After a couple years of resistance, I am now officially a twitter person. What does this mean? I have no idea. Probably it means it’s just another dumb Internet thing that will help me pass the time from sunrise until sunset and will sometimes make me feel badly about myself because I’ll burn too much time on it. It’s another thing I can use as an excuse not to get real work done, but it’s semi-socially acceptable, in the sense that it’s considered important for “branding” or something like that.

I’m going to act conflicted about this, and I probably am, but also the truth is if I was truly conflicted, I wouldn’t be posting about this on one of my four websites (besides this, one is easy enough to find, the others are here and here, plus there’s the podcast), and I wouldn’t be hoping for people to cross-promote it via their own social networks and link to it and retweet my stupid tweets and so forth.  Really, everything I’m doing is just another flailing effort at establishing some kind of minor online relevance that will make me seem more publishable to agents and editors, because this is what people say you should be doing.

It’s been four years since I sold the manuscript for my memoir to Random House. It’s been eighteen months since I started submitting my first novel to publishers, and we’re down to one publisher who is considering it and keeps asking for one more week. I’ve barely looked at the book since submitting, but I’m expecting that one of my summer projects will be trying to rehab that book and make it more palatable to people who aren’t me. It’s been three months since I finished another novel and about one month since splitting with my agent, and now I’m deeply immersed in the agent shuffle, which entails nothing more than waiting and waiting and waiting around the house for what a friend calls “the golden email.”

None of which I share because I’m looking for pity. I’m lucky to have ever had a book published and to have made some money on it.  I’m saying this primarily because I’m trying to figure out what the point of twitter is, and the only real justification for it–because obviously there is no need for me to have any more superficial relationships in my life– is because theoretically at some point in the future it will be professionally beneficial or lucrative in some vague way.

Or, more honestly, let’s call it what it is: it’s another way for me to waste some time and to make some jokes and to see my friends make jokes but without having the physical obligation attached to the joking, so that I can pretend to be participating in their lives without actually being present.  Which maybe is a depressing way to end a post whose primary goal is to link you to the twitter page, but also I don’t know exactly where else I’m supposed to end here.

Today I’m at the gym, and on the bank of wall-mounted TVs, there is Skip Bayless and there is Stephen A. Smith. Some masochist has turned the captions on (pity the poor intern charged with transcribing Smith & Bayless conversations)  and try as I might not to look, I cannot help looking, which is the only reason I am aware that there is a “controversy” surrounding Eli Manning’s upcoming appearance on Saturday Night Live.

I want to be clear that had this not happened, had I not arrived at the gym at that exact time, had someone else not hit the CC button on the TV, then I would have no idea about this, and my life would be better for having not known.

There’s no point in rehashing the details of the controversy; you can find it on your own. Abridged version: Packers QB Aaron Rodgers said something fairly innocuous about how Peyton Manning set the bar high for SNL guests, and it will be hard to Eli to top it.  This comment, naturally, was the foundation of an eight minute “debate” segment on a major cable network. Skip Bayless shrieks some petty complaints about Aaron Rodgers (he’s arrogant, I don’t like the way he carries himself, he needs to focus on football, etc), and then he says to Smith: “Stephen A., do you think Rodgers has the right to call Manning out like that?”

And the mistake Smith– who is also unlikable, I know, but who was at least at one point a pretty good writer– makes is this: he answers the question.

The only adequate response in that situation is I’m not going to respond to that because it’s a stupid question, followed by seven minutes and fifteen seconds of cathartic dead air.

And, at first, I thought, okay fine ESPN debate shows are stupid and everyone knows this, or will realize it when they turn sixteen and become too mature for these shows.  But then I thought, no, that’s not true, not everyone realizes it, because otherwise why would this show be on every time I go to the gym? Why would Skip Bayless have an alleged net worth of $4 million? Why would there always be people watching this show and why would Internet arguments be fueled by responses to this clown who has found a niche only by clinging to the underbelly of cable TV with people like Dr. Drew and eighty percent of the people on E (the network, not the drug, but also maybe the drug)?

