The Corner

New Website!

2018-07-31T11:54:00.001-04:00

Howdy, everyone!

I've launched a new website. Click here to visit the site.

I'm going to keep the site focused on my books and use this blog for my political rantings, if I have any left in me.

I've set up the site so new visitors are greeted with a popup, which offers a free digital copy of UNRAVELING in exchange for signing up for my mailing list. You're free to join and get your copy, or you can simply X out that box if you don't want to.

Anyway, I hope you'll take a look!

Thanks!
David

Here Endeth the Lesson

2018-04-06T10:31:00.000-04:00

We all teach our kids that when we make bad decisions, we have to suffer the consequences.

"It's how you learn," we tell them.

So trump supporters, it's time for you to suffer the consequences of your laughably stupid decision to vote for him.

Believe me, I have no desire to see my retirement portfolio tank, but if that's what it takes for you to learn your lesson, so be it.

Amid the racism and xenophobia and misogyny and sex assault and corruption and Russia ties and lies, you clung to this belief that trump would do a good job because he was, in your words, "a businessman."

We warned you every day for a year before the election, but no, you thought you were being clever by half, while somehow forgetting that this "businessman" bankrupted a casino. A casino!

So congrats, he is singlehandedly wrecking the economy. The markets are finally spooked, the tariffs are going to hurt badly, and the March 2018 jobs report was terrible.

And there goes your precious "businessman" theory. You were wrong. So unless you really are an asshole racist (and some of you are), there isn't anything left to defend.

All that's left is for you to suffer and pay the consequences.

While the rest of America suffered under this monster's thumb, you looked the other way. You didn't care. When faced with the overwhelming evidence of how utterly horrific a human being he is, you didn't care.

I don't take any joy in watching you suffer because I have to suffer for your abject fucking stupidity too.

But that doesn't mean you don't deserve it. You do. You deserve to really suffer. It needs to hurt you, so next time, maybe you don't think about yourself first.

The Existential Danger of the Friendly Trump Supporter

2018-02-24T07:22:00.000-05:00

In previous posts, I've begged Trump supporters to come to their senses before it was too late for America. I kept thinking that I would go to my grave and never understand why they support him. I kept thinking that slowly but surely, they would see the error of their ways and privately, if not publicly, turn against him.

I don't think that anymore because I finally understand. And the truth is much worse than I feared.

I know a lot of Trump supporters. You probably do too. Nearly all the ones I know are white and live comfortable lives. Most of them are men, but there are a number of women in there (I truly don't know how any marriage in which only one person is a Trump supporter survives). These folks hate paying taxes and they hated Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

They're successful, they're friendly, they raise solid families. Their kids are sweet and polite and respectful. They donate to charitable causes.

They don't worry about poverty or LGBTQ rights or minority rights or reproductive rights or immigrant rights or the Constitution or really anything. They're not really opposed to them, per se, but these things don't really affect them.

And these people constitute a towering threat to American democracy.

I don't say that lightly. Speaking from personal experience, this presidency has cost me at least two relationships with Trump-supporting family members and friends, and more may be ahead. But we cannot keep quiet. I mean, after all, the new hotness is that resistance to Trump is waning.

Anyway, back to your friendly neighborhood Trump supporter. I was talking to a friend recently about them, their thinking processes, and why they believe what they believe.

I've seen a few approaches they take when defending him. All of them are some variant of this question:

What's he done that's so bad?

Well, I am GLAD YOU ASKED (everything here is linked to a major media outlet website, including one conservative site):

He cheated on his wife with a porn star and then paid her hush money.

He sexually assaulted at least sixteen women and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy on tape.

He supported child molester Roy Moore (as did the rest of the Republican Party).

He defended a White House staffer who is accused of domestic violence by two ex-wives.

He dismisses Russian interference in our elections despite multiple indictments.

He sided with neo-Nazis and the Klan. HE SIDED WITH NEO-NAZIS AND THE KKK.

He brought us to the brink of nuclear war for no good reason.

He is under investigation by a special prosecutor for multiple crimes.

He has all but admitted to obstructing justice on Twitter and on television.

He ran a fraudulent university and had to pay out $25 million to settle the suit.

He has two advisers who pled guilty to crimes relating to Russia and two more dead to rights on money laundering and God knows what else.

He didn’t release his tax returns so we don't know who he's financially beholden to.

He profits off the presidency through the Trump Organization in violation of the Constitution.

He had his son meet with Russians at Trump Tower for dirt on his opponent.

He refused to implement a Russia sanctions law passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress.

He encourages regular assaults on the media and talked about curtailing the First Amendment.

He is so stupid and uninformed about issues that members of his own party were taken aback.

He demonizes immigrants but conveniently fails to call out white mass shooters.

He needs a military parade down the streets of D.C. to stroke his ego.

His speeches and interviews were actually utter gibberish and nonsense coming from the mouth of a profoundly stupid human being.

He is a pathological liar.

Just about the only thing he hasn't done is murder a mistress on live television.

So there you have it. Towering and overwhelming evidence of this man's lack of fitness for office and the damage he does daily to this country.

But they look at us as though we're the ones with the problem. As though we're the crazy people. They smile and nod and tilt their heads and say things like, "well, we'll just have to agree to disagree!" Or they say, "well, Obama did some terrible things too!" Or my favorite: "you can just send me your tax cut money," because, as I am learning, virtually every Trump supporter values money and guns over ALL ELSE.

And as I considered this, it hit me all at once.

They know exactly what he's done that's so bad.

I mean, we're not talking about stupid people here. They can read, and they can see his tweets, and they can listen to tapes. And I cannot believe it took me so long to accept this truth.

They just don't care.

Or if they do care, they actually care more about saving the wealthy white "Christian" America they believe they're part of, and so, in their cost-benefit analysis, Trump wins. It's why some Obama voters easily voted for Trump. It’s why his approval rating has been trending upward. It's why Christians so easily accept him.

Because the alternative is losing the America that works for them only. And rest assured, if they can't have America on the terms they dictate, they won't let anyone have it. Remember - whites across all income brackets have nothing to fear from a Trump presidency (well, except dying in a nuclear firestorm like the rest of us). Whiteness is what unites a majority of this country, from the richest Koch brother down to poorest white in the poorest county in Kentucky. As Lyndon Baines Johnson once said: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

If you think of America as a Tootsie pop (STICK WITH ME), this makes sense. Heterosexual Christian white males live at the center of the pop. There's good eating there. Always. Others - women, LGBTQ, minorities, immigrants, non-Christians - can get to the center, but it takes a little more work. And the farther out from the center you are, the harder it is to get to the middle (please tell me we can agree on which demographic has it easiest in this country). And the farther out from the center you are, the easier it is for you to fade away. OK, it's not a perfect metaphor.

No one will come for their guns, and no one will come for them. They can continue to claim America's status as a Christian nation without ever having to admit that modern American Christianity is just a cover for white supremacy. No one fears fair elections in this country more than Trump supporters. They don't need much less want fair elections. Because fair elections will bring their version of America to an end. The next time the Republicans lose the House and Senate may well be the last time they lose it.

I now firmly believe that Trumpers will burn down America the way Iraqi soldiers burned oil wells as they retreated during the Gulf War. And that was the thing we did not anticipate.

And the scary part? They don’t actually have to do anything. They are destroying America by doing nothing about Trump.

So I am done explaining myself, Trump supporters.

But please stop acting like you don't know what he's done that's so bad. You insult my intelligence and you look like a fool. All to defend a man who literally would not piss on you if you were on fire.

I cannot believe it took me so long to see this.

So we are at war.

