This year, oh this year, I’ve decided to keep a blog list of every book that I read and include my favorite quotes. When trying to think back on the books that I read in 2011, I had an embarrassingly difficult time doing so. This year (will hopefully) be different.
I’m a slow reader, but it’s something worth a renewed commitment.
This is my new year.
Keep on.
JRA
Posted from WordPress for BlackBerry.
I like endings, but this isn’t how I want to begin.
It’s quiet tonight in this apartment in Brooklyn. Our upstairs neighbors have gone out, to celebrate I’m sure. The street is lined with cars, everyone parked and in for the night, or attending a party. My wife and I are dressed in our best pajamas. Our dear friend, Jessica, is too. We have been watching movies for days and seen everything available on On Demand and tonight we plan to do more of the same. More movies. Maybe that new John Singleton movie with the kid from Twilight who takes off his shirt. No parties. No bars. No fancy dinners or expensive cab rides into Manhattan. Just quiet and Thai food. Just us expressing this day with measured revelry.
We ordered from my favorite restaurant, Dice Thai Cuisine, and so I have one ear listening for a soft knock at the door. They deliver fast, so it could be anytime now. Thai food is fantasticly festive as well as fantastic for breakfast. Leftovers are king. First meal of the new year.
We have been in our apartment for the holiday season and haven’t left. This is not a bad thing. This is a real thing. Even though we had plans to travel to see family this year, we changed those plans to stay home and continue to take care of health issues instead. This year, like last, my wife’s still undiagnosed illness hit a nasty stretch, and in addition to that my cat’s cancer treatments conflicted with our projected time way. So we stayed home in this apartment instead, caring for our cat, caring for my wife, and watching average movies–many, many average movies.
The Thai food should be here any minute. Still no knock.
I see commercials about resolutions. New Year’s resolutions. The idea of a New Year’s Resolution is an interesting one and something everyone talks about at a higher frequency these days leading up to tonight. People often, I think, confuse a resolution with a wish. Wishing for weight loss and more money and a boyfriend and a car and a job and on and on. A resolution is difficult because it takes hard work. It takes a professional commitment. A wish is a lazy, mystic thought. I don’t have more to say on the matter, and only mention it because it’s what is on my mind at this moment because it’s in-between scenes of a movie. The commercial ends.
I like endings and this day is the most reliable of all ending. Happens every year. Endings are everywhere and happen to everything. They are small and large and all sizes in-between. Endings can be happy things too, not just sad, emo, mopey things. When my food arrives, my wait for food will be over–ended–as will the delivery person’s job fulfillment–ended. Endings mean the possibility of new beginnings. This truly excites me.
There is a lot of sadness in my life these days–nothing tragic and new, only pre-existing and expected. There is happiness mixed in with the sadness. This is not unlike anyone else either. These things exist among us all, to different degrees, but exist nonetheless. I wish and I resolute things for the coming year, some of which will happen, some of which will not, but most of all on this day I acknowledge the end to another year. The last new year is ending with a new year rightly beginning.
Then, the soft knock.
A man in a motorcycle helmut delivers my food. He says, “Happy New Year.” I say, “Congrats on finishing the last one.”
Final Print out of Zombie
There is a redundancy in the process of book publishing that can make one feel like they are loosing their grip on sanity, or in this case that the damned zombies will never stop coming. If I were to count the number of drafts I have written over the past ten years, this book’s life, well, there aren’t enough fingers in the world for me to count them on my hands. (And, yes, I still count on my fingers! I like the self-congratulation of it all.)
In this latest and final draft of Zombie, every word has been type-set in a specific font, every interior photo has been placed. Chapter titles, numbers, punctuation, and, of course, content–it is all there in its final stage before it officially goes off to the manufacturer for production. Basically, it is a book in a print out form and it is my job to read it through with a fancy pen and tabs and mark the monster up–indicating typos, incorrect words, rogue spacing, incorrect Roman numerals, and on and on and on.
This: our final chance to make the book as close to perfect as possible.
The point? To seek out the hidden errors. The terrorist errors, as I like to call them–dug in deep and unwanting of freedom. To catch the often illusive mistakes of the writer, editor, or copy editor is a difficult one to because the content can feel so familiar and apart of you that your eyes trick, skim and can un-see the very thing a stranger may very well see.
Prologue to the Apocalypse
I am one of a select few who will service this tedious stage of the book process, and while, yes, I refer to is as tedious or monotonous (and I am not wrong to do so either!) to go over the book at such a fine level (again!), it also is a clear and sharp reminder to me that in just about six months my little book about fathers and sons and drugs and monsters and how men are educated by these monsters, my little book will be pushed out into the wilderness with all of the other books and expected to survive, without error or at least with few.
In addition, I write this post on a day when sickness has taken me out of general activity, mostly any activity that requires sitting or standing. Saltines and Ginger Ale. Heating pads and tea with honey. And staring at the stack of 340 pages waiting in the corner of the room for me to feel better to continue such a negative task of literary hide-and-seek.
Keep on.
JRA
My cousin, Dominic, is a musician. He lives in Philly and teaches music to folks who want to learn to rock like him. Since I’ve known him he’s been in a bazillion and four bands, each successively better than the last. (I once saw him perform at the Rechter Theater in Baltimore in a robe, pajamas and play the illest cover of Gin & Juice.) He’s the kind of guy who can’t be pinned down to just one style of music. He is in a band with Zoe Kravitz called Elevator Fight and he is in the band DRGN KNG. Again, both very different in style and genre, but both truly unique and electric in their own right. As a whole hell of a side note, the kid can pretty much freestyle with the best of them too.
