Attention, citizens of Faribault! (Faribaultians?)
I made the realization that, though I consider myself from Faribault and have set most of my stories in or around Faribault, I’ve never actually had a release party for one of my books down there.
Let’s change that!
If you or someone you know owns a business and wants to have a little par-tay, please reach out to me!
My new book, Cold World, comes out on June 2nd, 2022; I’m looking to do something on that day (which is a Thursday), or within that week.
I generally plan my release parties to run two-to-three hours, in the evening, which tends to be plenty of time to chat and share my work. All I really need is a roof over my head and a table; I’ve been doing conventions for years, so I’m pretty self-reliant, and I usually bring treats for everyone!
So: let me know in the comments or send me a message! Let’s set something up!
If you’re one of those people who are itching for an update on my publishing schedule (that’s right, I don’t just raise money to publish books, I also sometimes actually publish them), you’re in luck: I hit a major milestone tonight.
I’m finishing up the last “cel page” of Brushfire; without explaining that specific term, this book has been a very labor-intensive process, which had me basically inventing a new way to assemble it that hadn’t existed to me before.
Simply: I have drawn all of Brushfire.
If you slapped on the words from my script, you could read the whole dang story. That phase, along with a few other (much smaller, far gentler) touches, is all that’s left before I can start the printing process.
Speaking of: my birthday is May 1st, and my goal is to have Cold World locked by that date and put into print for my friends getting the special edition. (Fun fact: you can pre-order the ebook on Amazon right now!)
All this to say: if you run into me over the next six weeks or so and I appear to be off, I am, and this is why.
If you’re wondering why I decided to release these so close together, we don’t have time to go over all that, but one of the main reasons is that I really want to enjoy my summer. Actually take a break from the creative working process and live a little.
And these two stories would not have let me do that if they stayed in my echo chamber mind.
Which is why I’ve spent so many hours on this couch and at the table getting them out.
So, not time to fully celebrate, but this is a big victory for my anxiety in general.
If I live as long as my mom did, I already hit middle age at 29.
I think about hills. What it’s like to get to the top of one and then roll, fantastically, without fear, down the other side.
It’s what I should be doing. Hands up in the air, wild-eyed, breathless, focused only on the descent and the accelerating rise of the horizon around me.
But I feel new.
I feel like I’m putting on my shoes and looking up the side of a mountain with its peak obscured by the moon.
I’ve said before that time is a solid state, but it takes a shape no one can name. It’s not a ruler and it’s not ruled; we can pretend that seconds are concrete and objective but moments don’t last the same for everybody.
Me having a mid-life crisis at 29 makes sense, looking at it with these elderly eyes.
These are my favorite kind of words, the bolts of lightning that strike when nobody else is awake and the nighttime sky shares its darkness with the storm clouds, competing over who is more emo.
It’s me. I am more emo.
I got better before my mom said good bye but I wish I would have gotten better much sooner. I wish the amount of memories I have stained with guilt and wine was less.
During the intermission they whisper, “I hope the second act is better,” and so far I think it has been. The second act is what people tend to remember, anyway.
How it ended. What was resolved. What wasn’t. And if it left the audience wanting more.
As disclaimers go, this is a weird one: representation matters. I believe that to my core. I want to make that clear before I start.
So what kind of something am I starting?
I guess we’ll see.
When we’re kids, we are generally taught the difference between real and fake.
The news is real. The movie is fake.
I want to address the “controversy” over the film CODA, and use that as a bridge to talk about storytelling as a whole.
I am a Child of a Deaf Adult, the titular CODA of the film. I have absolutely no problem with a person who is not a CODA in real life portraying one in a movie, which is fake.
I have also been an actor. For example, I once played a World War II soldier, despite having never been to war myself.
That is acting. It is pretending. It is representation through empathy. It is an example of understanding.
I’ll repeat it: representation matters. But I also believe that people need to remember the difference between what is real and what is fake.
