loved the timely return of the Cat Squad, as well as the ever expanding Team Bartowski. Nice to see Awesome and Ellie pitching in to save Sarah. I also really like the dynamic between Frost and Casey. It was nice to see that Decker knows Casey, too, which should bode well for more Casey next season.

Next Season

They dropped a big bomb at the end of the episode: the suggestion that there is a Big Bad who has been responsible for everything that's happened for the last four years. It's a really intriguing idea, one which we get only one real comment on: Who would have that much influence over their lives?

There's an obvious answer: Beckman. The idea that Beckman could be involved in some way is absolutely nuts, but not necessarily bad. It would also be interesting to see them explain all the things Beckman has done over the years.

The other option would be the Bartowski parents. After all, they're connected to almost everything that's happened to Chuck. Does that suggest that they knew Chuck would be the Intersect some day? That he could be the Intersect? How messed up would it be if they made Orion and Frost bad guys after all this time?

Update: Orion doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, given his confrontations with Fulcrum. Frost, on the other hand, could actually work. She would know everything that Orion knew and we've never seen her interact with Fulcrum or the Ring. She really could work as the Big Bad (more easily than Beckman, really). The only real question would be, what is her goal?

I'm thrilled for season five, and it's going to be a long summer. I have no doubt it will be the best season of Chuck since season 2. I'm just hoping they take care of the ending of this episode as quickly as possible.

Update

2011-05-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

New update on Destroying Comics about Image's sudden increase in popularity (and sales):

http://destroyingcomics.blogspot.com/

Determining Chuck's Fate

2011-05-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

Chuck fans now have six days to neurotically worry about the fate of their favorite show. And I'll be honest: it doesn't look good. This begs the question: why is Chuck more likely to be canceled than renewed, and what could possibly save it?

Chuck is produced by Warner Brothers. NBC then pays the WB to air it. So we're looking at two different factions that need to make money in order for Chuck to stay on the air.

(Keep in mind that I am, by no means, an expert on these things, but perhaps living in Hollywood has given me some kind of knowledge through osmosis.)

Warner Brothers

The WB's formula for making money on Chuck is pretty simple: amount NBC pays them minus the cost of producing the show plus licensing income. I'm not sure if the WB gets all the profits from DVDs, but I'm sure those things probably pull in half a million dollars per season, if not more.

The WB is also in a pretty good position with Chuck because the show is relatively cheap to make; they've cut the budget multiple times over the last four years in an effort to make it more profitable. Up until now, the show has probably made plenty of money for Warner Brothers.

NBC

The show is not, however, as profitable for NBC. Their formula for making money on Chuck is pretty simple as well: advertising revenue minus amount paid to the WB plus any licensing fees they might get. Again, I don't know how the licensing is divided up, but I do know that NBC sells a lot of Chuck merchandise in their online store.

The problem, of course, is that as Chuck's ratings have plummeted, the value of commercial air time during the show has dropped. While it has probably not affected the show this year (as such advertising is most likely determined well in advance), it's going to be a hard sell for NBC for next year. After all, advertisers want to reach viewers, so why would they spend their ad dollars on a show that has a small audience?

The recent Twitter campaign to tell advertisers that fans watch the commercials and will buy their products if they support the show has been a good one, but it's hard to judge how effective it will be. Advertisers have responded to it on Twitter, but will that translate to them saying to NBC, "hey, we really want to advertise on Chuck again next year, and we'll keep paying what we paid this year?" I kind of doubt it.

So if NBC's advertising revenue decreases, the only way to keep Chuck profitable is for the amount it pays to the WB to decrease as well.

The Deal

Ultimately, this means there is only one thing that can save Chuck (aside from executive decision from someone in NBC who is just really nerdy like the rest of us): the WB has to lower its asking price to the point where NBC can make money on the show.

Why would the WB do that? Syndication.

Basically, the WB number crunchers have to figure out how much money they can make by selling the syndication rights to Chuck. Then they need to figure out how much they're willing to lose when they sell the show to NBC in order to make it back (and then some) when they sell the syndication rights.

The problems here are twofold: 1) There's no way of knowing for certain how much the syndication rights for Chuck will sell for, although they could probably come up with a reasonable estimate and 2) Would the discounted price to NBC be low enough for the network to pick it up?

The syndication point for a television is how is generally considered to be 88 episodes, although most networks prefer 100. But if 88 is the minimum, then Chuck would only be 10 episodes away after the end of season 4, and it would hit 100 with a final, full season.

But, again, it all boils down to this: Is it worth it to the WB to make a lower offer? And would it be worth it to NBC to take it?

Negatives

There's really only one negative that matters when it comes to the fate of Chuck: no one watches it. It has been bleeding viewers all season long. No other network (well, not entirely true, but I'll get to that in a moment) would even consider renewing it, the ratings are that bad.

Positives

I could go on and on about the idea that an official, final season of Chuck would bring back a decent number of former viewers and thus increase the ratings to at least an low average level, but that's all speculation and more of a sales pitch than anything else. No, if there's one, glimmer of hope to look towards for Chuck's renewal it's this: Fringe.

For reasons that have never been revealed by Fox, Fringe was renewed for next season -- for a full 22 episode season. Fringe gets ratings that are just as bad as Chuck's and airs on Friday nights, which means it's ratings could very well get worse. It's also clearly much more expensive to make, if the effects are anything to go by. It is, as many have said, mind boggling that Fox renewed it at all, let alone renewed it for a full season.

But here's the kicker: Fringe is produced by the WB. It has aired 65 episodes, just 23 shy of syndication. That's one full season plus one episode.

Did the WB make a deal with Fox this far out? Fringe has a pretty heavy cult following and would probably do well in syndication. So did the WB

Less helpful but still encouraging is the fact that NBC doesn't have a whole lot of new shows being prepped for next season, so there could very well be an opening for Chuck.

So there you have it: six days left to worry. Let's hope the Fringe effect wins out.

Chuck 4.23 (spoilers)

2011-05-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

You do have to wonder why this show can't be this good all the time. Why is it that the show has these extended stretches of...well, mediocrity? In some ways it's baffling that the same show can run so far to the extremes, sometimes in the course of the same season (honestly, sometimes in the course of a single episode). But I suppose that has a lot to do with the fine line that chuck walks. It's not a comedy. It's not a drama. It's not a romance. It's not even about action or espionage. Yet it steps in all of those worlds, and sometimes it leans too heavily in one direction and the show suffers for it.

This might seem like a bold statement, but this show should always concentrate on the spy aspects first and foremost -- or, more specifically, the spy elements need to be the essential A plot. Yes, I know that, in theory, the spy stories are always the main plot, but they're not always essential -- they don't always matter. And when they are insubstantial, the other aspects of the show are played up to compensate, and the balance is thrown off.

Here's the thing: the romance, the comedy, even the drama -- it can all be placed within the context of an important spy story line. I probably laughed more tonight than I have in the majority of episodes this season and this was, for all intents and purposes, a heavy duty, super serious episode. The romance was also really apparent, from simple moments between Chuck and Sarah to the rehearsal dinner. And it hit home because it wasn't the sole focus, because it wasn't laid on really thick. It worked because it was in contrast with something.

When I was in high school, my grade were always better in the fall because I played soccer. This meant I didn't have time to slack off -- I had to keep to a rigid schedule. Chuck is a lot like me in high school. It needs the structure of a tightly plotted spy storyline to keep it on task and to make the other parts of the show shine.

We have one week left until we find out the fate of this show. Like I said in my last post, I can't believe I'm back to being on the edge of my seat waiting for word about the fate of Chuck. But tonight's episode just reiterated the fact that there's plenty of material left to be mined.

I love the move to get Morgan out of the spy game. Honestly, I've had a hard time with the fact that he's been a part of the team for a while. It really, really stretched the suspension of disbelief putting Morgan in the field. It's possible to have believed him being back in Castle monitoring the missions, yes, but in the field? That's a bit much.

We also haven't seen Casey's ex-wife since she found out the truth about him. I was actually waiting to see her show up at the rehearsal dinner. That's obviously not a story that's going to get dealt with this season and it would be a shame to see it fall away.

I think it's probably safe guess to say the "Chuck going rogue" story line isn't going to be completely resolved at the end of next week's finale (the title kind of gives that much away). I also really like the idea of Chuck going rogue; it's pretty close to the finale I suggested many, many months ago. I also wonder if he'll do so alone; will Casey go with him? Will Sarah go on the run with him at the end of the episode after Chuck has saved her?

And then there's the twist that was suggested in the preview for next week. I honestly have no idea what it is. There as a point where I wondered if Vivian might actually be related to Chuck, as we've never really gotten a clear explanation as far as the relationship between Volkoff and Frost. It would make a kind of terrifying sense, really, if Ray Wise (whatever his character's name was) was partially right, that Chuck's dad actually programmed Hartley to be Volkoff as a way of getting revenge on him for having an affair with Mary. That seems kind of convoluted and intensely serious. It was also require Frost to keep sleeping with Hartley after he becomes Volkoff, since he became Volkoff before Chuck was born.

Then again, maybe the multiple Star Wars jokes tonight were meant as clues that there's a brother and sister at play here.

For that matter, it's possible the reverse is true. According to wikipedia, Chuck Bartowski was born on September 18th, 1981. That's 10 months after Hartley was turned into Volkoff, but it's entirely possible for wikipedia to be wrong (I'm honestly not sure where that date came from). The timing seems really close...

...could Volkoff be Chuck's father? And is that why the Intersect worked on Chuck, because it worked on his dad originally? (Technically, it also worked for Orion)

Again, that's probably a stretch, and way too convoluted. But the fact that I'm even considering such things is a good indication of how completely clueless I am, and how completely glued to my chair I'll be next week.

Next Monday could be a roller coaster for Chuck fans. We could get bad news during the day, then a great and sad finale. Or we could get good news and a finale that will energize for one, last season.

Fingers crossed.

A Little Something for (Almost) Everyone

2011-05-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

My web site is kind of all over the place.

Calling it a web site is probably a little bit a stretch, given that it's ultimately a personal blog, not that the two things are mutually exclusive. Still, if you look at all the tags for entries over there on the right side of the page, you'll see a pretty wide range of topics, although most of them seem to fall under the "pop culture" heading. But you never really know what you're going to get.

Since Things Are Happening (yes, capitalized) in a number of areas of my life right now (and in the near future), I figured it was probably time to stop vomiting on the page and perhaps get my ideas organized.

With that, I present to you all the various places you can now find me online and exactly what each of the is about:

www.kylegarret.com -- For all your KG info

www.iprayhardest.com -- the official site for my book, "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At," out June 1st from Hellgate Press!

http://destroyingcomics.blogspot.com/ -- home to all my ranting and raving on comic books, both the medium and the industry. I've already copied a bunch of the comic book-centric columns from this blog over to that one.

http://raychapmansrevenge.blogspot.com/ -- while it hasn't been updated in quite some time (these days mostly because I'm scared to), this is my blog all about the Cleveland Indians baseball team

Facebook Page -- the fan page for me

www.twitter.com/kylegarret -- my twitter

http://www.facebook.com/iprayhardest -- Facebook page for my book

www.twitter.com/iprayhardest -- Twitter for my book

My Amazon.com Author Page

www.comicsbulletin.com -- I post comic book reviews at CB

www.popmatters.com -- I've had a couple of things published here and I'm going to start blogging for them

I'm sure there are other places around the 'net where you can find me, but those are the major ones. So please, bookmark, follow, and/or like any of these pages that might tickle your fancy.

Chuck 4.22 (spoilers)

2011-05-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

"Now we have three episodes left, and from all appearances those three episodes are going to be packed to the gills with story. The last three episodes sound like they're going to be urgent, something Chuck has missed for some time now."

That was from my April 17th blog entry, "Why Chuck Fell Apart," my attempt at dissecting why, exactly, Chuck had diminished in both quality and number of viewers. My number one complaint was that the show had lost its sense of urgency, that sense that you never really knew what was going to happen next.

Certainly can't say that about this episode, now can I?

