Christopher Rowe

Worth Four Thousand Words

Erin provides a scan from the newspaper article I mentioned yesterday.

Every Little Thing is Gonna Be Alright

After a week off for Bluegrass College's Fall Break (and let me put in a word here for Fall Break, I think everybody should get one), I'm back to being a full time student and a full time writer at the same time. There's precedent for this, as my old buddy Stilgar said. "Liet serves two masters."

Obviously, things aren't as bad for me as they were for old Liet, what with Harkonnen scum staking him out over geologically active spice sands, but it is tough some days to keep my Penfield dialed to 419 ("giddily appreciative of the extraordinary opportunities that keep landing in my lap") when my natural predilections are to tune it to 254 ("anxiety that increases in direct proportion to the growing height of the real and virtual stacks of text books, research materials, manuscripts, e-mails, books and magazines to be read, and to do lists").

Next entry, comic book versions of mixed metaphors.

Now, since the internet moves much faster than the world at large, and thus it takes much less time for the old to become new again, I'm going to pretend it's already retrohip to do the "first lines" thing that stormed around all over the place back in the middle Triassic/a couple of weeks ago. I'm just going to do three, as these are the three things of "my own" that I'm actively trying to finish in the next couple of weeks. When finished, they'll all be genre short stories, novellinis or novelites, depending on what length they wind up needing to be.

These are all works in progress, and all lacking context, so excuse any present inelegance; the final versions will be great, I swear. (Somebody needs to invent an emoticon for that one kind of smartass "ahem" throat clearing noise, I'd use it all the time.)  Titles and first lines are:

Gather: At the beginning of winter, Gather had thirty-four dollars to spend.

Another Word for Map is Faith: The little drivers were throwing baggage down from the top of the bus and out from its rusty undercarriage vaults.

Some Properties of Asphalt: Rhea’s father, the Fed, had named her for some whack branch of science that people predating even his ancient ass had messed around with.

Okay, Kentucky Short Fiction midterm tomorrow, so that's all for now.

I've never locked my keys in my bicycle

The reading last night went well. Kim was a pal and made the trip with us to So-In (that's "Southern Indiana" for you coastdwellers). The bookstore was excellent and the local press coverage was good. The Tribune ("Floyd County's Newspaper Since 1851") did mislabel a couple of the pictures in their article, so  going forward, I'll be known as Christopher Rudolph when in New Albany, and poor Mark, who actually lives there, has to let all of his relatives know that he's now Mark Rowe--though maybe he could see it as penance for his interview answer that of course got pullquoted below our headshots, "Writers are a funny lot. It's hard to tell where they fit in, if they do at all."

(UPDATE: See it for yourself, right here.)

We went poems/prose/poems/prose, which equated to ladies first in this case. Erin read some fab new poems from an in-progress cycle about a circus, and also two of my favorites--the now timely piece The Giant Squid Mourns the Loss of His Privacy and one about a guy we've all known (or been), The Secondhand Record Store Clerk.

Gwenda read a crowd pleasing chapter from her YA novel about kids living in Seattle's undercity. The selection in question features high speed underground navigation and a special guest appearance by a De Brazza's Guenon. She also got pulled aside afterwards to provide some insider publishing biz type info for some interested listeners, but I'm sure she'll be sharing that part of the story herself.

Mark read from his new chapbook, our copy of which Gwenda apparently took with her on the plane this morning (see below) thus leaving me bereft of any details about it. I can tell you that he read some of his awesome "cracked fairy tale" poems and also Threnody at Sea, which he took great pains to let the audience know was published by Strange Horizons before he became their poetry editor.

Usually, when you're going into a reading before an unfamiliar audience in an unfamiliar venue, the best idea is to prepare material that's easily accessable and entertaining for the broadest possible selection of listeners. But I decided to, um, challenge conventional wisdom. Yeah, that was the plan. I read the opening section of The Voluntary State and all four extant pages of one of my new pieces, one that uses non-standard dialog tags and doesn't bother explaining exactly what larpers are. The power went out just as I was finishing, I kid you not.

