Drood, · where's · my · car?

Her absence didn’t concern me much at first. I did my work in the morning, ate lunch, and puttered around for a little while after. At that point, I realized that I’d not seen Fred in hours. So I checked her usual haunts—the niche behind the curtain where she can spy on the squirrels, the cubby beneath the sofa where she can nap in peace. She wasn’t there.

Nor was she in any of the places she goes to hide when she’s frightened of something—beneath the basement stairs, or in the crawl space beneath our den. I was beginning to panic when at last I spied a lump beneath the covers, on our bed. When I pulled them up slightly, I found her blinking back at me. She’d managed to nose back both blankets so she could crawl underneath. Between the fleece sheets (yes, I have fleece sheets in winter. It’s Michigan. What of it?) she’d snoozed for hours. Since I didn’t have a compelling reason to interrupt her, I let her slumber on.

She was still there when the Mont came home a few hours later. And she didn’t emerge until five-thirty, when we were about to leave the house for dinner. Her tail was in the air. Her fur crackled with static electricity from the sheets. She practically radiated steam as she wandered, well-baked and hot to the touch, into the den after her nine-hour nap. Did I miss anything? she seemed to be asking, as she prickled her nose in our direction.

God. I wish I could be a cat, some days.

--

And then there were her obvious favorites, the sparring teen detective titans: the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys always made me feel uneasy. Fenton Hardy was obviously the pushy type who was trying to plump up his sons’ college resumes, and resorted to withholding approval and affection unless Frank and Joe did him proud by figuring out the mystery of the sinister signpost. It was perfectly obvious that the Hardys were doomed to a life of solving mystery after mystery just for that one token of their father’s love that was perpetually out of reach. Nancy Drew, on the other hand was self-motivated. She and her gay band of chums solved mysteries for the love of it, sometimes in their clam-diggers! Nancy Drew had Ned Nickerson. Nancy had titian hair, and a roadster. Nancy Drew had Hannah Gruen making German pastries in the kitchen.

I was surprised to find a television show this fall that pushes all the same pleasure buttons as the Nancy Drew stories used to. I originally tuned into The Good Wife because it starred Julianna Margulies, a lovely woman whose performance was about the only thing I used to enjoy on ER. In The Good Wife she stars as Alicia Florrik, a woman whose husband has resigned as State Attorney after a scandal involving hookers and corruption. With her husband in jail, back to work she goes, for another favorite actor of mine, Christine Baranski, a senior partner who walks around the sets of her swanky law firm with a pole wedged firmly up her fundament. At first I must confess my heart sank when I saw that most of the show’s action was going to be within the law firm and in the courtroom, because courtroom procedurals are among my least favorite genres of television.

The show makes it palatable to me, though, by giving it all a citrusy, Nancy Drew-like girl detective twist. The character of Alicia, thanks to the public rigors through which her husband has put her, has a decided empathy with the put-upon pro bono cases to which she’s assigned as a junior associate. Like Nancy, she’s almost supernaturally observant, and always manages to spot the critical difference between an original memo and its photocopied duplicate that manages to thwart the evildoers trying to wring pension money out of mourning widows. With her chum Kalinda, played stubbornly and opaquely by the excellent Archie Panjabi, she snoops and detects and finds the loopholes in cases that others cannot.

The writers have given Alicia two adolescent children who have a detection plot of their own, as they try to figure out exactly who has been leaving mysterious photographs of their father with other women on their doorstep—and who exactly has been haunting their landing to take photographs of their apartment. Alicia’s son is a smart cookie armed with his computer software, his internet research, and his video-recording iPod; he and his younger sister are conducting their own investigations without their mother’s knowledge.

The cases on which Alicia works are not really any more complicated than the average Encyclopedia Brown mystery, but the acting is compelling and the way the series mingles Alicia’s personal afflictions with her everyday work is quite well done. Sure, Alicia Florrik is thirty years older than Nancy and much more worn and tired, and she may have swapped in her roadster for an SUV, but within her breast beats the heart of a true teen detective. When she’s sniffing around, she’s never more alert and alive.

--

(There's a big picture behind the link.)

I always envy people who've skills I haven't.

--

But I still can’t draw. That’s why I’m always delighted when I encounter the work of someone who can make sense of my scrawls. I submitted the map draft for The Buccaneer’s Apprentice a long while back.

(There's a larger pic beneath this one.)

I actually wrote more about it than I sketched anything. My email to the editor was full of cautions, like, The island of Gallina is supposed to be an active volcano, not a quesadilla, or I have drawn Cassaforte so that it looks massive when it should be weak and small compared to the country of Pays d’Azur, can you shrink it?

This week I got from the artist a rough and very preliminary sketch of how’s he interpreting my scribbles. Holy crap, is it ever nice.

(Again, there's a larger pic behind the link.)