There have been many times over the course of this season that I have been willing to let Chuck fade away. The quality had dropped and it didn't seem to be getting any better. Ideally, I would have liked a final season to wrap everything up, but I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and went about my business if we don't get that.

Now, however, I just can't imagine the season finale being the end of the show. Chuck has suddenly struck gold again and I think it could last for some time.

Season 2 Redux

The true beauty of season 2 was that it had focus. It seemed like there was a deliberate line planned out from the first episode to the last episode and the show was focused on telling that story. Every new complication seemed to stem from the main story and the show maintained the perfect pace because of it.

It felt like confidence.

It felt like the show had confidence in itself, that it was telling the stories it wanted to tell. We've only really glimpsed that same attitude a few times since season 2, and never for very long. In a lot of ways (and no doubt by network decree), the show seems to have tried to cater to new viewers in hopes of improving its ratings, only to watch regular viewers get bored and turn away.

But when this show gets it right, it really gets it right.

It's not the mystery that made last night's episode great. Yes, it's what drove the episode -- who wasn't eager to find out who Agent X is? It was what came after the revelation that made the episode perhaps the best of the season. It was the crazy implications of what they've discovered. It was the fact that Casey was (rightfully) the first person to piece it all together. It was brother and sister Bartowski debating whether they could just let it go.

And it gets to the core of the show: can someone like Chuck actually be a spy? Sure, he has the abilities, but he still doesn't carry a gun. Chuck has a very well defined moral compass and he has finally found himself at odds with the CIA in a way that there is no grey area.

What's particularly interesting is that no one associated with the team has any idea what they've just discovered; this is big time, high level, deep dark secret stuff. If and when the team goes rogue over this, how will Beckman react?

Also interesting is how this effects Chuck's battle with Vivian. While he might have felt guilty about her before, he most certainly feels responsible for her now. And if the only way to stop Vivian is to help her father, then doesn't Chuck have to do that to save his family and friends?

It's brilliant, really: a dilemma that strikes at the core of the show while being wrapped in complications and mysteries. It's what this show should always be about.

Yes, the similar named cities joke took a turn for the ridiculous at the end, although I personally feel like the "make it snow" joke saved it. I also really liked the new dynamic of adding Big Mike to Jeffster's misadventures. The musical montage was just long enough to be hilarious without being tedious.

What Next?

My initial instinct after seeing the "Next On" was that Morgan will get shot, and it will be up to Ellie and Awesome to save him. It would make some kind of sense, as the focus has been on how capable Ellie is, and it would be a natural way to involve her in Chuck's world.

But I re-watched the preview and there's no gun shot, which would seem like an odd thing to leave out if you're trying to create interest. Vivian's dialogue also seems to imply that she already did something to someone, which I think suggests poison. I also think that they give it away.

Go watch it again (I just added it below) and you'll see that Sarah is on the screen when Vivian makes her threat. Sara is also absent from the reaction shot. And given that we all know they won't get married just like that...

Second thought: It might actually be Mama Bartowski. While the writers have just said that something bad happens, I can't imagine they would kill off anyone but Frost. It would also be easy to see Vivian doing something to Frost before Chuck rescues her which would cause her to die later on. And, as far as revenge goes, Frost has to be Vivian's #2 target, if she finds out about her father's obsession with her.

Of course Chuck would get really good again. Just as I was at peace with the idea that this show would end, I find myself completely invested again, and trying to things of ways in which Chuck might actually come back.

Destroying Comics: Comics For Kids

2011-04-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

Marvel's late "kids" line, Star Comics

Every the comics' gadfly, I thought I'd chime in on a little tidbit that bounced around the virtual talk box yesterday, bleeding into today, even.

Roger Langridge, popular writer of Thor the Mighty Avenger, got things rolling with this quote from his blog, which was later reposted by Robot 6 on CBR:

I really don’t think Marvel and DC are helping things by having gritty, R-rated versions of their superheroes in their main comics – what they sell as the “real” versions – while simultaneously selling those exact same characters in kids’ comics and plastering them all over lunchboxes and animated cartoons… Casual readership by kids, or by parents for their kids, is effectively impossible the way things are currently structured. And I think the waters are muddied too far now to claw that ground back. I think it’s insane that DC have spent 70 years making Superman as big as Mickey Mouse, and branding him to be understood by parents as being pretty much as kid-friendly as Mickey Mouse, only to piss that brand away in a decade. Nothing wrong with doing mature content in comics – in fact, it should be encouraged as often as possible – but doing it with characters who are on your kids’ lunchboxes is kind of moronic. Take a lesson from Watchmen and come up with new characters for that stuff. And then go back to Superman and Batman and put the same kind of love and effort and craft and intelligence you’ve been putting into all those rape scenes and body mutilations into something kids can read, and adults can also be proud to read because of all the love and effort and craft and intelligence you’ve put into it, and make those the “real” versions.

People who both a) read comic books and b) like to post their views online ran with this quote. Many, of course, agreed with Langridge, and pointed towards things like death, violence, rape, vomiting blood, sleeping with Norman Osborne, what have you as examples that, hey, those aren't the people on my kids' sheets! It's crazy that the Big Two are marketing two different versions of the same characters!

Others responded with "I like my adult superheroes doing adult things and I don't want Batman patting bad guys on the head just because some brat out there wears Batman Underoos."

The next morning, Milk and Cheese creator Evan Dorkin added this on Twitter:

No one is going to try to pussify your goddamned Batman. The pool's already been pissed in, for good or bad. You've won. You can sleep well.

There are a lot of things about this discussion that, I think, have been left unaddressed. First and foremost, it's not strange for any company that produces anything to modify their product for a market. Every company does it. Coco-Cola does (you know they still make OK Soda in certain markets?). Hollywood does it (or do you think they actually show everything in an R rated movie on a plane?). Heck, a few years ago venerated fantasy fiction franchise Dragonlance came out with series of Young Adult books that were just re-writes of the original books for a younger audience. This is not new or different and it's certainly not bad.

I also can't imagine most creators would embrace the idea that only certain types of stories can be told with specific characters. It would be pretty awful to think that we would never have Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns because Batman's in a Saturday morning cartoon, and all versions of Batman must be the same.

But what I find most interesting is the theory that there's a demand for the character who appear on lunchboxes and backpacks or even in the cartoons. The idea that said demand not only exists, but is greater than the demand for "R-rated" superheroes is even harder to swallow.

I made comments in that vein on Twitter, and got a response from friend of the blog, Chris, who works at Hollywood's own Meltdown Comics:

@kylegarret : Kids, unless they are really young (<6 or so), may like "kids comics", but they love @MrMarkMillar books, in my experience

The short lived Legion comic based on the cartoon

And I think he raises a good point. As I mentioned in my last blog about comics, the first time I was ever offered a comic book, I was given a choice between Elfquest and a Disney duck book -- I took the one with the fighting (and implied sex, although I didn't realize it at the time). The ducks were for kids, as far as I was concerned, and I didn't want something that was for kids.

Which begs the question: Do kids even want kids comics?

I don't think so. I know I didn't. The movie version of Thor is rated PG-13, but if the all ages version of that character is more popular, than why would the studio go with a PG-13 version? Answer: because the all ages version isn't more popular, it just shows up in more places.

Yes, there's a lot to debate as far as why "kids" comics aren't more popular. Every single time Marvel or DC get a new cartoon on the air, there's a comic book version of that cartoon on the stands to match it...and yet those titles are usually canceled after only a few months because they simply don't sell (DC's foray into cartoon based anthologies seems like a good one, though, but that's an entire other discussion about format and demographics). Is marketing to blame? Retailers? Parents? Maybe. It's a good discussion to have.

I think it's a desire for a happy medium, a desire for balance. Those demanding more "kid friendly" fare point to all the gruesome moments in recent comics history that are used more for shock value than anything else, but those titles are on one end of the spectrum. No one was raped, eaten, or stuck in a refrigerator in any of the comics I bought yesterday.

But that tone seems to be a dominant element in superhero comics these days. And so one extreme is met by another in an effort to produce balance. In a rather perverse way, it seems like Hollywood might actually be right about something: PG-13 is a happy medium for a product that's meant to appeal to the movie going masses.

In the end, Marvel and DC are going to market versions of their characters that sell, it just so happens that different version sell in different forms. But the idea that one version should be sold across the board seems bad, no matter which version it is.

Idiot Box: Why Chuck Fell Apart

2011-04-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

Last week's episode of Chuck dropped to a 1.3 in the ratings, a series low. Since that would appear to be the last nail in the Chuck coffin (barring a miracle or the WB agreeing to sell the rights to NBC at a reduced rate for the sake of reaching the syndication point), I thought I'd take a look back at the show and figure out what exactly went wrong.

Chuck premiered on September 24th, 2007 to over 9 million viewers and what would have been around a 3.8 in the 18-49 year old demographic that networks count. For what it's worth, a rating like that now would make Chuck NBC's highest rated show, and even a highly rated show outside of the shallow pool that is NBC.

As with most shows, Chuck's ratings dropped after the premiere, but never ventured into the danger zone. In fact, the first season averaged 8.68 million viewers, a perfectly acceptable number, particularly given the fact that the first season was cut short by the writers' strike.

To give you an idea how of far Chuck has fallen, last week's episode reigned in 4.1 million viewers, less than half of its average from the first season.

So what happened?

Timing

For those who know anything about this show, "timing" would seem to be an obvious answer, if not an obvious excuse, although it would be wrong to place that blame entirely on NBC.

Watch Chuck or Sarah will shoot you.

Obviously, the writers' strike that derailed the first season didn't help matters. While the show got a typical half season order of 13 episodes in, the finale didn't pack much of a punch. It also aired in January, which isn't exactly a hot bed of television activity.

Because the season ended after only 13 episodes, the show never dealt with many stories of substance. The episodes consisted mostly of secret identity issues and Chuck pining away for Sarah, although it was all done very well. Each episode was funny, relatively self-contained, and at times even moving. The chemistry between the core cast members was on display from the start. We also got just enough information that everything made sense, yet not so much that we didn't want more.

The only problem is that the show never got to a point where it seemed like something real was at stake. This is completely understandable after half a season, but made the show feel less substantial than it really was. I think, to many people, it was easy to dismiss.

It's not entirely surprising, then, that the second season of Chuck (which premiered in September of 2008, 9 months after it had gone off the air) had less than 7 million viewers. The ratings were all over the charts for season two, but it eventually clocked an average audience of 7.36 million, about 1.3 million fewer than season one. And while that was good for something like a 2.7 average (which it would kill for now), the finale clocked in at closer to an 1.8 -- not a good sign.

What's truly frightening about the ratings trend that developed is that season two was easily the best single season Chuck ever had. The show had been renewed for an entire season well in advance of filming. The creators knew they had 22 episodes to produce and planned accordingly. They planned it out so much, in fact, that they ended it on a cliffhanger, as they assumed they would return for a third season.

Each episode of Chuck from season two (more or less) built upon the mythos of the show. The spy world was fleshed out, but so was Chuck's family life. Mysteries were introduced, new and old characters showed up at unexpected times, and we actually got plot twists -- all while Chuck and Sarah grew ever closer.

I was never more excited about the show than I was after season two, which made the fact that it's renewal was in doubt all the more frustrating. This is where timing would, yet again, get the best of this show.

NBC eventually decided to renew Chuck, but they only picked it up for 13 episodes. In many ways we were back to season one, with the show forced to try to walk that fine line between continuity heavy episodes that its core audience loved and self-contained episodes that could possibly bring in new viewers, all in just 13 episodes.

Season three of Chuck premiered on January 10th, 2010 and scored a 3.0, a huge jump from the season two finale and a rather ridiculous bump for NBC's overall ratings. While the ratings crept slowly downward after the premiere, the show was still above a 2.5 six episodes in, so NBC -- who were desperate for ratings (and still are) -- decided to order 6 more episodes, bringing the season 3 order up to 19.

The problem, of course, is that the show had already been planned out for 13 episodes, so the additional six were going to be like a new season. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the first 13 episodes felt like it was created by people who weren't entirely sure if these 13 episodes were the end of something or the beginning; it was completely unfocused.