But it came back up, and we hung for a little while before decamping to a nearby Mexican restaurant called Chiquitos, where the chorizo recipe is apparently a one to one ratio of Jimmy Dean mild country sausage and table salt, and the house band is convinced that anything, I mean anything, can be an easy listening song. And if you don't like the way they're singing, reader, well, you can just leave them long haired country boys alone.

This morning (we're getting closer and closer to the locked up keys bit, now), we got up way early because Gwenda had to fly to Atlanta to help make the world safe from avian flu. I'm not an expert on public health, folks, but I do sit next to one on the couch while we watch Veronica Mars, and my take is that insider reaction to the "next big pandemic" exists on a continuum ranging from, on one side, a measured acknowledgment that preparations and precautions are in order, to, on the other side, the observation that his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him, and Power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. One group consists largely of epidemiolgists and public health experts, the other of elected officials and political appointees. I personally think you should just wash your hands often, and otherwise get on with your lives.

After I dropped Gwenda off at the airport, I decided to grab a bagel and some coffee at the fabulous Magee's Bakery ("Fayette County's Bakery Since 1956"), and, owing to my not usually having to think about this kind of thing at all, I locked the keys in the car. No worries. Our cel phones have a roadside assistance policy associated with them, because if you're going to be driving around in cars, well, the sons-of-bitches are going to give you trouble aren't they? I didn't have the phone number to call for help on me (turns out it's H-E-L-P) but I do have good friends who'll roll out of bed on a Sunday morning and do some emergency googling when called upon. The dude that showed up to unlock the car took about six seconds to gain entry, using as his tools a screwdriver, a rag, and a stick.

While I awaited rescue, I took the opportunity to see and be seen on this gorgeous Sunday morning. Dressed as I was in my night britches and fuzzy slippers, I got glanced askance at a couple of times by quality BMW type folks picking up two dozen glazed for their pre-Bible study fellowship 'n' homophobia sessions. Eventually, though, the sticker covered Festivas and ancient Volvo station wagons started rolling in and disgorging hipsters recovering from last night's Taildragger CD release party at the Short Street Lounge. My people, my people.

Now I've got two days of bachelor squalor to look forward to, and it's coming up on noon, so I'd better get at it.

Hello, New Albany!

I'm moving into these new electrical digs gradually (everything I do on the internet is gradual), but here are a couple of bloggy things.

Tonight, Miss Gwenda and I will join Erin Keane and Mark Rudolph to read as "Four Writers: Four Voices" at Destinations Booksellers in that rockin' river town, N'Albany Eye In. We're thinking of dressing in costumes based on the four elements of the ancients, or possibly the four winds, or possibly the Gang of Four.

The traditional start of the cycling season in Europe is the stage race Paris-Nice, "The Race to the Sun," held in March. Today was the last of the year's big races on the continent, the 99th staging of the Giro di Lombardia, "The Race of the Falling Leaves." I mention this only to point out that my sport is more poetic than yours.

In writing news, I've been fictioneering at a white hot pace, at least when judged in comparison to my usual puce tepid pace. I've even got stuff going on that I can't talk about, on more than one front even, just like the adults! Non-disclosure agreements and "I'll let you know more once my agent/editor/senator says it's okay" and all that kind of stuff. Mainly been working on my own stories this week, though, and will read from one of them tonight, possibly while dressed as one of the four hoarse men.

You may recall that I'm posing as a full-time undergraduate student. That's going pretty well, grade wise, though I still have the occasional old man on campus moment. "What's with these kids and their damned flip-flops?," that sort sort of thing. Oh, and should you ever have the occasion to do so (and I hope that if you don't, you'll manufacture such an occasion) please join me in real-world memeifying a daily use name change for my school. I attend the Bluegrass Community & Technical College of the Kentucky Community & Technical College System. I'm  advocating that people instead refer to it as l'Université de Gazon Bleue. Or if you can't get behind that, then just Bluegrass College. Seriously, try to work that into a conversation today, won't you?

And finally, "below the cut" as our LJing friends say, a disturbingly on the mark survey dealie showing what D&D character class I belong to. Via Kim & Chris.