Not a shooting war.

But a cold civil war, as I heard someone put it.

A war for the soul of this country.

And you don't want to negotiate.

I am done negotiating. I am going to do everything I can to take this country away from you because you don't deserve it. We could have worked together. You didn’t want to. Instead, you kept your heads down and pretended nothing was wrong, ignoring the cancer spreading through conservatism, as was on full display at this week's CPAC Conference. You made jokes and you laughed.

So go ahead and laugh at me, mock me, tell me I'm overreacting.

That will be your undoing. It won't be mine.

You sold out America, Trump supporters. You sold us all out.

And in the end, your price wasn't even that high.

Red Alert 🚨

2017-11-29T16:26:00.000-05:00

“You really gotta hand it to those federal marshals, boy....”

Lt. Dan Kaffee from A Few Good Men, if Trump supporters were federal marshals or maybe vice versa

Anyway, it has been 27 days since my last rant into the void and things are actually so much worse than before...

Screw this president, his adult children, his sycophant enablers, and as for his supporters, screw those miserable, bigoted, fascist KKK/Nazi/pedophilia-apologizing fake Christian lying assholes too.

Is there a line where will you will say enough is enough? There really aren’t many more places for Trump to go before his rhetoric becomes action. Are you waiting for the trucks to cart away your non-white neighbors in the dark of night? Would that do it?

Because let me tell you, I think a good percentage of them would be pretty okay with that as long as the wealthy fictional version of you that doesn’t actually exist but you wish did got a tax cut, or maybe as long as you could lay your head on your pillow at night knowing that in the end, white people won out and everyone was living like Ward and June Cleaver forever and ever, Amen.

Watching people I’ve known for years and some of whom I’m related to act like this is all fine and dandy, and laugh at my utter horror or tell me I need to shut up and respect the flag and I am getting a pretty clear understanding on how the fucking Holocaust was allowed to happen.

And with today's fresh round of batshit Trump tweets, so horrific that even InfoWars, which thinks the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, was like "WHOA CHIEF GETTING A LITTLE CRAZY THERE," I think this is where we are.

If that's what you want, just find your spine and say it. Stop lying and claiming that this is about the middle class and jobs. Let's really get it out on the table. This is a battle for what America will look like in a decade or a century.

If you really do care about the great melting pot of America, it’s time to stand up and demand that he go. But sadly right now, the key to that door is in the hands of the GOP.

So Republicans can call for Trump's removal or resignation or they can just shut the hell up now and forevermore.

You cannot have it both ways.

You cannot follow your conscience while also betraying it every once in a while just to get your tax cut in.

If any of these men or women meant or believed what they said, getting rid of Trump must be their only priority, come hell or high water, at the expense of repealing Obamacare, at the expense of leaving tax reform dead in the water.

You turn on him for the good of the country. You burn down the Republican Party, which has become literally nothing but a cesspool of racism, bigotry, misogyny, hatred, xenophobia, fake Christianity, and tax-reform porn for the wealthy, and then you pour salt over the ashes and you start over. Small government my ass.

If you believe your house is on fire, you don't stop to deal with the interior designer who can get you an amazing deal on this Italian marble.

It cannot be a priority that they weigh against the GOP-issue-o'-the-day. I'm sorry, but this is the legacy of the Republican Party in 2017. This is not the party of Reagan or Bush I or Bush II. It’s the party of the KKK and David Duke. This is the hellspawn birthed by 30 years of kow-towing to the religious right, which we now know was nothing but cover for patriarchal white supremacy.

You cannot turn back the clock to those simpler times where you could just focus on just screwing over the middle class in favor of your big corporate donors.

Trump has to go. Now. And until that happens, every single Republican, both in office and on the streets, is nothing but a pathetic coward and I am ashamed to call any of them my fellow citizens.

There.

I feel better.

I know a lot of you feel this way too; please know that you are not alone.

As for the rest of you? Don’t bother arguing with me. I didn’t even have to touch on Russia (but seriously please hurry up Bobby Mueller) or the fact that Trump is an admitted sexual predator.

Besides, you know where the Unfriend button is. 😘

Also🖕

And lastly 🥃

The Papadopoulos Redemption

2017-11-02T15:24:00.000-04:00

For a while now, I've wondered if, when it comes to the Cheeto-skinned baboon testicle that some of you delusionally believe is going to make your life whiter I MEAN BETTER, I have gone off the deep end.

That I settled on a narrative about him long ago, and that was it. I'm no longer able to accept any information that is inconsistent with this entrenched notion of him. That I am ignoring the facts. The STOCK MARKET IS KILLING ISIS AND THE DEFICIT AT THE SAME TIME GRRRRRRR!!

Maybe he's just an extreme-right wing President and I need to suck it up and deal with it. Maybe the media and the Republicans and Democrats have made such a tangled mess of Russia and Ukraine and Putin and opposition research and this and that until it's just a giant pit of nonsensical slurry.

I think back to how crazy people on the right were about Obama. For eight goddamn years, they were in a state of total meltdown about him. MUSLIM SOCIALIST! ABANDONED WALMARTS CONVERED INTO GAS CHAMBERS FOR CHRISTIANS! FEMA BODY BAGS!

LITERALLY NO ONE SAYING MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

And it occurred to me that many on the right, including the nearly 80 percent of Republicans who still back him, look at me in the same way I once looked at them.

But.

BUT.

It turns out that we were right and they were wrong. And I know this because of this photograph.

This one simple campaign photograph.

By March 31, 2016, Trump was well on his way to securing the nomination. He was selling himself as THE guy on national security, the one with the plan to take care of all the other global threats the U.S. faces.

And this picture was supposed to reaffirm that image. It literally says it on the photo. NATIONAL SECURITY MEETING. It's even above Trump's name so you KNOW it's an important thing. It is undisputed that Trump cares about appearance virtually above all else.
His power, his masculinity, his control – and this photo was a message to America that he had national security, and its twisty vines of immigration, ISIS, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, by the short-and-curlies.

There are 12 men at this meeting. One is the future Attorney General, and one is the future President. Not even Mike Flynn, who probably deserves the death penalty for treason, is in this photograph.

And there in the middle is George Papadopoulos. I remember when this guy got named to the team – largely because of how young and unqualified he was. Trump himself called him “an excellent guy.” The news cycle moved on, and he was forgotten for a good while.

But now that Papadopoulos is knee deep in the Russia investigation, possibly having even worn a wire, the White House is all “GEORGE? GEORGE WHO? CURIOUS GEORGE IS A MONKEY POPULAR WITH CHILDREN OR MAYBE YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT GEORGE FROM SEINFELD?”

And Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who always looks like she just found out her sorority sister is dating a black guy, stood in front of the press and told the world that George Papadopoulos is a low-level volunteer. A coffee boy. There is no unit of measure for the stupidity it would take to believe this White House on anything.

Because this photograph slams the door on that. Forever. There is no place to hide. This is how dishonest this President is. You can bet your life and the lives of all your loved ones on this one fact – Trump’s entire existence, his entire life, his entire presidency, is built on dishonesty and deception. On lies.

The news isn't fake. The news is so negative about Trump because he's so fucking horrific. The mistake we made was believing it was the media's job to present both sides of the story. This is false and terribly dangerous to democracy. The media's job is to report the facts, no matter how bad they make someone look.

I love this photo, because it forced Trump to double down on his lies in a way not seen yet. He is basically mocking his base, daring them to believe this lie. And it gets better - the Papadopolous story is growing by the day.

