Hello...and welcome to Darby phone! If you know the name of the exciting news you'd like to see, press OMG now...

Uh. Yeah. Hi! If you pressed OMG, I'm sorry, I got nothin'. But, I do got random points of potential interest. These begin in five..four..three..

• I've finally (thanks to the insistence of my girlfriend) read Brave New World, which, well, maybe I was missing the point, since I found myself occasionally thinking, "Hey! Sacrifice truth and beauty for happiness? That there ain't so right bad an idea!" Thankfully I managed to keep reminding myself that, hey, truth is beauty, and beauty truth, and that's all ye need to know and yadda yadda. So, no fear: I haven't given up my non-existent writing career in favor of hard drugs and orgy-porgies. Not yet at least.


• Now I've started reading Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson. Me and Steve, we have an interesting history. The guy writes weird experimental surrealist fiction (sort of) which should be totally right up my alley. I actually discovered him in a used book store. (Well, his books. Not Steve himself.) Anyway, I think I thought the cover of Amnesiascope was pretty so I bought like three of his books; I read all of Amnesiascope though perhaps appropriately can't remember a single word of it today. I read part of Arc d'X before I lost track of it some fifty pages into it, and I think I read the intro quotes to The Sea Came In At Midnight but never got into the actual book itself. (One of the intro quotes is from a Bjork song. So.) So I've started this new book by him, because it sounds like it has a cool story line (something to do, I knew before going into it, with a lake appearing in the middle of Los Angeles) and it plays with type layout (somewhat a la The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway which if you haven't read it you should drop this blog like a bad habit and go read it yesterday) and those are pretty much two things that, when thrown together, means I'm probably going to look at least twice. I read about a third of it today and now I'm not so sure I trust the ground beneath my feet. It's that wild. There's a doctor who listens to the voices of dying houses and the lake itself is a character and a small child who sees the world in the most fascinating ways and it jumps through time and there's lost love and the writing itself is simply stunning and beautiful and he pulls an element of history into the story that I didn't think I'd ever see used in this sort of scenario or way and...yeah it's kind of a trip. I'm tentatively thinking I'll not only finish this book, but I'll remember it when I'm done, and then I'll go on to read The Sea Came In At Midnight sometime soon because I guess this new book is sort of a sequel. Looks like the bizarre is back on the menu, boys.


• I've pretty much tossed out working on everything I thought I was working on writing-wise this year and now I'm working on a new story and I think it's going to be really damned good, if I stick with it for a while longer. Yeah, that whole churning out a story a month idea I had going on there for a while? Good idea at first, stupid idea today. This story's in third person which usually leaves me feeling like I've brought a golf club to a baseball game, but it seems to be working better right now than anything else had been working for a month or two there, so hey. Why not.