Due to some recent douche-baggery, I’ve had to remove my email address from the contact page.

If you’ve emailed me before, that address still works and you’re welcome, as always, to email me again.

If you’re trying to drop me a line for the first time, I apologize.

For the time being I’m keeping below the horizon until I figure out a system for douche bag avoidance. Once I have a system in place I’ll be available for email again.

In the meantime, email you mom, she misses you.

-c

MADISON, September 30 – You don’t always think about what you’re doing.

Yeah, sure, that includes the three drinks too many and the person you really shouldn’t have gone home with. And, yeah, it also includes the mindless hours drained away by the tube. And the times when you don’t read the fucking directions before you start trying to insert tab A into slot B and end up tearing the whole thing to pieces out of frustration.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that you don’t always think about what you’re doing when you write.

If you’re me, you think about it very little indeed. Which is to say, I think about story and characters and dialogue most every minute I’m not thinking about baseball and football, but I don’t ever think about the actual writing.

Not that I care.

Not that I care, that is, until I think about it.

And nothing will make you think and care about writing quite so much as speaking in front of young writers on a college campus. Because believe me, sister, these kids think about writing. And they care about it. A lot.

Try this, address a short story class. Read to them one of your own stories. Upon conclusion, ask if anyone has a question. In the ensuing predictable and infinite silence, you will begin to think very hard about a number of topics.

To wit: What the fuck am I doing here? How the fuck do I get out of here? What the fuck am I going to say that won’t be utterly useless and make me feel like a total asshole (not that there is a reasonable answer to the later of these concerns)?

After those thoughts sprint across your barren mental landscape, times up and you better start talking.

And as you talk, and as the occasional question is launched at your head, you have no choice but to start thinking about writing.

What is it? Where does it come from? How is it done? How do I get from this idea to a story? How do I make characters talk?

Is it alchemy or is it science?

Fuck do I know?

But you can’t just throw up your hands and shake your head and mumble about how you just sit in front of a keyboard everyday and put words together and muster some kind of faith in yourself that you can make them say things that people will be interested in reading. That shit don’t fly.

You accept someone’s invitation to go speak to them and share some of your experience, you better be gracious enough to beat your head on a wall and say something of merit.

Of merit.

No pressure.

I was at Missouri State University in Springfield last week at the request of the English Society. I pray sweet Jesus that I said something to someone that they found useful. But even if I did, even if every person I spoke with was illuminated by my inner wisdom and truth, they still got the short end of the stick.

I got the long end.

For a day, I not only spoke about writing, but thought about it. Thought about it with a seriousness I rarely have the time or inclination to indulge. Will it make a difference? Will they or I write something one day that will be any better than it would have been if I had never been a guest of the Springfield Bears? God I hope so. Should that not be the case, I still came out way ahead.

In the midst of all the scrambling for something to say, slight secrets have been revealed. Small tokens presented by my kind hosts, fragments of myself and my work that I didn’t know were there.

Fruits of thinking.

Off the road,

Charlie

New Stuff Makes Me Say Yeah!

Yes, some of the site has been updated a bit. I’ve changed the foreshadow so as to be more instructive for the non-internetty. New samples of writing are now on the book rack (along with the requisite commerce links) and several new covers have been added to the Cover Gallery. Happy snacking.

NEW YORK, Feburary 23 – Is that the odor of impending doom I scent on the wind?

No, it’s just Comic Con New York.

Hide the women and children.

Especially the women wrapped in Spandex.

The new freak child of geekdom is coming to town.

Will I be there? Indeed, indeed I will. Wounded and shell shocked though I may have been at Comic Con San Diego, I will be at the big dance.

Older and wiser, my hip flask will also be there. As will my baseball bat. The flask will serve the obvious purpose of calming my nerves when the first waves of costumed attendees appear on the horizon in their Elf Quest loin cloths and the, should be comforting but only serve to make me feel old, Spock ears.

The baseball bat is for beating my way a clear path to the nearest exit when I see the green painted dude in the chain mail bikini.

People said I was hallucinating when I saw him at San Diego. But I wasn’t. He was there, man. All three hundred pounds of him.

Chain mail. The stuff is made of steel hoops. You can see right through it. Get where I’m going with this?