But the truth is right there in your face. You cannot argue with it. You cannot claim any spin. But you will. You will continue to believe his lies. You will go deeper into the rabbit hole to explain away reality because you cannot turn back now (and rest assured, you will never be forgiven – ever).

The rest of us can look at this photo and feel vindicated.

There are no "two sides to the Trump story." There is fact. And there is the bullshit his supporters have elected to unhinge their jaws like a racist rattlesnake for and swallow.

I don’t know if the Trump resistance will win. If there’s one thing 2017 has shown us, it is the horrific shit crawling around underneath the rock that is America and there may be too much of it for us to overcome anytime soon.

But we will always have this photo.

And Trump supporters will have a load of shit shoved down their throats that they call dark – I MEAN WHITE – chocolate.

American Hypocrisy

2017-10-21T21:52:00.003-04:00

Black players kneel during the anthem to protest racial injustice and Trump supporters are all “WELL I NEVER” while asking for smelling salts and a fainting couch but ...

When the draft-dodging Apostle Donald Trump tramples all over the memory of an actual dead soldier to cradle his own fragile ego, it’s crickets from those same people.

Have I correctly encapsulated the hypocritical bullshit nightmare we are living in?

(BONUS QUESTION: If Barack HUSSEIN Obama had done even a single one of the roughly 56 different shitty things Trump has regarding these fallen soldiers, how would the fake patriot right have reacted? BUZZZ SORRY WRONG ANSWER Thank you for playing and please kindly step on your own dick on your way out get me my bourbon)

The Things We Do Not Want to Believe

2017-10-09T16:24:00.001-04:00

Earlier this year, the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, made a statement that has stuck with me.

“People who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.”

I found it interesting not because of its applicability to treason, but because of its applicability to our own lives and, more specifically, to the current surrealistic nightmare we are in.

People who go down any path often do not know they are on it until it is too late.

When you are a kid growing up in this country, you are taught at a very early age about the inherent goodness of these United States of America. Scratch that. The inherent motherfucking unassailable GREATNESS of America.

Every politician - Democrat and Republican - who has ever held any political office repeats the mantra - America is the greatest country in the world.

You learn how we threw off the yoke of British colonialism and forged the “greatest” country the world has ever seen.

And in many ways, this is a great country. The freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the due process protections that prevent the government from tossing you in jail indefinitely without cause, the freedom to make your own way. Not only that, but perhaps in a world of nation-states as we are in, it’s important to believe that. A country’s survival may depend on its citizens believing that.

But there’s a dark undercurrent to believing in your country’s unmatched greatness, in refusing to understand its complete history and not just the one you learned in the second grade. Personally, I spent most of my childhood believing that "Indians" were bloodthirsty subhumans who deserved to be slaughtered by the brave newcomers to the continent. Slavery was bad, the textbooks said, but slaves were often treated well.

And I post this on Columbus Day, a holiday to celebrate the guy we all are taught "discovered" America. I remember just accepting that as fact, although I sometimes wondered why other people, like Amerigo Vespucci, didn't get way more credit or attention. I mean, why isn't there Vespucci Day? We named two continents after him! But you get my point. Only the dumbest among us would believe that Columbus "discovered" America.

I found that people often look at their country the way little kids look at their parents - perfect. Only as you get older do you start to see that parents are like everyone else - people. Usually good people, of course, but people who’ve faced the same challenges and indecision and self-doubt and regret that we all do.

For some reason, too many people refuse to accept the dark truths about this country.

When you unquestioningly believe you live in the greatest country in the world, a lesson imprinted upon you at your most impressionable age, by the time you have enough experience and knowledge to understand that America has done and is capable of doing both great and terrible things, it might be, as Clapper said, too late to accept anything else as reality.

When you first start writing (and this happened to me), there is a tendency to make your protagonists very heroic, almost to a fault. It can be very challenging emotionally to see your characters as flawed people who’ve made mistakes, have regrets, think less-than-pure or selfish thoughts, and make bad decisions that they know are bad—possibly because it makes you confront, or at least acknowledge, those flaws in yourself.

We don’t want to believe that we make bad choices or think bad things or do dumbass things even knowing ahead of time that they’re bad or make snap judgments about people that are fed by deep-seated biases and prejudices and beliefs that have developed over the course of a million different interactions and exposures. I've done it, you've done it, we've all done it, even if we haven't realized it (although we all realize it and just don't want to admit it). We don't want to believe that we, as a country, do this, because a country is nothing without its flawed people.

And failing to recognize the flaws in ourselves and in our country comes at a terrible price.

(EDITED TO ADD: I wrote this post before the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and I have edited it to add this section in light of it. I was in college the first time a female friend shared with me that she had been sexually assaulted by another student. I listened and I told her how sorry I was that such a thing happened, but I remember a part of me, at some level, not believing - or not wanting to believe that a guy I went to school with could be capable of something so awful. Of course, I know now she was telling the truth - it was my own obstinance that led me to doubt her. She would not be the only one to tell me about such an experience. Later, I would see something that showed me once and for all how widespread this is.

One night during my second year, I was at a party at a fraternity house. It was very crowded on the main floor. As we made our way through the crowd, we approached a corridor, where a girl was standing against the wall with her friend. A guy behind me reached out and squeezed the girl's breast as we shuffled by - this happened less than a foot away from me. It was dark and loud and crowded, and there was no way for the girl to see who had done it. I caught just a glimpse of it, but I remember the look on her face, one of stunned anger. It did not occur to me then that I had just witnessed a sexual assault. I did not know the guy who did it, but I could have identified him. Again, even though I had seen it with my own eyes, I didn't want to believe what I had just seen. As the years passed, I've become more disappointed with myself that I said nothing that night. I am sure this scene has played out countless times in countless college towns at countless college parties.)

And I think this is a big part of the reason why we ended up with Trump as president. When you refuse to accept that America is like any other powerful country or civilization that ever existed, one that bears many warts, one that has done less than pure things to achieve its current status as a superpower - when you start to think it’s infallible, then you accidentally hand the nuke codes to quite literally the last man on Earth you would want to have them. When you refuse to accept terrible things as reality because you don't want to accept that sometimes the boogeyman is the guy next door.

You buy into totems like MAGA and the National Anthem and the flag without stopping to think what they really and truly mean. I’m not even judging America for what it has done or what it has not done. What I am judging is its apparent inability to even admit those things happened at all.

We don’t want to believe we are racist.

We don’t want to believe we are sexist.

We don’t want to believe we are misogynistic.

We don't want to believe that women are assaulted and harassed every day.

We don’t want to believe that we are selfish.

We don’t want to believe that white Christian men spent many decades stacking the deck of America in their favor, at the expense of women and people of color and non-Christians.

We don’t want to believe that these men went as far as they could to corner the market, running right up against what the Constitution would allow - and in some cases, then some - to protect their corner on the market of America.

We don’t want to believe the scar of slavery will never completely heal.

We don’t want to believe the atrocities that European colonists committed when they got here.

We don’t want to believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again.

We don’t want to believe that two oceans provide a pretty big security blanket.

We don’t want to believe that other countries might not want the things we do.

We don’t want to believe that police officers or soldiers can do terrible things.

We don’t want to believe that we really do need the government.

We don’t want to believe that if, to steal an old analogy, the American Dream is home plate, that white people start on third base and many more people score before their mothers push them out of the womb.

We don’t want to believe that the good old days were not all that good for anyone but heterosexual white men and women.

We don’t want to believe these things because to believe means to cast doubt on the things that were imprinted on you as a child like someone jammed your flesh with a hot brand that reads America the Beautiful.

We don’t want to believe we elected an evil man as President, despite every single bit of evidence to the contrary.

