Blogjacker: Anthony Neil Smith

Last Stop: Gischler’s Blogpocalypse

It’s the trip through Missouri that gets to you–cheaper gas and long stretches of prairies interrupted by billboards advertising more adult bookstores than anywhere else I’ve ever seen. 

But once past that, we head into Omaha to find Sean Doolittle carrying his laptop (he’s got a deadline to meet), a Tom Waits CD, and wearing pitch-dark sunglasses.  Golf clubs are slung on his back like too many samurai swords.  At his feet, a whole cooler full of Fat Tire beer.

Doolittle is the professional.  I mean, he’s the guy who takes his time, crafts each draft immaculately in his head before getting it on the page.  Each book gets sharper, clearer, like morphing from a damned good color TV into a big-ass High-Def Plasma.  He’s also willing to take risks–if the book demands to go in a particular direction, Doolittle trusts that the characters know what they’re doing, even when they’re screwing it all up.  Go back and take a look at Dirt and Burn.  Compare those to Rain Dogs and (my favorite) The Cleanup.  You see?  He’s like a documentary filmmaker, most interested in letting these characters spill their own stories in their own way.  Same thing goes for Safer coming next year.  The characters in that one could be living right next door to you.  Hell, they could be you.

Maybe it’s hanging around Doolittle on the links and at backwoods catfish restaurants that rubbed off on me, but I think that if you enjoy taking trips to visit the people Sean thought up, you’d also be up for spending a weekend or so with Billy Lafitte from Yellow Medicine.  I mean, for a bad cop he’s not a bad guy, really.  Just a negligent and regretful father, a self-loathing prick, and a consummate manipulator, but if you’re on his good side he’s going to fight for you, no questions asked.  And he fights dirty, so you’ll win.  But at what cost?  If you think it’s worth finding out, give it a shot on May 12 from Barnes & Noble (if you can’t make it to those cool awesome indie shops, I mean)

As Doolittle adds his clubs to the bed of Big Red and climbs into the backseat, we all realize we might have to dump the truck and rent a Hummer.  But that can wait until morning.  Right now, we’ve got to find a cheap motel when the last of us is too tired to drive anymore.  Tomorrow, we’re going all the way to Philly first to pick up the near-legendary pulp-hack comic book genius Duane Swierczynski.

Driving Time: Google Maps says about 19 hours…but they’re never right.

Tune for this leg: “Rain Dogs” by Tom Waits.

A couple weeks ago, for family movie night, I rented, on various recommendations, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It turns out that this film is packed to the rafters with weirdness and wonderment. I’ll be honest:  some of the imagery and some of the action was unsettling enough at first that my wife and I both wondered if I’d gotten us in over our heads. But I find that two weeks later I’m still caught up in the adventures of Chihiro and Haku and pals.

My advice to other parents:  if your kids are almost seven and almost three and have not been raised on an anime diet, they may be frightened on first viewing (my son didn’t respond well to the Stink Spirit sequence; my daughter was disturbed and agitated by the boy-in-dragon-form-is-mortally-injured scenes; your mileage may vary). In fact, I worried at times about the possibility of nightmares and/or permanent trauma. But they slept like an almost-seven and almost-three year-old, and in the morning, they both wanted to watch it again.

Look here, crime fans:  Plots With Guns is back in black and badder than ever.

Our wires report that the first issue of the much anticipated re-launch of this seminal online crime fiction journal is now open for business, featuring short fiction from Greg Bardsley, Stephen Blackmoore, Tim Maleeny, Kieran Shea, Matthew Louis, William Boyle, Jeremiah Granden, and Justin Porter, all brought to you under the steely-eyed stewardship of editor Anthony Neil Smith. Check it out.

Until nine days ago, my home state of Nebraska retained the distinction of being the last state in the union to offer the electric chair as its only method of capital punishment. Some Nebraskans considered this a dubious distinction, and some considered it a point of pride.

While I’m not necessarily interested in joining the argument, I’m reminded of an  experience I had in college. This was in 1994, the night the State of Nebraska electrocuted Harold Lamont “Walkin’ Wili” Otey. Otey’s was the first such event since Charles Starkweather’s execution in 1959, and the unexpected turnout–a strange hybrid of protest and carnival–led state officials to conclude that midnight executions, all in all, were probably a bad idea.

 Anyway, I was there. A few days later, I wrote a short story about it. This story was published a couple years later in Issue #1 of a small horror magazine edited by Paula Guran. For reasons of both craft and perspective it’s a bit painful to look back on this story now, as looking at early work so often is.

