Spencer's Great Big Lies

I Wish I Were Twelve Years Old

2008-07-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

Which is something no sane person should wish.

See, when I was twelve, I had zero social skills and no wish to do anything but sit around and read. I read Redwall on top of an electrical box. I read Robert Jordan the night of Christmas all night and the next day. I read Watership Down on a car trip and I read "hardcore" Lord of the Rings, which means I started with the Silmarillion, went to the Hobbit, and finished with the trilogy.

My life right now would sound like a dream to my twelve-year-old self. I have a stack of books to read for work, a stack to read for school, and one from BEA I'm still trying to finish for pleasure.

But I'm kind of burnt out on reading. I need my old skillz back. If my twelve-year-old self were here, he would say: Yo yo yo, watch me read. I can read like a baker can knead. Read with greed and read with speed.

This would have something to do with the fact that my twelve-year-old self liked Public Enemy. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Love Me!

2008-06-20T13:17:00.001-07:00

I never saw this. It's funny.

Why Do I Hate Sleep?

2008-06-20T00:57:00.000-07:00

There's got to be correlation between madness and actively not wanting to sleep.

It's not that I don't get tired. I get tired around the same time every night, but lately I've gotten this constant, irrepressible urge to stay up even when assaulted by said tiredness. Tonight I gave in and it's like one-ish and I'm scouring the internet for live Radiohead bootlegs. Okay, well I would have been doing that during the day, but it feels particularly empty at night. I'm going to see them live in August and I'm not sure if it will be an apotheosis or just business as usual.

But I did write one page of a story, a reworking of an old one that I've shopped around everywhere and since gained strong opinions on what it should have been. Four words: less swords, more muskets. I plan to throw this one at Writers of the Future and see if it sticks.

Speaking of which, I saw the video of Green Day playing at Woodstock 94 today where they were pelted by mud that completely destroyed the stage and the equipment. It's kind of fun to watch Billy Joe Armstrong moon the crowd. Also to see the way he keeps playing after a glob of mud smacks his playing hand and splatters all over his pickups.

I've been avoiding some reading I have to do for English comprehensive exams in the fall. The reason why I've been avoiding it was at first because it was David Copperfield. I love Dickens, but I don't love being under a deadline to read him. Plus, I've got this shiny ARC of Ken Scholes' novel and I want to finish it cuz it's good, and significantly shorter than David Copperfield. But now I'm supposed to read Living By Fiction by Annie Dillard. I should have bewared when I knew this was a book on fiction that English theory professors liked.

More ranting to follow, when I'm not so bloody tired.

Stuck in the Mountains of Vernon

2008-06-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

I rode the bus to Mt. Vernon, WA today for an interview with my old job to see if I could go with them for the summer. It went well, and I will probably pick up some work during the summer, and to top it all off, I thought I was being brilliant by taking the shuttlebus and writing on it.

Turns out the shuttlebus doesn't leave for another two hours after the interview is done. I feel silly.

I'm 50k into my Crusades fantistorical novel, but there's two characters that I'm having a really hard time getting the hang of. This is a pretty big novel with lots of viewpoints, and out of six viewpoints that switch back and forth, these are the only two women. Well, there's a male character who becomes a woman, but he's not one yet. So I feel rather sexist at not being able to write the women.

On the other hand, my experience has been that the characters one struggles the most with usually turn out the best, because one sweats so much over getting them right.

Also, I'm kind of worried at how R-rated this novel is becoming. Not that I'm really offended by R-rated books--my love for George R.R. Martin and Jacqueline Carey should prove that. But now that I've been an agent, I'm quite aware of marketing issues, and PG-13 books are much easier to market. It's the same principle as movies. Other than the Godfather films, most of the biggest moneymakers are (I believe; too lazy to look it up) all PG or PG-13; Jurassic Park, E.T., Star Wars, Spider-Man, etc. Robert Jordan's books hold steady at PG-13, as do Harry Potter's later books.

Meh. I suppose I'll just write what I want and cry later.

Finance!

2008-06-18T00:47:00.001-07:00

I've never been very good with money. Chrissy is always nervous to ask me if she can buy things because she was raised by frugal people. She hasn't quite gotten used to my typical reaction, which is "Sure! Buy it!"

