TULIP IS BACK IN STOCK

Last year I turned Old News Records into a publishing company and released our first novel. It's written by the very talented Mike Farfel, and we just got it back in stock.

I wrote a bit about it over here, and Jay Meehan of the Park Record wrote about it in his column last fall.

It's a really great debut novel and I urge all of you to check it out. It's for sale in my shop right now, so get a copy while you have the chance. I'm looking into getting it in a few local bookstores, so if you'd rather wait for that to happen, I'm all for it. But, I'm just saying, it's right there, ready for you to read.

"Bogged down by the existential angst of the American Dream, Tulip has long since given up on any search for meaning—until a voice he's never heard sneaks into his head.

The small miracles of life, paired with the new voice, sets him on a path of moral awakenings and trials by the Devil's hand. Through it all, Tulip seeks love, fights back hoards of entitled masses and finds a new hope and respect for humanity.

At the same time, Tulip must decide if the voice in his head is real or if reality is just falling apart."

TULIP

Let's talk a little bit about Tulip for a minute.

I met Mike Farfel years ago through punk rock and hardcore shows. I didn't know him much beyond being Gardner's friend and they both lived in Heber. Gardner and I got along really well, but being vegan kind of does that. You're always running into the same people at the same restaurants and such but I never really hung out with Mike.

He always seemed like a great guy, just quiet. He always supported the stuff I did whether it was promoting shows or putting out CD's (I did that for a bit). I never knew he was a writer until Gardner told me as I was putting together the first issue of Filler. I asked him to send something my way and he gave me an excerpt from a novel. I read it, thought it was a little weird but liked it all the same.

When it came time to do the Top 5 videos, he said he was interested and I jumped at the chance. That's where I learned that he'd actually finished the book he gave me the excerpt from and was shopping it around to publishers without much luck. It's really hard for a first-time author to get anything published these days and self-publishing a novel is pretty much frowned upon. He was eager to get it out there, so I asked him if I could read it.

He sent me the file and I read it in about three days.

We had talked briefly during the video thing and I told him if he hadn't found a publisher by May, I'd turn Old News Records into a publishing company and do a small run of Tulip. May rolled around, I got accepted to Craft Lake City and we hit the ground running on the book.

"Bogged down by the existential angst of the American Dream, Tulip has long since given up on any search for meaning—until a voice he's never heard sneaks into his head. The small miracles of life, paired with the new voice, sets him on a path of moral awakenings and trials by the Devil's hand. Through it all, Tulip seeks love, fights back hoards of entitled masses and finds a new hope and respect for humanity. At the same time, Tulip must decide if the voice in his head is real or if reality is just falling apart."

It's a fun read and it will make you think about a few things in your own life.

If you want to get a copy, it's available in my shop now. Buy it, read it, tell your friends about it and let us know what you think.

GUN MACHINE

Warren Ellis has long been one of my favorite comic writers. His Planetary series is right near the top of my all-time favorite comics list and he's got a few more that are almost as great. He's taken a huge step back from comics in the past few years and started working pretty much exclusively on novels. I liked his first one, Crooked Little Vein, but didn't love it. However, I tore through it at a pace that can only be equalled by the first few Charlie Huston novels, so that's saying something.

I'm really excited for his next one though. It's called Gun Machine and is already on my list of things to read in 2013—as soon as I get through my pile of 2012 books that's been staring at me all year, growing faster than it shrinks. The good thing about Gun Machine is that since it probably won't be released in softcover (I hate hardcover novels but can't really explain to you why) until late in the year it may move to the 2014 list.

Holy shit that's a long ways away.

GODLAND

Picked up this little guy today at Dr. Volt's comics. I've been moving away from buying single issues and more towards awesome hardcovers and trades. There are single issues I still want to read, but I hate storing them all—luckily, most of them are in my parents basement. I've been trying to make the switch to digital on my iPad, but it's been difficult (more on that tomorrow, I hope).

Either way, I'm excited to get going on this. It's on the list right after Patton Oswalt's Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland and Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God.

GODLAND

"See how the greatest cosmic superhero epic of the new century began! See Commander Adam Archer, Maxim, Basil Cronus, Nickelhead, IBOGA and more in all their oversized glory! What other book delivers the secret origin of the universe? What other book squeezes your guts like an angry Torture-Bot? Only Godland gives you everything you'll ever need!"

JAMES ELLROY HATES EVERYTHING

James Ellroy is hilarious—mostly because he doesn't give a fuck what anyone thinks. He's been that way for years.

Every interview he gives he plays up a different angle. Sometimes he crass and awkward like he always was on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, other times he plays up the role of a callous, grumpy, bitter old man—like the video below. But he's not. He has a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor and he likes playing up that image as much as possible.

Also, make sure you watch that Conan video just to see Ellroy interact with Dave Chappelle because it's fantastic.