Is there a line for who an actor can represent? Sure. I think that’s decided on a case-by-case basis.
But to demand that a person actually has to be the kind of person they are representing through the art of acting suggests that acting is not a skill at all, and that authenticity is decided at birth.
I don’t buy that.
I see writers who say they’re uncomfortable writing from a point of view that is not their own. Because it’s not “authentic.”
Whereas I feel like I have the authority to write as any human being, because I’m a human being, as well.
Hell, I write from animals’ points of view because I’m that, too.
You don’t want to read a book with a cast of all straight white dudes. I don’t want to write that book. That book more likely than not has nothing new to say about the human experience. That book smells like cheap, toxic body spray and has the shortest temper you’ve ever seen.
I guess I’m put off that some of us decided that fake was real and that art is not a skill.
Third time’s a charm: representation matters. I think that anyone who want to use their voice or face or hands to give to this world should be embraced for their gifts.
But as much as they’re gifts, they are skills.
And I think any attempt we take to understand somebody who isn’t like us, and to go as far as to literally try to walk in their shoes, is as authentically human as we can possibly be.
A few years ago I did an escape room on my birthday. It was designed to look like the interior of a spaceship. I looked up photos of the room online and spent weeks getting excited for it.
When we arrived and my group finally got inside, the room was tiny. I was crushed, in several ways. It wasn’t a spaceship at all. It was a closet with a few buttons and a video screen.
It wasn’t until we solved a handful of clues that a secret door opened; through that doorway we walked, onto the huge deck of a beautiful, blinking starship.
And that’s what growing is like.
As soon as I think I have my shit together, and the tiny room in which I’m standing can’t take me growing any more, a door I didn’t see or just forgot about opens, and it reveals an adjacent, gigantic room in which I have so much more work to do.
I spent an evening this weekend with people like me and I felt a lot of feelings; the feeling I felt the most wasn’t how far I’ve come, but how far I have to go.
Not just forward, but back, too.
I can’t explain some of the stupid, hurtful things I’ve said and done. That’s work I’m always trying to do. I try to do that work in the present, and I’m learning that some of it has to be done in my past.
There’s a saying about people in active addiction; it’s like being kicked to death by rabbits.
That phrase describes so many parts of my life. The things that weigh on me, that jump on me, that give me overwhelming anxiety, they’re all rabbits, taking their time in taking me down.
And my work is finding way to tame and take care of them.
If you’re finding yourself in a big room with so much work to do, even though you’ve done a ton of work already, I’m looking around that room in awe with you.
It’s terrifying.
But I’m picking up the tools I have, borrowing the ones I don’t, and lending any I can spare to get that work done.
Over a dazzling array of a dozen varieties of Desert Fire hot sauce, Steven Starks Jr. and Dennis Vogen have an artist-on-artist chat about what inspired them to create, what makes them tick now, and what they’re doing next.
Steven is known for his musical career, playing with bands like Aeous and 3 Pill Morning, and his YouTube series My Dad Plays.
Dennis is a Minnesota-based writer and artist who is releasing his eighth and ninth books — Cold World and Brushfire, respectively — this summer.
(Check out this sweet conversation I had with one of my favorite people ever, Hot Ones-style!)
Okay, this is the post where I get all mushy, and then it’s back on the sarcasm train, full speed ahead.
I give up a lot.
“But,” you interject, “you’ve made so many things! A person who gives up would not have so much to show for it!”
It’s a lot of tiny give-ups.
Every day.
I get inspired, something tells me that idea is stupid, I give up. I get excited, I tell myself that idea is terrible, I give up. I get motivated, something gets hard, I give up.
Over and over and over again.
An infinite series of quantum give-ups.
Throughout my life, however, frequently from the most unexpected places, sparks from the universe burst and ignite and bring me back to life.