I was raised in a house where our living situation went from well-off to dirt poor to well-off again, so I seem to have this attitude that I should spend it while I have it. A credit card is a horrible trap especially since all my old musical equipment seems to be wearing out at once. Therefore I am very proud to say that I sold my old amp and hunted like a madman for a cheap but good new one. I found a new one, the exact one I wanted, used, and sold the old one for the exact amount the new one cost with tax, and therefore I got a new amp without going over budget AT ALL.

Now if I could just learn to walk past a bookstore without buying something, or seeing a Starbucks and saying, "Mmm, five-dollar Frappuccino!"

Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah.

2008-06-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the fabulous Boise Murder in the Grove Mystery Writer's Conference. It was a good day with fabulous food, and I got a chance to hook up again with a friend from my legendary Utah writer's group. I had a nice chat with Sorche Fairbank, an agent I haven't met before, and a lovely breakfast with T.L. Cooper, who organized the shebang and is a writer in her own write. We swapped recipes.

I'm worried that some of the people I asked for partials from at BEA and Murder in the Grove are put off by my auto-reply. Let me say again: if I asked you for something, send it to me. I'm just closed to blind submissions in order to catch up on the backup from the school year.

In My Shell

2008-06-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

Hopefully those of you who are thinking of submitting to me are following this blog and agentquery.com. This update should be on agentquery shortly.

I must say sadly that I am closing to submissions for the foreseeable future. Because I do this part-time, in addition to graduate school, being a dad, and my own writing, I have been backed up lately with great projects. I have four or five people whose manuscripts are very important to me but who get shunted aside by other things. In order to get to them, I have to stop the slush from piling up.

If you have sent me a partial or a full manuscript, then know that you are in my priorities, but the next two weeks of finals will push everything aside. After that I've got a very good client whose novel is awaiting a critique, then several other prospective clients who are awaiting critique, and another client whose work needs to go out to editors. After that I can work on partials and slush.

If you are still dying to talk to me, you can go to Boise's Murder in the Grove conference this weekend, and I may still make it to the Surrey International Writer's Conference in October, and of course you can hunt me down at Worldcon, attempting to steal kisses from George R.R. Martin. But I am not taking any submissions, or new clients, for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for understanding.

Political Rant, Part One

2008-05-26T20:51:00.000-07:00

With the Obama/Hillary showdown proving a lot more interesting than the Obama/McCain showdown will probably be (I predict every debate will include the words, "When I was your age, young Barack...") I thought it was time for me to share the political opinions that nobody cares about.

1) Why I Oppose (and always did) the War in Iraq. Or: That's Right, I Hated the War Before it was Cool.

Does anyone remember Afghanistan? It's the other war. By the way, it's also the country where the guy who masterminded a major terrorist attack was last located. He's the one we never caught and executed.

Afghanistan seems to get as much press as Korea does in relation to Vietnam, so I thought it would be nice to talk about this little war for a while. Start with this. So the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden to another country at one point. Although it doesn't sound like the best idea--who would they have chosen, Pakistan?--it might have isolated the source of the 9/11 terrorist threat from the beginning. And maybe settled things down a bit before a major military commitment. Of course, I'm not sure that anyone in the US wanted such a bloodless victory.

The Taliban fell, though it reformed. There are UN troops in Afghanistan and Canada is currently very worried about its role there in trying to rebuild the country. Afghanistan is the major producer of heroin in the world, and like Somalia, is mostly controlled by warlords. It is no more stable now than Iraq, and the President knew when he invaded Iraq that Afghanistan would be hard to handle and Al-Qaeda, within Afghanistan, was nowhere near neutralized. So that's the commitment we made before Iraq. And the US is still committed to it, though they've left it mostly in the hands of the UN forces.

Some people want you to believe that Obama is a fool for calling for negotiations with people like Hezbollah and Hamas. Those people seem to forget that negotiations with a terrorist group, with whom Scott Card lumps the Palestinians, have worked in the past. Most recently, they worked in Belfast in 2005.