I found this video on Warren Ellis' site earlier today and loved it. Figured I'd share it, and Ellis' thoughts on it, with you. He's in on the joke, too.

Watch the videos and then immediately go out and get some of his novels, American Tabloid, L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia are some of his best.

WarrenEllis.com -- "A glorious routine by novelist James Ellroy. And I think he was reining himself in, too.

Interesting interstitial things happen when a writer devises a character to be, for interviews and the like. Especially if someone’s been doing it a long time, and has gone through the cycle and, I suspect in Ellroy’s case, gotten back to the point where he hopes someone somewhere is getting the joke. Listen to how Ellroy speaks, now: more than ever, he’s speaking for tv, and speaking to be transcribed. A lot of media training under the bridge, there. And the little wink to the audience, if not his interviewer, is there too. Slowed down, like a big bit of bait being trawled across still water."

KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE

I should have learned my lesson by now, but I haven't. 

The lesson, of course, is to stop loaning out my favorite books because I never get them back.

I've purchased Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs four times and this is my third copy of Killing Yourself to Live. I keep loaning them out because I want people to appreciate them the way I do, but it never quite works out that way. It usually just ends up like this:

"How did you like that book?"

"What book?"

"*Insert book title here*? You asked if you could borrow it a while ago?"

"Ohhhh, yeah! I haven't gotten to it yet. I still have it though. I'm excited to read it."

Usually the phrase 'I still have it, though' is code for 'Oh shit. I lost that book like two days after you loaned it to me, forgot the title and haven't thought about it since.'

The bottom line is that I found this book for dirt cheap, so I didn't feel too bad shelling out a few more bucks to read again.

It's a road trip story in which Chuck Klosterman (a guy you'll either love like I do or wholeheartedly despise) drives cross country and visits the site where significant rock stars died. He then examines what it meant to their career, and in a lot of cases, them dying was probably the best thing to happen to their fame.

It starts at the Chelsea Hotel where Sid and Nancy died and ends in Seattle at the home of Kurt Cobain. And through the trip, all he has is time to reflect and over analyze hundreds of songs, their meanings and how they relate to his life.

It's a great read if you're a fan of music, rock stars, fame and the whole 'only the good die young' mantra.

Pick it up and hold on to it.

Definitely don't loan it out. You'll never see it again.

"WHEN IT'S NOT YOUR TURN"

THE WIRE is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. It's got so many layers, interconnecting stories and sub-plots and most importantly it's got absolutely fantastic characters. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it.

And this is what I love about the Internet. Someone has taken THE WIRE and re-imagined it as a contemporary literary classic from the early 1900s, in the vein of a Charles Dickens novel.

Head over and check it out. Worth your time for sure.

THE GUNSLINGER

I read this book a long, long time ago and remember enjoying it quite a bit. It's part of Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER series and I've read the first 4 books, but the problem is, I can't remember a single thing about any of them. I don't know if that reflects poorly about my memory or the books themselves, but it's probably been 11 years since I read the first one.

But Stephen King has always been one of my favorite writers (even if he has kind of fallen off the past decade or so). I read MISERY when I was 12—which is a good story in itself that I'll tell sometime—and did an entire project on him in 7th grade. Got a letter from his wife and everything. So, even if he does write some run-of-the-mill horror novels from time to time, he still has a penchant for great storytelling and I'll always have a soft spot for his stuff.

I'm kind of getting back into his work because of LOST, in a way. JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, the guys that created LOST, did an interview with King a few years back where they basically just talked about how they loved each others work the entire time. It ended with the news that Abrams and Lindelof had acquired the rights to THE DARK TOWER series and were planning on adapting it.

Cut to a few years later, Abrams is busy making fantastic films of his own and Lindelof just finished working probably 100 hours a week for six years straight getting LOST finished, and neither of them probably have the time or desire to spend another 6 years on a single project. So in come Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman to pick up the ball and run with it.

Since THE DARK TOWER is something like 8 books and 4 or 5 comic prequels, they have kind of an ambitious plan. First up, a movie based on THE GUNSLINGER, which leads to a season-long TV series, a second film, another TV series and concludes with a third movie. The plan is to shoot all the films at the same time (which sometimes works, i.e. THE LORD OF THE RINGS and sometimes doesn't, i.e. THE MATRIX, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 and 3) and use some of the sets and production aspects for the show.

Now if everything goes right, this could be a fantastic project. Ron Howard has an excellent track record, and the source material is ripe for a great set of films.

Guess I better get started on the books. That way I can complain when I see the movies and things have been changed.

HYPERTHETICALS

I love Chuck Klosterman. You might be the exact opposite. It's come to my attention that most people are either in the "I love him" camp or the "I can't stand him" camp. Not a lot of middle ground, but oh well. I'm firmly in the first camp and every time he writes a new book, some kind of review (his Chinese Democracy review is one of my favorites) or is a guest on a podcast I'm all over it.

