Dylan Thomas, detectives, and a depressing dentist: my 2018 reading list

One of my favorite posts from last year (and let's face it, I probably read this blog as much as anyone else, just shuffling back through to keep track of what I wrote about X months ago) was my year-end racap of what I read in 2017. I was actually surprised when I wrote that up how few books I'd made it through. This year's list will nearly double it, though we did have a few shorties in 2018, so apples/oranges, etc.

This list is in roughly chronological order of when I read each book, but neither you nor I know how precise that is. I can remember the last one I read and the one before that, and maybe the one before that, and then things go fuzzy.

A Man with One of Those Faces, by Caimh McDonnell. This is an Irish detective/adventure/humor that I stumbled across last year and added to my Christmas list. Got it and read it soon after the holidays. Loved it. Then found Caimh McDonnell had several other books, which will appear later in this list, all featuring the same characters. 

Adventures in the Skin Trade; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog; Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas. Three short books, all received for Christmas in 2017. Along with the Welsh music and football, came an interest in the culture generally, and Dylan Thomas has to be a jumping off point for that. The first two books were mostly short stories, some of which were humorous, some quite religious, others just generally freaky, bordering on some kind of mythological horror (or horrifying mythology). I can't say I loved them all. I did enjoy Under Milk Wood, though I had the sense I only ever picked up on about 35-40 percent of the actual meaning of things. It's one I'll have to revisit sometime, though the proper way to absorb it would be to hear the original radio play.

Merry Christmas from me to you

My uncle from Connecticut came to visit last month, staying for a week at my dad's house. He's a reader, and having not brought enough reading material to last him the week, he borrowed a couple of books from my dad. My books. My first two, to be specific, The Greatest Show on Dirt and Nine Bucks a Pound.

I spent six years from start to finish on each of them, with some overlap when I put the first aside to attempt to find a publisher. Poured everything I had into them, and then moved on. I read The Greatest Show on Dirt a couple of years ago, just to refresh my memory on what I had written. It will always have a special place in my writer's heart, having been my first, but reading back through it confirmed to me that it's not my best, even though it has sold better than all of my others.

No, my best book, in my opinion, is Nine Bucks a Pound. Though four years after its release, I seemed to have forgotten most of the nitty gritty details and could only answer my uncle's questions to the best my fuzzy memory would allow. Which was made the worse by the humdinger of a cold settling into my head the night I saw him. Later that week, when I finished the book I had been reading, I decided it was time to dust Nine Bucks off and give it another go.

The Book Designer awards gold star to cover of First World Problems

The Book Designer unveiled its October 2018 e-book Cover Design Awards today, and you'll never guess who garnered an honorable mention gold star. Okay, maybe you will if I give you a big enough hint: It was the author's second such honorable mention in a row.

Ringing any bells? Okay, it was me. Well, I didn't design the cover, so credit goes to Ebook Launch, the company that designed both honored covers (as well as the next one, so maybe there will be another gold star coming next year). But it was my concept. And I'm the one who had to go back and forth, saying, no, not quite, change the lettering, change his face, change the color, etc.

We got there in the end.

Joel Friedlander, who runs the Book Designer site, made this comment about the cover for The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo: "Charming and well integrated, the hand lettering helps to create a unique look." He makes comments on most of the entries, saying what worked and what didn't. Some of them are quite entertaining (read: brutal) when he's not in love with a particular cover. For example, "Terminally boring. Why would anyone care?" Ouch. That would smart a bit.

Amazingly, each month a handful of authors will submit covers they designed themselves. As if they haven't learned over the years to hire this job out from all the previous critical comments.

It's hard enough catching readers' eyes with a professionally designed cover. Why anyone would go the DIY route is beyond me. I'm sure glad I didn't. I'm happy with the covers of all four of my books. The first two were done by a graphic designer I worked with at Baseball America. Considering she didn't specialize in book design, I thought she did a great job with them. I particularly love the bobblehead on the cover of Nine Bucks a Pound, which was created by another designer and then used as the focal point of the book cover.

Help me help you help me

Did you know it's just six (6) weeks until Christmas? Yeah, sneaks up on you fast, doesn't it? It's easy to keep track of the holidays where I work, because it neatly coincides with layoff season. For the past 10 years, November has been the month to keep your head down. I've seen them come, I've seen them go, and somehow I always survived.