Chain mail bikini.

Sans dance belt.

Yes, that was a chill of fear that just ran up your spine.

When I drop dead one day and they cut open my body, because I’m leaving it to science in the hopes that no one makes the same mistakes I have, they’re gonna find a strange scar on my left temporal lobe.

Some clever neurologist will scratch his nose and point at the ridge of pink tissue.
-What the hell is that?

His assistants will lean closer, assuming this is some kind of test.
They’ll be stumped, make blind guesses.
-Lesion?
-Surgical scar?
-Hemorrhagic fever blister?
-Cigarette burn?

They’ll take photos, pickle my brain in grappa and send it around the world to various specialists in brainology.

They’ll be stymied, one and all.

Finally, many years later, a grad student doing his dissertation on The Mysterious Brain Scar of Charlie Huston will stumble across an obscure photo of me in attendance at Comic Con San Diego 2005.

In an unrelated file, he’ll discover a handful of nightmarish sketches and horrified eyewitness accounts from that same Con.

A pattern will emerge.

A year later his discoveries will be hailed and he will be honored with a Nobel Prize in medicine following the revelations in his dissertation: “Green Painted Chain Mail Bikini Dude and the Scarification of the Human Brain.

Thus, the baseball bat.

You see me at the Con taking cuts at peoples’ knees as I bludgeon a path to daylight, you better fucking run away.

Don’t run from me.

Don’t fear me.

Fear the green painted chain mail bikini dude I’m fleeing.

Fucker makes brain scars. No lie that.

Surely Having Something More Important to do Than This,
Charlie

Speaking of the Con

A last minute addition to my CCNYC appearances:

I will be signing at the Marvel Comics booth on Saturday the 25th from 4-5pm.

Rumor has it they might have some Moon Knight mini posters to give away. But I’m not sure about that so don’t hurt me if you get there and the only reason you came is for the free posters and they don’t have any left because they used them all up when David Finch did his signing.

I’ll bring some SIX BAD THINGS postcards or something for the losers.

Oh the Agony.

Why Rick Kleffel of the Agony Column wanted to waste time talking to me, I’ll never be able to fathom. But he did. And seeing as he’d just posted a pretty fucking flattering review of Already Dead, I saw little choice but to get on the phone with him and curse a lot. Mr. Kleffel then took bits and pieces of my vile language and edited it into the body of THIS AUDIO REVIEW.
You can also go HERE for links to the written review, or the entire, unedited, swearfest-interview.

Give the audio a minute to load up.

I Go Bye Bye
Traveling after the Con.
I will try to update before I blow town, but it may be leftovers here until the week after next.
Take care.

NEW YORK, July 6, 2005 -

Reviews. Love them, hate them, at some point you need them. The good ones that is. At some point a writer may become review proof. James Patterson and his various ghosts and co-writers aren’t going to notice that their latest has been panned in the Tallahassee Courier Journal Examiner (God, please let no such paper exist, and if it does, God, please help them to understand that I just pulled that name from my ass and would still be happy to see a good review of any of my books in their estimable periodical). One also assumes that Patterson et al are immune to the emotional impact of any nitpicking over the quality of their plots and prose. After all, the marketplace has not only spoken, but has also embraced this product with its quivering loins. Patterson readers aren’t worrying about what Publisher’s Weekly has to say. They know what they’re getting already. Indeed, that’s pretty much the point. Even a bad review in the mighty NY Times is unlikely to seriously upset the Patterson machine as it churns, and heaves it’s product into airport bookshops the world over. We should all be fortunate to have such success in our given professions. But for most of us groundlings, particularly for the newly birthed such as myself, reviews are not only essential, they are our greatest single instrument for creating awareness of our books. And so here I am, in the second week following publication of “Six Bad Things”, sweating out reviews.

Unless you already possess some level of notoriety, getting people to know your book exists is the single most difficult tasks to be faced (beyond actually writing one of the fuckers in the first place). I don’t think this is a matter of any inherent rightness or wrongness in the publishing world, it is simply a fact of life. A celebrity tell-all, the newest-latest conservative/liberal basher, an all chicken fat diet guide, a diary of “all the asses I injected with steroids”, or an uplifting how-to on improving your spiritual satisfaction in ten easy steps, will all generate a certain amount of notoriety and buzz within the industry. But a first or second novel that doesn’t ride the coattails of either “The Da Vinci Code” or Harry Potter, by an utter unknown writer, is going to have a lot of stream to swim up.