I was at Barnes & Noble the other night (killing time, as usual) and came across this little gem he wrote called "Hypertheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations."

It's a little box full of cards containing completely ridiculous questions. There are no right or wrong answers, it's more of a test to see how you will answer. I'm very much looking forward to a slow day at work where I can bust these little gems out.

A little (shortened) sample:

Would you have unprotected sex with a homeless person if it guaranteed that in five years homelessness would be completely eliminated from the world?

VAMPIRE WEEKEND

I've been avoiding the vampire thing as much as possible. I saw Twilight because I had to review it for the paper last year (because no one else would go) but that's as far as I'm going to take it. I toyed with the notion of reading all of the books just so I could see if Breaking Dawn was as weird and laughably bad as I'd heard, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. Not even for a slightly funny blog post. Just wasn't worth the time.

I've never watched True Blood, either. Most of the shows on HBO are great, but I just never cared to try it out. The one vampire series I do read is Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt Casebooks. The first one is called Already Dead, then came No Dominion, Half The Blood of Brooklyn and the one I'm currently on, Every Last Drop. From the description, they sound like the cheesiest books ever written—Joe Pitt is basically a vampire private eye. But that's just where he starts. Charlie Huston has basically turned all of New York City into a vampire haven and created an entirely new world. That's the goal of most books, but this guy has actually planned out every minute detail from how they get the blood to the technical specifics of how the "Vyrus" as it's called, works. Good, hard-boiled crime fiction. Which I've always loved.

Started Every Last Drop a week ago and blazed right through it. Good stuff, but I'm kind of glad there's only one more book in the series. The broad themes seem to be repeating themselves which diminishes my interest a little bit.

On a side note, Googling "Every Last Drop" for a picture of the cover turned up a whole bunch of porn with that same title. That's some entertaining research, right there.

Also, yesterday I picked up a book called The Chill. It's a graphic novel—if you want to get all proper and pretentious—from Vertigo Crime. Vertigo usually puts out great stuff, but they just launched this new line that I'm really excited about. They're complete stories, but instead of the big pages like regular comics, they're the same size as the pulp hardcovers you might find at thrift stores or on the shelves of an antique shop.

I'm a huge fan of those kinds of books, but I'm more of a paperback guy. Every time I go to the D.I., Savers or any antique/consignment store I always look for those books and try to pick up at least one. They're usually only a dollar or two, but they're always great.

The Chill had some great quotes from a few of my favorite writers on the back, and even though I've never heard of the guy that wrote it I wanted to give it a shot. My goal for this year is to pick up a lot of comics that I've never heard of. Looking at my Best of '09 column (that's in City Weekly this week), I realized that most of the stuff I liked was from either Marvel or DC and I feel kind of bad for not checking out more unknown, indie stuff.

So you'll probably have a lot of comics-related posts to skip over in the next year. Or maybe you'll actually try a few of them out. I bet you'd like a couple.

HMMM, INTRIGUING.

I thought this was a joke. But it is, apparently, very, very real.

Warren Ellis.com -- "It’s Monty Python meets Nazi exploitation in a surreal nightmare as can only be imagined by Bizarro author Cameron Pierce.

In a land where black snow falls in the shape of swastikas, there exists a nightmarish prison camp known as Auschwitz. It is run by a fascist, flatulent race of aliens called the Ass Goblins, who travel in apple-shaped spaceships to abduct children from the neighboring world of Kidland. Prisoners 999 and 1001 are conjoined twin brothers forced to endure the sadistic tortures of these ass-shaped monsters. To survive, they must eat kid skin and work all day constructing bicycles and sex dolls out of dead children.

While the Ass Goblins become drunk on cider made from fermented children, the twins plot their escape. But it won’t be easy. They must overcome toilet toads, cockrats, ass dolls, and the surgical experiments that are slowly mutating them into goblin-child hybrids…"

THIS MAN SPEAKS THE TRUTH

"Writing a novel—actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs—is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV's so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it's damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit." - Steve Hely - How I Became a Famous Novelist

That about sums it up.

A QUEST FOR LITERARY GREATNESS

I've been trying to read a lot more lately. Sure, I still read 5 or six comics a week but I'm trying to get back in the swing of reading more actual books.

That's not to say that comics aren't books, because some of them are better written and more creative than half the novels on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. But still. I used to plow through one a week, but that was during the time when I only worked two days a week, didn't have school or a million other things occupying my time.

I'm back on it now.

Just finished this -

I really liked it. Definitely not as good as some of his earlier stuff and this one is a little bit more pretentious, but still an entertaining read. The Terminator 2 chapter was the best.

Now, it's on to this. Hopefully it lives up to the hype.