Season three did just barely well enough for NBC to renew it, yet again for only half a season, lead it to the same difficulties in season four that were found in season three. And when the show debuted with a 2.5, NBC did exactly what it did earlier; picked up the show for a full season even though it had been plotted out as half a season. And, again, it was obvious that the show had not been put together in a cohesive manner.

NBC's

But all of the blame can't be placed on the network. No, some of the blame falls at the feet of the show itself, at the drop in quality that has been so evident since the end of season two.

Manufacturing

The end of season two changed the core dynamics of the show. First, there was the fact that Chuck and Sarah had, at the very least, made their feelings for each other known. And then there was the Intersect 2.0.

I know that, at the time, Chuck's upgrade was a point of contention for many people. The problem was that Chuck was no longer a fish out of water, but the ultimate weapon. Personally, I have really enjoyed Chuck having 2.0 in his head, but I think it was a difficult adjustment for the writers to make, one that didn't always work out.

In fact, the most fertile ground after Chuck's upgrade was the issue of what the Intersect 2.0 was going to do to Chuck's brain. But the issue was never addressed until the second episode orders, which shoved a potentially overarching story into just 6 episodes so that it was never covered as thoroughly -- or as effectively -- as it could have been.

With Chuck suddenly becoming a full fledged spy, the writers had to find a new source of drama, and they decided to focus on the relationship between Chuck and Sarah, a relationship that had, up until this point, felt very natural. And then we met Shaw.

Clearly, two people with chemistry...or not.

Honestly, I liked Shaw. We never learned much about him and he lacked any kind of chemistry with anyone in the cast, but that was fine with me, for the most part. As a spy, and later a villain, he was great. But they ruined him by making him a complication in the Chuck/Sarah relationship.

This was problematic on a number of level. First of all, Shaw and Sarah had no chemistry, and we were constantly being told about how they were together as opposed to ever seeing it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it was unnecessary. The fact that Chuck had decided to become a spy even against Sarah's wishes was more than enough reason to keep the two of them apart. It was a huge issue that was going to cause problems between them ; there was no need for anything else to happen.

And yet we got Shaw. And the we got Hannah, who was almost as ridiculous, given that the number one rule of the show up until this point was that Chuck couldn't date a civilian, but for some reason it was now okay...because Sarah was dating Shaw, evidently.

The relationship drama was forced and heavy handed and it was particularly frustrating given that it could have been left out completely and nothing about the third season would have changed.

Timing and Manufacturing

Season four has, in many ways, been a combination of all the things that have gone wrong with this show. Yet again, Chuck got an order of only 13 episodes, 13 episodes that could end up being the series' last. So over the course of those 13 episodes we were introduced to the proposal storyline.

"You're very nice, but totally unnecessary."

Part of my issue with the proposal storyline is that we got only 6 episodes in season three of Chuck and Sarah being together, and then only three in season four before the proposal comes up. In other words, they had been together for less than half a season and already they were talking about getting married. It was way too quick and, even worse, became the focal point for the show. As if to replace the "will they/won't they" question that had now been answered, they found another "will they/won't they" question one which, frankly, had significantly less impact. And, again, it was forced.

Again, we saw the balance of the show shift. Whereas season three had fought to regain some semblance of the balance the show had before Chuck got his upgrade, any steps season three had finally taken to right the ship were thrown out the window. All focus was place on Chuck and Sarah, with minor storylines going on around them. The plot of every episode was built so that it connected to something Chuck and Sarah were going through, and often times that construction was heavy handed and flimsy.

Then Chuck got picked up for an additional 11 episodes, and it was clear that the creators weren't prepared for more episodes. The initial episodes after the original finale seemed hastily thrown together, with ridiculous plots that pushed suspension of disbelief well beyond its breaking point. We saw a random and, at the time, rather bad plot point from the first set of episodes brought back, and while they've managed to make it work so far, it's underscored how awful it was to begin with (yes, I'm referring to the computer).

Now we have three episodes left, and from all appearances those three episodes are going to be packed to the gills with story. The last three episodes sound like they're going to be urgent, something Chuck has missed for some time now.

Season Five?

The final episode of season four is called "Chuck vs. the Cliffhanger," and given what we got at the end of season two, I have no doubts that the creators mean what they say. For those of us who have spent four years following this show, one more season seems pretty essential.

The fact that Fox renewed Fringe for an entire season even though its ratings were, at the time, lower than Chuck's is a little bit encouraging, particularly given that Fox operates with higher ratings standards than NBC. But the real glimmer of hope has to come with the fact that Chuck is, at most, just ten episodes shy of the threshold for syndication.

From a creative standpoint, I feel like the fewer episodes, the better. Ten episode will get them to the syndication point, and ten episodes might be about right. Give us ten episodes filled with suspense, adventure, humor, drama, and romance. Give us ten episodes that I can't predict based upon the "next time on." Give us ten episodes where the stakes are high and emotions run wild. Give us ten episodes that culminates 4+ years of television.

And then let the show rest, as I think it's probably about that time.

Destroying Comics: Important Issues

2011-04-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

In the penultimate Meltcast (the podcast put out by the fine folks at Meltdown Comics), Caleb, Sam, Chris, and Aaron give their top 5 lists for the greatest comic books of all time. It's an interesting discussion, and I invite you to listen to it, as well as the 73 previous Meltcasts (and the 1 later).

My wife is a film editor. A few years ago, the post-production team on a movie she was working on decided to share their top 10 favorite films of all time. You could probably imagine what a list like that, created by people in the industry, would look like...I don't think I'd seen most of them. One of the movies that Nicole put on her list was Garden State.

One of the other people on the post-production team told my wife that, as she got older and saw more movies and as time passed from when she saw Garden State (it was the movie of the moment around this time), it would eventually fall off her list. In other words, he was saying it wasn't a particularly good movie.

That's a valid point. But here's the thing: Garden State (for whatever you might think of it) played a pretty big part in the beginning of my relationship with Nicole, a relationship that eventually led to marriage and that has lasted nearly 6 and a half years. We own a copy of that movie and probably always will, because it means something to us.

And that's the thing about top whatever lists: very often, people ignore the personal significance aspect and choose what they think is the "best," even though such a distinction is subjective.

(Side note: the Meltcasters do a good job of include personally significant books on their lists)

I listen to a lot of music. So much so, that I associate nearly every song I own with a period of time in my life, down to even a specific month. At a certain point, I decided that I need to collect the songs with the greatest meaning to me into one playlist. That playlist then got broken down into sub-division and off-shoots, for what I broadly refer to as my "bio mixes."

With the advent of digital comics, I wondered if maybe I could do the same with comics. What if someday I actually own an eReader and I want to put together a folder of all the comics that ever meant anything to me?

What would be on my biographical comic book list?

The first few are pretty easy. The first comic book I ever read was a copy of a Star Trek comic that my brother had. That was actually pretty strange, given that my brother has never read comics. It was part of the Gold Key run, #53, featuring a really creepy cover.

The first comic book of my own was the Epic Comics edition of Elfquest #8. It's interesting to note that had two choices when I picked that book, the other being an issue of one of the Walt Disney duck books. So far my experiences with comics had nothing to do with superheroes.

That issue of Elfquest was bought at a book store in a different town, so I had to find some place to buy comics that was close to my house. That meant my local Convenient store (that is not a typo -- I don't mean a convenience store, I mean this place). At that Convenient store they had spinner racks, and on those racks they had...a whole bunch of superhero comics.

My first superhero comic books (bought at the same time) were Uncanny X-Men #207 and Web of Spider-man #17. Like any good little kid, I knew who Spider-man was, mostly from Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, if I remember correctly. And how could I resist that cover? The end of the red suit? I didn't even know what that meant, but I wanted to find out!

I had no idea who the X-Men were but, again, look at that cover. Is there a more iconic X-Men cover or, at least, a more iconic Wolverine cover? I wonder how many people can point to this issue as their first comic, because I would imagine it caught a lot of people's eye from the spinner rack and news stands (that's where we got our comics back in the day, you young pups).

I was generally a Marvel zombie in my younger days, although that changed when a borrowed a copy of Who's Who in the DC Universe #23 from a friend. I was blown away by the scope of the DCU, and to this day I can remember how exciting it was to get my first glimpse of those worlds.

I would be remiss if I didn't include Strikeforce: Morituri #20, the first comic book to nearly make me cry, and Legion of Superheroes volume 3 #57, the starting point of a long love affair that I would have with the Legion.

The 90's eventually pushed me out of comic books, which is probably a pretty common refrain for readers. I was drawn back in by creator owned, independent comics. I was drawn back in by Stray Bullets #4.

My copy of Stray Bullets #4 was passed around my dorm like a good joint; I had people coming to my room to see if they could borrow it. Stray Bullets led me to Strangers in Paradise and I just kept going down the rabbit hole of independent comics.

It would be hard to pick a single issue of Strangers in Paradise, so I suppose I'd have to go with the first collected edition, which I'm sure is probably out of print by now (but not really an issue for an all digital list).

Arkham Asylum (which scared the bejeesus out of a teenage me and introduced me to the guy who would eventually become my favorite writer), Watchmen, Sandman (I got the Doll's House for Christmas one year and it also scared the bejeesus out of me), the Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (my first taste of comic book history), Marvel Masterworks Uncanny X-Men volume 1 (my introduction to Jack Kirby), and Maus.

That generally covers the first 25 years of my life. But what about the last decade? What have I read in the last ten years that could be added to that last? All-Star Superman? Phonogram? The Walking Dead? I'm not entirely sure...and I'm willing to bet this list will continue to evolve.

So what are the most important comic books in your life?

Destroying Comic Books: Hollywood Will Save Us

2011-04-04T17:54:00.000-07:00

I know how you feel, too, Cap.

As rumored for some time -- as mentioned just the other day int his blog -- Steve Rogers is retaking the mantle of Captain America, just in time for the release of the Captain America movie. Marvel, to their credit, have actually come right out and said that they realized there would be no better time to bring Steve back as Cap than when the movie was released. They are making a publishing decision based upon a movie.

And I'm actually fine with that. But it's not all they're doing.

The latest issue of Iron Man sold more than 41K copies. This is actually 6K more than the final issue released before it was restarted the month that the movie came out. In defense of that series, though, it had sales of around 40K earlier in its run, so it's not like this new run is blowing it out of the water. In other words, the new version, which was started the month the movie came out, isn't really doing any better than the last version...it hasn't picked up any new readers.

But, that first issue of Iron Man that came out the same month as the movie sold over 100K copies. That's crazy. It's crazy to think that it sold that many because it was a) a new #1 and b) had a movie out. It's also crazy to think that it has dropped 60K in under 3 years -- and that's with a creative team that is, by all accounts, doing a hell of a job on the book (I don't read it; I can't get past the fact that Tony looks like Sawyer from Lost -- I know it's minor, but it bugs the hell out of me).

What does this tell us?

It tells us that making a publishing decision based on a movie is a good business move. Heck, had Marvel NOT made this move, I would have been confused. Yes, make your money where you can, Marvel. I applaud you. Go to town.

It also tells us that it's not a solution to the real problems the industry faces. A new number one featuring the iconic version of the character may generate a ton of initial sales, but eventually those sales drop off to where they were before, which is a pretty good indication that this move did not create any new comic book readers (or at least not many).

But here's the thing about the Iron Man move: it didn't change the story. Tony didn't boot his sidekick to the curb for this new first issue. The creative decisions of the book were dictated by the story. Were there connections to the movie? Sure, but nothing as big as replacing the main character.

And that's why this Captain America announcement annoys me. I'm fine with the money grab if that money grab actually led to something more, but it doesn't -- or at least it hasn't. And so we're getting Steve Rogers back now, when perhaps we wouldn't have, for the sake of ramped up sales that won't last and won't do anything to help comics' real problem.

You know what? If the new Captain America series features previews in the back of a diverse selection of Marvel titles, I might let this slide. Because then at least we'd be seeing a concerted effort to win new readers, aside from the myopic view we keep getting.

Destroying Comics: The Return of CrossGen

2011-04-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

My whole "Destroying Comics" series fell apart after a few entries, basically because life got in the way. But I realized that I write about comic books so often that perhaps approaching these topics as if they are finite is a bad move. So this is the first, non-sequential episode of "Destroying Comics."