I accidentally cursed out loud at the TV, which happens sometimes at the gym. I mean, it happens at home too, but my wife is used to this. So I blurted out Oh fuck you people, and the woman on the elliptical next to mine gave me a sideways look like she was trying to determine whether I had some kind of mental illness or if I was just plain uncouth, and then I stepped off the elliptical because I couldn’t bring myself to even look upon the existence of a show that offensively trivial.  But you can’t turn it off, can you? You can’t avoid it. Because within thirty seconds, I was confronted by a commercial in which Mario Lopez told me I’d better tune in to find out what Pippa Middleton is up to. Plus: Hear what the Dancing With the Stars stars think about Pippa’s partying!

That is a real thing the TV said to me.

The discouraging thing is that there are people at home who saw that commercial and then said, wait a minute, I do want to know what Urkel thinks about the prospect of a beautiful young English woman partying in the wake of joining the royal family. There are people who will be annoyed if they don’t get answers to these questions.  These shows don’t just encourage us to indulge in pointless fantasies, but they encourage the development of a culture of Answering Stupid Questions, a culture that has somehow degenerated to the point that it’s considered scandalous when the President doesn’t take the time to refute every conspiracy theory on the Internet; when it’s considered legitimate news reporting to debate the merits of Donald Trump’s demands for a birth certificate; when decisions about women’s sexual rights are made by a panel of celibate white men; when professional psychologists feel no compunction about going on the news to diagnose the mental state of a celebrity they have never met and, in fact, have never even seen in real life; when a celebrity can arbitrarily decide that the polio vaccine causes autism, and can be allowed to appear on show after show after show spreading misinformation and damning unlucky children to unnecessary deaths; when we waste so much god damn time having to respond to every dumb question people ask that we don’t ever move forward, because at some point it became ingrained in our culture that there are no facts but opinions and all opinions are equally valid and therefore deserve to be treated equally.

But you know and I know: sometimes opinions are wrong. Sometimes they are stupid. Sometimes they are offensive and insulting and indecipherable. So why do we have to pretend to entertain these notions?

I get why we teach children to respect one another’s opinions, to listen to one another, but somewhere along the line, we have made a cultural misstep, have missed the point.  Which is why it’s difficult, sometimes, to accomplish anything in my classes, because discussion inevitably leads to students writing things like Some people opposed Gandhi’s ideas of nonviolence but Gandhi kept going and in the end everyone has their own opinion. Sure, everyone has a right to say what they believe, but if it’s based purely on gut feel, if it begins with something like I know the facts, but or ends with Sure the scientists agree, but I feel like I would know better then there is no reason to continue the conversation. There certainly is no reason for a news show to invite an actual accomplished expert who has been working on an issue for thirty years (building on another four hundred years of work from their colleagues) and plunge them into a split screen argument with a concerned but uninformed activist, the physical representation of their selves in a 50/50 split screen literally suggesting intellectual equality.

We’ve eliminated ethos entirely from the rhetorical triangle (or, maybe worse, have begun to define ethos entirely by who the speaker’s sexual partners have been), eliminated logos because logos depends on facts, and have flattened it into a straight line that begins with emotion and ends nowhere.

What’s the point in establishing expertise if it can be undermined by half-formed opinions? What kind of culture wants to define itself via baseless skepticism and wild guesses?

Is this whole post, more or less, my gut reaction (or overreaction?) to a dumb sports debate? Maybe, sure. But look around you. Think about the conversations you’re having on a daily basis and the things CNN and Fox and MSNBC  and ESPN want you to care about. Doesn’t it feel like I’m right?

The first episode of the Book Fight podcast is now available for download.  I should probably embed it here somehow, but I’m not quite sure how to do that yet, and anyway it’s easy enough to follow the link and listen on the Book Fight site itself.

This is only the second podcast I’ve ever done, and it was a lot more fun than I expected, actually. Essentially, the goal of Book Fight is to invite listeners to join me and Mike Ingram (friend, fiction writer, Barrelhouse co-founder/editor) in wide-ranging discussions of books we’ve read.  There isn’t much else to it, structurally; we’ll pick books based on what we’re reading right now, so there figures to be a wide range of authors, genres, and subject matters represented (as opposed to, say, only focusing on indie lit, or only reading classics, or whatever).