Dom via DRGN KING
Late last month, Dom sent along a few demos of songs he has been working for a while as I promised him an advanced reader copy of Zombie was on the horizon as well. See, he and I trade work quite regularly–him sending me rough cuts of songs, me sending him chapters of a novel-in-progress or drafts of short stories. I can’t say whether our work influences one another as I doubt that it does in any tangible or overt way, but I can tell you that all of his demos are part of my writing library, especially a track called “Cherry Hilll” that I hope finds it way to an album someday. (Ambient killer!) But I digress. The demos he sent were rough, but clean and pure in a way that surprised me–the cleanest I have heard in a long time of his. I wasn’t surprised talent-wise, I was surprised by the content. It seemed, to me anyway, that for the first time in a while he connected with a group of people who all came together to create something beautiful and seamless. His vocals, the production, the lyrical narrative, the band–they were all working in all the right ways.
They went on to make a video directed by Dan King for one of the tracks: “Paragraph Nights.” This is what I want to share with you. Based on this song alone, knowing nothing else about the band or their music or Dom or that when we were kids we developed a video production company called Green Sheep Productions where we would get together and make these awful, low-budget (would there be any other kind at ages 15 and 10?) movies, but based solely on this song, do me a favor, remember their name.
During the many final (writing) days of Zombie, I very often found myself procrastinating, as one tends to do when faced with impossible doom, which is one way to say that I had a very unremarkable and reasonable deadline. Like many writers, bizarre Google searches, like REDACTED, and brief REDACTED YouTube videos ate up much of that time ear-marked for procrastination. Eventually, play time ends, sadly. So as this happened, and I began weening myself off the non-unique procrastination strategies and back onto the strict sour diet of revision, I did allow myself one tiny infraction–the time and space to research images of zombie film posters. Specifically, Night of the Living Dead (“NOTLD”), like Jeremy, also one of my favorites.
From my copious hours of necessary internet research–you know, for the book!–I found that over the years, NOTLD collected quite an assortment of vibrant artwork representing the film’s zombie content. I saved my favorite images as the background of my desktop, changing the posters as readily as one might change seats in a rollicking game of musical chairs. If I switched from reworking a Byron Hall high school scene with Coach O’Bannon to shortening up one of Rembrandt’s many Dostoevskian monologues (and I mean literally Dostoevskian as in he is quoting Dostoevsky), or jumped in the middle of a sexually-explicit, real-time, Jackson fantasy–I would change the NOTLD film poster too match my revision space.
Always keeping it fresh. Always keeping it funky.
Here is a sampling of my precious, zombie darlings.
Yesterday was a day ten years in the making, long awaited , to say the least. The Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) of my debut novel, Zombie, finally arrived. I swung by the new digs at Soho Press and met up with Editor Mark. He introduced me around to the whole team of folks over there working hard to promote and produce this book. Some super fun and smart people work at Soho and their exciting promotional ideas for Zombie are too cool for school. (But I will keep them hush-hush for now.)
The books themselves look absolutely gorgeous. Jad Fair‘s art, a paper-cutting of the little zombie monster man, and Kapo Ng’s cover design with the cut letters and tape never tire the eyes. It feels surreal to have 20 of them in a box. A box of 10 year old Zombies ripe for the (early) reading.
In addition to my box of zombies, I somehow walked away with another writing credit to my name, as a contributing author to the forthcoming anthology Who Done It? for 826NYC, in their own words, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.” My fellow contributors, apparently, include: Dave Eggers, Rebecca Stead, Lauren Oliver, Lauren Myracle, Adam Mansbach & Ricardo Cortes, Maureen Johnson, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Gayle Forman, Melissa de la Cruz, Anna Godbersen, Daniel Handler, Pat Carman, MT Anderson, Mo Willems, John Green, Holly Black, Coe Booth, and many more. Oh, yeah, and my wife, Kate Angelella, too!
I got a box full of Zombies and it’s time to dole them out. If you are a blogger or reviewer and would an ARC, please email me with your name and mailing address. It’s time to start spreading the word.
Keep on.
JRA
One of my favorite movies of all time is the zombie apocalypse classic Night of the Living Dead directed by George A. Romero. It was a huge influence on me in my youth, a simple yet terrifying horror film without explanation. I spent many a nights lying awake in my bedroom, thinking about what I would do if I were pinned down by a zombie attack in rural Pennsylvania.
What a conflict! The dead come back to life, reanimated by some unknown power/force (NASA?), as a group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an abandoned farm house and fight to survive the undead attack. Now I’m simplifying here. It’s clearly about more than just a farm house in PA under siege by zombie ghouls.
This is to say that NOTLD has had an even bigger influence on my first novel, Zombie, as part of the zombie movie obsession that a few of the characters develop–an unexpected aspect of the book that came late in the writing process. I should clarify–there are no real zombies in my novel Zombie. I know, I know. Why call it zombie then? I know, I know. All I can say is that like my narrator, Jeremy, NOTLD plays a substantial role in the book, both literally and figuratively. This is why I think everyone should know the basic storyline of NOTLD before picking up my novel. I believe it will enhance the reader’s experience. Therefore, you must watch the movie in its entirety:
But what if I simply don’t have the time to watch the whole darn thing, you ask? Good question. Very good question. Here is what I can I do . . . because I am such a thoughtful, sweet, and understanding guy, I don’t want you to waste an hour-and-a-half watching the entire movie. Instead, i want you to watch this abbreviated version:
The bunnies really do a much better job.
Keep on.
JRA
(NOTE: this is absolutely how I spend Sundays–watching 30 second bunny cartoon re-enactments of zombie movies, like Grindhouse: Planet Terror & Death Proof.)