"Terrorist groups" is a terrible simplification for people like Hamas, who basically own Palestine. They build hospitals, provide medical and health care, build and maintain mosques, run TV stations, and, not surprisingly, are a force in politics. And, like with any organization, there are different forces at work within it. Scott has joined with a force that prefers to see events in black and white so that they can shift responsibility. "The Palestinians did not do what we asked them to do, therefore we have NO blame for the situation there." Of course. Just like England had no blame for the motivation of the IRA.

Finally, for all the furor about Obama's position, the truth is, no once can tell what a President will do until they're in office.

The only thing Obama has proven in his stance on the war is that he's not an idiot. He opposed the war when military resources were strained and an oil-friendly administration was trying to tighten its grip on an oil-rich country. But once US soldiers and Iraqi lives were invested and US responsibility was taken, he was a little more hesitant about incurring a bloodbath by pulling out. Now that it has become clear that there are only hard choices regarding the war, he wants to withdraw troops but step up humanitarian effort. Will it have disastrous consequences for the region? Most likely. What will happen if we keep US troops in Iraq? US troops will keep dying, and Afghanistan will get worse, and our aid won't go to places like Sudan and Liberia. Sounds like disastrous consequences.

So he's looking at the past precedent of people like Carter and Clinton who, though their truces fell apart, managed to suspend the bloodletting. Maybe, he thinks, I can suspend the bloodletting enough to have a Northern Ireland eventually, where old grudges simmer but are put aside in the name of economic prosperity.

What is our other option? More fighting? Optimism may be a risky projection, but when we see what pessimism has led to, and the hard choices on either side where lives will be lost one way or another, we need to dare to dream of change.

Laughter Ensues

2008-05-23T22:11:00.001-07:00

If you know anything about Transformers, you owe it to yourself to listen to More Than Meets The Ear: Selections From Transformers The Musical.

My favorite is "The Acousticons."

Turtles Love Dolphins

2008-05-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

Chrissy and I were talking with some friends once about a nature special we had seen on dolphins. It seems that dolphins are randy creatures, and quite willing to... you know... do it... with anything. Including the shells of nearby turtles.

One of the friends got a turtle-y look on his face and said, "I'm going as fast as I can!"

I know he was trying to represent the turtle. I'm not sure what the turtle was doing, and whether it was willing or not in his representation.

But in that spirit, I have midterms to grade this week and I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the pace at which I deal with agenting work.

I go slow.

Very slow.

If you're the type of person who wants immediate replies and constant attention, I am not the agent for you. I am a grad student and I teach and I've got a family. I do the best I can, but I thought I'd add this since I'm getting tons of queries and most people don't seem to realize that I am not an ideal agent for someone on the move.

Behold, the word of the Agent Descended

2008-04-18T10:53:00.000-07:00

Hi again.

This is Agent Spencer talking.

I'm the new agent, and I'm invigorated by some of the amazing books I've rescued from the slushpile. But there's a lot of things I'd like to see that I'm not. Some specifics:

Mormon historical novels. This is a rich and deep vein that hasn't been explored. I'd love to see a well-written book about Zina Huntington, a secret wife to Joseph Smith and faith healer, in the vein of Orson Scott Card's Saints.

Crusades historical or fantistorical novels in the vein of George R.R. Martin, Jacqueline Carey or Bernard Cornwell. Give me blood-drenched battles, intricate politics, good old steamy sex and bring the religious frontiers of the medieval Mediterranean into it.

Victorian, Edwardian, or Regency fantasy. Given the massive success of this genre lately, I'm surprised at how little we see it in the slushpile. If you have the next Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell, send me an email.

These are all genres where I'd accept the breaking of the traditional "word ceiling" for new authors, usually set around 100-120,000 words. Historical and fantasy novels need to be long and absorbing, and some new authors can pull it off. For shorter works, I'm always in the mood for a good memoir, particularly if it can deal with painful events through a good sense of humor. I also love Chuck Palahniuk and Dave Eggers, so if you can do literary satire, drop a note.

For All My Fans...

2008-04-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

My inbox has been really cluttered lately at the agency with "You've won a billion dollars from the Bank of Africa" emails.

So if you send me a novel query, be sure to title it "Query:" and then the title of your book so I know you're not trying to get my urgent assistance in transacting the Very Large Sum of 9,600,000 dolars to the United States as it was the late Prince's dear wish.