Until today.

Yep. My number came up today. Seventeen and a half frickin' years, and I got called into the 9:00 meeting with HR. It wasn't a surprise, necessarily. Well, the part where they're closing our entire office (400+ people) was kind of a stunner. But there have been enough warning signs that I saw this coming. I've seen it coming for several years now. And after all the gallows humor and hallway chatter ... it still kind of hurts.

Even though it may be for the best in the end.

Funny how life imitates art. Or maybe art imitates life imitating art. I started a blog to make the marketing of The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo a little more fun. It's Jason's blog, but shhhhhhhhhh, I write it. Last week Jason got laid off. I had to use my imagination a little to picture how it would all go down for him. I don't have to imagine it any more. I lived it this morning.

Jason Van Otterloo is ready for the world

Good morning, World!

Today is the big day. Yes, it's National Bologna Day. Yay. (Disclaimer: I can't eat bologna or baloney any more. I maxed out as a kid.)

It's also Release Day for The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo. Yay! Yes, it's here at last. I know you may not have been counting down like I have been, but we can all enjoy it now just the same. And to properly enjoy it, you might find it handy to actually own a copy of the book. And to that end, here are a few useful links:

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JDPQ154

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-first-world-problems-of-jason-van-otterloo-james-bailey/1129736330?ean=2940161919613

Everything else (Apple, Kobo, more): https://www.books2read.com/b/3L0X7w

Casting a wide net--again

Stop me if I've said this before, but I'm done with selling ebooks exclusively on Amazon. I've gone back and forth on this in the past, but the benefits of being Kindle-only have really dried up over the past year. By mid-November, I should have all four of my novels available on all channels.

As of today, my third novel, Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed, is no longer Amazon-only. If you do Nook, Kobo, Apple, etc., you can now get it in whatever format you like. Here are a few links:

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sorry-i-wasnt-what-you-needed-james-bailey/1122021881?ean=2940156934812

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1439860272

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/sorry-i-wasn-t-what-you-needed-1

My new book, The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, releases on all platforms tomorrow. And my first two books will be made available around November 14. (Their "exclusive" period ends November 13.)

YA fans, meet Jason Van Otterloo

Do you like reading YA? Do you enjoy humor? Are you on a budget? Man, have I got a deal for you.

I'm taking my first step into the YA segment with The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo. It's like starting over as far as marketing is concerned. So I'm trying something new this time around. I'm giving away copies. FREE! All I ask in return is a little help spreading the word. If you enjoy the book, tell a friend. Post a review. Share a link on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social media you use. And if you happen to be in a book club that reads YA, I'll spot you a copy for everyone in the group. (All you have to do is talk them into picking it, which judging by some of the book clubs I've encountered must mean you have a lot of political sway.)

I can see you there thinking, what is this book even about. Well, here's the official "blurb":

Jason Van Otterloo has been waiting for his parents to grow up for nearly 16 years. It doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon. While his dad loses his paycheck to the neighborhood poker sharks and his mom cruises the happy hour scene, Jason haunts Seattle's coffee joints and indie cinemas with his best friend and fellow intellectual Drew. The tragicomic accounts of his ill-matched odd jobs, summer fling, and the mysterious and exotic new neighbor lady are detailed in emails to Drew and others. This will be one summer Jason will never forget—try as he might. (Ages 14 and up.)

Imagine a cross between Nick Hornby's Slam and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (please tell me I'm not the only one who has read and loved both of those) and you'll be on the right track. If that sounds like something you'd be up for, drop me a line, either by email (jamesbailey@rochester.rr.com) or on Twitter, and I'll shoot you a link that will let you download the entire book in your preferred ereader format from Book Funnel (no membership required, though you may need to install their app).

Simple, right? Well, what are you waiting for? Let's do this.

Houston, we have a release date

Back in March, on this very blog, I boldly announced my new book, The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, would be "Coming Summer 2018." I figured that gave me a reasonable three month window, three months down the road. Very doable. Or so I thought. Well ... some things just take a little longer than I think they will.