I am always amazed when someone has skills that I don’t personally possess, and the fellow who has been doing my maps for this series has them in abundance. I would name children after him if I could.

--

One can tell by the strange, Victorian-broadside-meets-psychedelia packaging and the orange-and-purple color scheme that Mattel released it in the late sixties, shortly after the Summer of Love and roughly concurrent with the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “Toot Sweets” is the name of a musical number within the film, in which Sally Ann Howe waltzes around in a long Edwardian skirt whilst playing melodies through a candy cane with holes in it. Mattel, desperately searching for something to sell while slapping From the Movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! on the front, abandoned the candy cane idea and decided to introduce kiddies into the wonders of injection mold manufacturing.

And I loved it.

The basic idea behind the Toot Sweet is to make whistles out of Tootsie Rolls. The Toot Sweet machine itself is fairly simple, consisting of a sturdy base, a lever that retracts a plunger, and a screw-on-top to hold various molds included with the toy.

To make a whistle required two miniature Tootsie Rolls, which would have to be warmed and rolled thin in order to fit into the machine’s narrow bore. Once inside, one would pick a mold for half a whistle, fasten it on the top, and then very gently push down on the lever in order to force the candy into the mold. When the top was unscrewed, viola! Half a whistle.

When you’d made two halves, all you’d have to do would be to press them together to complete your edible musical instrument.

As my mother could have attested, and my cat Fred, who was hanging this morning around to leave cat hairs all over the candy and who went running when I blew through the slightly crushed glob of Tootsie Roll, the whistles actually work. They emit a loud and shrieking toot that, while not perhaps as melodious as what Truly Scrumptious produced in the movie, is probably more delicious than any ol’ candy cane.

But the fun of the Toot Sweet doesn’t stop there. Oh no. The machine came with other molds with which you were supposed to decorate your whistles, by affixing them to the whistle’s butt.

So if you really wanted to personalize your sticky, spitty whistle by giving it a skull, a fish, a teddy bear, a mouse, a scary clown, or a child molester in a trench coat, you could!

Trust me. When you’re six and your father is a sugar freak who keeps a never-ending supply of miniature Tootsie Rolls in the house, the Toot Sweet was the delicious gift that kept on giving.

--

I have a few minor objections to NaNoWriMo that I’ve made known in the past, though they shouldn’t stop anyone from participating. For one thing, the fifty-thousand-word goal to which people aspire is only half a novel, really. It’s a novella. Or a longer-form project. For another, NaNoWriMo's advertisement of writing a mere fifteen hundred words a day makes the composition process sound like a cakewalk, when even fifty thousand words is a marathon. It’s easy for people to miss their daily goal. What I end up seeing on the pages of my friends’ journals, starting even as early as the fourth day of the month, is usually an unending stream of self-reproach and even outright scolding for falling behind. Often that leads to people writing filler, padding scenes with unnecessary dialogue or utter nonsense in order to make a word count.

And finally (and probably most upsetting for me), NaNoWriMo tends to act as if the writing of the first draft is really all there is to completing a novel. The month’s over! You’ve got a novel! Call Random House! To me, revision is an essential part of the process. I usually go through three drafts of a manuscript before I dare submit it to my publisher. And I’m not talking about minor word correction and polishing. I mean rigorous, front-to-back deconstruction of the infrastructure I’ve created and taking the time to make it right.

Somehow, though, National Longer Form Project First Draft Writing Month, or NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo, isn’t as catchy.

Those quibbles aside, NaNoWriMo does give people an easy-sounding structure to work with. A deadline can be helpful for many people to give them the momentum to work. It makes writing approachable, and the results satisfying. It fires people’s imaginations and creativity and sometimes inspires people who might not ordinarily attempt a novel to sit down and write, and I’m all for that.

As the author of sixteen published novels and therefore allowed to claim the status as An Authority In The Field, I therefore offer a few little tips for my friends who are attempting the Herculean feat of writing a long manuscript.

1. Be aware that the first third of the novel is likely the most difficult stretch of writing you’ll encounter. You might have a vision of your story in your mind, shining and bright, completely with richly realized characters and scintillating dialogue, but the moment you start writing, it comes out kludgy and drab. Or else you have a brilliant start for a few pages, and then it all seems to fall apart. Yes. It’s going to be like that for a little bit, until you get into the rhythm of your characters and their patterns of speech. You’re also going to be trying to figure out the voice of your narrator, who is a character to himself, even if he’s narrating in the third person. There’s also the chance that you’ve overanalyzed all your characters so that once they start doing their stuff, they seem dull and lifeless. If that’s the case, you need to let them do something unexpected and see where that carries you.