I Know the Blog is True, Cuz it Feels Like Awesome

2008-04-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to General Conference and blogging at the same time, so you'll have to forgive me if some Mormon-isms make their way into this blog... even my blog on this internet in these latter days.

I've had a really exciting and whirlwind first week of school. I've always wanted to teach but I've been discouraged since starting graduate school at the fact that, rather than landing a full-blown TA-ship, I was given the pithy research assistant job. Actually, being a research assistant is a lot more fun than being a TA--the TAs don't get paid to read this book, and I did--but it's also a lot less financially secure. The TAs get their tuition and insurance paid, and get paid for a set number of hours a week, whether they work them, overwork them, or don't. The RAs (this is me) have to meet hours in order to pay our own insurance and usually borrow money to pay our tuition.

Last quarter I was assigned to my favorite teacher to be an RA since the original didn't have enough work for me. She immediately enlisted my help in writing study questions and reviewing materials for a class. In short, I've ended up as the TA and I get to stand before a classroom a little bit and help out.

It's a class in American Ethnic Identity and Coming of Age. I told that to a friend and she rolled her eyes. "Let's be multicultural, right. I feel like that's been shoved down my throat so much that I hate it." This is not exactly a backwoods hick. This girl lives in Seattle, works for Boeing, and last time I checked, her last three boyfriends were all of a different ethnicity.

So if this were just a class in PCisms, it would suck. Lucky for me it's a class in identity and in the history of those identities. We're reading the greatest greatest book ever, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, as a way of absorbing the history behind current notions of race. We're also reading some funny and touching stories in a collection that isn't nearly as PC as it sounds, Growing Up Ethnic in America.

My teacher has made the point several times that there is no way to rank ethnicity. She compares it to the AA principle that all pain is equally valid. If one person comes into an AA meeting weeping over having not gotten a job they wanted, and another person comes in weeping because their son died, the meeting does not ignore one person's pain in the idea that the other's is more important. They try to give equal love and support to both. In the same way, this isn't a class in white guilt. This is a class in discovering identity. It's really neat and I'm glad I get a chance to be a part of it.

Order the First of my 10-DVD Series "How to Procrastinate" tomorrow!

2008-04-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

I came up with that title all by myself.

Why Do I Hurt When They Kick My Children?

2008-03-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

The answer to the above should be obvious, I guess. I got a rejection that, while it doesn't sting as much as last year's, still stings. I didn't get into the Clarion West Writing Workshop for this summer in Seattle. I still haven't heard from the Clarion San Diego workshop, but I was pulling more so for Seattle because 1) I had a good friend apply and 2) I could see Chrissy and Adia on weekends.

I've been writing a lot lately, and I don't think it'll stop because I don't go to an expensive workshop. But... fuhhhhhuuuwuaaaahaaaaahuuuuuuuhhhhhck.

The Pressure

2008-03-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

Because I am a writer and deal in subtleties and hidden meanings, the title today has multiple meanings. For one, I am pushing myself to finish a story for WotF by this weekend. For another, I am also pushing myself to read all the full manuscripts sitting in my "Unread Fulls" folder so I can feel caught up. But for final, I have the world's worst cold and it feels like the Smurfs are busting out of my head.

This weekend Chrissy, Adia and I attended the madness that is NorWesCon, where I critiqued some stories and even sat in on my first panel. We didn't have Mary here this year, but we did have Ken Scholes, John Pitts, Jay Lake, Lisa Mantchev, Harold Gross, and a host of other wonderful people that I see far too little. I got to talk about where writers get their ideas to a full room with some other wonderful people, which was a lot of fun. We talked about dreams, word association, making up stories about place names on the freeway, or just dropping first lines. I still need a story to go with this first line: "The snow blew over five dead bodies, two large and three small."

I also talked about inserting one idea into another--like taking some of the disabled people I used to work with and putting them into my new novel.

We attended Talebones Live, which was a little underwhelming after the epic beauty of last year, but was still pretty good. We also saw a lot of people walking around on leashes, with little stars over their nipples, or in other ways contributing to the strange, strange atmosphere of NorWesCon.

I missed another panel and my reading to spend Easter with Chrissy's family and cook them dinner. I was so exhausted that I didn't stick around for dessert and collapsed into bed afterward. Now I have awoken with a nasty nasty cold virus that has me feeling like crap.

