I just got my copies of the print edition of the book, and I'm very happy with the results. It's a real book, in every way that matters. As of today the print versions are available on Amazon for $12.50. It's a little more than I'd like to sell them for, but the costs of print-on-demand require it.
If anyone is interested in a signed copy, I can do that, too. However, it would probably cost closer to $20, not because my signature's all that valuable, but because I'd have to get copies shipped here, then pay to re-ship them to you. Still, feel free to contact me if you're interested and I'll figure it out. International copies may turn out to be a bit more--depends entirely on shipping.
The process of creating the physical book was easy enough I've also started work on a print version of Chicagoland. It's got more pages and will probably end up a little closer to $15. I'm supposed to get the proofs for that book any minute now (I literally just jumped up and ran outside because I thought I heard the delivery truck, but it was only the neighbor). If all looks good it could be available in just a few days or maybe a week at worst. I'll keep you posted.
The car I was in got back to the house first, while Moses’s car with Dan got delayed. Not wanting to waste any minutes of the bachelor party, everyone with me started drinking quickly. When Dan arrived, we shoved drinks at him so he could catch up. Then we had more drinks so we could stay ahead and keep stringing the late arrivals along.
We talked Dan into doing some shots, him individually against several of us, before the party moved upstairs. A while later, I went back down to the kitchen to find him doing a shot against himself. “Nobody else wanted one, and I wasn’t going to waste it,” he said.
“Why not just pour one shot?”
“I didn’t think of that.”
Soon after that, I found Dan slumped over the kitchen table, head on his arm, muttering to himself in German. I didn’t even know Dan spoke any German. “Mein freunde, mein freunde,” I heard him say, which I barely recognized as “my friends, my friends.” I tried to shuffle him off to bed, but some switch had flipped, and he ignored everything I tried to tell him in English, only responding with more German. I had maybe thirty words in the language total, but thankfully one phrase I could remember was “good night.” Heavy repetition of “gute nacht” got him to agree it was time for nighty-night. I grabbed his shoulder to help move him toward a couch.
Apparently that was a mistake. Angry, belligerent, Dan turned on me and shouted in an evil robot voice, “DEFCON 3, defenses rising!”
“Hey, wait, I’m just helping you to bed.”
Again, in the robot voice. “Does not compute. Nicht Deutch. Error.”
“Look, can we just go and-”
“Misunderstood. Mein freunde sprechen Deutch. Escalating. Approaching DEFCON 2. Nuclear assault imminent.”
“You’re a vegan, damn it; you’re supposed to be a pacifist!” He approached me threateningly, regardless. “Freund! Freund!” I shouted, desperate for any friendly German words. “Gut! Liebe! Freund!”
Dan started to deflate. “Freund recognized. DEFCON levels decreasing. Nuclear arsenals on standby. Gute nacht.” With that, he turned and walked upstairs, lay down on the couch, and didn’t move until morning.
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This was an excerpt from Chicagoland. The complete novel is Kindle format through Amazon.
As soon as they were cool, Rob cut up the brownies into tiny pieces, handed out a chunk to everyone, and hid the rest before the roommate could return. Then we pulled out Trivial Pursuit and played for a while as we waited.
“Nothing’s happening,” Rob declared after half an hour.
“Yeah, I don’t feel anything either,” Greg said. The rest of us shrugged or nodded in agreement. Rob brought the bag of brownies back out, and everyone took another couple of cubes. Doing the math, I’m pretty sure this gave us each about eight times more than a reasonable dose.
We continued playing. I would have sworn I still didn’t feel anything, but the questions in the game kept on getting weirder and weirder. Someone ate ten pounds of what meat in a challenge? (Eel. Naturally.) From what country is so-and-so from? (Forgive the double preposition.) “Red Dragon” is a sickly prequel to what prickly sequel? (Huh? Is that a spoonerism?) Investigating a horse murder, being what book? (Seriously? What the hell?)