We don’t want to believe that he lies every single day about matters big and matters small.

We don't want to believe that it's our fault because to believe would mean accepting that it was all these denials about ourselves that gave oxygen for the Trump fire to burn.

We don't want to believe that Trump is the shadow version of us, down to the easy-street lifestyle many of us wouldn't mind having, the version of ourselves that we hide from the rest of the world in our day to day life (although more and more are willing to let it all hang out online), fears and biases and prejudices that we let bubble out into a President-shaped vial of toxic waste because we were not willing to face up to them.

One thing I’ve learned in my two decades as a lawyer is that evidence does not lie. Evidence does not care. When you put on a case to a jury or judge or tribunal, you’re trying to reconstruct a picture of an event that has already happened, and you’re trying to get the fact finder to see it in a light as favorable to your side as possible. But the facts are the facts (although even that is becoming a bit more elastic as time goes on).

The evidence of America - both good and bad - is right there in front of us, if we were only willing to look. But we need to look, America, soon, or it will be too late for it to matter. We will end up in a very, very dark place that we never believed possible.

I feel very lucky to live here, in a place with so many different kinds of people and cultures, and I would live nowhere else. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to America’s faults or to my own.

If we could believe for a minute that we’re not as great as we think we are, if we could believe that the founders did great things while also doing terrible things, that we are all capable of low moments, of being racist or sexist or misogynistic or ethnicist (I think that's a word), if we could stop looking at America through rose-colored lenses that belong on the face of a first-grader - then we could see the founders, in all their flawed brilliance, gave us all the tools we needed to keep making America - if not the greatest - then at least pretty great.

Not just Great Again.

But Greater than it Ever Was.

I Cannot Remember All the Gun Massacres Anymore

2017-10-02T21:25:00.000-04:00

Here we go again, because of course we have to do this again, and we will do it again soon.

Let me start by saying that with the possible exception of September 11, no event ever hit me as hard as the Sandy Hook school massacre, partly because I have a son the same age as the children who died that day and partly because it was kids. Kids, man. Every so often, not every day, I'll see my kids head out the door to school, and I'll think about that terrible day.

But hell, folks, that was like four or five massacres ago! (UPDATED - EIGHT OR NINE MASSACRES AGO)

Anyway, again, I write not to change anyone's mind but to keep myself on the sunny side of sanity. Partly sunny, at least. This will change no one's mind but I'm writing it anyway. I fear nothing about guns will change in my lifetime because guns are more than part of our culture - for many, they are the physical manifestation of what it means to be American. You can't even talk about reasonable restrictions without some clown spouting off about the Federalist Papers.

And this week, we (again) face the deadliest gun massacre in American history, which supplants the previous deadliest gun massacre (Orlando) in American history after it held that morbid title for only 16 months. Think about that. In 16 months, we've had the two worst gun massacres in modern American history - at a time when gun ownership is at an all-time high, when we're supposedly made safer by such a well-armed public.

(I won't even get into the lone-wolfication of the shooter that has already begun. OF COURSE he's not a terrorist, of course, white men can't be terrorists, they're just disillusioned maybe he was ECONOMIC ANXIETIED if you know what I mean. But that's another rant for another day.)

In addition to Sandy Hook, we've had Blacksburg and Orlando and Aurora and Chattanooga and Lafayette. The on-air execution of two reporters from a Virginia news station. The community college in Oregon. San Bernardino. I can't remember all of them. Can you believe that?

UPDATED - (a Texas church, Parkland, Santa Fe, and I am sure I’m missing some)

We can't keep track of all the gun massacres.

I mean, this stupid thing doesn't make any sense at all.
Just look at it.

And it will never stop. It will never stop because if a classroom full of dead first graders didn't change anything, nothing will.

OK? I get it. We are never getting any substantive gun control. But Jesus, Republicans won't even give an inch? Their heads are so far up the NRA's ass that they won't even consider a universal background check?

So, understanding some might take issue with this anti-gun rant, please - and this is the best part of being in your 40s - rest assured that I am all out of fucks to give. The gun folks will come at me with their Federalist papers and their smugness, their strict constructionism, anything to cloak themselves from the responsibility for the fact that it's their bizarre fetish with instruments of death that resemble 18th-century firearms about as closely as a pudding cup resembles the Mars rover that keeps us trapped in this endless cycle of death. And believe me, I know that I'm not reinventing the wheel here. Everything I've said has been said. It won't matter. Nothing will change. That ship sailed when America looked at a classroom of children ground into hamburger and shrugged.

That said, I've long been done with your supposed right to own as many guns as you want. Do the math. More innocent people are killed by privately-owned guns than are saved by them. UNLESS you're a soldier or law enforcement officer or a hunter with appropriate hunting weaponry, you don't need a gun. I'm not at all convinced by the argument that you might use a gun to protect yourself, since that right has been paid for and will continue to be paid for with the blood of too many innocents. Oh, and, in the extremely remote chance you're ever confronted with a situation in which you could justifiably use a gun, the odds are excellent that you'll miss, shoot yourself or another innocent bystander, piss yourself, or have the gun taken from you. Then you die anyway. And yeah, I get that once in a while, a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy. Is it worth a blood-soaked massacre every year (UPDATED - every three months)?

I hate guns. I didn't grow up around them, but my family in Lebanon did, especially during the civil war. Sure, they had guns for hunting, but the ones I remember were the ones they had for war. I remember my cousin, who had fought in the war, showing me his Russian-made AK-47 machine gun. He may have been sixteen years old. It scared the shit out of me.

I cannot imagine the fear that those people felt at that concert or inside that school or in that church or in that movie theater. Stop pretending you're Bruce Willis in Die Hard and understand that your childish fascination with guns has real, life-altering consequences. When I was twelve years old, on our first night spending a summer in Lebanon, I lay awake for hours listening to a gun battle a few miles away, and it sounded very much like what you've heard on the videos of the Las Vegas attack. I wasn't anywhere nearby that gunbattle, but I can still hear the rat-tat-tat of those guns, even though it's been thirty years. It's terrifying in its relentlessness, the way it burrows into your head (and remember I WASN'T EVEN IN HARM'S WAY). So I cannot imagine the ball-shrinking terror you'd feel if you were in the middle of such a nightmare.

If you want to protect your home, get a dog or security system. A security system costs about the same as a decent gun plus the cost of ammunition and the cost of time on the shooting range you'd need to maintain any level of gun proficiency (you gun humpers all do that, right?) Criminals don't want to break into YOUR house. They want to break into ANY house. A barking dog will send them on their way.

The Second Amendment sure as shit didn't contemplate weapons that fire bullets like lasers. You know it didn't. And in the end, even assuming it did guarantee an unfettered right to bear arms, even if it said, ALL THOSE WHOSE EYES CAST UPON THIS PARCHMENT CAN POSSESS ALL THE GUNS THEY WANT, so what? Aren't we better than that?

Aren't we civilized enough that we don't need to pay an almost daily blood sacrifice at the altar of the Second Amendment? Aren't we smart enough to recognize that these aren't your great-granddads' guns and adjust accordingly?

Don't people in the 21st century get to decide what the Constitution says? I mean, we let women vote now and we ended slavery, right? Back then kids died of typhus every day and today we've got two spacecraft that we built outside our solar system. THINGS ARE DIFFERENT is what I'm saying. For the love of Pokemon, if this guy had done this when the Second Amendment was first written, he'd still be trying to shove his second musket ball in for a second shot. But in 2017, you can shoot 600 people in 10 minutes. Stop pretending this doesn't matter or that the founders' original intent is largely irrelevant because of technology.