The first third of a novel is always a tough haul for me. I usually give myself three and a half months to write a manuscript, and my manuscripts tend to be about a hundred thousand words, or three hundred typed pages. Usually it takes me a month and a half to write the first hundred pages, another month to write the last two hundred, and then a month to revise everything. Notice how disproportionately long it takes me to write that first third of the book? I accept it now, after doing it so many times. But in the beginning, it was awfully frustrating.

2. Picking up from the day before is difficult. You will want to do anything but write, when you sit down to your computer at your appointed writing time. You will want to surf the web or clean the toilets or give yourself that colonic you’ve always thought about, but you will not want to write. You may even feel vaguely nauseated at the thought of stringing words together. You will feel uncreative and void of any ideas. This is totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily go away, either. I still encounter the same feelings each and every time I sit down to work.

However. If you’re serious about getting your word count in for the day, you will need to hold yourself to it. Disconnect your ethernet cord or turn off your WiFi. Don’t let yourself open up that Bejeweled application. Sit there in front of your word processor and stare at it until grudgingly your brain taps out a few words, and then a few more. It might take a half hour or even an hour to kick in, but eventually the rusty pipes will groan and a trickle will emerge. Eventually that trickle will turn into a steady flow. Maybe not the gush you were hoping for, but enough to get by.

Want to know my simplest tip for picking up on your narrative the next day? Tempting as it may be to finish out a chapter at the end of your writing period, resist. Stop writing in the middle of a fiercely exciting scene. Oh, you might be tempted to continue, but that’s the entire point. Your mind will work on that scene in your downtime, even as you sleep. When you sit down the next day and open up your document, you’ll be itching to continue and get to the exciting resolution. The carrot-on-a-stick of completing something exciting is more potent a lure day-to-day lure than having to start something fresh. Trust me on this one.

3. And finally, be kind to yourself. Jesus, are you a professional novelist with a deadline? Some of you may be, but the vast majority of you aren’t. So why put yourself through the angst? Sure, you may want to have the satisfied glow of knowing you’ve made your word count, and be able to show off your fifty-thousand-word badge on December first. But honestly, it’s more valuable an experience to write, to continue writing regularly, and to enjoy and learn from the process than it is to pound out random words and hate every minute of it. It’s better to take a year to write fifty thousand words than it is to feel guilty and berate yourself for thirty days for not keeping up. Your manuscript will be better for it, too.

Writing a novel is difficult enough. A writer needs to have confidence in what he or she is doing, or else the project will fizzle. Drowning out the litany of self-reproach—all the internal editor’s cries of Well THAT’S no good! and This chapter is going nowhere!—while listening to the story and its characters as a reader might, is nigh on impossible as it is. Pummeling oneself for not adhering to what is (let’s face it) an arbitrary and meaningless deadline is not going to make your compositional process any easier.

So be kind to yourself. Enjoy NaNoWriMo for the creative kick in the ass that it is, and don’t fret about the daily word count. Make it the start of a year of writing on a regular basis. In the end, you’ll be a better person for having followed your muse.

--

Instead, he’ll go out to a restaurant a couple of times a week, take home the leftovers, dine off them for a few days, and then inform me of exactly how many meals he can make from a dinner at Appleby’s. (Sadly, it’s a trait to which I’m prone myself, I realized last night when in my head I calculated quite gleefully that I could make three meals out of the leftovers we took home from a Mediterranean restaurant.) Or he’ll buy a roasted chicken from Ukrops, and feast off it for half a week. I’m just happy he’s eating something other than candy and cookies, so I let him do his thing.

When I was visiting him this week, I was sitting around reading when he approached me with something in his hands. I could tell by the red-and-white checkered cover that it was my mother’s ancient Betty Crocker cookbook. “What?” I asked.

“You need to make raisin sauce for me,” he said. “A big double batch. For my ham.”

Apparently another of the things my father does for his meals will be to buy a large baked ham, cut it into meal-sized portions, and then dole it out to himself over the week. And just as the man can’t eat chicken or turkey without gravy, he can’t eat ham without—and pardon me while I shudder here—raisin sauce. It’s a mixture of brown sugar, vinegar, mustard, and raisins simmered to a thick consistency. My mother used to make it, though she couldn’t stand the stuff. I can’t either. Even thinking about it makes my mouth salivate in the same way as if I think about chewing on aluminum foil. But fine. He wanted raisin sauce, so I made raisin sauce.

Since the only ingredient for the recipe that my dad actually had in his pantry was a bottle of vinegar, we had to run out to a Kroger on the way back from one of our dinners out. “All right,” I told him, when we walked inside. “We need brown sugar, dry mustard, and cornstarch from the baking aisle. Stick butter from the dairy aisle. A lemon, for juice and zest. And raisins.”

“Raisins,” said my father. Then, over and over again, “Raisins.”

“This way,” I told him, peering at the aisle markers.