But now, at long last, it is ready to see the light of ereaders everywhere. It is formatted, converted, and ready to rock on multiple platforms. We are not going to do the Kindle-only thing this time around. No, we're casting a wide, wide net in the search for readers. Nook, Kobo, Apple, pretty much any ebook retailer, we will be there. The official release date is October 24, but it's already available for pre-order on the following sites:

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JDPQ154

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-first-world-problems-of-jason-van-otterloo-james-bailey/1129736330?ean=2940161919613

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1438917361

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-first-world-problems-of-jason-van-otterloo

If it rocks, it rocks, in any language

How much of our love for music is dependant upon being able to sing along? It's a factor, definitely. Critical, undoubtedly, with certain songs or bands where screaming along with the chorus is most of the fun. But what about the bands where you can't make out a lot of the words? What about the "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" anthems? Maybe the words you're chanting are not the same ones they are. What if the folks in the video look just like us, but we can't sing along because it's all Greek to us? Or *insert language here*?

I think our brains will try to map it anyway. Guitars and basses and drums know no language. That gets us 70 percent of the way there. Our toes still tap if the beat is right. And we're used to not knowing the lyrics the first few times through a song, anyway. Or more. How many times have you heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? How willing are you to bet your life you know all the words, even 25 years after you first heard it?

I listen to a lot of BBC Wales. The English version, as opposed to Radio Cymru. Which is great for catching some Manics, Stereophonics, Catfish and the Bottlemen, etc. That's how I got tuned into a couple of my newer fixes. I've bought more than a handful of CDs I wouldn't have otherwise stumbled across. And then I started following DJs or music critics over there who may dabble in Welsh language artists on the side. (Or maybe the English ones are what they would consider the aside from their viewpoint?) And certain bands seem to show up in my Twitter timeline. In some cases the band name is the only word I recognize, as my Welsh has a long ways to go.

Critique group jumps very horny shark

On and off over the last several years, I'd been keeping my eye open for a local critique group. In my head, it was a handful of writers who met every month in a bar somewhere and spent a couple of hours sharing feedback on each others' works. We'd each credit the others in the Acknowledgement pages of our novels and move on to the next round of drafts (and draughts). But I never found the secret bulletin board where this group was posted, and it lived only inside my mind.

This past January, I discovered Meetup.com, which for perhaps apparent reasons I had previously dismissed out of hand as a site for finding discreet partners. Turns out it's nothing like Adult Friend Finder, and you can instead discover groups that knit, hike, and even critique each others' writing. However, there were no writers groups that met during non-working hours. So I started my own. Instead of a bar, I scheduled the first meeting in a coffee shop. Five other writers showed up, which surpassed my expectations, as I'd imagined the horrible awkwardness of sitting across the table from one other person, much like a "party" I hosted one night years ago.

We laid out some basic ground rules about how much was reasonable to expect each other to read each month (in the neighborhood of 10-12 pages, double spaced) and what was the best way to share our work (we settled eventually on emailing it around to the group). It was decided that the coffee shop was too loud for us to all hear each other easily, and we searched for a new home, eventually settling on a somewhat centrally located library with reservable rooms.

Hillsborough haunts pages of Danny Rhodes' novel Fan

Over spring break we took a family trip to Washington, D.C. It's been years since I'd been there, and I'd never stayed in the city before or visited for more than a day at a time. This time we did four nights in the Embassy Row neighborhood near Dupont Circle. Nice neighborhood, and if my feet hadn't been so tired from walking all day every day I would have liked to have explored Massachusetts Avenue a little more and seen more of the embassy buildings from various countries.

I did find time to visit a book shop a couple of blocks from our hotel, called Second Story Books. Which is on street level, not the second story, but it sold used books, hence the name. I could have spent hours in there scanning the shelves, but unfortunately didn't have that much time. So I bee-lined for the fiction shelves and netted a couple of Richard Russo novels (Straight Man and Mohawk). And then another book caught my eye. Fan by Danny Rhodes. I don't remember where, but I read something about it in the not too distant past, just enough for that "hey, I've heard of this" lightbulb to click on when I saw it. It's a novel about a rabid Nottingham Forest fan whose life is changed after witnessing the Hillsborough tragedy from the other side of the pitch.