I placed the last card back in the box, convinced it left a broad swooping trail behind as it moved through the air. “Okay, I think maybe I’m feeling something after all. But I swear this game is also independently getting weirder. I’m not understaying what they’re sanding half the time. Um. Understanding, saying. If I didn’t know better, I would say it was on pot brownies, too.”
Everyone agreed that was a perfectly reasonable suggestion.
With a start, I realized five minutes had passed, everyone sitting in motionless silence. I felt oppressed by my own thoughts and weighted down by an unusual inertia. “I don’t think I can play anymore,” I said.
“I want to lie down, but I don’t even think I can do that,” said Langston, scooched so far down on the couch his head was almost touching the seat, and with his legs splayed across the coffee table. Gravity would get him there eventually.
“I can’t …” groaned Rob. Finish the sentence, apparently.
“We need music,” said Greg. He oozed in pudding-esque fashion across three feet of floor and started flipping through a huge stack of vinyl records. Nobody else moved. It was about ten minutes before he spoke. “Wow, these are oooooold.”
Langston said, “Yeah, I got those from Mom when she moved to Chicago. There’s some good stuff in there.”
“And some really bad stuff.” Greg grinned devilishly. “Ooh, this looks awful. I’m going to put it on.”
It was awful, we all agreed, when we could summon the strength. Greg went from record to record, listening to some for as much as ten minutes or as little as ten seconds, trying to find something worse than the previous song. He was cunningly accurate with his picks.
It did not occur to any of us to suggest maybe we put on good music instead. We just sat and/or lay there and groaned, wishing it would stop.
Greg gasped, eyes wide with a child’s enthusiasm. “This! Here we go! John Barleycorn Must Die. That’s got to be the worst possible name for an album. It’s going to be terrible.” It was. It really was. He played it through five times in a row.
I finally found the strength to stand up. “I think I have to go lie down,” I said, dragging myself back downstairs to my temporary bed. Not since my first experience with the stuff—when I was convinced my arms were shriveling up into little Tyrannosaurus rex claws, and I could feel my tongue turning thin and forked like a serpent’s, darting around evilly inside my own mouth—had I been so disoriented by mere tea. Slumping on the couch, I lay for hours, half-catatonic with one foot in the land of Nod and one foot firmly planted in outer space.
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This was an excerpt from Chicagoland. The complete novel is Kindle format through Amazon.
As the meal wound down, I realized Moriarty was still missing. Nobody else had seen him. Loud and noisy inside, I stepped out and tried calling him.
“Yeah?” slurred a confused Morty, barely audible over street traffic, bad reception, and noise from the El he was on.
“Where’d you go?”
“Look, man, it’s no good. I tried and I’m sorry, but I failed, and there’s nothing left.”
I almost joked that when everything is gone, there’s always Nothing left, but Mort didn’t seem to be in a playful mood. “You sound drunk. What are you talking about?”
“I’m through with it. I’m going to go down to the roof of my office, and I’m going to end it all.”
I felt a real jolt. Everything tingled, and my brain seemed to be floating. I desperately tried to pull myself together. “Please tell me you’re joking!”
“No, man. Look, I’m sorry, but this is the only option. I love you, you’ve been a good friend, but I’m through. You can have all my stuff. Except the guitar. Moses gets that.”
“Please don’t do anything crazy. Can we talk about this?”
He said something garbled, and then either hung up or we got disconnected.
I called back. No answer.
Again. No answer.
A third time.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?!” he shouted.
“Morty, I’m begging you, please. Don’t do this. Tell me where you are. I’ll come get you.”
“I’m, I don’t know. On a hell. In train.” More noise, more garbling. “I’m so fucking sick of this,” I think I heard. It was hard to tell.
“Look, come back, or tell me where you are. We’ll talk.”
He said something I couldn’t follow and hung up.