“Vance,” he said, stopping to point up. “Do you know what I like? I like when they put the aisle signs at the very end of the aisles. Then I can see them clearly.”

A Kroger worker stopped at the sight of my father pointing up at the sign. “Can I help you?” he asked. The man was older than my father by a good ten years or so; his back was hunched over and what little wispy white hair he had left made him look like a troll doll, set on the eraser end of a pencil and whipped around.

“Raisins,” said my father.

“Oh, they’re right here,” said the man, hobbling over to the end of the aisle next to ours. He pointed.

“Thank you very much,” I said, bending over to price the raisins.

“Will there be anything else?” asked the old man.

“Vance?” said my father. “Tell him what else we need.”

“We’re fine,” I told them both. “We can find the rest ourselves.”

“Vance?” said my father. “Read him the list.”

“I’m not going to read him the list,” I said, taken aback by the idea.

“If you read him the list, he’ll take you to the other things we need.”

“We’re fine,” I told the old man. “I can take it from here.”

“Vance? Read him the list.”

“We are big boys,” I said to my father through gritted teeth. “We are in the baking aisle. The spices are alphabetized. We can find the dairy and fruit aisle on our very own.”

“We need lemon juice,” my father said to the old man, ignoring me.

“Bottled lemon juice is right over here.” The little old man started to walk away.

My father followed, then turned. “Aren’t you coming? He’s showing us lemon juice.”

“We don’t need bottled lemon juice. We need a lemon,” I explained. “Lemons are in the produce department. The produce department is over there. If I get a fresh lemon, oddly enough, I can get both lemon zest and lemon juice from the same ingredient.” I put my hands on my hips and stood my ground. “You. Come back here,” I said to my father, ordering him back like an errant dog. “And you. Thank you, but we’re done. We don’t need a guided tour of Kroger. Goodbye.” I felt like a puppy-kicker when the old man limped away, but I was stubborn and cross enough to watch him go without much regret. “Honestly!” I said to my father. “We’re capable adults!”

“He’s paid to help. He was going to show us around,” he kept muttering, the entire five minutes we stayed in the store.

I’m still not certain what this little stand-off was about. They’re always about something, aren’t they? Is it that my father projected himself onto the Kroger man, and wanted to feel useful? Is it that I’m morbidly sensitive about feeling dependent on other people? Does my father resent me dragging him through a grocery store now, when he was the one who used to cart me around Colonial Foods when I was a kid? Or did he simply think it would be a timesaver, and I'm a big ol' crabbypants?

It was a minor incident in an otherwise nice visit, but it still puzzles me.

--

Until this weekend, however. When we weren’t out looking at the same civil war museum to which I’d been subjected on my last visit to Virginia (my father ‘missed some of the details’ during our four-hour visit, last time) or taking entertaining walks along the riverfront, my father’s butt was planted squarely in front of his enormous television so he could absorb the details of every game playing this weekend. Of which there appeared to be plenty.

THE SCENE: My father’s living room, where I skulked in the far corner playing The Sims 3 while my father flipped between two different college football matches, occasionally cursing at the screen.

MY FATHER: OHHH! That was not out of bounds! Even I could see that! Did you see that?
ME: No.
MY FATHER: Come on. You had to have seen that.
ME: You remember that you tried to teach me the rules of football when I was young, right? And that I showed an utter lack of interest?
MY FATHER: But you know how it’s played by now.
ME: I know how to play the tabletop version with a folded-up triangle of paper. I’m not sure how much more of your version I can take, though.
MY FATHER: Oh, don’t worry. I know how this one comes out. It was taped yesterday and I already knew the final score. I’m switching to Desperate Housewives soon. I don’t miss my Housewives.
ME: Excuse me?
MY FATHER: I’ve got to get my weekly dose of Bree.
ME: I think that is the single gayest thing I have ever heard you say.
MY FATHER (turning around at last): What? Why is that gay?
ME: Desperate Housewives is like, the gayest show on television. It makes Project Runway look butch.
MY FATHER: Why is it gay? It only has two gay characters on it and gawrsh, you hardly ever see them.
ME: Trust me. It’s gay.
MY FATHER: But it’s all about women!
ME: It’s all about women acting like vicious drag queens. It’s the sensibility of the show that’s gay. Its creator is gay. One of its producers is the man who gayed up Frasier.
MY FATHER: I don’t think it’s gay.
ME: Well, that’s fine, but let me just assure you that you are probably the only heterosexual male who’s ever uttered the words, “I’ve got to get my weekly dose of Bree.”
MY FATHER: You know, that reminds me. Do you think your cousin is gay? I do.
ME: I know you’ve said that. Why, exactly, again?
MY FATHER: Well. He is thirty-five and single.
ME: Okay. I think there are straight men out there who are that age and single, but go on.
MY FATHER: His best friend in college would have married him, but he didn’t want to. The girl he was living with as a roommate would have married him, but he didn’t want to.
ME: He could just want to play the field.
MY FATHER: He owns his own home and he likes working on his garden. A lot.
ME: Ohhhh. Yes. Now we’re into the juicy incriminating evidence.
MY FATHER: He raises exotic plants. And he makes his own beer. But he doesn’t drink it.
ME: Anything else?
MY FATHER (thinking): I think he has a cat.
ME: And bang goes the lavender gavel! Case closed! Ladies and gentlemen, the court is adjourned!
MY FATHER: I don’t know what the lavender gavel is.
ME: It’s the same gavel that pronounced Desperate Housewives to be the gayest show on television.
MY FATHER (with wonderment): I don’t know how you got to that conclusion. All I know is that my week’s not the same without Bree in it.
ME: And there we go again.