Coming Summer 2018

It's been three years since I released Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed. Three long years. What the heck have I been doing all that time?

Following a brief break and a series of false starts that resulted in a collection of abandoned Chapter 1s, I settled on a new story, which turned into two books, and may eventually result in a third (fourth, fifth?). My goal is to release the first, entitled The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, this summer. Jason is 15, going on 16, and still waiting for his parents to grow up. The story is set in 2003 and told entirely through online exchanges with friends. I'll describe it as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole meets Nick Hornby's Slam. (Not sure what the Venn diagram of readers for that combo looks like. Anyone else in the intersection with me?)

I'm currently on the nth round of revisions, with at least one more pass to come. I'm still toying with releasing both books together, but the longer things drag out, the more I rethink that.

If you'd like to be the first to know when they are available, please sign up for my email list. I promise, I do not spam. I only send messages when I have something significant to announce (which as you might guess from the fact it's been three years since the last book came out, isn't all that often).

In the meantime, if you want a taste of what's to come, here's the first ~2,000 words of The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo. (It's not divided into chapters, which should make sense once you read it.)

Discoverability and pure dumb luck

As an indie author, I have a soft spot for indie artists generally. I particularly love to discover a new band that hasn't broken big (yet). I've found bands on Twitter, sometimes from a tweet recommending them (Rizzle Kicks, H/T to James Corden), and sometimes via direct contact from the band itself (Lux Lisbon). Discoverability has always been the key to an artist's success, but discoverability is so different now to what it was a generation ago. Musicians can find an audience halfway across the world without trekking there in a broken-down van to play a crowd of 20 people. Sometimes purely by accident.

My son is 8 and into music. If you drew a Venn diagram of what we like, there'd be a reasonable sweet spot in the middle. Most of those songs are ones I've introduced him to, despite his initial reluctance to give anything I like a chance. From AC/DC to Trombone Shorty to Snow Patrol, he has added a fair number of my tracks to his mp3 player and/or Spotify list. It doesn't often flow the other way, though. He gets a lot of his music from whatever they play on Dude Perfect, which mostly all sounds the same to me, bland synthesized music and cliched lyrics that play well behind footage of morons performing trick shots.

Parkland survivors offer hope that something might finally change

A lot can change in a week.

Seven days ago, 17 lives were needlessly lost in the horrific shooting in Parkland, Fla. My first awareness of it came via Twitter, before any details were available. Another school shooting. The all-too-familiar depression and hopelessness that washes over me during these incidents struck me harder and harder as information was reported. Many injured ... multiple fatalities ... more than 10 deaths ... then, finally, 17 dead. And eventually a grim sense of relief that the count had finally stopped going up.

Happy Valentine's Day.

I had taken the afternoon off to buy and prep a steak for our traditional Valentine's cookout. But by the time my wife got home from work I didn't feel much like celebrating anything. It felt wrong to be grilling--to be doing anything I enjoyed--with such a tragedy for all intents still unfolding, knowing so many families were being irrevocably torn apart. I felt more like crying than anything else. But I put my best face on, partially because I still don't want to talk about things like this in front of my son. He's 8. He shouldn't have to know these kinds of things happen.

The muddy fence

Every morning during the week, I wait for the school bus with my son out in front of our house. Yesterday morning something looked different. It took my brain half a second or so to process it, because it was so unexpected. An entire panel of my neighbor's fence had been turned from white to black.

Theirs is a corner house, and over the years they've been victims of a number of lawn jobs, which sadly seem to happen on a semi-regular basis here in Suburbia. This time, however, it appears to have been an inside job.

Those tracks in the snow come from the driveway, where I'm guessing someone was blocked in. There are five driver-age occupants there, requiring quite a bit of car shuffling at times. My working hypothesis is someone was parked in, decided it would be quicker to pull across the lawn than get the blocking vehicle moved, got stuck, and spun their tires until the sky rained mud.

I only wish I could have seen it, because it must have been spectacular. I mean, if you look close enough, you can see mud on the fence surrounding their pool in the backyard. How high must have it been arching through the air? I bet it was beautiful. In a dirty, muddy sort of way. And in the way that things like this are always more spectacular when it's not your fence.