But just for nostalgia, I’ll do something I generally don’t do and pull this old manuscript into the Internet age. So if, for whatever reason, you’re interested in the earnest, slightly pretentious, ethically uncertain writings of a college English major still searching for his voice as a writer, here you are:

 die.pdf

I must have tinkered with this at some point, because the manuscript appears to differ slightly from the published version. Beyond that, two things jump out at me now:

There’s a narrative technique in here that I ended up using, in slightly variant form, in my upcoming novel, Safer (now scheduled for Winter ‘09). Though when I wrote this book, I wasn’t consciously aware of having used the technique before.

Also in Safer, I decided to use a quote from an old psychology textbook that I’ve had on my bulletin board for years. I thought, “It’s about time I used this somewhere.” And it seemed to fit the purpose at hand. 

Lo and behold, looking at this short story nearly 14 years after writing it, I discover that I did use this quote before. . .

. . .confirming what I’ve grown to believe as a writer, which is that I don’t always know as much about what I’m doing as I think I do. 

Before someone demands an obviously justified recount, my most humble thanks go to Sandra Ruttan, Spinetingler magazine, and all the folks who voted The Cleanup to the center podium in the 2007 Spinetingler Awards.

Congrats and red red wine to friends/heroes Laura Lippman and Al Guthrie (who won twice), banquet buddy Stacia Decker, Crimespace czar Daniel Hatadi, Bitter Lemon Press for best publisher, and Chris F. Holm for best short story on the Web.  

Over the weekend my wife and I finally got a chance to check out Film Streams, Omaha’s great new art house downtown, where we saw The Savages, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, co-produced by Omaha favorite-son Alexander Payne. Now, in some ways, this film is typical of its type (type = purposefully drab-looking indie feature in which over-educated, depressed people confront their drab-looking lives). A part of me was in the mood to go see Cloverfield instead. But we both loved this movie. Jenkins tells a specific story with grace, genuine humor, and poignancy, and if you told me there were better film actors than Laura  Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, I would call you a liar. But I’m not a professional film critic.

Celebrations begin here:

Ah, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was working on the edits to my second book, Burn, when then-editor Jim Pascoe of the late, lamented UglyTown sent me the original ”Trogdor the Burninator” episode for inspiration. How I clung to that little wing-a-ling dragon.  Was that really five years ago?

Well. Congrats to Strong Bad and The Cheat and all the gang. I’d do it all over again.

Somebody told me it was 2008 already. How did that happen?

Well. It’s been awhile. What’s the news?

Nothing much. You all heard about our shooter. Flags flew at half-mast here at seandoolittle.com.

There were holidays. Edits on the new book, Safer, are now finished, turned in, and anxiously awaiting a blessing.

The final season of The Wire started up a couple of weeks ago. I’m distracting myself from waiting for each new episode by working on a short story. Soon, a new novel. In the meantime. . .

. . .I wish State Farm had The Pips.

Looking for a hard-burning shot of back alley egg nog? Try the December issue of Thuglit. This month features short fiction from Scott Wolven, Jonas Knutsson, Brian Haycock, John Schulian, and Ellen Neuborne, along with a humble Hallmark moment from yours truly. Happy Seasonings. . . .

When I fly, I like to leave enough time to stop by the Waterstone’s bookstore at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield and say hello to Jim Ross, manager of the location. Jim’s a personable devil and it’s always nice to chat.

On the relatively long list of people you wouldn’t expect to run into at the Waterstone’s bookstore at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, American satirist Christopher Buckley might be somewhere near the top.

Yet that’s exactly who happened to be browsing the shelves one afternoon several weeks ago, when I stopped by the store on my way out of town. Mr. Buckley had been in Omaha speaking to a group and was killing some time, waiting for his own flight out of town. Years earlier, on a plane somewhere else, I’d read his novel Thank You for Smoking and enjoyed it very much. I thought the film adaptation was pretty good, too.

Anyway, Jim was nice enough to introduce us. Buckley was nice enough to buy a copy of The Cleanup, which I signed for him. I was nice enough to buy a copy of Buckley’s latest novel, Boomsday. . .except that Jim happened to be freshly sold out at the time.

I attended to the matter upon returning home and have now finished reading Boomsday, which involves an ambitious, indignant young blogger named Cassandra Devine. In the novel, Cassandra proposes a tax credit for baby boomers who voluntarily off themselves before reaching retirement age (thereby helping to allay the projected collapse of the US social security system). Hilarity and catastrophe ensue.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. If you like your novels smart, very funny, completely preposterous, and yet alarmingly plausible, I highly recommend Boomsday.

Ironically, due to a mixup at the cash register, I somehow left Waterstone’s owing Christopher Buckley, a baby boomer, 57 cents.

I’m not going to worry about it.