One of the weird things about being around my friends who are also some of my favorite writers is that in the past it's made me envious and depressed. This time it didn't, and believe me, just about anything can make me depressed coming out of finals week without any band practice. Instead, I got energized and woke up before the con to start a story. It's done now, and it's an absolute mess, but I think I'll have something for Writers of the Future this quarter. Excellent, he said while rubbing his hands together in a most cliched way.

In the Continuing Saga of Self-Promotion

2008-03-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

For those of you who can't get enough of Spencer, my new band, Bad Motel, not to be confused with my old band Sam Stereo, has recorded and posted some demos.

http://myspace.com/badmotelband

I'm really proud of this band. We've managed to make stuff that sounds kind of bluesy rock and also complex at the same time, and our singer has one of those soulful voices I've always wanted to accompany my lyrics.

Parts

2008-03-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

While I battle the beast of MySpace, here's some more nonfiction for my adoring fans. This one makes reference to the characters in The Second Funniest Story From My Mission.

Parts

Wayne backfilled his life with little bits of information, always couched in the form of stories. For a missionary, he'd lived a colorful life. "Did I ever tell you about the time I was in a high-speed chase with the cops?" "Did I ever tell you about the time my girlfriend and I made porn and my friends got ahold of it?"

There was only one story he told tersely, with no trace of embellishment. "My brother died when I was four. He was four-wheeling and it flipped over." There was never more than that detail--a seven-year-old brother, riding a four-wheeler who died under it.

It's the thing about funny stories. You tell enough of the story, and there are messy pieces--bits that don't fit, cutting room floor relics. It's all in what you leave out.

* * *

Merle--our nigga--had a wife named Jackie, a tiny little Cherokee woman with crooked teeth. When we went back to see him, Jackie welcomed us in. "Merle's not here, but I've talked to Mormon missionaries before. I like you guys."

"Can we give you a Book of Mormon, too?" we asked.

"I can't read," she said, in the same tone most people might say they couldn't skateboard. "Merle tries to teach me, but I get frustrated with it."

"Do you want to try reading now? We can help you."

She looked at the book and back at us. "Not right now," she said. "I get too frustrated."

When we left, with an appointment to come back, she smiled her big crooked smile. "I sure am glad Merle got saved in prison," she said. "I've always wanted to be Mormon, ever since I was a little girl."

We went back to Merle and Jackie's accompanied by a recently baptized couple named the Dorians. The Dorians were overwhelmingly friendly and homely. They were both pear-shaped and balding with large eyes and large smiles. I loved them--loved their innocence, their joy, their certainty. I wished I had it.

Merle and Jackie's house was dark and sweaty. "We didn't pay the power bill," Jackie said, "so we've got to sit in the dark. And of course the swamp cooler's out, too." We lit candles in the hot dark and read to them out of the Book of Mormon.

In the presence of the Dorians, or perhaps just for his wife's sake, Merle left the N-word out of the conversation. He just mentioned, "I done a lot of things I regretted before I was saved. I done drugs, I hurt people."

We passed the Book of Mormon around and each read into the quiet, hot dark, except Jackie. At the end of the night there was a feeling in the room that Merle expressed by saying, "I could just jump up and shout! I never knew what people was talking about till now!"
We asked Merle and Jackie, "Will you be baptized?" and they, through faces lit by pure joy, said, "Yes."

On the way home, we laughed with the Dorians about the reaction Merle and Jackie might get in church. "Where will they fit in?" I asked Brother Dorian. He replied, "What will happen the first time Merle gives a talk?"

Elder Pierce and I, laying on our beds across from each other, asked "Can Merle get baptized? Can you get baptized if you've killed people?"

"I don't know. I guess we'll figure it out soon enough."

The next time we went there, the house was empty. "They took off," their landlady yelled from her porch. "Don't know where they went."

Brother Dorian approached me in church a few times, his hands crossed on the bulge of his stomach. "Have we heard anything about Merle and Jackie?" I shook my head. At one point I said, "People we teach have a tendency to vanish."

I could see a little bit of his certainty fail.