Beyond the broad principle of selection, though, the hope is that our recorded conversations can replicate the kinds of discussions we would be having anyway over a few beers, which means they’ll follow tangents, they’ll open up into discussions of larger issues relevant to reading and writing, and they’ll hopefully offend a few people at some point.  Oh, and it should be the kind of discussion listeners can enjoy without having read the book first.

Mike had to talk me into this, honestly; the work on this project is 85% his so far.  But now that we’ve started and recorded a couple of episodes, I’m really excited about it and hoping this is the first of many episodes we’ll be posting.

Hey Internet,

Here are the things you need to know about my life right now.

- Along with Barrelhouse editor Dave Housley, I’m running an online fiction workshop that begins in two weeks.  It’s a great value (really– compare it to the others out there) and although I’m not good at a lot of things, I like to think I’m pretty good at helping people improve their writing.  There are only a few spots left, so you should register now.

- More Barrelhouse: Every year, we run a writer’s conference in DC called Conversations & Connections.  This year, the conference is on April 21, and, besides being a great value (for $65, you get admission to the conference, a subscription to a literary journal, a new book, and more), it’s focused on offering practical advice for writers, including direct consultations with actual living editors of journals who will read your work on the spot.  I’ll be on a panel with Cathy Alter, discussing the issues involved in writing nonfiction about friends and family.  We’ll be running a Philly version of the conference this year on Sept. 22 at the University of the Arts, and I’ll post about that when the time comes.  Registration is open for DC, and sells out every year.

- I started a really dumb Tumblr blog about whales. I love it. It is my favorite thing.

- I’ve been occasionally reviewing inspirational pet books (in the vein of “Marley & Me”) over on the Barrelhouse blog. They’re long, but maybe entertaining? A friend tells me she loves them because I am so articulate in my rage.

- I still have a job at Temple, even though the Governor keeps taking our money away.

- I now have two novels floating around in the world, out of my hands, and I am in the midst of daily freakouts re: their status and what their status says about my status as a person who writes books that may or may not be unpublishable.

- I’m stumbling into the world of podcasting. On Thursday, Barrelhouse editor Mike Ingram and I will record the first episode of Bookfight, a podcast where we talk about books in a hopefully entertaining and accessible way for both writers and non-writers.

- I learned more than I ever wanted to learn about NJ building codes, to the extent that I actually started having very unpleasant, and occasionally violent, dreams about the local building inspector.

With any luck, someday relatively reasonably maybe kinda soon, I’ll be able to report some more good publishing news.  Maybe.

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from La Salle College High School, my alma mater, asking me to be the guest speaker at their Honors convocation. They wanted a younger speaker than they usually get (I can’t remember who spoke to my classes when we were there, but I assume they were in their mid-50s and had made a bunch of money trading frozen concentrated orange juice futures or something), and maybe someone who could connect to the students. So I went, even though I don’t give many speeches, because it was a real honor to be invited, and because it was an opportunity to begin rewriting what has been a complicated history for me at La Salle.

There were about 600-700 people there. 240 students, their parents, faculty and administrators. Not too long ago, I would probably have actually vomited at the thought of speaking in front of a group like that. I would have been paralyzed at the podium, and I wouldn’t have been able to look away from any students who looked bored.

But I’ve been teaching and I’ve had to learn how to handle public speaking, at least a little bit, and I think it went actually kind of okay. At one point, early in the speech, a Christian Brother in the front row looked like he was dreading what I was about to say, but otherwise, I felt like, at the very least, I didn’t totally screw up.

Two reactions stand out. First, a member of the La Salle board of directors said, “That was unlike anything I’ve ever heard!” It’s best to just assume that’s a compliment, I think. (I’ve now used that joke on three different websites, and in about 5 different conversations. I’m sticking with it).

Then, about two hours later, a La Salle student emailed me to thank me for the speech, to say he really related to it. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, I’m working on getting a video of it, but in the meantime, the transcript of the speech is below.