Those sparks range from a friend picking me up and gently pushing on my back when I forget how to walk; to having a conversation with someone who just finished a book I wrote almost ten years ago, and wanting to talk about it like it was born yesterday, full of ideas and questions and ways of thinking about it that I never even had before; to random encounters in the entirety of my life where somebody says something nice to me about something I had done, no matter how small; to meeting a person at a convention or getting a message from someone who just gets it; to having a mom who was my biggest fan and helped shape the way I not only want to see the world, but how I want to exist in it.
In short, those sparks are you.
And, sure, the dollars we raised are essential in getting this work out into the world. But it’s the sparks I get from the support and the shares and the words and the anticipation that actually get me up in the morning and remind me that I have work to do, and it might not be world-changing, but it is person-changing, and that is important.
So thank you for being my sparks. Thank you for not being perfect humans, but for being kind ones who are doing the best they can.
All my love today, and every day, until the last pixel of light goes out.
There are only hours left of my Kickstarter, so if you were wanting one of the exclusive editions of my new books Cold World or Brushfire, now is your final opportunity!
Like I’ve said several times (and for the last time!), these Kickstarter exclusives will not be available after tomorrow. Ever. To anyone. So don’t ask. Both books will be coming out in regular editions, as well, but these versions are only being produced this one time.
That being said: we’ve already raised almost $2,600 of my $2,000 goal, and I could not be more humbled or inspired by every single supporter of my work.
Thank you.
Enjoy this photo of my two babies Bay and Marvel having an autumn adventure together.
Normally I would ask you to excuse my language, but then again, you don’t know this pothole.
You can’t see it?
I can still feel it.
Week after week, I would fearfully drive past this very spot; here lived the deepest, most gnarly pothole I had ever set my eyes upon.
And on each occasion, I would carefully find my way around it.
On one Tuesday, there was a generous rainstorm. It was only a moment, that’s all it took, but I forgot about the pothole; the rain had filled it and made it look like the rest of the road.
My car fell into it and I swear we touched the top of Hell. My entire vehicle shook, sending violent vibrations through my body that resonated in my soul.
I said many bad words.
No matter how many times I drove around it after that, I still felt it; the incident had an echo that made my stomach drop.
Maybe a month later, they fixed the pothole. I can actually drive over the place it used to be.
And every time I do, I feel it a little less.
But there’s a part of me that knows that I won’t ever feel nothing at all.
Another high-profile musician passes away; another round of the internet mob with their opinions to share.
During times like these, I feel it’s important that people suffering with and recovering from addiction use their voices, and with that, I raise my hand and walk up to the front of the classroom.
The comments tend to range from things like “what a waste” to the truly heartless “what a selfish, stupid man.” As a formerly wasted, selfish, stupid man, I relate.
The internet lacks general empathy. Nobody questions that. But what it really seems to lack is the understanding that no one person will ever completely understand another. Every single one of us have a singular experience that nobody will ever be able to fully share.
But we can get close.
So while someone will say of a man “what a waste,” I look at him and say “he was probably just doing the best he could.”
It is hard, especially, for an addict or anybody who questions their worth to stand up for themselves. It is very hard for me to stand up for myself in a meaningful and constructive way. For most of my life, I would get very angry or very sad, and when I felt that way, drinking was a way I would cope. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out well.
But I found other ways, and to walk those paths took a lot of work. The kind of work that not everyone can bear. I can stand up for myself better now, but even now, doing so takes a huge emotional toll on me.
It’s hard, but I am doing the best I can.
The guy in this picture, just over four years ago, was doing the best he could, and he looks like a piece of shit.
Initially, I overcorrected and saw a world ready to be saved. Pretty quickly, though, I had to adjust how I approached others who were still struggling the way I had. I learned that I have empathy but not sympathy for a person whose life is unmanageable.
Which means I feel you, but I don’t feel sorry for you.
I understand, but I can’t excuse.
All the while remembering that everyone is only doing the best they possibly can.
The Den 