THE SCENE: A deli my father particularly enjoys.

MY FATHER: Did you hear the woman in front of us ordering?
ME: Nope.
MY FATHER: Now when I come here, you have the choice of potato chips with your sandwich, or something called 'baked' potato chips with your sandwich, though I tried them once and they didn't taste like sour cream or even butter.
ME: They aren't 'baked potato' chips. The chips themselves are baked, rather than fried.
MY FATHER: Ohhhh. And it seems like you can get your burned-up things as well.
ME: Burned-up things? Tortilla chips?
MY FATHER: They're black.
ME: They're made out of blue corn, old man.
MY FATHER (peering at my plate): Are they actually blue?
ME (with meaning): Anyway.
MY FATHER: Anyway, the woman in front of us asked if she could have soup with her sandwich instead of chips and a pickle or baked potato chips and a pickle or burned-up chips and a pickle. And do you know what they said?
ME: I await the answer with bated breath, but my Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction lead me to predict it was either 'yes' or 'no.'
MY FATHER: They said yes!
ME: Goodness. What a roller coaster of a tale. Does this open up a whole new culinary world for you?
MY FATHER: Ohhhh, I don't know. The soups they have here are real fancy.
ME (incredulously): You're kidding me.
MY FATHER: Read me the soups. You'll see.
ME: Tomato basil.
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh, that's fancy.
ME: How?!
MY FATHER: It has a fancy herb.
ME: Red beans and rice?
MY FATHER: Fancy.
ME: Potato.
MY FATHER: Fancy.
ME: Potato soup is not fancy. Seafood bisque?
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh.
ME (moving on): Black bean.
MY FATHER: Very fancy.
ME: Fancier than seafood bisque? No, don't answer that. I can see it's a debate that would interest you. Vegetable.
MY FATHER: Fancy.
ME: Don't screw with me, Briceland. Vegetable soup is not fancy.
MY FATHER: It is to me. I don't know what fancy vegetables they put in there, like baby corn or radishes or asparagus.
ME: What soup is not fancy? Other than water boiled with a single river stone at the bottom? Chicken? Chicken noodle?
MY FATHER: Oh, chicken noodle would be good.
ME: Chicken with rice? Chicken with stars?
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh. Fancy.
ME: Freakin' Campbell's freakin' chicken with freakin' stars out of the freakin' can is too fancy for you, huh?
MY FATHER: It's just fancy!
ME: So chicken noodle is the baseline of soups, from which all other soups deviate into fancydom.
MY FATHER: Do they have chicken noodle?
ME: They do not have chicken noodle.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. I told you all the soups were fancy here.

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We had just finished a lengthy walk and were ‘cooling down’ by speed-walking around the local track when suddenly he stopped on the fine gravel path, stomped around, and kicked clouds of dust in the air. Then we had the following conversation.

ME: What exactly are you doing? Do you see a roach?
MY FATHER: I am erasing marks on the ground.
ME: Marks? What kind of marks?
MY FATHER (pointing): Look. There’s one. Like that.
ME: That six-inch straight line is a mark?
MY FATHER: It means that someone on the course is marking how many times they’ve been around the track.
ME: Oh. I thought it was like, a gang mark or a satanic ritual mark or something, you know, interesting.
MY FATHER (pouncing on another mark and scrubbing it out with his feet): God damn it. There’s another one.
ME: Why do you feel it is your bounden duty to erase other people’s lap marks?
MY FATHER (as if the answer were obvious): They offend me.
ME: They offend you?
MY FATHER: They offend me!
ME: All right. They offend you.

We made another lap around the track, passing everyone else using it—an elderly African-American couple, a portly scion of the South in a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and a tie, and a frail old woman whom my father greeted heartily. Seconds later, he found another mark.