Two notes, for some context:

1) I practiced it a lot, but planned on some ad-libbing; it’s how I’m comfortable speaking to groups. So what you see below is about 75-80% of what I actually said– there were some last-second cuts and additions, as well as a bit of reorganization.

2) For those readers who don’t know anything about La Salle–  it’s a really well-respected, expensive private school in the Philly suburbs. That’s relevant later.

[Greeting, congratulations]

I got two bad grades in my life, and I remember them both vividly. The disappointment, the frustration. The two worst grades I ever received, one here, and one at La Salle University as an undergrad.

The grade, both times? It was a B.

The class? Both times, same class—public speaking.

And yet, here I am, eleven years removed from high school, an unlikely speaker, for a number of reasons.

The last time I was at one of these Honors Convocations, I was seventeen and I was feeling very proud of myself. I had a near-perfect GPA and had convinced myself I was the smartest person in this room.

Actually, it didn’t matter much which room I was in, or what time of day it was, or who else was there—I always thought I was the smartest person in the room. And I made sure everybody knew it. See, I was arrogant, but I was also insecure. As much as I believed in my own superiority, I also needed other people to acknowledge it. So I became dismissive and rude and condescending. I spent the entire convocation, and about 80% of my life, making snide comments about other people. I became an expert at muttering sarcastic insults. Every word I said traveled sideways.

But still few people acknowledged the genius I was sure I possessed. Mostly, I was anonymous at La Salle. I didn’t know many people in this school because I acted like they didn’t deserve to know me. My few friends and I devoted free periods to discussing how much better we were than everyone else around us.

To an extent, I was right to be proud of my GPA, as you should all be. Like you, I worked hard to achieve it. I earned those grades, and the honors, and, later, the scholarships. But I took it too far.

I let good grades define me.

I let good grades skew my perception of self.

I let good grades rob me of my empathy.

At the beginning of my Senior year a few friends and I printed a newsletter that we smugly called an underground newspaper even though it was only four pages long. The administrators here who remember this would probably prefer if I limit the details on production and distribution. So, for the sake of avoiding another detention, let’s just say this: the feature article was a detailed attack on every group of people on campus, from hockey players to band guys to guys who owned their own cars. The goal was to condemn every aspect of the school; a little bit of teenage rebellion. It was, let’s say, not well received. By anyone.

Although we published anonymously, I was caught within a day because I’d bragged to about three dozen people that I’d written it. It wasn’t enough to put people down; I wanted them to know who I was. Once everyone found out, my alienation from them was complete. I spent the remainder of my final year with one foot out the door, eager to escape to a world filled with people I would like.

But I ran into the same problems in college. And graduate school. And at work. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties when I finally realized that I was the problem. Maybe it was me who was making things so difficult. It took me until then to realize that intelligence and good grades are meaningless if they’re not paired with humility.

You are all obviously intelligent, hard-working people. You’re going to achieve incredible things over the next decade and beyond. So you have every right to enjoy your success and anticipate bright futures. But do not allow it to corrupt you. Without humility, achievement can become toxic. Without humility, you risk reducing your life to a series of hollow certificates.

These letters you just received [they all receive academic letters, an 'L,' like athletes traditionally receive], are functionally meaningless objects. [this is the point when the Brother started to look uncomfortable]. They look nice, but they do nothing. For functionality, you would be better off with a rock. The thing is, like a nation’s flag, their value isn’t in their physical utility, but rather in what they represent.

If you’d asked me back in 2000 what this school represented, I would have had a very different answer than I do now. I walked off campus on graduation day and vowed never to return, and certainly I never could have predicted that I would be invited back. I maintained that vow until last year, when Mr. Bloh invited me to speak to his creative writing class. I was still conflicted—it was hard to overcome four years of bitter memories. But I decided to go because Mr. Bloh has always been supportive of me and my work; when I was a senior, he conducted an independent study with me where I was allowed to work on a novel, the first time a teacher had ever encouraged my writing to that degree.