Why do gun-rights activists forget this part when someone says "hey maybe we need gun control," and they're all "POINT ME TO MY FAINTING COUCH WHERE ARE THE SMELLING SALTS?"

Every time you mention a possible regulation, something that might prevent people from being slaughtered in bunches (what kind of constitution-hating monster wants to stop mass murder RIGHT), the gun rights groups come at you with HEY TRUCK ATTACKS, HEY SHOULD WE BAN KNIVES - their arguments are so devoid of logic or common sense that it's befuddling. There are 300 million guns in this country. No one is coming for them - despite what the NRA wants you to believe. And the NRA - Christ, what a bunch of self-serving assholes. Here, read this opinion from a former Supreme Court justice and tell me the NRA is on the front lines protecting some ancient right, your supposed right as an individual to rise up against the tyrannical government.

And enough with the mental health treatment bait-and-switch. Let's put aside the fact that these same people are the ones who want to cut healthcare. But this guy in Vegas - no mental health history. No warning. He was a good guy with a gun until he wasn't. You cannot stop that. You can't stop a good person snapping, you cannot stop them if they decide to do this.

Call me a partisan, a pansy-ass liberal. A coward. But before you do that, close your eyes and picture that psychopath inside that classroom, pumping his .223-caliber bullets into those 6- and 7-year-old children, turning their precious little bodies into human rubble.

Picture that racist piece of shit murdering nine innocent people engaging in their faith or that wanna-be terrorist killing 49 people in a dance club or that other lunatic cutting down a dozen people while they watched a movie. Picture that young reporter running for her goddamn life as that psychopath chased her down and executed her. Picture thousands of people running for their lives in Las Vegas as a lunatic rained death down on them from a hotel room. And not to mention the invisible gun killings that happen every day of every year, victims of family disputes, domestic violence, toddlers, women, children, innocent bystanders, and so on.

Either way, it doesn't matter. So keep your guns, America, the rest of us just sit by and die while Republicans and their soulless NRA overlords dish out thoughts and prayers the way Mexican restaurants hand out chips and salsa. No one is ever coming for your stupid guns.

It's far more likely that someone ends your life with a gun.

Charlottesville

2017-08-14T00:01:00.002-04:00

I don't write this to change anyone's mind because, shit, we know that is not happening. I write it because I've felt sick to my stomach for days and Saturday's horrific white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, a place I love like few others on Earth, coupled with Trump's horrifically pathetic response (he might as well have patted his KKK and neo-Nazi buddies on the back, he might as well have put on a white hood), has pushed me over the edge and I don't know what else to do but put this into words. I am too angry and too heartbroken to hold back any longer.

When I think about my own family - I look white, but I am the son of Lebanese immigrants. Full-on Lebanese immigrants, as Arabic as they come. There are many like me, people you claim to be friends with, that you work with, that you claim to respect, that you live alongside. But when you stand up for Trump, or when you claim that both sides were in the wrong, you stand against me and my parents and all my relatives and anyone with skin that isn't lily white. When you talk to me, Trump supporters, when you look me in the eye, I can no longer help but wonder what's really going in there.

(Oh, and to my relatives who voted for Trump - really, LOL, in the words of the immortal Heather Chandler from the movie Heathers, did you have a brain tumor for breakfast? What the ever living fuck is wrong with you?)

So let's stop bullshitting. The President of the United States is, among many other really awful things, a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. That's why his response to the terrorist attack was so weak. He may be the president of the United States, but he is anathema to the only thing that matters about the United States. It's really that simple. And if you support him, well, boy howdy, have I got some bad news for you, that's what you are. Let's put a knife in the chest of the idea that the Confederate flag stands for anything but racism. When white supremacists carry the flag next to one bearing a swastika, it sounds pretty ridiculous and yet HERE WE ARE.

So when this is all over, assuming we live through it, nothing will define you in my eyes and the eyes of a majority of Americans more than where you stood on Donald Trump.

And history is not going to be kind to many of you. Nor should it be.

It won't matter how many kids you had, what your job was, how much you volunteered or where you went to church, whether we're related, whether grew up together, whether we broke bread together, whether we got drunk together.

Your support of Trump, a Nazi sympathizer, is disgusting and reprehensible and tells me everything I will ever need to know about you.

There is no a la carte option with Trump. You don't get to believe in the (nonsensical) fantasy that he will make America great again but simultaneously disavow the KKK and Nazism.

In for a penny, you are in for the whole goddamn racist and Nazi pound.

Here's the thing. Deep down, you know you will lose. Not today and maybe not for a while (again assuming we live through it). But someday. Someday. Someday you will be an absolute disgrace to your descendants, nothing but an embarrassed whisper at Thanksgiving.

Part of me hopes that every day a different Trump voter, somewhere in America, wakes up and thinks, "GOD WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I DONE?"

I've seen stories that the Democrats are asking for trouble by running solely on an anti-Trump platform. Why? Why is that? He is destroying us from the inside out. I would very happily support anyone who made destroying Trump's Presidency his or her sole platform. If my house was burning down, I wouldn't care about the candidate who promised to fix my cabinets.

I hope flying the flag of a pathetic and backwards "country" of traitors that got its ass kicked 150 years ago or buying into the idiotic and mind-blowingly stupid fantasy of a perfect white Christian America that has never even existed was worth it.

Lastly, go ahead and let me know if you're a Trump supporter - it will make my Christmas shopping easier.

I'll just send you a white sheet.

THE LIVING is here!

2017-05-17T10:07:00.002-04:00

Very excited to share that my new book, THE LIVING, is now available on Kindle. It's a sequel to THE IMMUNE, but I wrote it to stand alone, so you can start with either book.

Here's the book description:

Thirteen years have passed since the Medusa plague wiped out nearly 99 percent of the world’s population and pushed humanity to the brink of extinction.

Climate change triggered by nuclear skirmishes in the last fevered days of civilization decimated agriculture and livestock, and the hardened survivors battle for what few resources remain.

Rachel Fisher is one of the lucky ones. In her small community in Nebraska, she and her family have access to food, clean water, weapons, and medical care.

And her 11-year-old son Will is the only child known to have survived infancy since the plague.

But everything changes when someone comes looking for him.

Click here to go to the book's Amazon page.

Part I of The Immune is the Kindle Daily Deal

2016-01-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

For the second time, Amazon has selected UNRAVELING, the first installment of my IMMUNE series, as its Kindle Daily Deal for today only (January 25, 2016).

It's just Part I this time (as opposed to the Deal that included all four installments last spring).

If you haven't given it a shot, now would be a good time to check it out.

Most people seem to like it. Some don't. Your call. If you enjoy stories about the end of the world, you'll probably dig it.

If you read it, feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you thought of it.

If you like it, tell everyone.

If you don't TELL NO ONE IT'LL BE OUR SECRET.

The Immune Series is the Kindle Daily Deal!!

2015-05-18T17:06:00.002-04:00

I should've posted this earlier, but there's still time.

Amazon has made all four parts of The Immune series the Science Fiction/Fantasy Kindle Daily Deal today. That means you can all four parts for 99 cents each. Even cheaper than the Omnibus, which is normally $4.99.

Click here to go to the Daily Deal page.

ROAD TRIP! FIVE THINGS I LEARNED WHILE WRITING THE IMMUNE

2015-04-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

Today I'm over at Chuck Wendig's blog, Terrible Minds, with a guest posted titled "Five Things I Learned Writing The Immune."

Chuck is a terrific author whose star is on the rise. In addition to his excellent Miriam Black urban fantasy series (about to be re-released), he's the author of the upcoming official Star Wars novel, Aftermath, set immediately after the events of Return of the Jedi and due out in September.