I can update this website to my heart’s content, do readings, send email blasts to my mailing list, count on the word of mouth delivered by my friends, be grateful for the hand-selling being done at some independent book stores that have given me their support, but nothing is going to beat a killer review in a major publication in terms of eyeballs. And it’s all about eyeballs. No one will buy your book if they don’t know it exists. Even a tepid review is better that no review at all. Fuck, it’s arguable that the old saw, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” applies here, and that even a bad review is better than silence. And yet, there are always exceptions.

There is always the book that slips into the public’s consciousness through the strange workings of word-of-mouth. Likewise, there are the sure fire, boffo-reviewed juggernauts that belly flop and must be helped from the pool before they suck half of the urine-tinged water into their lungs. Why? Fucked if I know. If I had to make a guess, I’d say it’s because reading is a personal indulgence. When we open a book, we go in there alone.

Certainly there are books that get read because everybody is reading them. We read them to get in on the discussion, to have an opinion about what everybody else has an opinion about. But the experience of the book is still solitary. 75% of my reading gets done on subway trains in the midst of a crowd, but most of the time I’m unaware of the crowd. That’s the point. A packed subway car is a crappy place to be; go inside a book and I don’t have to be there. So how do you reliably market that kind of experience? How does a publisher know where to place their bets? Well, they don’t. That’s why the same old horses collect the bulk of the wagers. You can afford to slap down a couple bucks on a long shot only if your short money nags stay in the money. And those few long shots are picked with great care.

Which leaves me where I am this week, dredging the internet, looking for signs and indications, sorting old Google results from new, plumbing the depths of the (God save me) blogosphere, hunting for the telltale dropping and chewed bones that will tell me awareness of my work has passed this way. The big game, beasts like that sleek and wondrous Washington Post review, will charge out of the bush and announce themselves without my stalking them. But there are squirrels and woodchucks and hares out there as well, and they make good eating, too. A new strike on Google, a post on someone’s site mentioning how much they liked “Six Bad Things”, that’s eyeballs. A good review in some online weekly, more eyeballs. And while these traces of me and my work certainly feed the ego, they do something more important (to me), they give a slight reassurance that I have a future doing this. These eyeball attractors equal, in a manner not altogether rational, a kind of job security. They are tidbits that my wife and I can giggle about at the end of the day as we sit on the couch and clink out beer bottles together and toast good fortune for smiling on us for another 24.

But it’s not always pretty. Needing good reviews, badly wanting good reviews, is not what I want to need or desire. It’s, to be plain, whorish. No one really wants to feel like a whore. And I do. And I earned that feeling. I write what I like to write. And I work hard to write it well. To that extent, I am a chaste virgin. But the second I take my virgin ass out on the street and wiggle it up and down the block for all to admire, I cross a line. I am selling. Actively selling. I’m not sitting back waiting for someone to do it for me, I am trying to sell these books. Period. I am invested in the process. I want it to be a success. Whore.

Do I want success on a Pattersonian level? No. Really, I don’t. Too weird to even think about. I want to write my own books and I want them to be considered as well written genre fiction. I want them to entertain, but I also want the writing to be taken seriously by people who love this stuff.

So.

Whore I may be, but my tits are real.

Thanks for tuning in to the ramble,

Charlie

Some Other Stuff-

At about 1:52 AM EST on July 4th, some 83 million miles from earth, an 830-pound copper-core “impactor” smashed into comet Temple 1 at 23,000 miles per hour. This was done on purpose. Frankly, I’m impressed. Human beings hurled a craft 83 million miles into space and accurately fired from it a projectile that hit a bulls eye on a chunk of rock and ice maybe half the size of Manhattan that was first discovered in 1867. The “impactor” was taking photos until a few seconds before the collision that send an enormous plume of debris blasting into space. Photos and spectroscopy from the collision will now be studied to see if we can learn anything useful from the $333 million spent on the mission.

