What’s Been Goin’ On: Updates and New Projects
I do not update this blog as often as I should, and every time I set out to do just that, even just a consistent, every Monday post, I fall short of the mark. Tons of blogs and sites to work on, and I pay the least attention to my own. Maybe a New Year’s Resolution.
Here’s some updates. The new novel, It Has Always Been the End is slowly but surely getting back on track, with the second and close to final draft done in another week. With any luck, we should see the thing in the world early next year. Structuring a novel is a complex undertaking — especially after having so much fun with the poetics of it for most of the last year. Adding in a story and retooling the words to make some narrative sense is a total challenge. Here’s a sentence from last night:
“Red leaves stain every part of the landscape, from the front door to the street’s edge. This strange, singular fall – a careless, bloody damage, without explanation. And everywhere else in the neighborhood, it’s still winter.”
Expect a couple of excerpts early next year in Dark Sky Magazine and a much-anticipated journal on the apocalypse, among other things.
Back to the other websites, since I’ve ended up doing most of my writing there. Lots of writing on solar panels and alternative energy for the green blogs, including several on the Green Tech and Green Gadgets blog, as well as this one regarding the recent UK pull back on their feed-in tariffs, and the early closing down of the government’s subsidies that were originally set to end in April of 2012, but will now end later this year.
That beauty up there is my newest guitar strap design for Couch down in Long Beach. Dan Perkins and the team contacted me a couple months ago, and in the wake of the Byloos Victorian design a few years ago, asked me to work with their designers to put the new Byloos Navajo Design Guitar Strap from Couch out into their already awesome line of vegan straps and wallets.
Portland Restaurant Review is taking off a bit more lately, with some social media marketing assistance and no shortage of weird and wonderful dining experiences up here in PDX. Check the pictures of this ridiculous chicken sandwich at Cackalacks Hot Chicken Shack, a food cart with a severe heart attack in mind. Look for reviews of Bar Avignon and now Daily Grill Portland in the next several days.
Last, let’s talk about Smalldoggies. The reading series continues to surprise and attract a great, enthusiastic crowd. The magazine’s new feature chronicling the life in photographs of Glenn Danzig is growing, with me and Matt Ferner having some serious fun. New comics, and hopefully Josh Atlas and Maggie Wells will jump on this one with me, but yes — finally, a cartoon project like we had going on the first version of Smalldoggies back in 2003, only this one is called Adverts: The Truth Behind Advertising, and it’s about a bunch of weird animals living in a city and openly reflecting on the truth behind the advertising world. Gabe Blackwell’s now long-running feature called One Note, where writers talk about the book they are reading and why (all in a single paragraph, thus the title of the feature), got to me and I had to take a stab at doing a One Note myself, on Donald Ray Pollock and his novel The Devil All the Time.
Look for interviews with Rachel B. Glaser and Donald Ray Pollock soon, look for Vanessa Veselka, Brian Ellis, Ben Loory and others very soon at the reading series, and before the end of the year, Smalldoggies Press will announce it’s very first book, to be published in February of 2012! Thanks for all of the generous donations at the reading series this past year, we could not have done it without our loyal supporters!