So hop over for a little discussion about the writing craft/life and some background as to how The Immune came to be. And then buy Chuck's books!

Enjoy!

My New Novel! THE IMMUNE!

2014-12-22T19:04:00.000-05:00

And now for the big news about my new book, THE IMMUNE.

The novel, about a man looking for his daughter in the wake of a catastrophic global pandemic, is ready to roll out.

It's long, like Stephen-King-long, so I split the e-book version into 4 parts and gave each its own very cool cover.

Part I (Unraveling), Part II (Void), and Part III (Evergreen) are available now.

Citadel, the fourth and final installment, is up for pre-order now.

You can order the first three parts here for automatic delivery to your Kindle or Kindle app (download the free Kindle app to your phone or tablet and link it to your Amazon account.)

It's been a very long road for this book, and I'm very excited to finally send it into to the world.

Thanks to all of you for your support as I make my way through the publishing jungle. And please do feel free to share the link - I am not at all above begging.

The Slowpoke Variable

2014-12-15T14:57:00.002-05:00

A couple Sundays ago, my daughter had a friend over to play.

They were sitting on the floor near me, chatting and laughing and putting together rubber-band bracelets or bead necklaces or whatever it is schoolkids are excited about these days. I had a football game on and I was trying to bang out some words on the new manuscript.

And then I overheard my daughter drop this bombshell:

“People call me slowpoke, but I like to take my time.”

She might as well have ripped my still-beating heart out of my chest and showed it to me. It was the cutest and most devastating thing I have ever heard her say and probably will ever hear her say.

I have called her a slowpoke. My wife has. I’m sure her brother has.

But she doesn’t care. SHE DOES NOT SUFFER FOOLS AND OUR PESKY HUMAN IMPATIENCE.

She won’t be rushed. Whether it’s her homework sheets or a craft project or simple coloring, she does take her time to make sure it is done right.

She’s the baby of the family. She hits a lot of the stereotypical checkboxes for adorable little girls. When she gets tired, she grabs whatever’s in reach and sucks her thumb. And so sometimes I admit that it’s easy to forget what she’s becoming.

A bad-ass.

I know one thing. I won’t ever call her a slowpoke again.

LEST I INCUR HER SLOW, METHODICAL WRATH.

Print Version of The Jackpot Now Available!

2014-12-10T10:36:00.000-05:00

It only took three and a half years, but I'm excited to announce that a paperback version of The Jackpot is now available! The list price is $11.99, but I've seen that fluctuate downward a bit in the last few days (something I have no control over). Last I checked, it was $10.53.

Here's the link.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Jackpot-David-Kazzie/dp/0692340513/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1361972869&sr=8-1

It would make a fine Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Festivus receptacle stuffer.

A Brief History of My New Book

2014-12-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I was watching an episode of a now-cancelled television show in which the villain, who was trying to unleash a biological weapon that would have decimated humanity, was stopped at the zero hour. Good guys win, bad guys lose, see you next week.

I've made no secret of my undying love for novels of the apocalypse. I love reading about the breakdown of society, following ordinary characters living through such extraordinary circumstances, and watching how they deal with the brave new world of the day after. I had long toyed with the idea of writing a post-apocalyptic novel of my own, but for years, the setting was all I had. And it's not enough to only have a world wiped out by plague. That's a setting, a backdrop. You still need a story. A loaf of bread for your main character to trek to the store for. Otherwise, the characters are just wandering around eating canned goods.

But back to that television show. I started asking myself, well, what if the villain had gotten away with it? What if the bioweapon had gotten loose, and there was no way to stop it? I had this vague image of the architect of this disaster nervously waiting to find out if his bioweapon had been successfully released. He's sitting at a bar, drinking too much booze, his heart racing, certain that any moment, the feds will bust in, arrest him and haul him off to prison. I didn't know much about him. I didn't know why he was doing this. But I couldn't shake the image.

And I had the beginnings of the story. Eventually, I fleshed out the full storyline, or at least the early prototype, and I began work on it in June 2011. I worked on it for four months, wrote about 115 pages, and then stopped. This was one of the dumbest things I have ever done. I didn't stop writing totally, but I decided that this book wasn't marketable enough, and I wrote another book instead. That book, which I finished in April 2012, sucked, and I finally put it out of its misery later that summer when I realized it would need a complete re-write. As in throw out 350 pages and start over. That's how bad it was. Key takeaway: Never stop working on a book you love.

I flailed around a bit, and in November 2012, I went back to my unfinished novel of the apocalypse. Abandoning it had felt like the biggest mistake of my writing career. So I spent the next six months writing my big, sprawling tale about the end of the world, not caring a whit about agents, editors, publishers, contracts, or the like. I loved writing it. Every day was a joy. There were obstacles, of course, as no book of that scope goes off without a hitch. But by April 2013, the first draft was done. It weighed in at 180,000 words - double the length of any book I had ever written.

The book went out on submission in February 2014. Well, I wish I could tell you that there was a happy traditional publishing end to this story where the book sold for seven figures and in a dozen countries, but there wasn't. I was hopeful, but in the end, none of the publishers have come calling. That's been a hard thing to deal with, but I've made my peace with it. Because we live in a world now where the book still has a chance.

So as it looks like we have exhausted all the traditional publishing outlets, I'm going to be self-publishing it. I'm very, very proud of this book. Although the final version of a book never matches the author's original vision (which always is perfect), I can say that this is as close as I could have hoped to come.

I hope you will stick around as I bring you THE IMMUNE, one way or the other....

30-Day Running Challenge - Update #3

2014-11-28T22:53:00.001-05:00

28 days down. 81.5 miles.

And now I'm fighting a pretty nice little respiratory infection. It started as a sore throat on Thanksgiving Day, which is my favorite holiday, SO THANKS FOR THAT UNIVERSE. Now I have a little congestion and stuffiness. I put in two miles today, and I doubt I will do much more than that tomorrow or Sunday.

The worst day of the month was the day before Thanksgiving - temps in the low 40s, and it was pouring down rain. But I got through it.

I'm debating continuing my streak through December, when I'll have a similar schedule that made it relatively easy to get through November. Runner's World is sponsoring a run streak starting on Thanksgiving Day and going through New Year's Day.

I haven't lost any weight but there's no doubt I'm a bit leaner. I like that. I feel pretty good too.

Now back to the abomination of the Virginia-Virginia Tech football game.

30-Day Running Challenge - Update #2

2014-11-20T14:47:00.001-05:00

Still at it.

At lunch today, I ran 3.5 miles to get me through my 20th straight day of running.

This has been the toughest week yet due to the ridiculously cold November weather that we've been enjoying.

My November 19 run was 1.08 miles, just enough to qualify as a run and keep the streak alive. When I headed out the door that morning, the temperature was 15 degrees. Easily the coldest weather I have ever run in.

I was layered up pretty good, but my exposed skin, namely my face, took a beating. I thought about pushing it to two miles, but after a mile, my lungs hurt and my face burned.

No physical issues. My legs feel pretty good, and I haven't developed any lingering pain from overuse.

I've even started to see a couple pounds come off.

THANKSGIVING DINNER I AM COMING FOR YOU.

30-Day Running Challenge - Update

2014-11-10T17:00:00.000-05:00

For those keeping score, I've now completed one-third of my November running challenge.

I've run every day for the last ten days for a total of 30.1 miles.