While driving here last year, I felt again like a seventeen year old, fearful and angry and lonely. But when I walked through that front door, I ran into Ms. Shustack. Even though she has taught thousands of students during her career, she recognized me immediately, talked to me for ten minutes, remembered the one class I took with her back in 1998. I saw Mrs. Mullen, who hugged me, and took me on a tour of the building, showed me the upgrades the school had made, and, above all, seemed genuinely happy to see me.

Throughout the tour, I ran into other former teachers, and the story repeated itself. A week later, I received a handwritten letter from Brother Ken Cook thanking me for visiting. They all welcomed me not because I’m remarkable—I am not, I’m just a smart kid who got into some trouble. Not because I’m remarkable, but because they are.

That, to me, sums up what this letter represents. It represents a spirit of generosity and fairness. A spirit of forgiveness and compassion. An understanding of the moral obligations we all have to make others’ lives better, rather than worse.

Make no mistake, it is a privilege to go to this school. Few students anywhere have the benefit of parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to send you to a school of this caliber. Few students have access to the advantages this school offers—the facilities, the space, the curriculum. Few high school students, in this city especially, go to school every day actually believing that they can do whatever they want to do with their lives.

I don’t say all of this to diminish your accomplishments. I say it to remind you that, for all your hard work, this is also a room full of very fortunate people. Look at the state of the country today—the unemployment, the unrest, people feeling betrayed and forgotten by the power structure—and think about how remarkable it is that you have to opportunity to overcome all of it.

But it all comes back to humility and empathy. Do not allow your success to harden you against giving back to your community. I should be clear: this is not a plea to people to drop your careers and sign up for Greenpeace, living your life on the high seas. I’m not asking that you give away your material possessions. This is a call for the most gifted, intelligent, and diligent among us to remember the good fortune we have had and to use our talents to help people. Maybe that means doing charity work. Maybe it means improving the world through scientific research. Maybe it means bringing you La Sallian values into a life of public service. Maybe it just means making a concerted effort to be kind to people you’ve never met. Saying hello to strangers. Giving people second chances. Trying to understand them, even if—especially if—they annoy you.

There’s an adage you’ve all heard before: “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a harder battle.” I really don’t like that one at all. I think it’s a little bit stupid and shortsighted, and obviously not true. It’s too often used as a blanket defense for people acting rudely or shamefully. It’s the kind of thinking I used to justify my own condescension toward everyone. Just because someone is going through a difficult time, it doesn’t entitle them to treat others poorly.

So, no, I don’t like the Be Kind adage, although I like the idea behind it. The idea, I believe, is better expressed by the novelist Elizabeth McCracken, who wrote: “one should never guess at the complicated histories of strangers.”

As a student here, I spent far too much of my time concocting simplistic histories for the classmates I didn’t like, and I judged them based on the little bit that I knew. Those judgments turned my gifts inward rather than outward. I always wanted to be a writer, but never learned how to truly write until I learned how to listen, to hear people’s stories rather than filling in the blanks on my own. Only then did I realize that I could use art to contribute to our culture, rather than just boosting my ego. Only then did I finally start publishing stories and essays, and then a memoir.

I took the gift of this education from my hard-working parents and I scorned them for it. I didn’t begin to share those gifts with others until I started teaching, developing friendships with students and trying to guide them through their own college struggles.

Without humility, without empathy, I was just an unpleasant guy with a high GPA. With it, I am working toward becoming a man who people can respect, and a man who can respect himself.

So, I’ll close by urging you not to make the same mistakes I did, to appreciate the privilege you have here. I urge you not to use that privilege as an excuse to put people down, but as an opportunity to lift them up.

Yesterday, NFL wide receiver Steve Smith left the New York Giants as a free agent and signed with the Eagles, a potentially major move, depending on his health and a few other variables.  But I’ll leave that discussion to the experts.  (I don’t use this blog for much, but one thing I can assure you I will never use it for is to offer my amateur analysis of NFL personnel moves).

