New Website

I just redesigned my website, which makes updating much easier, but I could use your help troubleshooting, especially if you're viewing on an iPhone. So, if you're inclined, head on over and tell me how to make it better.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

My New Essay on Public Readings up at the Weeklings!!!

Wherein I manage to slag everything I'll be adopting in six months to promote Badge.

Speaking of Badge, I finished the final draft of it this past week (seven years in the making), and it's currently in the hands of its proofreader. I expect a proofread copy back in a week. Then I have to format it, Kel and I have to finish the cover, and it's off to the printer. I should have a copy in my greedy little hands by October, which means I'll be taunting you with it via the Internet during the last quarter of the year. Yes, torture is why I do this.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

My Review of Rock Novel WISE YOUNG FOOL by Sean Beaudoin

As a teenager, I wasn’t much of a reader. Sure, I read the sports page, the occasional rock biography, but reading novels meant an assignment leveled at me by a teacher. Homework. These required books—A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind—offered nothing to appeal to my adolescent fantasies, which revolved around wanting to be awesome musician, play in a band, put out records and be chased by groupies. I wanted to be a rock star. Sorry, Madame Defarge, but Gene Simmons wins every time.

In the 1980s, the vast divide between books and rock music couldn’t have been wider. I suspect pop culture was seen as a threat to the vaunted world of books, the barbarians at the gate of The Important Stuff. David Lee Roth had a thousand times more influence on the kids of my era than Holden Caulfield, much less Natty Bumpo, and this no doubt pissed off some people with elbow patches on their suit coats. I of course loved that it pissed them off.

Still, when I turned eighteen and took my first lit class in college, I fell in love with A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five. These seemed more rock and roll to me than rock and roll, so much so I regretted not having started my fiction life earlier. Had Sean Beaudoin’s Wise Young Fool existed back then, it might have meant an entirely different launching point for my book life.

I’m a big fan of Beaudoin’s work at the websites like The Weeklings, and his first foray into the rock novel seemed the perfect time to jump into his longer efforts. Much of Beaudoin’s verbal talent is in full force in this novel. Here, the author renders the hottest girl in protagonist Ritchie Sudden’s high school class, Ravenna Woods:

So why does she make every dude in the school apoplectic? 

Why does she walk around lobbing a toaster into the collective bath tub?

Hey, let’s not pretend.

It’s her body.

There is simply no ignoring its heft and criminal perk. It’s a monument of taut Austrian hydraulics. If she were flat or fat she’d still be pretty, but no linebackers would be cutting practice trying to get to know her better. Without the badonkadonk and sheik-money strut, guys would hardly be killing themselves to score her fake digits anymore.

You’ve got to figure that level of constant objectification and wheedling hypocrisy would make a girl bitter.

And you’d be right.

Ravenna’s caught two hundred meters below the reef, unwanted sexual pressure crushing her lungs, sharks below and the bends above, nowhere to go but farther inside herself.

Any reader of Wise Young Fool will have no trouble finding such acrobatics, the next tumble of tropes never far from the last, creating a distinctly Beaudoinian joy ride.

The plight of Ritchie Sudden from discontented high schooler to rock hero to juvenile detention attendee is the raison d’etre of WYF, and Ritchie’s frustration is palpable throughout—his unresolved feelings over his sister’s death; his too-busy, too-lesbian mother; his absent father; his disgust with the folks in his class. Most effective are the times Beaudoin touches on the very human teenager behind the wise ass, like when a high school student almost chokes to death in front of Ritchie in the cafeteria.

“Call the nurse,” Lacy says.

“Yeah,” Meb says.

“Right,” I say, but for some reason don’t move. I don’t take charge. I don’t leap to action. I don’t leap at all.

I just sit.

Scared.

Such trepidation is the yang to Ritchie’s sardonic edge, and Beaudoin plies his budding guitarist’s frank observations for all they’re worth. At the detention center Progressive Progress, Ritchie lists his classes: “Art Therapy, How to Do a Job Interview, How to Not Be High All the Time.” Ritchie’s mom’s girlfriend’s boss, a businessman and pool cleaning entrepreneur named Rude, is always worth a few chuckles when seen from Ritchie’s vantage. “There’s always enough dirty pools, leaves, and dead mice and bugs, and kids squeezing out a Baby Ruth in the shallow end to keep [him] busy.”