MY FATHER (scrubbing it out): God damn it!
ME: You know that mark wasn’t there the first time around.
MY FATHER: It offends me!
ME: It probably belonged to that old woman we just passed.
MY FATHER: She’s a preacher’s wife.
ME: I think she’s staring at the ground now and wondering where it went to. Poor woman.
MY FATHER: She had her wits about her. She can count her laps in her head.
ME: Did someone appoint you track monitor?
MY FATHER: I am doing everyone a public service. If everyone were to make marks for every lap, the entire track would be covered with nothing but marks and. . . .
ME: . . . And would lose the natural beauty of trampled muddy dirt studded with crushed styrofoam coffee cups.
MY FATHER: Exactly.
ME: And you don’t make exceptions for little old ministers’ wives.
MY FATHER: That would be unethical.
ME: You know, one of these days, that little old lady is going to follow you home and see where you live and then you are going to emerge from your front door and find it spray-painted with the words, ERASE THIS, FUCKER.
MY FATHER: You really are insane.
ME: Oh yes, I’m the insane one.

One would have to have taken up residence under a mighty big rock not to know Glee’s basic premise, in which a pretty but witless Spanish teacher takes over his high school’s glee club, which is filled with misfits of every archetype—the overachieving girl, the doe-eyed jock with a heart of gold, the effeminate gay guy, the sassy black girl, and a few others designed to have as minimal screen time as possible. We’ve seen them all before. It’s as if someone spliced up film from Election and Bring It On and every other teen movie of the last fifteen years and dropped them into a fishbowl and asked the writers to draw out a few at random.

There’s some nonsense in the story that involves Jane Lynch as a rival cheerleading coach, and there are too many pregnancy plots and totally illogical loopholes surrounding the pregnancies. The show has too many preposterous character reversals and this-would-never-happen-in-television-much-less-real-life story choices that send Glee off into the Lost realm of absurdist storytelling. They might as well throw in a nuclear bomb and some time travel and call it a day, and they’re only a half-dozen episodes into the first season.

But my real objections are as follows.

1. The musical numbers in Glee are inconsistent. They're inconsistent with the talent level of actual high school students, for one thing. The kids get thrown some sheet music and without even so much as glancing at it, they’re all jammin’ and producing professional tracks destined for hitdom. Even in the first couple of episodes in which the kids were supposed to be awful, they were far better than the highest-jury-scoring school choirs I’ve ever heard. Same for when a group of the male teachers decided to form their own a cappella group—they were effortlessly perfect, instantly.

Which, you know, is fine in the world of screen musicals, in which an invisible orchestra swells up and an entire town sings about the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe before going back about its business. Glee is supposed to be about a scrappy substandard vocal group straining to be better than the sum of its parts. But it’s too good. Why should the kids work any harder? Their songs are already best-sellers every Thursday morning on iTunes.

I’m also not fond of the show’s wishy-washiness over how to handle its musical numbers, either. For a while there it seemed as if it would stick to having the kids singing only in rehearsals or performances, but then it would veer off unexpectedly into singing revenge fantasies in individual characters’ heads, or a let’s-pretend rehearsal session in which the idiot director would announce at the end of an impeccably-sung sight reading, “That’s the way it will sound some day!” But then, for almost every awkwardness, there’ll be nice moments. The episode with Kristen Chenoweth, for example, featured a nice number in which the guest star and the girl lead sang Cabaret’s “Maybe This Time” to great effect.

2. Glee doesn’t live up to its title. There’s no joy in it. There’s no euphoria. The characters are either smart and cynical and throughly unlikeable (are we really supposed to forget that female lead Rachel, in the show’s first thirty seconds, ruined the former director’s career by falsely accusing him of molesting one of his students?), or gullible idiots. Everyone’s miserable and unpleasant. Everyone’s chewing on their own discontents and spewing bile.

That would be fine and dandy if the characters let the music transform them, or if singing made them feel happy—but it doesn’t. The musical numbers tend to be shouty, frantic, and rife with somersaulting acrobatics seemingly intended to distract from the vocal auto-tuning going on. After the big musical moments, they’re back to their glum lives. The limitation of being a weekly TV series is partly to blame. In a two-hour movie, it’s possible to have the happy ending that an open-ended series cannot. But jeez. I’ve never seen a show so dour.

I keep watching and hoping that the show will find its groove. Yet as with Paula Abdul and MC Scat Kat, it’s always two steps forward and one step back, with Glee.

Oh, and P.S., Glee writers. The thing you keep calling a mashup is really a medley, God damn it.

--

I’ve seen the preppy gentleman a couple of times since, but not wishing to endanger his relationship with the siren song of my kneecaps, I’ve kind of avoided him. From the karaoke mistress I found out that he has an ailing mother who lives with him, and that he cares for her full-time, thus making it rare that he has an opportunity to get out of the house. But I saw him again recently at the Pontiac bar where I sing on Saturday nights, and although I found myself trying to avoid him again, I really couldn’t. I was talking to the karaoke mistress at our table when he joined us. She put his arm around him. “I was just having dinner with Dirk and his partner,” she said. “Do you know Dirk?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ve seen you at Karen’s other karaoke bar, in Detroit.”