I called again, but no answer. I tried a second and third time, but he refused to pick up, or he had no signal. I left a pleading message on his voicemail, asking him to call back, asking him to wait and give us a chance to do whatever he needed. All the while, I’m pacing up and down a street, but it’s not a real street. The people on sidewalk aren’t real people, and the passing cars aren’t real cars. They’re imaginary, illusions I barely register as I walk back and forth, shouting and begging on the phone, my only connection to the one thing that matters right now. I heedlessly step in front of a turning car. It brakes. I walk on as if it doesn’t exist, through ghosts of people I do not see. If anything happens to Moriarty, all of this may as well not exist. The only reality is at the other end of the line, where I’m leaving a desperate message for a lost soul who may or may not ever hear it. It could be the message that saves a life. It could also be the message the police listen to as they investigate the phone record of a dead man for clues. It could be the message I play to myself, over and over, when I inherit all his stuff, except for the guitar.
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This was an excerpt from Chicagoland. The complete novel is Kindle format through Amazon.
The new edition of Chicagoland has been published on Amazon. I'm very proud of the new edition. While at its heart it's basically the same story, the streamlining makes it a more coherent read. I've also cleaned up some things that, upon further reflection, shouldn't have been included in the first edition for one reason or another.
Readership to date has been small but generally positive, with an average rating of 4.5 stars on Amazon. I'm very pleased with that.
In the months since Chicagoland was first published, I have learned a lot of things. Some of them about editing, some about storytelling, some about marketing. Quite a few of the most valuable lessons have been outside the realm of the book itself, but have affected how I want to tell a story, and what I ought to include in one.
Because of all those things and more, I was convinced to do a round of revisions to the book. It's now shorter, snappier, and more focused on scenes that are emotionally important to the main character. I have simplified a few things, including combining a mess of about forty minor characters into a neatly packaged dozen or so. Finally, I fixed some large issues with the pacing and chronology in the latter third of the book, which hopefully helps draw it to a more satisfying conclusion.
More details to come once the new version is published.
Moriarty went back to his guitar, strumming and, noodling around with lyrics. “I will buy you a bracelet of silver … that every thief would want to pilfer … Ah, that’s no good. Hey, what rhymes with silver?”
“Nothing, really. It’s one of those un-rhymable words. Silver, orange, purple.”
“What, really?”
“You never noticed, mister poet? It’s weird they’re all colors. One of those odd groupings that make me wonder about the English language. Have you also noticed most of the words that have the same singular and plural are nearly all animals? Deer, moose, fish, rutabaga.”
“I don’t think rutabaga is an animal.”
I laughed. “Just testing. It also uses a normal plural.”
“And isn’t the plural of moose meese?”
“No, you’re thinking of meeses, and that’s the plural of mice. And it’s not the real plural, it’s a joke cartoon plural.”
“Oh, right. But nothing rhymes with orange?”
“Can you think of anything?”
“Borange, morange, porange … no I guess not. That’s so incomplete. We need to make up words that rhyme so songwriters like me won’t get stuck. Let’s see. We’ll do gurple, pilver, and lorange.”
“But what are they going to mean?”
“Say a couple's gettin' it on. So he puts his gurple in her pilver and reaches for her lorange, which will be her boobs, and—”
“It doesn’t count if you’re just making up slang terms. Besides, we’ve got enough words for genitalia already. You need to use the new word to fill a definition that doesn’t exist yet. Find some new shade of meaning, or a way of relating two things, or wait until we invent a new technology and lobby to have the word used instead of J.A.A.”
“J.A.A.?” Morty asked.
“Just another acronym.”
“Gotcha. But wait, you want me discover some way of describing the world that nobody who speaks English has ever needed so far, but that’ll make sense to everyone once explained?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds hard.”
“Keep in mind, since you’re inventing these words to rhyme with other words, they also need to go together. It wouldn’t do any good to decide lorange is a step-aunt’s second cousin and then still not ever be able to use it in rhyme with orange. Unless she’s been eating too many carrots or something.”