Answering the call for a literature that says something to young rockers about their lives, Beaudoin includes plenty of teenage rock fantasy moments, like when Ritchie dons his Les Paul in front of his bedroom mirror.

I do the Keith Richards slouch, the Billy Zoom grin, the Chuck Berry duckwalk, the My Chemical Romance dickwalk, the Eddie Van Halen finger-slam, the Hendrix teeth-pluck, the Joe Strummer low-slung, the Jimmy Page smack-daze .... Then I stop screwing around and just straight-out pentatonic air-wail like my man Joe Walsh.

Anyone who owned a guitar as a teenager can relate—or so I’ve heard.

Beaudoin skillfully bounces back and forth in time between Ritchie’s time in juvie and the events that lead to it, but the detention side of Ritchie’s experiences runs thin compared to the drama of his band, his love life, and the moment he commits his crime. Still, Beaudoin seamlessly brings it all together in the end, like the disparate members of a rock band coming down hard on the last note of the night, right before the singer shouts “thank you” and they scurry off.

Teenagers and angst go together like Les Pauls and Marshall Stacks. Luckily, rock is there for those who need a potent release from this mortal coil. If our literature doesn’t show that struggle, it’s the lesser for it. Wise Young Fool offers up a fun, fast-paced and ultimately satisfying road map for the young rocker in search of the way home.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

Come to our Reading Next Week!!!

For the first time in two and seven-twelveths years, I will be participating in a reading.

Yep. It's at Taborspace in SE Portland, and I'll be reading with other members of my writing group Writers Anonymous. The Co-Guests of Honor are Mark Russell, whose God is Disappointed in You will have just come out on Top Shelf; and Heather Arndt Anderson, whose Breakfast: A History just came out on Altamira Press. (Heather promises to make pancakes while reading.)

Other readers will include me, Sarah Gilbert and Rebecca Kelley, and the night will also feature live music by Dave Lindenbaum. (Other WA members may sign on too.) I'll be reading a short piece you've never heard before and manning the book table with Kel. Here's the skinny:

What: Out in Public: Readings from the Writers Anonymous Writing Group
Where: TaborSpace 5441 SE Belmont St  Portland, OR 97215 (503) 238-3904
When: Thursday, August 8th, 7-9 PM

Come help us celebrate two books being released by our group members within a month of each other, which is frickin' ridiculous.
Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which will premiere in Tempe in early 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

More Badge Revision

I'm about three quarters through my last read-through of Badge, and it feels very close. I managed to talk myself out of one of the two biggish edits from last week, so I've got just one left. It will take about 2k out of the novel, which feels good. That 2k focuses almost entirely on characters who don't really factor into the main story. In other words, they're not that interesting. So off with their heads.

I feel like my novel can so easily slide from good to bad. There are 80,000 words in Badge, but one phrase--even one word--can make me feel like the whole etude gets knocked out of key. Every book and movie I love tilts on the characters' or actors' every word, every gesture. I don't know how anyone does anything of quality in less than five years. It happens, but not with me.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which will premiere in Tempe in early 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

Badge Revision

I'm about a third of the way through my final read of Badge, and I'm already set on making a couple of biggish changes. I had no idea what my reaction to the book would be this time. I half expected to blow through the thing with just small edits, but that's what a little distance gives you. If I know how to make Badge better, I have to do it, right? We're still looking at Aug. 29 as the drop dead final edit date, after which it goes to the proofreader. I'd better get at it.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which will premiere in Tempe in early 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

Kickstarter Surveys, and The Final Pass at Badge

The first of the Kickstarter surveys went out yesterday, this batch to the folks who donated $125 and up. Everyone else will hear from me at the beginning of 2014.

Also, I start my final edit of Badge today. There's nothing better than going over something you've been working on for years. How nice to sit down and start a novel I know I'll like (and what I don't like, I'll change). Drop dead date for revisions is August 29th. After that it's off to the proofreader.

Did you know Sean Beaudoin's rock novel Wise Young Fool comes out in August?

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which will premiere in Tempe in early 2013.

Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.