After all my railing against corporate comic books, it would seem strange for me to say anything positive about CrossGen, a company that was, perhaps, the epitome of corporately owned comic books. It was also seem strange for me to say anything positive about the return of some of their properties, this time from Marvel, one of the Big Two I so frequently attack.

And yet...

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I didn't really have a comic book store that I could call my own. I also didn't go out of my way to find a store, as I felt pretty removed from that world. So I signed up with an online service, which meant that not only were my comics shipped to my door, but that I ended up paying less for them. It was nice to get a big box of new books once a month.

I was looking for bang for my buck back then, and CrossGen was offering exactly that with their compendium series. Up until that point, I had never read a single issue of a comic book that CrossGen had put out. It's not that I didn't appreciate a new publisher making their mark on the industry or the fact that they were doing something other than superheroes, I just wasn't a fan of the core concept of that universe, and none of the creative teams particularly moved me (not back then, at least). But something like 200 pages of full color comics on glossy paper for what, after my pre-order discount, was like $6? How could I pass that up?

Perhaps not surprisingly, CrossGen slowly began falling apart just after I started reading their compendium series; I was actually a pretty faithful reader of those two books. And why not? Like I said, it was a great value for a guy on a limited budget. Not only that, but they were stories that I couldn't get from the Big Two. It reminded me that I was a nerd for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, not just for superheroes.

When CrossGen eventually went under, I wasn't surprised. I had read enough about the CrossGen system to know that it was destined to fail, regardless of the egos as play. Yes, comic books are a business, but comic books are a business, but they're also an art form, and you can only monetize art so far. Both Marvel and DC have been smart enough to realize this; CrossGen was not.

The lasting legacy of CrossGen was ultimately its attempt at diversifying the types of comic books we see on the shelves each week. CrossGen actually said, hey, people who read comic books also like science fiction and fantasy and pirates and spies and kung-fu, so maybe we should try to give that to them. And who knows, maybe that would have worked had these comics been produced in a different way.

And that's exactly what is happening now, at least on a small scale. Marvel now owns the CrossGen concepts and they have decided to start publishing some of those titles, initially as four issue limited series' (a smart move, I will admit). So far, they're publishing Sigil and Ruse, but rumor has it that more are to come.

I love that Marvel are doing this for the very obvious reason why I would love it: diversity. And, as a man who tries to put his money where his mouth is, I'm buying both of them.

Subjectively speaking, Ruse is the better book, as it's basically the original concept minus all the shared universe business that weighed it down originally. Sigil is a fairly complete revamp, and a strange one at that. The creative team is great, but the story so far hits on all the stereotypical YA beats, complete with what feels like a mandated teenage girl as the lead. I've got no problems with a title featuring a teenage girl in the starring role, but Route 666 wouldn't have to be changed at all to fit that mold, so why not just go with that? Meridian wouldn't have to be changed at all, either. Why not use a series that already exists?

I have no idea if the CrossGen titles coming out from Marvel are going to bring in any new readers. I have no idea if they'll even do well with people who already shop in comic book stores. I hope they do. But at the very least it's something different than everything else we see on the Marvel shelf, and at this point that's all I can ask for.

Nightwing Might Break Me

2011-04-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

From the Newsarama.com write up of the DC Nation panel at WonderCon today:

"When asked about Dick Grayson, DiDio unbuttoned his overshirt to reveal a Nightwing t-shirt."

This might sound insane, but this news -- or at least what was implied -- had me pretty annoyed. Fear my nerd rage, DC, fear it!

Why did this bother me so much? Because it was, yet again, a reminder that mainstream superhero comic books thrive on the allusion of change, but nothing ever will -- particularly when dealing with a corporately owned character.

I love Dick Grayson as Batman. I am currently reading more Batman books than I have ever read in my entire life and 2/3 of those start Dick Grayson as Batman -- and I'm only reading the Bruce Wayne book because Grant Morrison is writing it. Dick Grayson as Batman and Damien Wayne as Robin are a fantastic Dynamic Duo. There's so much to like about them, it's hard to even know where to begin.

But let me just cut to what I liked about them thematically: change. Growth. Forward motion. The former sidekick actually grew up and took on the mantle of his mentor (even if the mentor stuck around). It was a glimpse of a DC universe in which things actually happen -- and have consequences.

I know how you feel, Nightwing.

The revelation -- or the implied revelation -- that Dick Grayson will be returning to his role as Nightwing is a joke. It completely undermines the growth of the character...and it's a horrible reversal of a great story.

I have no doubts that Grayson's return to being Nightwing will happen as a result of DC's big summer event, not unlike the way that current Captain America Bucky Barnes will hand over the mantle to his mentor Steve Rogers by the end of Marvel's summer event. Because this is the way that comics at the Big Two work.

I've gotten to the point where I firmly believe that I could quit reading comics from Marvel and DC today and go back to them in 20 years and nothing will have changed. But, really, why would I think otherwise? They have to stay the same because they're not comic book characters, they're brands.

Believe it or not, I'm so annoyed by this news that I'm on the verge of dropping all the Big Two books I read. I know, probably ridiculous, this is how I look at it: the money I save on Big Two books could be spent on creator owned, small press titles where decisions are made by creators whose bottom line is the story, not, well, the bottom line. I want to read books that make money because they're good, not that are good because they make money.

I don't actually read that many comics by the Big Two, but it's enough that the money I do spend could support some more deserving titles.

I have no doubts that I'm being something of a nerd drama queen. Then again, the idea of dropping all the books I buy by the Big Two feels...liberating.

2011 Cleveland Indians

2011-03-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

Here's your dose of optimism: the Tribe should be better than they were last year.

Granted, that's not going to take much.

This is a make or break year for the Indians. It's not a matter of contending, because no one really thinks they'll contend. No, this is the year where this team either makes real strides towards being competitive again or they decide they need to "reload" yet again.

ROTATION

1. Fausto Carmona
2. Carlos Carrasco
3. Justin Masterson
4. Josh Tomlin
5. Mitch Talbot

Pity poor Fausto Carmona. There's every possibility that Fausto's fate will be determined by those around him. Unless he suddenly reverts to '07 status, he could end up on the trade block at mid-season if the rest of the Tribe don't show progress. If "reload" becomes our only option, Fausto will be a big time chip to trade away.

In Carmona's defense, he's turned into a nice #3 starter on a team full of #3 starters. And while that role would be enough if Carrasco and Masterson have good years in the majors and Alex White and Drew Pomeranz have good years in the minors, it won't be enough if...well, if most of that doesn't happen.

Carrasco is slotted in at #2 to break up Carmona and Masterson, but that's more or less where he's predicted to end up, anyway...assuming he gets his two major issues out of the way: giving up the long ball and giving up big innings. From what I've read, Carrasco has the raw stuff to be a front of the rotation guy, there are just questions about his mental make up.

Masterson, on the other hand, has physical problems, more specifically issues with his mechanics. This is the year that will decide whether Masterson is a starter or a reliever, although I take comfort in the knowledge that we'll at least get something out of him. When he's on, he's really on, but when he's off...

The Jake

Josh Tomlin is an enigma. I constantly hear about how he doesn't really have the secondary pitches to be a successful big league pitcher, and yet here he is. At the very least, we can hope that Tomlin's attitude rubs off on the others, since the man appears to be fearless and is a strike throwing machine.

Mitch Talbot is also something of an enigma, given he had a great first half last year and a horrible second half. Part of that can be chalked up to an injury, but how much can be chalked up to people figuring him out?

It's interesting to note that I don't think either one of these last two guys are in the Tribe's future plans, not with all the talent they have in the minors.

BULLPEN

Chris Perez
Tony Sipp
Rafael Perez
Chad Durbin
Vinnie Pestano
Frank Herrmann
Justin Germano

I can't help but feel like the signing of Chad Durbin is going to end up being a head scratcher. I can see why they did it: they wanted a veteran presence in the bullpen who could protect the youngsters from having to throw too many innings. And that's fine. But he hasn't really looked great this spring and there are definitely guys in Columbus that are ready for the show.

In fact, being a veteran might be the only thing to get certain people into this bullpen. Supposedly, one of these guys will get dropped when Joe Smith returns, but who? It's going to be someone who deserved to be in this bullpen, when there's a glut of relievers in AAA ready to say the same.

Bullpens are mercurial things, though, and it's always better to have too many solid relievers than too few. I would expect the Tribe's bullpen to be a strong point this season, which is incredibly hard to believe.

LINE-UP

1. Michael Brantley, CF
2. Asdrubal Cabrera, SS
3. Shin-Shoo Choo, RF
4. Carlos Santana, C
5. Travis Hafner, DH
6. Orlando Cabrera, 2B
7. Austin Kearns, LF
8. Matt LaPorta, 1B
9. Jack Hannahan, 3B

This is obviously not going to be the line-up for much of the season, given that Grady Sizemore and Jason Donald are due back at some point. Although, honestly, if Jack Hannahan plays well and hits well, he could win that job regardless of Donald's health.

And let's also accept the fact that Hannahan and Kearns (again) are trade bait come mid-season. Depending upon how well Jason Kipnis is doing in Columbus, Cabrera may be as well. Actually, scratch that, if Donald is back and healthy, I think O. Cabrera is definitely headed out the door before the trade deadline.

So that's 1/3 of our opening day line-up that will most likely be gone by mid-season. The upside is that at least we'll keep our 1-5, perhaps even our 1-6, depending upon where Sizemore is slotted in.

Obviously, this is the year that Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley have to prove themselves. Brantley has shown us more so far, but neither of them have made the jump to quality, every day players. That has to happen this year, or else the Tribe might start leaning towards the "retooling" I mentioned earlier.

I would expect Kearns to move to the bench when Sizemore returns. I think we'd all like to see Grady moved down in the order, too, although at this point I'm not sure where -- mostly because I don't think anyone really knows what kind of a hitter Sizemore is these days. But I don't think putting him back in the lead off spot is wise.

BENCH

Travis Buck, OF

Adam Everett, INF
Lou Marson, C

The decision to go with Marson as the back-up instead of sending down to Columbus where he could get more ABs is an interesting one. What it says, ultimately, is that they want to focus on pitching and defense in the majors, even if it means putting up with Marson's anemic bat...and possibly a chance at turning Marson into a viable every day catcher. That's fine, given that Santana is going to be the guy for a while and Chen is moving his way up the minors.

The strange thing about this bench is that Buck, Duncan, and Everett are on borrowed time. Sizemore will push Kearns to the bench and one of these guys off the 25 man roster; Donald's return will do the same. The problem for Buck is that, even though he had a good spring, Duncan can play 1st, and LaPorta needs some protection. Then again, Santana is going to get a few starts there and Hannahan has played there a few times, so perhaps Duncan's experience at that corner isn't as much of a leg up as it appears.

Everett's in a tighter spot. Even if Donald loses the starting 3rd base job to Hannahan, there's a good chance the Tribe will want him as their utility infielder. Then again, I believe Donald has options left, and Everett has experience, something the Tribe is focusing on for their infield.

Honestly, it's all going to depend on how these guys perform over the first few weeks.

PREDICTIONS

The Tribe makes progress. They hold on to Carmona. They deal Kearns, Hannahan, O. Cabrera, Everett, and Durbin by the trade deadline. Chisenhall and White get the call at mid-season.

The end the year in 4th in the Central, at 82-80.

Brand Building or, "Porno Bantering"

2011-03-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

I know this is hard to believe, given that I only mention it every other day, but I have a book coming out.

I don't know much about promoting a book, so I contacted a writer that my publisher had put me in touch with. His wife is his business manager, so she generally answers all his e-mails.

I got some great feedback from her as far as tips for promoting my book. It was invaluable stuff, really, although I'd actually thought of some of it.

But that was just the first half of her e-mail. It would not be an overstatement to say that she spent the second half of the e-mail scolding me.

Her first complaint was that she had to type the URL for my web site into her browser or she never would have found my site. This, I thought, was a legitimate complaint, until I did a search on Google and found that all of the results on the first page for a search for "Kyle Garret" are about me, and almost all of those are for my site. I even tried using AOL and got similar results.