It hasn't been terribly difficult, and I really haven't experienced any pain or fatigue issues. I've been pretty good about keeping my pace steady and easy. Yesterday (Sunday, November 9) was the hardest day but that was because I stayed up way too late Saturday, um, sampling, uh, our region's finest craft beers. Yeah, that didn't end well.

The best thing about this project so far is that it's made getting my workout in automatic. I don't think about it or look for ways to get out of it. I just get dressed and go. And the deeper I get into the month, the less likely I will be (I HOPE!!) to bail. If I miss one day, that's it, it will feel like it was all for nothing.

The worst thing so far is that I haven't lost any weight. I've been pretty good about my calorie intake, and I think I feel a bit leaner, but the scale really hasn't budged.

STUPID SCALE WHAT DOES IT KNOW ANYWAY.

I'll be back with another report on November 20.

30-Day Running Challenge

2014-11-03T13:56:00.000-05:00

Running is my primary form of exercise, but it can get a little boring from time to time. I didn't have time to train for the upcoming Richmond Half-Marathon, which I've run twice before, but with colder weather setting in, I need something to keep me going with my fitness plan.

So as I debated this dilemma this past Saturday, November 1, it occurred to me that I could shoot to run every day this month. It actually works out pretty nicely on the calendar - we have 10 weekend days in November, and I'll have four additional days off from work due to various holidays. I work from home a couple days a week, which makes it easy to squeeze in a lunchtime run on those days. So that will leave me with only 9 days that I will be in the office this month, which will be the trickiest days to navigate.

I've done this once before, back in 2008, when I ran every day in January. I logged about 90 miles that month, by far the most I've ever run in a month. I averaged about 2.7 miles per day. I experienced some knee pain down the stretch, but that seemed to resolve itself before the month was out. In reviewing my running diary that I kept, I see that I started to come down with a cold, around January 20, but that, too, seemed to go away on its own without affecting my streak.

There are three big differences between this attempt (now three days in) and my 2008 challenge.

1. Last time, I did all of my running on a treadmill. We don't have a treadmill anymore. I'll be curious to see how my body responds to running outside without a break.

2. Thanks to completing P90X in 2010, I've lost a fair amount of weight since 2008, weight that I've mostly managed to keep off. I'm hoping this will make things a little easier on me.

3. I'm almost seven years older than I was in January 2008. That blows my mind a little. But I'm a much stronger runner than I was then, so I'm hopeful that the age difference won't have any impact.

I'm now three days into November, and so far, so good. I've averaged about 3.3 miles per day (and plan to go a little shorter on those days I'm in the office). Since I will get no recovery days, keeping my legs fresh will be extremely important. To that end, I've dialed back my pace - I normally run an 8:45 to 9-minute mile. This month, I'm planning to run much slower, around 9:15 to 9:30/mile, even slower if I need to.

I'd like to break 100 miles for the month, but that might be a shade out of reach. Because of Thanksgiving, I'll be off work from November 26-30, so I'll see how far away I am from the century mark with five days to go (assuming I make it that far).

Running every day without a break is a popular activity in certain running circles, and having done this challenge once, I can see why. According to most of what I've read, you need to log at least one mile for the streak to stay alive - so that will be my measure as well.

ALSO NOVEMBER IS A BIG EATING AND DRINKING MONTH AND I HAD BETTER BE MOVING MY ASS A LOT.

OK, so that's my challenge.

Any long running streaks out there?

James River Writers Conference 2014

2014-10-19T20:57:00.001-04:00

We just wrapped up this year's annual James River Writers Conference, the signature event for the James River Writers. It was a terrific event this year, and included a very high caliber of speakers, including my own agent, Ann Rittenberg, Hugh Howey, Jane Friedman, the Book Doctors (Arielle Eckstut and David Sterry) and a number of other authors, agents, and editors.

It was a fantastic weekend with a lot of excitement, not the least of which was meeting Ann for the first time in person. I also got to spend time with Hugh AND LOOK AT ME NAME DROP WITH THESE FANCY AGENTS AND EDITORS.

HAHAHA seriously - spending a weekend with these kinds of people is a master class in publishing. I learned all kinds of fascinating industry information from Ann, and I loved hearing about Hugh's experiences the last couple years.

It goes without saying that Hugh is one of the most well-known and controversial figures in publishing today. You don't have to agree with everything Hugh says, and he'd be the first to tell you to do your own research, to do your own study of the business.

But I say this, and I mean it, and you should really listen to me ... You ignore or underestimate Hugh at your own peril. He's smarter than me. He's probably smarter than you. He's thinking of things that the big publishing houses are not (or simply won't). That's not to say he'll be right on everything or that all his ideas or predictions will pan out. But I'm willing to bet that most will.

And here's the thing. It sort of goes back to something I wrote back in February, in a post called Why Hugh Howey is Wrong - Sort Of. My main point then was that self-publishing had become a legitimate way to fail.

The truth is that very, very few authors will ever be offered a traditional deal (me included). Self-publishing may well be the only option the vast majority of authors ever have. So we shouldn't be looking at this as a traditional vs. self-publishing argument. We should be looking at it this way - look at what's possible now.

As for me - I'm more motivated than ever to get back to writing, whatever the future may hold.

R.I.P. Copper (2000-2014)

2014-07-25T13:30:00.000-04:00

Our dog Copper died today. She was 14.

I wrote her this letter.

Dear Copper,

In 2000, which, when I was a kid, seemed like the distant future but now seems like ancient history, I decided to adopt a dog. I’d never had a pet before. My soon-to-be-mediocre career as a lawyer was underway, I was in a relationship that looked like it would go the distance, and it seemed like as good a time as any to get a dog.

So that August, Jennie and I visited a bunch of shelters before landing at the Richmond Animal League, a no-kill shelter just south of the James River. "No-kill shelters" are favored by five out of five dogs surveyed! The staff had just brought in a litter of cute 4-month-old pups - you and your three brothers. They'd named you Silhouette, due to your jet black coloring. You'd been abandoned in a baseball field and you were all sick with parvovirus (sadly, one of your brothers didn't survive). You were a mix of some kind, mostly lab, maybe a little chow and hound in there. Little did we know that you were also a nuclear reactor meltdown in canine form.

From the beginning, we knew you were the one. After the adoption was squared away, we took you home, re-named you Copper, and OH MY GOD PUPPIES ARE AN ADORABLE PAIN IN THE ASS. I won’t sit here and say everything was hunky-dory from the get-go. Because it was not. When you’ve never done it before, having a puppy kind of sucks. Housetraining a puppy sucks. You don’t realize that having your home soaked in urine for a month is pretty much par for the course. You don’t realize that a puppy will whimper all night and bark explosively at something that happened yesterday.

And this was my failing. Not yours. You did what dogs do. I, on the other hand, was a total coward. In fact, one day a couple of weeks after we got you, I even drove you back to the shelter with every intention of returning you. We were standing there in the reception area, and I think the staff even knew why I was there, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. Instead, I made up some reason why I had come back with pup in tow, and we went back home. I still feel so, so guilty for that, and I'm so very sorry.

But eventually I got my shit together. I think. And we got through the hard stuff. Well I did. You just continued being a dog. By your first birthday in April 2001, we were rolling along. There was a dog park a few blocks from my apartment that we went to most evenings after work, which you loved. Always a dozen or more dogs in a (mostly) friendly battle royale. I still remember the closure of that park – that summer, a big sign went up at the gate that read THIS PARK WILL CLOSE 9/1/2001. Given what happened ten days later, the sign still haunts me.