I’ve been distancing myself from football for a few years now.  Not entirely, not a clean break or anything, but working hard to put it in the proper perspective, as opposed to the perspective evinced by my memoir.  And I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it, actually, to the point that I actively avoid most NFL pre-game and analysis programs, because after a while it’s so hard to look past the fact that these shows are devoted almost entirely to grown men wearing thousand dollar suits while they shout crazy, baseless guesses about upcoming football games at each other and work very hard to convince their viewers that this game is The Big Game and it Means Something and is Very Very Important.   For a long time, I believed them.

Obviously, a lot of people do enjoy the hype because those types of shows thrive, and are remarkably influential.  Same deal with talk radio.  And when you allow yourself to be immersed in the endless hype and you wholeheartedly invest in this idea that Your Team is the most important team in the world, this is what you get.

You get people like the immature, destructive protagonist of my book.  You get people who are willing to go on a player’s Facebook page and wish death upon him because he had the gall to go work for somebody else.  You get people saying incredibly racist, violent, and homophobic comments directly to a player because he made a personal decision about his career and that decision is inconvenient for some New Yorkers.  To be clear: I don’t think I would have actually written these specific kinds of things on a player’s Facebook page, although I am continually relieved that Facebook and Twitter were not around to reflect my worst impulses and to consume all of my time when I was a teenager.  But I had the same basic mindset as these people: I had built my life and my image and my self-esteem around the well-being of a football team, so when someone did something to hurt the team, I took it as a personal offense, a direct attack on me and those I loved.  I don’t want to blame the media too much for this, although their whole This Is War narrative certainly contributes; the blame falls squarely on the individuals for so structuring their lives and for so losing perspective that they think it’s okay to say something like, “Steve I hope you blow out your knee again.  By the time next year you’ll be selling rock in Compton.”

First, let’s note that it’s not a surprise that a lot of the most vitriolic comments are imbued with this kind of somewhat subtle racism, the implication that his only career options are to be a football player or to sell drugs in Compton, or the consistent implication from semi-literate Facebook users that he is dumb and somehow less capable than them.  Even the implied idea of ownership– their rage at his making the personal choice to work in another city– is pretty uncomfortable.

Second, a lot of Eagles fans online (specifically in the comments section I linked at BGN) are very pleased with themselves because Eagles fans aren’t the ones doing this. This time.  But let’s be honest here: this is not a New York or Philly thing.  It’s a lunatic sports fan thing.  There are insane, hateful, awful people rooting for every team.  There are good people who turn into awful, selfish, petulant people when their team is threatened.   Of course Philly fans would do the same thing.  Anyone who has ever attended an Eagles game– or watched a sporting event in a Philly dive bar– has heard them saying worse things.

Finally, the thing that’s most interesting to me is that usually the ignorance and hatefulness of the Internet is blamed on anonymity. In my book, that’s what I said was the primary cause.  And lately, websites have been forcing commenters to register using their real names and photos, presumably in an attempt to curb the kind of incivility that dominates Internet discussion.  But look– there are a bunch of people who are perfectly willing to attach their real names, face, and profiles to racist death threats.  There are people (using photos of their children as their avatars!) who are so callous and so caught up in their life as a fan that they have no qualms about letting the entire world know exactly how ugly their soul is.  Some of these people could probably be fired if someone clicks through to their profile and finds out where they work.  Many of them are probably considered reasonable, caring people by their peers.  But left alone, given the opportunity to say something terribly hateful, they embrace the opportunity, and you can’t help wondering– are we supposed to believe in the person they show us in public, or the person they reveal themselves to be in private?

Skimming through the comment thread on Smith’s Facebook page, I kept coming back to this thought: this is the reason I’m ashamed that I was an obsessive fan.  Because it turns you into the worst kind of person you can be: selfish, unaccountable, and heartless.

I’ve always been bad at maintaining a bloggy presence.  Even during my summer break from teaching, I didn’t manage a single post, and although I’m not exactly sorry about that, I do wish I had more interesting things to say on a regular basis.  And, honestly, the thing I’ve been waiting on is the opportunity to write a triumphant post in which I broke the news about selling my first novel to a major publisher, which would then launch several weeks worth of novel-related postings.