What kind of an ending would that make? It's much better to leave it at the moment when Merle put his stained, scarred arms around us and said, "Y'all's my niggas now." The story is quick, clean, young. Add the rest and it gets older.

I HATE YOUR SPACE

2008-03-11T23:09:00.001-07:00

MySpace has long been known as a corporate front designed to fool innocent teenagers into eating babies and having orgies. But, much like a lousy lion tamer, I'm still trying to use the stupid ******* ******* ******* piece of ****.

My new band, Bad Motel, recorded some demos that are fully mixed. When enjoyed in their full capacity, they sound much like hearing Amy Winehouse and the 1971 Who fight their way out of a Surrealist painting.

But even when I can actually make the stupid site take me to where bands sign up, its security thingie won't show up on the screen so I can't type the letters to avoid spam.

Clearly there was a baby-eating teenage orgy, and they're still cleaning up.

How To Tell It

2008-03-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't done this in forever. It's midnight and I've just finished the pages I made myself write for WotF this quarter. Yay for sleep deprivation in the name of art.

Thanks to the people who gave me nice compliments about the creative nonfiction. Here's another one. I read this one at the grad student reading a few weekends ago.

How to Tell It

The first thing to know about Elder Wayne was that he wrestled a bear. He'd slip it in, mention it in passing. He liked people to tease it out of him. "You did what now?" Sometimes he used the story to break up inane conversations. "Hollywood is just being taken over by homosexuals," one older member would say, and Elder Wayne would come right back with, "Did I ever tell you about the time I wrestled a bear?"

On missions, with little in the way of visual, auditory or read entertainment, we all had to gain some skill in oral tradition to relate our adventures. It was a learned skill, honed and practiced as we lay on our beds, unwinding from a day full of heated conversations about theology. Some missionaries were more skilled than others. Wayne was Pavarotti.

When he told it in full, the bear and the bear's siblings were being relocated to a den after they had been tranquilized. Elder Wayne was standing over this particular bear, who, it turns out, was not tranquilized all the way. Groggy but angry, the bear reared up and Elder Wayne tried to push it back down. It didn't go. It tried to claw him with its front paws, but Wayne stayed behind it. As a matter of fact, he got the bear in a full nelson. The bear tore chunks out of his legs as it came more and more awake. Elder Wayne's father, from the front of the den, called out, "Get out in one… two… three… now!" Elder Wayne dove for the door of the den just as his father jabbed the bear with a dose of tranquilizer on the end of a pole.

If he had his way, Wayne would leave the fact that the bear was adolescent and drugged out of it. "We were putting it in a den and it woke up," he would say.

"So it was a teenage bear?" I asked him one night after he had let that information slip.

"Well, yeah," he said.

"How much did it weigh?"

"One hundred-thirty pounds. So yeah, I outweighed it. But a Doberman's like, what, sixty pounds?"

I couldn't begrudge him a few embellishments. He played his part and was eccentrically obsessed with animals. He kept a snapping turtle in the apartment and fed it nightcrawlers, and at one point let a squirrel loose to run around our place. He stared down a big black dog that a woman turned out of her house on us, and brushing past the beast, knocked on her door. "Dogs don't scare me. I wrestled a bear."

Every time Wayne told the bear story, he imbued it with a sense of wonder. The fact that he believed it eventually made me want to believe it. I stopped questioning. Some stories are meant to be told, and heard, and accepted.

What You Don't Do

2008-02-22T16:22:00.001-08:00

I'm back to my creative nonfiction. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

What You Don't Do

They say that depression is the common cold of mental illness. That metaphor works surprisingly well. It is communicable--there's nothing more depressing than living with a depressed person. It has a season--January--and it hits harder in cold rainy climates.

I remember going into my dad's room on Christmas morning, thick with the smell of sweat, his bed dotted with wool blankets that predated my birth. He stared at the ceiling.

"Are you going to come open presents?"

He was, by his own admission, thinking about his childhood Christmas, where his mother, taking a regimen of 50s diet pills, lost her speed-fueled temper and beat him. It made him depressed. When he talked about it, it made everyone depressed. He waded through days at his private clinic and applied for jobs in a fog, while we went deeper into bankruptcy.

"Um. Yeah," he would say after a few minutes.