“Oh, were you there?” he said, with the kind of nonchalance that can only be feigned.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard you sing The Killers’ “Are We Human” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Whistle Down the Wind.” A couple of times.”

Karen then turned and started talking to the Mont, leaving me standing there awkwardly. I turned my knees out of view and said, “How did you enjoy your dinner here?”

“Oh, it was very good,” he said, standing too close to me, but looking away. “Very good.”

“Have you been to this bar before?” I asked.

“I AM HERE WITH MY BOYFRIEND!” he said in a very loud voice, staring at me with stricken eyes. “HE IS SITTING OVER THERE. MY BOYFRIEND!”

I stared at him for a moment. All I could think was, Jeez, calm down. I’m not trying to pick you up! I'm making the kind of casual conversation people exchange on an everyday basis.“Ye-es,” I said with care, after a long pause. “I’ve met him before. I was just wondering if you guys had been here before or not, because I’ve only seen you at the other—”

“I AM HERE WITH MY BOYFRIEND OF TWENTY-SIX YEARS!” he said loudly. Then he waved at George Burns, sitting at the table across the bar, smiled, and called out in sugar-sweet tones, “Hi, honey!”

“All right,” I said, smiling and gliding off with saucer-sized eyes. “Have fun.”

I saw the pair again Saturday night at the same bar, but I avoided saying hello. I went the long away around the man, in fact—which in that bar means veering slightly to the left and evading eye contact as much as possible. I couldn’t avoid Dirk’s stricken glance when I approached, though, or the hand that shot out to his partner’s arm, clutching it in a show of desperate affection when I passed.

I’m not exactly sure what he thinks I’m going to do. Punch out his partner, a man thirty-five years my senior? Wrestle him to the ground and plant an importunate kiss on his lips while I pound my manly chest? I rather think not. I suppose it’s ego-gratifying to know, however, that the power of my knees still lingers.

--

Of all his boorish mannerisms, though, the one that bothered me the most was when, toward the end of each of the two semesters in which we were forced to live together, my roommate would waken in the morning, crawl through the near-darkness of the Jefferson dormitory basement rooms, and settle next to his overflowing laundry basket. Then he’d remove a pair of underwear from its depths, sniff it gingerly, and hold the increasing pile in his lap until he’d found a pair that, while not fresh, were at least not reeking. Then he’d proceed to wear it for another week. The actual process of laundering his clothing during the course of a semester was beyond him. In the autumn and again in January he arrived at school with a mass of dry-cleaned prepwear that would grow progressively more grungy and moldy as he used them week after week. Then at semester’s end, he’d haul home several bags of stinking clothing for his parents to take care of, one way or another.

It seems to me these days that my freshman roommate was a highly resourceful man.

I’d like to blame the fact that I have no clean clothing today on the fact that when I’m trying to finish up writing and revising a book, I’m highly blinkered and absent-minded about things like laundry, bill-paying, and bathing. The truth, however, is that while in college I might have fastidiously washed and ironed my things on a weekly basis, after a good twenty-eight years of taking care of myself I’m no longer as particular. I have enough boxer briefs and socks in my drawer that I can go for a few weeks without worrying about running out. Ironing? Pfeh. A t-shirt and a pair of jeans that aren’t actually caked with filth are good enough for the likes of me. When my basket of dirties gets full, my first instinct isn’t, My, I really should have a busy laundry day! No, it’s, I wonder if Target carries bigger laundry baskets?

On mornings like today, though, after weeks of neglecting my washperson duties, I find myself running my fingers along the bare bottoms of my dresser drawers and contemplating an outfit that consists of the only clean clothes I have left: an outsized caftan from my larger days, a pair of sweatpants with legs that stop mid-calf, an ancient jockstrap, and a pair of striped clown socks from 1993. And it seems to me and my nose that my college roommate had a pretty good thing going.

Not that it means I’ll actually do any laundry, mind you. I’ll spend time writing about it instead.

--

“Um,” I said, not having a clue. Chad can be like an excitable puppy who barks like mad at the sight of a leaf blown by the wind, so for all I knew, he and his daughter could’ve seen a squirrel. “I give up.”

“Josh Peck!” he crowed.

“Josh Peck!” I replied in surprised.

“I know! Josh Peck! Right there on the sidewalk! Right?”

I caved. “Who’s Josh Peck?”

Josh Peck turned out to be one of the stars of Drake & Josh, a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, of which Chad’s daughter is apparently a huge fan. I, being somewhat outside the demographically either mentally (Chad) or physically (his daughter), had never heard of it. “They’re in town for the remake of Red Dawn,” Chad explained. “They’re filming right around the corner.”