Meanwhile on earth, over the weekend humans banded together to fight poverty and disease in Africa by throwing a rock concert.

The mixture of my feeling over all of the above is profound. You will rarely if ever find me poo-pooing scientific achievement, especially when it comes to space exploration, but the juxtaposition of the two events (Temple 1 meet Live 8, Live 8, this is Temple 1) collided in my head the other day and sent plumes of gas and rock spewing from my ass. Do I have something useful to say here? Probably not. I like a good charitable rock concert as much as I like a good experiment. And really, before I whine about dollars spent on expanding the breadth of human knowledge rather than spent of feeding the starving, I’d need to spend some time raging about the dollars being spent on killing people in Iraq. But I digress.

Yeah science!

Yeah rock-n-roll!

And so say all of us.

Final Note-

Carl Abbott cares deeply about music. He invested time into the Live 8 concert that I could not begin to conceive of. I myself lurched out of my sick/hangover bed just long enough to tune in, see two talking heads babble for a minute, segue to the Dave Matthews Band (emphasis on the Eeeeww) for a couple seconds, and cut to a commercial. That was it for me.

But here’s some of what Carl has to say:

“LIVE 8

the television coverage was just short of miserable-

not that I expected a lot, but I video taped and

DVR’ed every second and have now reviewed them [i am

on vacation] and I’ve got the figures: 64%

commercials, 16% babling-MTV-heads and 19% actual

uninterrupted performance.

The MTV shit … Can be summed up this way = first,

you rarely got more than one song from an artist and

you were lucky if a commercial or a talking head

didn’t cut off the last 15 seconds of that one song

your getting. { Deity artists got 4 or 5 numbers, Hero

artists got to do 2 or 3 } but you only see/hear one.

a couple of exceptions- U2(3)including opening the

entire day with Sir Paul on Sgt.Peppers- yes, it was

perfect-

…

Here I am, shitting my pants, for I have just

witnessed “Breathe,” “Money,” “Wish you were here,” in

uninterrupted glory- then, as Mister Gilmore put

it…”Here We Go”… COMFORTABLY NUMB- Note for Note-

I’m not bullshitting… it appears to be a perfect

set, the only one I will have witnessed in the last 12

hours I’ve been watching; and then- as though the

devil himself took control, David hits the “Glory”

note at the climax of Solo #2, and just as he begins

to descend down the fingerboard, Camera view on

figures with Roger’s smiling Face in the background-

Human Excrement Producer Fag-Boy at MTV, cuts the

visual to the 2 bone-head…dweeeeb-hosts, volume of

performance-sound cut to 25%, shot now showing Bimbo &

Looser Boy on the announcer’s platform with Pink

Fucking Floyd off behind them in the distance- so we

can hear Bimbo-Bitch and Loser-Dweeb COMMENT ON HOW

FUCKING INCREDIBLE THIS EXPERIENCE IS AND HOW THEY

WISHED WE COULD BE THERE TOO… as Bitch-Bimbo

remarked: ” this is just amazing, I mean, like, I

Wasn’t even born when they first recorded this song

and now I’m like, totally here and totally

experiencing this truly amazing moment.” YEAH YOU

FUCKING BITCH, YOUR EXPERIENCING IT ALRIGHT, WHILE I’M

HAVING A FUCKING CORONARY!

…

The Who Rocked. U2 Rocked. Surprisingly, Faith [dump

Tim and please do me]Hill rocked Rome. Neil Young in

Toronto brought the house down. and of coarse, How

can 500,000 people in Hyde Park London singing, “nah,

nah,nah, nah,na,na,nah, nah, na,na,na,,nah, HEY JUDE-

be anything but tear-jerking? A great Day for music

and lets hope a truly great effort with real results

for Africa!

One final note- upon my examining the news reviews

from around the globe on the following day, one

reporter’s snippet summed it all up I think, as she

described how:- Mariah Carey was seen pushing for a

better view on the side-stage… and Snoop dog climbed

a scaffold for a better view {of the REFORMATION-}

while Madonna, was noticed in the wings, air-guitaring

to the solo during Comfortably numb.

I’ve always known what matters in Rock History and it

appears so does Mariah, Snoop & Madonna- and that’s a

NOTE I like closing on!

CARL