"Did you see your stocking?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Santa brought you some gooood stuff."

"Yes. Thank you."

Depression is a disease represented by what someone doesn't do. They don't take interest in sex, they sleep more or less often, they can't concentrate. I wonder how many conversations with my dad might have been lost to depression. I wonder how many times he stared at the ceiling when we were supposed to be talking about spirituality, teenagerhood, or our mutual love of the X-Men.

Elder Coombs was my first depressed missionary companion. We lasted five days. He was five foot one inches tall with bright dark eyes. In his little white shirt, tie and tag, he reminded me of the smallest mamushka doll in a set.

It was well-known throughout the mission that Coombs was "having a hard time." I thought I might help him. The first day we were together, we spoke about our respective punk bands back home. "Of course it all died down once we got girlfriends," Coombs said. "See, I managed to avoid that part," I said. "I'm kind of proud of it. You know, in an I-never-got-action kind of way." He gave me a half-smile.

We went door-to-door through a rural neighborhood, with quarter-mile walks up the driveways. At the first door, a smiling woman said, "We've been looking for a church. Why don’t y'all come back and talk to my whole family?" Elder Coombs brightened for a little while afterwards. "That's the first lead we’ve had in months in this area."

"I'm magic," I said, trying to provoke a response. He gave me another half-smile and stared at the blanket of deep green kudzu falling across the trees.

At the next door, a red-faced man came out, wearing only shorts, sporting ingrown toenails the size and color of plums. "I just don't understand the people from my church," he said. "They say they're going to help you out, but nobody helps me out. Nobody comes to see me. I just sit out here and get lonely and don't nobody come to see me!"

"I know. It can be really frustrating," Elder Coombs said, with complete empathy. "It seems like no one cares."

"Why do people do that?" the man with the ingrown toenails asked. "Seems like everybody wants you to join their church but they don't care about you after you get saved."

"I'll come see you, man," Elder Coombs said.

I couldn't wait to get away from the guy. Elder Coombs talked to him for an hour.

We sat in a creek bed for a break and I took pictures of Coombs holding a huge frog up by his face. "Aw man," he said tonelessly." It peed on me."

"At least it got you first," I joked as I picked it up.

"Yeah," he said as if he deserved it.

The second day we were together Elder Coombs vanished. He left me a note while I was in the shower that said, "Sorry, man, I gotta jet. If there's a problem call the mission president."

If there's a problem? I hadn't been alone in a year and a half. Leaving your mission companion alone was tatamount to a soldier deserting his platoon in the field. We had rationale--that the Bible said two by two, that it had always been done that way. We needed rules. Coombs had committed the ultimate breach of trust.

He came back later that day, having ensured by this breach of the rules that he would be sent home. Or rather, by reporting it, I had ensured that he would go.

There were no hard feelings. We got Chinese food that night and sat on our back porch and talked about punk music, and he gave me the rest of his orange chicken. That night was the first time I saw him laugh.

Elder Remy followed Elder Coombs. In this case, Elder Remy had been sent home from his mission in Australia for depression. After a trial period, he'd proven himself happy enough to go out again.

The first day we were together Elder Remy took a shower with the door wide open, singing "Come, Come Ye Saints" at the top of his lungs. I couldn't help myself. I filled a pitcher full of ice water, snuck in and poured it over his head.

He shrieked, which was pretty much what I was going for. Then he leapt out of the shower and chased me around the apartment, naked and sopping wet. "I'm going to kill you!" he screamed, until he backed me into the kitchen corner and wrapped his hands around my throat. His eyes got smaller and tighter as his grip closed and he breathed, like a bull, through his nostrils. Finally he let go, backing up in naked rage. "Don't ever do that again," he said.

Elder Remy's depression wasn't the cloud that Coombs's had been, or my father's was. He was a volatile, lurching creature who could only exist in extremes. There were times where he would sit on his knees, solemn as a prophet, before the map of our area, trying to divine the spot where we would knock on the right door. Remy said poetic prayers full of pleading and fulfillment. "Praise God and His Christ, for this work is verily true."