Her second complaint was that I should have a web site dedicated to my book, not one dedicated to, well, me. A totally valid point, but I actually DO have a web site dedicated to my book, it's just not done yet, so I haven't been adding it to my signature in my e-mails (which, by the way, is how she knew about my personal site).

So far, I was right there with her. These seemed like legitimate issues, even if they both had explanations.

And then she started in on the content of KyleGarret.com.

I should point out that, estimating the age of her husband, she is probably around my parents' age. If you look around this web site, you could probably see that she isn't remotely my target demographic; she's obviously not a nerdy white guy in his 30's. So I can understand visiting this site, expecting one thing, and being put off by the reality.

She suggested that I set aside my book from the rest of the things on my site, which she referred to as "political viewpoints, comics, music and porno bantering."

Yes, "porno bantering."

Now, go ahead: look around this site. Take your time. You will not find a single instance of anything involving pornography. You will, however, find a review of the latest album by the band called The New Pornographers.

She went on to imply that I wasn't honoring my grandparents (whom the book is about), and that I should wrap my head around it being about them and not me.

You can probably understand why I was a little annoyed by all this.

After my initial shock and awe, I began to wonder why it was that this woman's e-mail bothered me so much. Aside from being accused of a number of things of which I'm not guilty (not taking my book seriously, not honoring my grandparents, and, of course "porno bantering"), I kind of wondered if maybe there wasn't another reason why I was so upset.

The answer was obvious: this is exactly the reaction I worry about getting.

"I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At," aka "my book" is non-fiction. It's covers 3 wars. It's about my grandparents, who are much older than me. There are no superheroes in it. There's nothing supernatural about it. There's no swearing and no sex. Aside from some tricky narrative devices, it's pretty straight forward.

In other words, it's absolutely nothing like anything else I've ever written, or anything I'm writing now.

People who write a book like "Pray," write it because they have a story to tell; I have a LOT of stories to to tell.

I have always worried about my first major foray into publishing being a book that is an anomaly, because it is.

The other day I went to Meltdown, my local comic book store. I ran into my old comic book writing class teacher, who was there with his current class. He introduced me to his class and mentioned that I had a book coming out.

I was in a comic book store, surrounded by other nerds, talking to people who wanted to make comics about a book that probably didn't appeal to them on any level.

If I had another book coming out, I could have a signing at Meltdown, or use them to help promote it -- I could go on Meltcast, their weekly podcast, to talk about it. But "Pray" has nothing to do with that world...a world I feel most comfortable in.

I know that I'll have to put on a specific face when I promote "Pray." It's not a false face by any means, but it's not the one I feel most natural in. I also know that, aside from family and friends, there's not going to be a lot of cross pollination between "Pray" and any of my other works. I can only imagine what those who buy "Pray" and then buy my short story collection are going to think.

In some ways, it makes me feel like a fraud, even though I know that's not the case. But promoting this book is going to be something of a mind twister.

Then again, "Pray" does have at least one thing in common with the rest of my work: heart. And perhaps that will be enough.

Look for the "Pray" web site to be up by the end of this week. Look for "Pray" to be in stores about a month after that.

My grandparents bought me my first comic book; I'm honoring them just fine.

Radiohead Makes Complicated Music That's Starting to Annoy Me

2011-03-10T18:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Radiohead,

Stop it.

xoxo,

Kyle

I have been a Radiohead fan for a long time. Even before Sally Oldham told me in study hall that she thought of me whenever she heard "Creep," I'd dubbed a copy of "Pablo Honey" from my friend, Rob. While I enjoyed songs like the aforementioned "Creep," as well as "Stop Whispering," and "Lurgee," it didn't completely knock my socks off. Radiohead was just another good alternative band.

Then came "The Bends." I suppose in some circles, "The Bends" is probably a litmus test for Radiohead fans. If you were to ask someone who has listened to Radiohead for a long time which album marked a turning point for the band, they would point you not to "OK Computer," but to "The Bends." There might not be a more solid Radiohead album from start to finish. And while it stands fantastically on its own, it shines even brighter when you see it as the evolution of a band from their first record to their second one.

And then everything went insane. "OK Computer" was released and something was in the water. Suddenly, Radiohead became the biggest band in the world. I'll admit that I wasn't enamored with "OK Computer" when I first heard it. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it. This was entirely because of how much I loved "The Bends." That's what I was expecting: more of "The Bends." After all, that's what every other band in the world did -- they made consecutive records of music that generally sounded the same. But it was clear that Radiohead wasn't going to do that. It took me a little while, but eventually I was able to embrace "OK Computer" as the amazing album that it is. And, yet again, it's even more amazing when you consider the progression from "Pablo Honey" to "The Bends" to "OK Computer."

As hard as it was to believe, Radiohead wasn't done yet. "Kid A" was, yet again, the perfect next step in their progression as a band. Sure, you could lay it down as something as simple as "Pablo Honey is full of guitars and Kid A is full of machines," but even the songwriting was different -- but not unnatural. That was the beauty of following Radiohead: you felt like you were a part of their evolution, like you were getting to experience it first hand. It made their music all the more exciting.

"Amnesiac" wasn't a particular departure from what Radiohead had done before, but with good reason: the songs were recorded at the same time as "Kid A." It was more of a collection of b-sides than anything, which is a particularly nice way of looking at it if you're inclined to view things the same way that I do. It also came out less than a year after "Kid A." It's a wonderful album on it's own (particularly "Pyramid Song" and "Life in a Glass House") but was the first full length Radiohead album that didn't show any movement from the last one.

And that's when things started getting weird.

I liked "Hail to the Thief" well enough, but it felt insubstantial to me, like it wasn't important. And it's easy to see why I would feel that way: it was stylistically redundant. There was nothing on that record that could not have shown up on an earlier Radiohead album. And while that's perfectly fine, it's not what I'd come to expect from this band; honestly, it took away a bit of their shine.

Then again, when was the last time we saw a band transform like that over time? The fact that they put out an album that wasn't particularly breaking new ground for them could be forgiven; that's a pretty high standard to hold them to.

Four years later, we got "In Rainbows," an album whose quality was overshadowed by the way it was sold. And while perhaps more focused on electronic music than "Hail to the Thief" had been it was, ultimately, more of the same from Radiohead. Of course more of the same from Radiohead is generally better than more of the same from any other band, but you can see where I'm going with this.

And that leads us to their latest, "King of Limbs." Internet hyperbole aside, "King of Limbs" is disappointing to me for one main reason: there's nothing new about it. I feel like I can take the last 3 Radiohead albums and insert them into the albums that came before. It seems like they've gotten complacent.

I miss not knowing what to expect from Radiohead.

I realize that it's unreasonable to expect a band to change from album to album, but Radiohead did that...and now they don't. And that's kind of disappointing.

Wonderful World of Whedon

2011-03-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Later today I'm going to write about how I first discovered the works of Joss Whedon and what they've meant to me over the past eventful 15 years of my life. But for now, I just wanted to point out that the fine folks at Pop Matters are running a spotlight on Mr. Whedon which will feature a new essay every day for over a month.

You can find all that Whedon goodness here.

And because I'm not entirely a saint, I should point out that I contributed two essays to the cause. My first, on everyone's favorite second fiddle, Xander, was posted today. My second is about casual sex, so be sure to keep an eye out for that one in the next few weeks.

I don't know any of my fellow contributors personally, but the essays I've read so far have been great, and the titles for those coming down the pipe suggest they will all be of the same high quality. I'm thrilled to be a part of it and extremely grateful to Robert Moore at Pop Matters for putting it all together. I guess there's even talk of a book of some sort...

Destroying Comics Part 3, Myth of the New Reader Friendly Superhero Comic

2011-02-16T21:25:00.000-08:00

Those of us who read superhero comic books thrive on confusion.

Originally, I was going to go into what the comic book reader can do to help save the medium we love so much. But I was ambushed by this crazy illness which has laid me up for a few days. As I often do when I'm sick, I looked to my comic book collection to help me pass the time.

Apparently, my illness is from Earth-2, as I've done nothing but read DC stories involving the pre-crisis multiverse. The fact that the previous sentence made sense to a bunch of people is a pretty good indication that we superhero fans love totally insane comic books. And we should embrace that. It's what makes superhero stories great.

It's also what makes the idea of a superhero comic that is "new reader friendly"crazy.

First, you have to ask the obvious question: new to what? There are ultimately three different types of "new" readers that a superhero comic could attract: new to the title, new to the genre, or new to the medium.

If you're looking to get people who already read superhero comic books to read a specific superhero comic book, then making it "accessible" is beside the point. We don't want something simple; we want to be submerged. If we polled comic book readers to find out what comic book was their first, I would bet fat sacks of cash that 99% of those first issues were not "new reader friendly" issues.

We don't read superhero comics because they're accessible. In fact, we read them for the exact opposite reason. Chris Claremont ruled the sales charts for decades with Uncanny X-Men and I'm pretty he had 3 or 4 plots going at one time that made absolutely no sense. I'm still waiting to find out why Polaris suddenly lost her powers and became super strong.

My 1st issue of X-Men

Sure, it makes sense to try to make each individual issue as self-contained as possible, but that's ultimately impossible, given that comic books are episodic; dropping the elements that make it a serial would no doubt alienate the people who are reading those comics because of them. I love self-contained stories as much as the next comic book reader, but people don't go to their local stores every Wednesday because they're eager to read a one and done story; they go because they want to read what happens next.

So perhaps the new reader we're going after is new to the genre. But think about that. How many people do you know who read comic books that have never read a superhero comic? Given that 99% of what gets published these days are superhero comics, there can't be more than a handful of comic book readers out there who haven't at least dabbled in superheroes.

Then is the "new reader friendly" superhero comic book aimed at those who have never read a comic book before? It must be, right?

But how is that possible? We've already seen that superhero comic books don't attract new readers; it's a niche genre and the same people who love Spider-man movies don't buy Spider-man comics unless they're already doing so.

Periodically, the "comics for people who don't read comics" meme makes the rounds, and the vast majority of the books on those lists are something other than superhero comics. Watchmen might show up, but even then it's in some part due to the fact that it's a finite series. At one point Ultimate Spider-man was a popular answer, but now? Where would someone brand new to comic books even begin?

Superhero comic books are not going to bring in new readers and I would like them to quit pretending otherwise.

I know that sounds counterproductive, but does Thor or Captain America or Batman need a dozen new limited series when a movie comes out? Those stories can be incorporated into the regular titles. The only reason they're pushed out as new books is to take advantage of the added press that a movie brings, but when has that worked? All it does is alienate the people who already enjoy those characters because suddenly they're being asked to buy yet another comic book each month. Not only that, but how essential are these stories? Are they being green lit because they're important, or because the Big Two want as much product on the shelves as possible?

I know this seems at odds with my criticism of event comics. But my problem with event comics isn't that they're steeped in continuity, it's that they appear to be the sole component of the comic book industry's business plan. Do the epic, sprawling stories, but don't do it as a way of making more money by gouging the fan base. Embrace the fact that superhero comics are an insular niche. Give superhero fans what they want, but don't take advantage of them.

And in the meantime, focus the "new reader friendly" efforts on genres that can actually attract new readers.

Destroying Comic Books Part 2: I Know What I Want and I Want What I Know

2011-02-08T15:46:00.000-08:00

Publishing superhero comics is not a growth industry.

It seems odd that I would have to say that, given the number of readers the industry has lost year after year. It seems especially odd when you consider that movies featuring the most popular superheroes are making hundred of millions of dollars, yet the comics featuring those characters aren't selling any better. Millions of people are willing to fork over $10 for 2 hours of of stories that they don't even own afterward. Their enthusiasm for the characters is trumped by their lack of enthusiasm for the medium.

In any other industry, a company would look at the writing on the wall and say "we need to get out."

But we don't. The two companies producing 99.9% of all superhero titles aren't publishing comics, they're creating IPs and maintaining copyrights. They're brand building.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that keeping the comic book industry healthy and growing isn't their main focus. Does that mean they're not making good comics, that they're not putting their all into the books they put out? Of course not. I'm sure everyone creating books for the Big Two are doing the most exciting work they can. The problem is that it doesn't matter how good those comics are if no one reads them. And, ultimately, the large companies that are publishing them don't really care one way or the other.