But that hasn’t quite worked out as planned.  The book is still out there, my agent is still pushing it, but I got spoiled by how quickly my first book sold (less than a month on the market, I think), and this is going a bit more the way these things usually go, as I understand it– interminable waits, rejections that are comprised of about ninety-nine percent praise (i.e.- we really love your book, you’re a great writer, it’s very entertaining and engaging, but we’re not going to publish it), that kind of thing.  In theory, hopefully we’ll have news on that front sooner than later though.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing.  I have an essay forthcoming in the Eagles Annual 2011; it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from one of those pre-season football magazines, as the editor allowed me to go in depth on my moral quandary as an Eagles fan forced to learn to root for Michael Vick.  I’m pretty proud of that essay, actually, because it took me a full year to figure out how to articulate my feelings on that complex issue.  As far as I know, it’s not quite on newsstands yet, but you can order online, and once it hits the streets, it ought to be very easy to find in the Philadelphia area.

Over at the Barrelhouse blog, I’ve been writing a series of reviews of inspirational pet books (those books that follow the formula of something like Marley & Me), a project that started as an excuse to make some  jokes about an easily mocked genre, but which has turned out to be really interesting, at least to me, not to mention that it’s been a good project in forcing me to articulate exactly what’s so objectionable about some of these books when most people would probably find them pretty harmless.

At Barrelhouse, we also just launched our latest online issue, and we’re in the finishing stages of producing our newest print issue too.  Once Issue 10 is released, then I think I become a full member of the team, rather than just some guy basking in the reflected glory of an indie lit magazine.

Okay, one more Barrelhouse note: in September, I’ll be teaching an online Fiction workshop along with my former Iowa classmate Sarah Strickley, who is dramatically smarter and better read than I am, which is intended as a compliment, but probably sets the bar a bit too low.

Finally, I’m working on another novel, on which I finished my first draft last week, but about which I’m probably better off not saying anything else until I’ve got a real finished product.  Don’t want to jinx anything by getting too presumptuous.

This is where I would say that I’m planning on updating more frequently over the coming months, because I would love to do that, but I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.  But more frequently than once every three months also seems like an attainable goal.

Late notice on this one, and I refuse to be one of those people who begins every blog post with a litany of excuses for failing to post regularly, so let’s just get to it:  tomorrow, Barrelhouse Magazine is hosting a reading at Tattooed Mom (530 South Street, Philadelphia), and I’ll be one of the featured readers, alongside Lee Klein, Stan Mir, Christian TeBordo, Katherine Hill, and Elise Juska, all of whom are more accomplished than I am, and all of whom figure to present some pretty great stuff.

In order to fit the theme, I’m breaking one of my rules, which is that I have long refused to read from my new novel until it’s actually under contract somewhere, because it seems seriously presumptuous to call it a novel when no one else in the world is validating it as such.  But still, I’m doing it because I don’t know what else to do, and I am, frankly, tired of reading the same passages from the memoir.

Logistical details: Event begins at 8 PM, the readings will be short, there is no cover charge, there are 50 cent pierogies, and we’ll be upstairs.

This week, I’ll be completing likely the final flurry of promotional events for “Bury Me in My Jersey.”  Saturday’s event will occur almost exactly 11 months after the book’s release, and more than a year after my pre-publication reading in Denver, and it seems like the well has dried up as far as promotional opportunities in the area.    So I’m hoping to have a successful, active week, and hoping to see a lot of people at the following events:

April 13, 6:30-8:30 PM– 4th Annual Meet the Authors Event at the Monroe Township Public Library in Gloucester County, NJ.

Library is located on Marsha Ave. in Williamstown, NJ.

April 14, 5:30 PM – A conversation with Tom McAllister & Ray Didinger. I’ll be reading from my book, then discussing sports and sportswriting with Philadelphia sportswriting legend Ray Didinger (!) at Samuel Paley LIbrary, Temple University

1210 Polett Walk

Philadelphia, PA

April 16, 10 Am – 5PM – Philadelphia Book Festival, sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia

19th St., between Wood St. & Vine St. in Philadelphia, PA

Of course, at all events, I’ll be signing and hopefully selling books; even if you already own a copy, now you’ve got another chance (or three) to get someone a signed copy as a gift.