Then when he was down he would talk about sex. "Have you ever smelled the fish, man? When a girl starts to get really horny, you know? I was fourteen, and I was talking to this girl I knew on the phone. I was like, 'Hey, have you ever had sex?' and she said, 'No,' and I said, 'Me neither. Want to?' So she came over and we had sex!" It was not unusual to hear such confessions from other missionaries--in spare terms like, "I used to fool around with this girl." What set Remy apart was the detail. "I didn't really know what I was doing and she was really loose and open, you know, and I had never smelled the fish before--it was creeping me out--so I was just like--I think I came?"

He was haunted by his masturbation habit. I later found out it was the reason for his odd way of showering, in order to try and make himself more vulnerable to discovery and less apt to play around. "I just let the hot water touch my dick a little bit and it feels good--sometimes I shove the shampoo bottle in my ass a little bit--and then I have to touch it and pblllltt--" He made a farting noise that was supposed to represent him coming. He used it a lot. "My girlfriend and I used to play around, you know, we'd get all lubed up and she'd rub against me--she was afraid to actually penetrate so I'd be like, no, oh no, it feels too good and pbllllltttt--"

I couldn't help but be fascinated by his open, destructive way of sharing his sexual history. I told myself I was trying to help him, but even then I was writing in my off times, and I knew I was really collecting material. Once he told me, "I've done some gay stuff. I didn't really think of it that way at the time. I was little and my cousin would want to masturbate with me. I guess it was more abuse than gay stuff. But I liked it, you know? I liked him." The stories of his cousin's sexual abuse were the only ones of his sex stories missing the detail and the 'pbllllltttt.'

When he finally imploded, it had been a long and exhausting week full of his self-destruction. It was seven in the evening and I wanted to call it a night, but he stood in the doorway and said,

"We should go do some work."

"I feel sick," I lied.

He changed out of his shirt and tie, which wasn't unusual for him at home, then put on his only set of street clothes. Still not unusual. The front door opened and by the time I realized that he was leaving, he was out. I ran out into the night, but he was a faster runner than me, especially fueled by his madness.

I called the mission president. "It happened again," I said.

After he came back, Elder Remy chided me. "You should have made me work harder," he said. "I know you liked talking about sex. You could have done better. You just encouraged me. And I knew you weren't sick." I knew he was projecting, but I've never forgot those words. I never forgot what didn't happen.

* * *

When my dad was going through the worst of his depression, he came home from work shirtless, his round body burned bright pink. "My patients cancelled, so I just went to the beach for a while," he said, "and stared at the water." The smell of his burnt skin filled our house's hallway, rubbery.

My siblings and I gathered around and laughed a little. "You should have brought some sunblock!"

"I wasn't planning on going," he said, as if unsure why he had.

We gathered around and laughed in lieu of a hug. He had done something. If he hadn't we all knew the afternoon would have been a void, a mass of typicality and ache. I wonder how many sunburned skins and days at the beach he lost, or Elder Remy lost, or the whole world lost.

Remember Me To One Who Lived There

2008-02-19T06:39:00.001-08:00

It has been a while since I dared brush the cobwebs of the intertubes.

I'm in a reflective mood.

One of the sad and good things about getting older is that life gets less complicated at the same time it gets busier. I think I could never have handled all the hats I wear now when I was eighteen or twenty-one or even twenty-five: being dad, grad student (graddy daddy), husband, band guy, writer, agent. Okay, so I don't handle those all too well. But other than the constant spectre of the poopy diaper or the occasional Princess Leia costume from Chrissy, life is generally free of surprises.

At the same time, the fact that I'm generally at peace is the biggest surprise of all--when it happens.

Read This Or Die

2008-02-04T22:43:00.001-08:00

Intergalactic Medicine Show, which pays me to ramble, has an announcement.

To Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy everywhere,

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1^st, and two more on February 15^th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale -- as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It’s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert

Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show

www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com

My buddy, my pal

2008-01-29T18:42:00.000-08:00

Cat Rambo has a book!

I forgot to plug my very talented buddy Cat and Jeff Vandermeer's book during my school madness.

Go. Buy it. It is exquisite.

Googleganger

2008-01-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

Interrupting my string of creative nonfiction, has anyone heard of a "Googleganger?" It's when you google your name and find someone with the same name.

This is mine. He even has a sister named Melanie and loves George R.R. Martin. Wha?