“You know what, let’s just forget it.”
“And that’s why we don’t have any words that rhyme with orange.
-----
This was an excerpt from Chicagoland. The complete novel is Kindle format through Amazon.
One reason Dominik and I got along so well was we had nothing in common. That’s not what it sounds like. We had plenty in common, and one of those things was Nothing. Not the Seinfeld nothing, meaning a certain empty pointlessness, but literally nothingness itself, the word nothing, and everything that stems from it.
Nothing is a funny word. Nothing is better, but there’s nothing worse, and there’s nothing like it in all the word. In the immortal words of Queen, “Nothing really matters.” You may whisper sweet nothings at the start of a relationship or be left with nothing when a bridge is burned. Even when you’re bored, you still have nothing to do, even when hungry, you have nothing to eat. And yet, despite its prevalence, it’s nearly impossible to think about nothing at all.
“I want to have a website that sells nothing,” said Dominik.
“Most websites don’t sell anything.”
“No, not just not anything. I want it to sell things, but all of those things are nothing. People will buy it out of perversity.”
“I don’t think credit card processors like empty transactions. And I don’t see even perverse people giving money away.”
“Okay, we’ll sell them something, but they’ll all be representations of nothing. A scribble. A picture of rust.”
“The number zero?”
“No, I’m pretty sure zero is actually something. But anyway, people will meditate on these things that have no inherent value, and in that meditation, they’ll actually discover the truth in the emptiness.”
“So like matter and antimatter particles that pop in and out of the void of space, appearing and disappearing and leaving everything essentially unchanged, but something really happened?”
“Yes! A picture of a particle and antiparticle is a good image; it’s two contradictory opposites, so it’s nothing. They can meditate on that one, too. Like giving someone silence, or space, they’ll produce from within themselves things to fill the void.”
“So when we sell them nothing, what we’re really doing is giving them themselves.”
“Absolutely. That will be our slogan, ‘Selling You Yourself.’ I like it.”
That’s how it went. We compiled a list of thirty or forty different logic-bending ways of using nothing in a sentence, as if it were a sentient agent. For example, when I told Camille I’d rather have her than Nothing, did Nothing’s feelings get hurt?
We collected visual representations. We constructed textual meditations on nothing, the void, emptiness, mu, and the like. Each time we got together, we’d add to the growing collection, bend our minds a little further, and laugh.
In the end, we didn’t get anywhere. It should have been obvious from the beginning that Nothing would come of the idea.
Moses seated himself in a papasan chair. The drugs must have been still messing with me, because every time I looked, it seemed like the papasan was slowly melting. Then it suddenly dumped Moses onto the floor, and I realized the chair had actually been broken and sagging all along. I couldn’t stop laughing at the reverse irony.
“Why didn’t you say something?” Moses asked.
“I didn’t think you were really sinking; I thought it was a hallucination,” I tried to explain.
“You know I have trust issues with chairs.”
“Yes, I know how three chairs once collapsed on you in a single day. I was even there for the third one.”
“Right. So you should know what a big deal this is for me.”
A couple of years later, I would turn up the volume on a softly spoken background reading in a Moses Marx song, trying to really catch the words that had so far eluded me. “We start in a womb and end up in a tomb and in between we deny the doom,” it said, before diving into a long list of misfortunes we pretend won’t befall us. I nearly lost it when I heard the words “and every chair you sit down on will be sturdy.” This was something that went all the way to Moses’s core.
Disgruntled, Moses shuffled over and took a seat atop a gigantic piece of stereo equipment. “Allow me to introduce the speaker of the house,” he said.
Not sure how long it will last, but Chicagoland is listed as a hot new release in Amazon's literary humor section. While it may be more properly filed first under just plain literary fiction or coming of age, humor is a big part of the book.
See here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/digital-text/7588850011/
Chicagoland is now complete and available for sale in Kindle format through Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagoland-Aaron-Rath-ebook/dp/B00H37PTXQ/