At night, you'd plop down on the floor of the bedroom, but by morning, without fail, I found you curled up at my feet. You once ate and digested a tennis ball cover. You ate a bunch of rat poison and survived (that one required some medical intervention). You chewed up a pen and pooped blue for two days. In November 2002, you developed a bladder infection (a chronic problem that we ultimately solved with a diet change) and peed blood on the carpet about 2 feet from from Jennie’s wedding dress (which admittedly was bagged and hanging off the floor, but still). You hated to play fetch or quite frankly chase anything unless it was alive (your snatching a bird out of the air in mid-flight remains one of the most amazing things I've ever seen), but you loved to go running with me.

I remember once, we were out running at dusk, headed down a street near our apartment building. Up ahead, I could see a man standing there, silhouetted in the gloom. I didn’t think too much of it, but when we got within about half a block, you stopped dead. You weren't a huge dog, but I couldn’t get you to budge an inch, and your fur bristled. You were staring right at this guy, who I still couldn’t quite make out. Finally, I gave up and turned back; immediately, you released and followed me the other way. I think about that moment from time to time. What you were protecting me from, I’ll never know. Probably nothing, but I'll be telling the kids that you saved me from an ax murderer.

Life went on – Jennie and I got married and bought a house with a huge fenced-in yard. When you were five, our son was born, and you happily accepted the change in the pecking order. When you were eight, our daughter came along, and you welcomed her as well. Later that fall, you tore your ACL and meniscus, and Jesus knee surgery for dogs is expensive. But we made it through that too, and by spring, you’d never have known that you’d blown out your knee.

You were there for everything important in our family's life. Marriage, babies, our first house, our second house, employment drama, first steps, first words, first day of school, lost teeth, our third house, book writing, job promotions, sickness, health, the Sopranos, Chinese food delivery. You were the best alarm system I've ever had - if a stranger got within 20 feet of our house, the whole neighborhood would know it. You loved table food and treats and especially when I held the remnants of a t-bone steak and let you chew off the bone. You loved running in the backyard and having your ears scratched and using our furniture as a napkin. And woe to the plate of food left unattended on the coffee table.

You only got lost once, very briefly. Jennie was 8 months pregnant with baby #2, and I was out of town at a conference. A couple days earlier, a workman had come to mark utility lines in our yard and left the gate open. That Saturday morning, you finally found her way to that side of the yard and Jennie only realized it when you never came back inside. So there’s your pregnant momma, in her PJs, scrambling to get our toddler out the door, me in D.C., when the phone rings. All was well. You had made friends with a family about a mile away who found our number on your collar, and you were home less than an hour after disappearing.

In 2010, you hit double digits. That fall, you injured your other knee, and we decided against another operation. It seemed to be the right call, because within a few weeks, you were walking normally again. You weren't quite as active as you used to be, and a bit of white had started to take hold around your snout, but you still looked and acted far younger than your years.

The years rolled by, and you never seemed to age, even as you hit 11 then 12 then 13 years old. Our life got busier and crazier…. but in January 2014, something changed.

We noticed you hadn’t eaten for a couple days. That was followed by a couple days of … let’s call it stomach issues. We tried our best - medications, new foods, more medications, more new foods, but your appetite never returned, and your bathroom trips became wildly unpredictable. You grew weaker through the spring and summer as your weight dwindled from a peak of about 55 pounds, until physically, you were a shadow of your former self. You began sleeping downstairs all the time after a scary fall down the stairs. You couldn’t hear the doorbell anymore, which was nothing short of astonishing. I still tense up when I hear a doorbell, even if we’re at someone else’s house. But you always seemed happy, always in the mood for a treat here and there. You turned 14 in April, an age that I think any decent-sized dog would be proud of.

But by the end of July, walking was becoming a struggle and your stomach was a mess. Despite all the medications, including our last-ditch effort, an appetite stimulant that didn't work, you just weren't eating nearly enough, and you were wasting away. You didn’t seem happy anymore.

It was time. After consulting with your vet, who cared for you for nearly your whole life, I made the appointment. The whole family went because they wanted to be with you as long as they could. We made a special stop and fed you two hamburgers and a doughnut. You didn't tremble at all during the ride there, like you always did, and that told me you were ready.

You didn’t fight or struggle because I think there was no fight left in you. You'd given us all you had. It was over quickly.

And I know we made the right call. You were thin, paper thin. You were deaf, and your once-bright eyes were clouded with cataracts. There was no pep in your step. There were barely any steps. I don’t know when you passed the point of no return, but the important thing was that you had passed it. Everything that made you you was gone.

But the house seems empty without you. Quieter, even though you hadn't made a sound in months. Your leash hangs by the door, where it will remain.

I have never been the world’s most patient person. I fly off the handle at stupid things, and I worry about things no rational person would. I’ve always known that, so I won’t claim some brightly lit revelation about that in the wake of your passing.

But in looking back at your joy-filled life, which you gave to us unconditionally, I would be stupid not to at least try and live as you did, if not all the time, then at least a little bit.

So farewell, sweet girl. Wherever you are now, the place is richer for it.

And this world is darker without you in it.

Inside a Writer's Head

2014-06-11T20:28:00.001-04:00

Ooh, I have an idea. Where are the Post-It Notes? Fuck it. I’ll remember it. Dammit. I already forgot it.

This laptop is so slow. Can I buy a new one? I’ve had this one for eight months. I can write it off. It’s like 50 percent writing, 50 percent RedTube. So I can write off half, I guess. Do I even owe taxes? I made thirty-eight dollars from writing last year. I’m not reporting it.

I’ll check my e-mail. Maybe someone made an offer on the book. I better call my agent. It’s been two weeks since we talked. That’s a good non-stalkery time to wait. Saying “my agent” is weird. It sounds uppity. I find myself saying, “the woman who submits my work to publishers.” Really rolls off the tongue.

I should do some outlining. Why bother. Writing sucks. The Onion makes fun of writers a lot. I can’t remember the last book I read. I should just pants it. That’s what geniuses do. I should've gone to law school. Wait. I did go to law school. I SHOULDN'T have gone to law school.

I have a funny observation. I’ll post it to Facebook. I got 21 Likes for that Facebook joke! I’m good at Facebook. Please kill me.

I’ve seen this episode of Beachfront Bargains. Twice. So much for making a Best Writer Under Forty list. It’s not me, it’s the editors. Hahaha. Seriously, it’s probably me. Or my book. It’s trite. It’s tired. It’s clichéd. I’m terrible. How did my agent even like this? Maybe she didn’t read it. Are my beta readers brain damaged? Why did I write a 620-page book?

Lunchtime. Tuna fish is healthy. But this cheeseburger is delicious.

My characters don’t talk to me. How did this even become a thing? I don’t cry when I kill a character. They’re not real. Maybe I’m a sociopath. More likely a shitty writer whose characters have no life.

I’m so happy about the foreign deal. Did the publisher read it? They probably didn’t even read it. If they read it, they wouldn’t have bought it. I love my foreign publisher. They're the best.

Good thing I self-published it. Should I self-publish again? I should probably self-publish again. I should never self-publish again. You can wait longer. Don’t be stupid. No one cares where the book comes from. Well some people do. Fuck them. You could be sitting on a gold mine. You could be sitting on a time bomb.

That was a good song.

Can I mention the name of a song in this book? A guy kills another guy for the lyrics to a song. That’s a good idea for a book. Wait. It’s probably been done. I’m too dumb to craft a mystery novel. All the clues.

First plot point. Goes right here.

I’m on page fifty of this book. The one about the murderous singer sounds better. That guy in Star Wars keeps yelling “stay on target.” I should stay on target.

This book is horrible.

Game of Thrones is on.

Mailing List

2014-04-08T23:19:00.001-04:00

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