I mean, do you think the heads of Disney are sitting around going "Fear, Itself is going to be so great!" Or people at Warner Brothers are jumping for joy over "Flashpoint?"

There are times when I want to get in a room with those in charge at the Big Two and just ask them what they're thinking. Because if you had a business in a failing industry, wouldn't you try to do something to fix it? And if you don't, doesn't that expose your true motivations?

Will diversity make a difference? We have no real evidence that it will, at least not recently. But what we're currently doing is obviously not working, so what do we have to lose? Superhero comics are clearly the problem since 90% of the books shipped to shops each week feature superheroes. And let's not forget that this isn't a new idea; comic books used to jump from genre to genre all the time up until the 60's.

"But, Kyle," you say, "the Big Two are just publishing what people want to read." Yes, I've heard that argument before, and I would like to point out that it's insane. That's not a business plan. You don't produce a product that people already know they want and are already getting; you produce something they don't realize they want and aren't getting. If giving people only what they already wanted was a good business plan, then Starbucks would be selling fast food and you'd be listening to your fancy new Apple iDisc.

Even worse, the Big Two have taken "give them what they want" to a frightening extreme. The solution to lagging sales has been event comics. Instead of trying to double the number of readers, the Big Two is instead getting current readers to buy twice as many books. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul; the books are so dependent upon continuity that they're incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't already read them.

In other words, we've managed to take our relatively niche medium and devote it to a niche genre and then made it as insular as possible. And considering that people aren't flocking to comic book stores after seeing Spider-man or Batman in theaters, it would seem like a bad idea to put all of our eggs into that genre basket.

The only solution is to change the preconception of what comic books are, and the only way to do that is to actually change what comic books are. We can't keep saying that "comic books aren't just for kids" when 90% of our products feature adults in tights. We can't keep bitching and moaning when something like "Whiteout" or "Road to Perdition" or "The Surrogates" gets made into a movie and no one realizes that they were originally a part of our medium.

Doing this is going to take time, time that work for hire companies don't have. Marvel and DC have a different bottom line than creators do. Companies have to pay for people beyond just those who make the book, and every month and every quarter they have to justify their actions. Big business has different requirements than people.

A creator owned book is bound only by the creators' ability to continue making it. If a creator owned book makes enough for those behind it to break even and still cover their cost of living, then it's a roaring success, and it will continue on. At no point in time will someone on a creator owned book wonder why they're wasting their time on a title that is only selling 20K copies when they could be putting out another title featuring a popular character that will most assuredly sell 25K copies.

A creator owned book won't switch creative teams every few months to the point where no one can follow it anymore. A creator owned book doesn't get canceled because the other titles being published by that company are going in a new direction and that book doesn't fit in.

I know people always point to the Walking Dead when they talk about creator owned books and for good reason. Part of the reason that the Walking Dead has been so successful is due to its longevity. Because it was a creator owned book, it was given the time it needed to find its audience, even if it took a year or more. Had the Walking Dead been published by either of the Big Two, it would have been canceled after just a few months.

Since we can't look to the Big Two to change things, it's up to creators to make the push. The problem is that they can't do it on their own.

I'll get to that in Part 3...

Destroying Comic Books Part 1: Opening Salvo

2011-02-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

It's always strange to me when topics I consider ongoing and relevant flare up and garner attention, as if they haven't been there the entire time. I also find it interesting when such flare ups happen on what seems to be a regular basis, as if people forget that the topic was ever an issue to begin with and then suddenly remember again.

And so we find creator owned comics being discussed more prominently in the comic book community this week, the result of many things, but none more inflammatory than the Goon's Eric Powell's video. I remember when comic book firestorms where borne of livejournal posts, but these days it's all about videos.

It's funny to think that the last time creator owned comics became big news was when Robert Kirkman released a video of his own. I suppose it's probably a little disconcerting that comic book creators are turning to video as the best means of expressing themselves as opposed to, you know, comics.

Allow me to throw out a crude, over simplified summation of the creator owned comics issue: work for hire comic books are killing the medium.

BOOM!

There's a lot of directions you can go with such a conversation, but I'm going to start with the trendiest: Hollywood.

One of my current favorite creators is Echoes writer Joshua Hale Fialkov. He recently said something interesting to me on Twitter:

@kylegarret The whole industry is in dire straits. Us indie folk at least have Hollywood to prop us up.

I'd never really considered this before, but it made sense.

Imagine that you're a film studio. You're looking for some fresh ideas, something that's easily translated into a movie -- and comic books are very similar to story boards, after all. So you head to your local comic book store to see what's good, what's popular.

Are you going to check out the Marvel books? They have their own studio and they're owned by Disney, so there's no hope there. DC? They're owned by Warner Brothers. No, you've got to go for an indie book...a creator owned book.

Sure, we mostly hear about movies featuring characters by the big 2, but the percentage of stories that get optioned by studios that actually make it on the to the big screen is very small. Even if the story never gets made into a movie, the creator is still paid for the option. That money allows them to keep creating.

What's interesting is that Fialkov doesn't write superhero books -- most indie creators don't, at least not unless they're doing work for hire. So this means a lot of non-superhero comic book properties are being optioned. But why would studios do that, given how huge superhero movies are?

Or are they?

Fialkov also said something else that was interesting:

@kylegarret and, indie comics are from more mainstream than superhero comics.

What? Superheroes aren't mainstream? That can't be right...can it?

It is. How many superhero shows are on television right now? I can think of one, maybe two, and neither is going to make it past a single season. What about the NY Times bestseller list? How many books about superheroes are on there? Have ever been on there?

But movies! Surely movies prove that superheroes are mainstream, right? No, they don't. This is a big year for superhero movies, with 5 films being released. Looking at the numbers and making a rough average, there were 28 movies released every month in 2010. That's 336 movies in one year. If that many films are released this year, superhero movies will make up 1.5% of the movies released. Not exactly cornering the market, are they? In comparison, how many romantic comedies are released in a given year? How about horror movies? Or "based on true events" movies?

In fact, I will take it a step further and say that the majority of successful superhero movies do well not because they're about superheroes, but because they're about pop culture icons. Aside from perhaps Iron Man, the most successful superhero movies feature characters that everyone already knows. People do not need to be introduced to the characters or the concepts.

So, no, superheroes are not mainstream....except when it comes to comic books.

What we've done is taken a niche market and devoted our entire medium to it, and then we wonder why it is that we don't have more readers.

Clearly, we have to diversify, and we can't expect the Big Two to do it. They won't. And they have entirely legitimate reasons not to.

Which I'll get to in Part 2.

Chuck 4.13 Review (spoilers)

2011-02-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

And that, right there, was everything that's great about Chuck.

Well, in the last ten minutes, at least.

Two weeks ago I said I thought Chuck had run its course and that it was time for me to accept that. Last week I was so disappointed that I didn't even bother to write a review. My expectations for this week, which had been promoted as the original season finale and which co-creator Josh Schwartz had said was the best episode of the year, were pretty low.

I disliked the proposal story. I disliked the Sarah going bad story. I really didn't see how the culmination of those two plots could, in any way, appeal to me.

I was wrong...more or less.

If I had one real problem with this episode, it was infiltration of Volkoff's ship. Whenever they put Morgan in the field, I cringe. There's no advantage to it and, in fact, only bad things can happen. The idea that Chuck would take Morgan with him makes very little sense during a "season" in which the writers have constantly had characters do things that don't make sense for the sake of the plot. I think Morgan is a great character, but they really need to stop doing this; it stretches the suspension of disbelief beyond its breaking point.

Thankfully, they limited the damage to believability done by the "Sarah has gone rogue" story. I was relieved to see them quickly dispose of any notion that Chuck might actually be worried that Sarah was going bad. As much as I dislike that story as it stands, it only would have been worse had we gotten scenes with Chuck wondering if Sarah had really switched sides.

Initially, I had a problem with the fact that Volkoff was able to untie himself so easily, but then I realized that this was also a part of Chuck's plan. He needed to give Volkoff the upper hand to get certain words out of him. That said, how long were his men going to wait for him outside? I mean, he was knocked unconscious at one point.

Also, it's worth mentioning that Timothy Dalton has been fantastic this entire season.

The Last 10 Minutes

So why was the last ten minutes so great? Well, allow me to break it down:

1) Chuck's Plan

There's nothing like a good reveal and it's even better when it ties together different aspects of the show. And it's always great to see Chuck succeed at being a spy. Honestly, I think this is part of the reason why this show can't bring in new viewers: Chuck pulling off this grand plan means a lot to those of us who have been with him from the beginning, but it would mean absolutely nothing to those new to the show.

Incorporating every member of his team in the plan and actually using Morgan in a way that's believable made it all but perfect. Invoking his father was brilliant.

2) Jeffster

Sure, it could be argued that someone would have stopped them before security showed up. And, sure, as always, there are more instruments in the song than they are actually playing, but who cares? It's freaking Jeffster. The song was great, although their reasons for performing it were even better.

But the absolute funniest moment was when Casey heard the music and knew who it was. "Jeffster." Classic.

3) Family

I have long maintained that the show's secret weapon is Ellie. She is the heart of the show. Without her, Chuck would be entertaining, but it wouldn't have the depth that it's capable of. It makes me wish I had a sister.

It was also a nifty piece of symmetry to have the team rally around Chuck and then switch to having them rally around Ellie. And the way they had the larger group break off into smaller groups was perfect. We went from one large, extended family, to three smaller, just as important families. It was just a fantastic bit of execution.

Tying the entire season with a bow in the shape of Chuck's father was exactly what this season has needed.

4) Emotion

I know the emphasis in the Chuck community lies in the very last scene, but I can't be the only one who got choked up when Mary Bartowski entered her daughter's hospital room. Ellie's reaction is just so perfect it's giving me goosebumps just thinking about it.

Add to that Casey's grudging evolution as a father (and person) and, of course, the proposal, and the last few minutes of this week's Chuck had more emotion in it than the previous 12 episodes combined.

5) Balance

For the first time all season, Chuck achieved balance. There has been so much emphasis placed on Sarah and Chuck that it has overwhelmed the show; it's become white noise, really, with no moment seeming any more important than any other. The fact that we weren't beaten over the head with it all episode made the end all the more poignant.

In fact, if I have one real question about this episode, it's this: Would the ending have been better if we hadn't been bombarded with proposal talk all season long? What if it had been introduced and went away? Everyone watching the show was expecting this episode to end with a proposal, but imagine how great it would have been if we hadn't? Would this past season have really lost anything? Or would it maybe have been better, more balanced?

The only real flaws in this episode were a result of what had come before, so as it stands on its own, it's almost perfect. Unfortunately, it doesn't stand on its own.

The Future

Really, the next 11 episodes of Chuck are a blank slate. I would imagine that Mary Bartowski will be sent to D.C. to clear her name and report on her mission, so Linda Hamilton will be moved off screen, at least for a bit. I would also expect to see her back periodically.

I really want Chuck to come clean to Ellie about being a spy again and I really want Ellie to tell him she already knew.

Obviously, we have a new baby and a wedding to plan, so I would imagine those two things will take up some screen time, although, again, I hope they try to maintain a better balance than they have so far.

I can't help but wonder if we'll see Volkoff again leading up to the season finale. They brought Shaw back last year when they got a back order and they actually had to resurrect him. Volkoff's just in jail.

I'm hoping this episode marks a turning point for Chuck. I hope that the marriage and the baby will be handled a bit more smoothly than the proposal. And I'm really hoping we get some spy related drama like we got in this episode.

Some more viewers would be nice, too.

Superhero Movies, Part 1: The Dark Knight Rises

2011-01-23T19:22:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I happened to stumble upon the incredibly uninspired Avengers cartoon. Seeing the Hulk in action made me want to watch the Incredible movie version again. I didn't have the chance to watch it at the time, but the simple thought seemed to trigger a thematic movement in my reality.

A few days later, the news broke that Anne Hathaway had been cast as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, the third and final Christopher Nolan Batman movie. The same news also revealed who Tom Hardy would play: Batman villain Bane.

Not coincidentally, I'm sure, TNT showed the second Batman movie this evening. TNT is really good at playing movies that kind of force you to watch them, even if you already own the movie on DVD.

Between the Batman movie news, TNT, and my desire to watch the Incredible Hulk again, I have found myself on a superhero movie kick. It's good timing, too, given how many of these movies are going to be released this year.

The Dark Knight Rises casting story caused quite a stir, although I think more for those who don't read comic books than for those who do. Want proof? The phrase "Batman Bane" was one of the most searched on Yahoo last week, because only people who read Batman comics actually know who Bane is.

Those of us who do read comic books talked about how odd the choice seemed, given the library of much more popular Batman villains. Bane, however, has advantage of being a character who easily translates to film. He also doesn't have much of a fan following or any pop culture recognition, so he's ultimately a blank slate for Nolan. There's also nothing particularly campy or over the top about him, or at least such a portrayal can be easily avoided.

I do wonder how much Nolan will delved into the drugs that give Bane his superhuman strength, or if that will even be a part of the movie. Simply giving Bane such abilities begins to take the movie away from its strengths, and it wouldn't surprise me to see Nolan drop it all together, or at least make Bane's usage of the drug (known as "Venom" in the comics) less frequent.

It will also be interesting to see if we'll get a brief appearance by Hugo Strange, who had a hand in creating Bane.

As for Selina Kyle, I had something of an epiphany about her character earlier this evening. One of the things that most people have pointed out as being curious is the fact that the press release announcing Anne Hathaway's casting referred to her character as "Selina Kyle." It didn't say anything about Catwoman.

That's kind of strange, given that Catwoman is a household name and not many people know the name Selina Kyle. If they're going to name Bane, why wouldn't they name Catwoman?

My theory is that Selina Kyle will never be called Catwoman in the movie or, if she is, it's just as a joke. She'll still retain all the elements of the character: she's a cat burglar, she's a love interest to Batman -- I would guess she'll probably even love cats. But I don't think she'll ever use the name or ever wear any kind of costume.

Which makes sense. Nolan would want to keep this movie as realistic as possible and costumes have been off limits so far for anyone other than Batman. I wouldn't expect Bane to wear anything resembling a costume, either.

I have high hopes for The Dark Knight Rises, despite the title.

Now, Green Lantern, on the other hand...

Nation of Humpbacks

2011-01-20T23:31:00.000-08:00

That is nothing at all like what my desk at work looks like, I just felt like being hyperbolic. But I do work in a cubicle, albeit one that is relatively free of papers, let alone stacks of papers. And I do sit in a desk all day, which has slowly but surely beaten all the muscles in my back to something of a gelatinous state. This, of course, is only compounded by the fact that I then go home and sit at another desk for a few hours to, in theory, write.

This is all in addition to my carpal tunnel syndrome, for which I have wrist braces and a snazzy keyword and mouse. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what was wrong with my wrists, well, I wouldn't have to work in a cubicle anymore and then no one would ask me that. Wrists brace are the helmets of the cubicle world.

I took time off over the holidays to visit my in-laws. The secondary goal was for me to go and visit a physical therapist, a guy who specializes in what he calls "reposturing." It's basically what it sounds like. He works on your muscles to get them back to how they should be, as opposed to what they are now. I had three sessions with him over three days. I nearly threw up twice and I nearly passed out once. It was horrible pain doing things that, had they not been done by a certified professional, would be considered torture.

What a human skeleton is supposed to look like.

There were a number of things wrong with my overall posture, and Aaron (said physical therapist) took pictures before assaulting me. He then took pictures afterward to show me what he had done. The entire difference was startling.Perhaps the most notable of all the problems Aaron fixed was what, Google tells me, is described as a "neck hump." Google also tells me that "neck humps" are apparently not particularly rare these days. This, obviously, is a product of our society, as more and more people spend hours and hours every day sitting at desks.
Even more bizarre is the fact that there are other causes for these humps besides sitting at a desk all day. Not only that, but the humps can vary in size and how greatly they influence a person's body. In other words, we are slowly but surely becoming a nation of humpbacks.

Perhaps it's evolution. Perhaps this is what's eventually going to happen to the human race. Maybe all those stories of a dystopian should really be millions of Igors ruled by those special few who can still manage to stand upright. And maybe when the aliens show up to eat us all, we really won't be that hard to catch.

When I looked at my "after" pictures, I couldn't believe the difference, even more surprised than I was when I learned I was only a few years away from living in the bell tower of a cathedral. Aaron's assistant said they were "fighting hump backs, one person at a time."

According to Google, that might be a losing battle.

I, for one, welcome our new upright overlords.

Chuck 4.11 Review (spoilers)

2011-01-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

I think it's time I finally read the writing on the wall: Chuck has seen better days.

For every moment that I enjoyed (Lester, the near proposal, the A plot itself), there was a moment that made me groan (the lack of logic in the ending, the proposal storyline, the lack of logic in the ending -- did I say that already?). Sadly, this has become a pattern this season on Chuck, and one I don't see ending until the initial season order of 13 episodes has wrapped up.

Old School

There was something incredibly charming about the spy story in this episode, something that harkened back to early episodes of the show. Perhaps it was the somewhat wacky, very simple premise: crazy CIA gadget needs to be retrieved and the team goes undercover to get it. Perhaps it was Casey taking on a role as yet another person who has to serve Chuck (like a waiter or a bartender, etc.) or Sarah and Chuck posing as a couple on a romantic trip again (even though, this time, they're exactly that). There was a certain purity to this story, like something out of season one.

The same could actually be said for the Buy More crowd. It was good to see Big Mike get decent screen time and, really, as far as this episode goes you'd never know he was no longer in charge. And, of course, there was Lester being Lester and another great performance by Jeffster. It really was the most awkward five minutes on television.

And before I go ahead and start sounding like a jaded old man, I have to say that I really enjoyed the scenes leading up to Chuck's near proposal, particularly when he was working up to popping the question. I love Chuck and Sarah and it was a really sweet moment to watch...

Killing Me

...but that doesn't take away from the fact that this proposal is killing the show.

On the surface, the fact that the issue of the two of them getting engaged has even been talked about at this point is a bit much. The audience got to see them as a couple for 8 whole episodes before the issue came up. That's not a whole lot of time. It's so little time, in fact, that it's made this entire story seem forced.

I'm willing to let that slide, though. I understand that they wanted to create some drama in Chuck and Sarah's relationship. I also understand that they initially only had a 13 episode season. It would have been far more organic had this proposal come up mid-way through the season, but, sadly, the people who run Chuck had no idea if they'd get more episodes. They had to jump the gun, just as they had to give Ellie the fastest pregnancy in television history (baby Awesome is reported to be born in the next two weeks). It's not a perfect world, so I accept that.

The problem is that this already forced storyline has taken over the show. The third episode was called "Chuck vs. the Cubic Z" for crying out loud. The ending to "Chuck vs. the Coup D'Etat" was incredibly heavy handed and cheesy solely for the purpose of connecting that storyline to Chuck and Sarah's relationship. Chuck's perfect proposal plan and his attempts to propose come up again and again in episodes like "Chuck vs. the First Fight" and "Chuck vs. the Fear of Death," and even "Chuck vs. Phase Three." And then, this week, we get another episode where the supposed B plot for the season takes over.

Even worse, it has no turned the A plot -- Chuck's mom and Volkoff -- into yet another vehicle for their proposal. There is no logical reason for Volkoff to believe that Sarah has gone rogue. None. He would never even give her the chance to prove herself and even if she passed some kind of test, he still wouldn't let her join him. She's Chuck's girlfriend. We have seen that Volkoff runs an airtight operation, and now we're supposed to believe that he would do something as stupid as to believe that Sarah wants to join him.

But he has to do that for the sake of the proposal storyline. He has to be stupid so there can be another complication that will drag this out even longer. As of last night, the B plot has completely taken over so that no aspect of the show this season stands on its own; it's all about whether Chuck and Sarah get engaged.

Here's the problem (or another one, at least): I'm not a 13 year old girl. In fact, I don't even think a 13 year old girl would find any real tension in this story. What's the worst that can happen, they don't get engaged? Really? That possibility is supposed to create tension and drama? It's supposed to keep the audience interested?

At this point, does anyone even care what happens to Frost?

There's no weight to this show anymore, and that's a shame. Season one had its moments. Season two was filled with so many twists and turns that it raised the bar for the show. And even as sporadic in quality as season three was, there were still consequences, there were still things at risk.

What's at risk now?

In a Perfect World

In a perfect world, this storyline would go away, and perhaps it will. Since the first 13 episodes were ordered together, maybe the proposal storyline will end with the 13th episode, and the next 11 episodes can move forward.

Now, as is my way when it comes to all things Chuck, I will share my wild speculation/borderline fan-ficquo.

I think that Frost should die and that it should seem like Chuck had something to do with it. Volkoff would, of course, launch an all out assault on Chuck, which would include going after anyone that's close to him. People would get hurt (anyone and everyone, from Sarah to Alex). There would be no stopping Volkoff and his men.

And then Chuck is killed. Big explosion, body that is ID'd as his, the whole bit. And there would be massive mourning. I picture a shot of Sarah crying in Chuck's bed -- it would be totally heart breaking.

Then, of course we see Chuck in some hidden location, video conferencing with Beckman. She tells him she's made sure all of his records say he's dead. They talk about the fact that, in order for everyone to be safe, Chuck needs to be gone, and how he is now going to go full on black ops in order to take down Volkoff...alone. Beckman says she will expect to hear from him exactly 1 year later, but until then it will be complete silence. And we'd get "it was an honor working with you," of course.

End season. Cliffhanger? Sure, but one that, in theory, could be left that way.

Then the next season would open with Chuck returning, and that would be a complete CF, as everyone would have moved on with their lives...or tried to.

Of course, there are variations. It doesn't have to be a year, it could just be six months. And Frost could actually stay alive for this. She could simply betray Volkoff and then "die" with Chuck -- then the two of them would go underground, which would actually give the season some symmetry. And, of course, next season we would see that Sarah and Casey have been trying to avenge Chuck...but perhaps someone kept beating them to the punch.

Again, think of how much tension would be in those last few episodes. This kind of a storyline would probably require 3 episodes. From the moment Frost dies on would be nonstop drama. It would be heavy duty. It would be gut wrenching.

It would seem like something is actually at risk again.

Idiot Box

2011-01-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

I watch a lot of TV, I freely admit that. It probably takes the place of things like working out and being social.

I know that when the TiVo was first released, people said it revolutionized television, and I scoffed. But then I got one and it really and truly does change the way I watch TV: it lets me watch more of it.

In a TiVo-less world, I wouldn't watch half the shows I watch. If I had to pay for each show individually, I wouldn't watch most of them. But neither of these things has come to pass, so I fetter away the hours on my couch.

Since new episodes of traditional television shows are returning to the air in the next few weeks, I thought I'd throw out my big, fat, list of Shows That I Watch. So here we go, starting on Monday and going forward...

MONDAY

CHUCK -- 8:00, NBC

I will not bore you with details on this show, as it could be argued that this is actually a blog about Chuck in which I periodically talk about other things.

HOUSE -- 8:00, FOX

I used to love House. I'm not so fond of it anymore. It's kind of just there. I really wouldn't still be watching it without TiVo, as it's on the same time as Chuck.

GOSSIP GIRL -- 9:00, CW

Sad but true. I enjoy certain aspects of this show, mostly the wish fulfillment part. But most of it is pretty bad.

TUESDAY

LIFE UNEXPECTED -- 9:00, CW

I really enjoyed this show when it debuted last season. It was quaint. That didn't last. It is now ridiculous and horribly written. Thankfully, it's coming to an end this month.

PARENTHOOD -- 10:00, NBC

I like about 75% of this show, while my wife likes about 100% of it. It's got a pretty great cast, too. If they got rid of one character, I'd enjoy this show a whole lot more.

WEDNESDAY

MODERN FAMILY -- 9:00, ABC

When this show is on, it's hilarious. When it's off, it's boring as hell.

COUGARTOWN -- 9:30, ABC

This is the second funniest comedy on television right now and, sadly, gets very little press for it.

THURSDAY

COMMUNITY -- 8:00, NBC

This is the funniest comedy on television right now and, thankfully, it's getting a lot of press for it. Maybe that will actually result in more viewers.

BONES -- 8:00, FOX

Not unlike House, this show has become white noise to me. It's like muzak.

FRINGE -- 9:00, FOX

Soon to be appearing on Friday nights, Fringe is one of the few shows (like Chuck, Cougartown, and Community) that I would pay to watch if it weren't on TV. It's also a show that gets better as its mythology expands, but it doesn't seem like it will be around long enough to get much bigger.

FRIDAY

SUPERNATURAL -- 9:00, CW

This would be the fifth and final network show that I'd be willing to pay for. I had my reservations at the beginning of the season, but the show has won me back over.

SUNDAY

FAMILY GUY -- 9:00, FOX

Still good for a laugh here and there.

MAD MEN/THE WALKING DEAD -- 10:00, AMC

Great shows, both of them, and not surprisingly on cable and not on network television.

ENTOURAGE/TRUE BLOOD -- HBO

Combined because they're both on HBO and because I doubt I'd really go out of my way to watch either of them, although I might be more interested in Entourage next season since it's coming to an end.

So that's it, more or less. I'll watch a few other things here and there, but nothing regularly like these.

I do find it interesting that, as far as network shows are concerned, the line is drawn at five shows comprising only 4 hours of television, which isn't that much, if you think about it. Even on the off chance that both AMC shows were ever on at the same time, that would only get me up to six hours, a not unhealthy amount of television watching.

That's as opposed to the, you know, roughly 12 hours that make up the whole list (dividing the AMC and HBO shows in half).

Yikes.

Avatar Review, and stuff about science fiction

2011-01-04T18:53:00.000-08:00

My friend Tony commented that not seeing Avatar in 3D was a waste of time, and I'm inclined to agree with him. Unfortunately, a) 3D makes my brain tingle (seriously) and b) I feel like any movie that's dependent upon special effects to be good, really isn't. And that was certainly the case with Avatar.

The movie was 162 minutes long, which was roughly 142 minutes longer than it really needed to be. Twenty minutes of an adventure in the alien forest would have been enough.

I won't talk about the story, as that's been beaten to death since the movie was originally released. No, what Avatar made me think about was science fiction in general, and our efforts to tell science fiction stories in visual mediums.

Basically, the odds of an alien race looking anything like us (as in humans) are really, really small. The sheer number of evolutionary coincidences that would have to happen to create a humanoid race would be astronomical. In other words, the little green men wouldn't really be men at all.

Of course, visual storytelling has been hampered by its tools. Star Trek had face paint and limited prosthetics to work with, so the fact that every alien race they encountered had two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth wasn't their fault. They did the best they could with what they had.

I won't fault Avatar for this, either, even though it was, in theory, the first science fiction movie that could actually move away from this rather ridiculous trope. From a storytelling standpoint, making your characters humanoid means the audience will be able to connect with them, at least better than they'd connect with, say, a shapeless cloud of energy.

Avatar does lose points for the rest of Pandora's residents. Every single life form on that planet was an analogue for something on Earth. You saw the alien creature and you knew it was a bird, or a cat, or a horse. Each creature matched up with something familiar when, again, the odds of such a thing happening are infinitesimal. Even the fact that the planet had plant life just like Earth is ridiculous.

And, again, Avatar, with all of its vaunted special effects, is the first movie to come along that truly could have acknowledged all of this. It could make special effects look real and, in turn, made the unnatural comprehensible. But it didn't.

No, I didn't see Avatar in 3D, but I think creators actually dropped the ball on this great new technology, which is unfortunate.

My Top 10 Albums Released in 2010

2011-01-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

These are going to be in no particular order, mostly because I was having a hard time putting them in some kind of order.

A few opening comments: There are two notable releases from this past year missing from this list, by the Black Keys and The National specifically. I have them, I just haven't listened to them yet. I have a good reason for that.

I have a backlog of new music. I have a playlist called "New" that I fill with music and periodically refill with music as I'm going through albums. The list is currently filled with 8.8 hours of music I've yet to hear.

I also have a playlist called "Next." This consists of new music waiting to move to the "New" list. It currently contained 20.8 hours of music.

When a new album comes out, I don't always listen to it right away. More often than not, it gets sent to the "Next" list to wait its turn. I try to move new albums to the front of the line, but it doesn't always happen. How do I decide what gets listened to right away and what doesn't? I honestly don't know; it's kind of a mood thing. It's also kind of a timing a thing; if I buy a lot of new music at one time, chances are good a new album is going to get lost in the shuffle.

So, now, without further ado...

My Top 10 Albums Released in 2010

Band of Horses -- "Infinite Arms"

If you're a band trying to win me over (as I can only assume most bands are trying to do), a good way to do it is by having a few songs from your new album appear on "Chuck" before said album is released. That's a good way to get my attention. I wasn't sure what to expect from this album, and while this is by no stretch of the imagination a wild departure of their normal sound, it still sounds like a step forward, filled with larger, more epic songs, as evident at the very least by their length.

Broken Social Scene -- "Forgiveness Rock Record"

I've always been kind of "meh" about Broken Social Scene. For every song I really like by them, there are two that are just kind of there. Not unlike Spoon, I just assumed they'd be a band that put together a fantastic "best of" album. That changed with this album, which was far more killer and far less filler.

Dangerbird Amazon Sampler 2010

Okay, sure, this might be cheating, putting a compilation on here, since it has the advantage of being made up of, theoretically, the best examples of each band. Still, I had never really been exposed to Dangerbird Records before I heard this sampler, which is surprising considering a) how great these bands are and b) this label is based right here in Los Angeles. I've only broken the surface of their output and I imagine there will be even more new music from them on my playlist this year.

Freelance Whales -- "Weathervanes"

And here's the "Chuck" factor again. On first listen, this didn't really seem like an album I was going to enjoy. Their singer's voice is a just a bit too clean for me and there were lots of songs that relied heavily on cutesy keyboard parts. But the more I listened to this, the more I was okay with that. This is their debut and from what I understand their lead singer basically put together the entire thing, so it will be interested to see how they progress from here.

Frightened Rabbit -- "Winter of Mixed Drinks"

And speaking of progression, we have the latest offering from Frightened Rabbit, featuring a lead singer who has clearly been beaten up by love. However, this album seems to be less about moping and more about getting over it. "Living In Colour" could be my song of the year.

Medications -- "Completely Removed"

Medications are a good example of a band I discovered well after most people. They seem to have moved towards a less straight forward math rock sound to something bordering on the operatic -- more than a few times I thought of Queen while listening to this.

Nada Surf -- "if i had a hi-fi"

Okay, fine, I'm biased when it comes to Nada Surf, given that I'm a huge fan. But this album of covers was actually better than I expected, which says a lot given how few of these songs I actually knew in advance. No one would ever mistake these covers as being by any band other than Nada Surf, but they still remain true to the originals (after I went and looked them up).

The Sword -- "Warp Riders"

This was a big year for me and The Sword. This was another band that I discovered late, so I ended up listening to more than one of their records over the course of this year. Yes, it's not unreasonable to say this album saw them leaning more into hard rock and less into metal, but it was still heavy and it was still loud and it was still great. They get compared to Black Sabbath a lot, but it's their similarities to old Metallica that sold me.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Soundtrack

I really liked this movie. I mean, I really really liked it. It's probably no surprise then, given how important music was in the movie, that I also really like the soundtrack. I really like that they had the actors sing the songs their characters sang in the movie, although it was a little annoying that the Brie Larson sung version of "Black Sheep" was on the bonus tracks version. From start to finish, this is just a quality mix of songs.

Weezer -- "Hurley"

Corporate sponsorship aside, this felt like the truest, most complete Weezeras I discussed here). While still not as great as the pre-hiatus albums or the underrated classic that is "Maladroit," "Hurley" still stands as near return to form for Weezer. Hopefully, good things keep coming.

There you go, my 10 favorite albums of 2010, in all their glory.

Biographical Mix, 2010: Getting Better

2011-01-02T15:50:00.000-08:00

It's January 1st, 2011 and I've already begun to notice a trend for the new year, one that actually started last night: optimism. I was kind of taken aback by the volume of optimistic comments I saw on the various social media sites I frequent.

Yes, such optimism is generally a part of every new year, but it seemed more prevalent this year, far more so than last year, that's for sure. Given the state of the world (not to mention a Republican controlled House of Representatives), it's hard to believe that so many people are coming out of 2010 and into 2011 expecting something better. But that seems to be the case.

And why not? We've all been in a very deep hole for a very long time, and while we might still be below ground, we're considerably closer to the surface than we have been in years. For all the doom and gloom, the talking heads and spin, things are getting better. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it feels like we're actually moving towards it.

This was very much the case for me, personally.

A reminder for anyone new to these "Biographical Mixes" of mine: these songs are the best of what I listened to over the last calendar year, and usually includes music that was not released in said year. I listen to a lot of music over 12 months and I'm on a fairly regular search for new bands to get into. Because of this, the new music I listen to in any given years isn't usually from that year.

As a matter of process, I create a new mix for each quarter of the year, so when the year comes to an end I have four mixes which I then distill down to one. Usually, any songs I deem "slow" or "sad" or the like ends up on a completely different mix, so while this is, in theory, a "Best of What I Listened To in 2010," it's is made up of only non-depressing music. Perhaps someday I'll share my depressing stuff on this blog.

Okay, without further ado, my "Best of 2010" list...

"Mercury" by Chris Walla and J. Robbins
"Once, Twice, Again!" by DARTZ!
"Feel Good Together" by Drummer
"Living In Colour" by Frightened Rabbit
"Get Better" by Mates of State
"Bottled In Cork" by Ted Leo
"Left & Right In the Dark" by Julian Casablancas
"Up In the Dark" by the New Pornographers
"Hang On" by Weezer
"X's On Your Eyes" by +/-
"Enjoy the Silence" by Nada Surf
"Forced to Love" by Broken Social Scene
"Credible Threats" by One AM Radio
"Generator First Floor" by Freelance Whales
"Eyes On the Prize" by Eulogies
"Black Sheep" by Metric and Brie Larson
"Beat the Devil's Tattoo" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
"Long Day" by Medications
"Perfect" by Sounds Like Violence
"How Heavy This Axe" by The Sword
"A Horse Called Golgotha" by Baroness

Up next: Best albums actually released in 2010...

Calendars Are Not Hard, People

2010-12-31T17:27:00.000-08:00

I did not turn 1 on the day I was born.

No, because a year is a measurement of time, my first birthday actually signified the end of my first full year and the beginning of my second year. In other words, the fact that I'm 35 means that I have been around for 35 years and am now into my 36th...even though my age only accounts for 35.

I point all of this out because the new millennium did, in fact, start when we entered the year 2000. Twelve months make up a year. Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, we will enter into the year 2011, marking the end of 2011 years and entrance into 2011+one minutes, one hour, one day, etc.

If you want to put a fine point on it, this also means that we are now entering the second year of this decade, the decade with a 1 in the third spot.

I'm always surprised how many people have latched on to the idea that a year isn't made up of smaller measurements of time i.g. twelve months equals a calendar year. I'm surprised because it's completely illogical and breaks down with even the slightest amount of scrutiny.

Oddly enough, it seems like the "year one started on day one even though day one was just day one not year one" theory is mostly perpetuated and embraced by members of the comic book community. In general, they are the only ones I ever read talking about it. Oddly enough, this is a group of people who live their lives based upon the very same units of time measurement that they're ignoring.

I know, I know, I'm being petty. But you know, every New Year's Eve this comes up and every New Year's Eve my poor, patient wife has to listen to me rant about it. So now I'm sharing her pain with you.

And if I'm wrong, then I should have been allowed to drink a year earlier...and I should be allowed to retire a year early.

Poll!

2010-12-22T17:12:00.001-08:00