“Did she get to talk to this Josh Peck guy?” I asked.

“No,” admitted Chad. “But he petted the dog!”

I’m willing to bet that’s one dog who never gets washed again.

Michigan’s been used more and more over the last couple of years for the filming of a lot of Hollywood projects, and it’s seemed as if my little suburb has been one of the epicenters of it. Probably the most visible project with which we had to cope was Sigourney Weaver’s Prayers for Bobby a couple of years ago, which tied up the Mont’s church, the restaurant next door (a stylish gay eatery that somehow doubled as both a scary, seedy gay bar and the fern-covered restaurant frequented by middle-class suburban moms), as well as most of Royal Oak’s downtown streets. There was also a month in which it was impossible to dodge the filming of dueling Christina Ricci and Drew Barrymore movies, no matter where we seemed to go.

Lately the neighborhood’s been completely invaded by Red Dawn, however. Whenever I drive out on an errand, I see signs for cast and crew parking. The other day when I drove home from Target, I passed a small battalion of armed and uniformed communists taking a Doritos break on the side of the road. Even when we leave Royal Oak, we’re running into the production. One night when we went to our favorite karaoke bar, a good ten miles north, we found the street in front completely blocked off and shut down. Tanks were pointed at the bar’s front door and military vehicles completely surrounded it. Despite the loud music and the festive atmosphere inside, the place looked as if it were under siege. A glum security guard stood on guard to make sure no one climbed on the tanks. Which was tempting.

But honestly. Isn’t Red Dawn one of those movies that should never be remade? And no, I’m not saying it in the way that some movie executive should have when they heard that Melanie Griffith wanted to one-up Born Yesterday. I’m saying it more like this: wasn’t one Red Dawn enough? I think the death of Patrick Swayze has made some people a little sentimental for his movies, but surely this was among the least of them.

--

Click here to reserve yourself a copy!

From the back cover:

On his first sea voyage away from the magical city of Cassaforte, seventeen-year-old Nic Dattore awakens to find the vessel overrun by marauding pirates—and everyone else on board kidnapped or killed. After slaying the pirate who attacked him, Nic tosses a torch into a cache of gunpowder and blows up the ship.

Washed up on a deserted island, Nic and a motley crew of castaways decide to commandeer the pirate ship to get home. They battle pirates, assassins, and a cursed ship with a powerful secret while racing against time to save Cassaforte from a diabolical plot.

--

A Traveler to Nascenza is the third fantasy set in my medieval Venice-inspired country of Cassaforte. It’s the story of Petro Divetri, the younger brother of Risa Divetri, who was at the center of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. Petro’s main problem is that he has a remarkable sister—a hero several times over who occupies a singular place in her city’s history—when he is not at all remarkable himself. He finds himself either falsely admired for his connection, or bullied and despised for it. When the persecution gets out of hand, he’s sent away from the school where he’s lived for several years on a pilgrimage to the remote religious shrine of Nascenza, deep in the countryside. His best friend accompanies him, and Petro is so anxious not to be dogged by his own reputation that the two boys decide to play a schoolboy prank on the other pilgrims and swap identities, pretending to be one another.

It’s a piece of mischief that goes awry when Petro’s friend is kidnapped for political motivations along the way. The rest of Petro’s path to Nascenza is frantic and desperate as he tries to find his friend once more and uncovers a plot that threatens to ruin not only his country’s future, but his sister’s wedding. And boy, nobody wants to upset hot-tempered Risa Divetri when her marriage is at stake.

I envisioned and plotted the story before last year’s elections, and thought of it as a commentary on what happens when a reactionary minority group, incensed by the background of a country’s leader, resorts to domestic terrorism as a means not only to force the country’s hand, but to reduce its citizens into a state of panicked fear. It turned out to be more of a timely topic than I imagined.

The night I finished A Traveler to Nascenza, I stayed up until two in the morning to get it done. I knew early that evening I only had a little bit to go and that I needed to get it out of me while the words were flowing. Besides, I wanted to see how it ended! I’d drawn up a broad sketch of the story last year, true, but as always, I deviated some from the outline. The guard that Petro works with after the kidnapping discovers his true identity well before I originally intended—but she was smarter than I anticipated, and not easily duped. I’d planned for Petro to run across a younger child in the book who in the outline was outright antagonistic. As I wrote the story, Petro ended up treating the kid very decently and as a little brother, so I had to make the child more sympathetic than I envisioned, and give him an opportunity to prove himself worthy of Petro’s faith.

Most of all, though, I wanted to see if the story’s primary antagonist bit it in the end. I honestly had no idea whether or not he was going to die until I actually got to the sentence that decided it. When I penned the book's last sentence a few minutes later, I was so pumped up and excited—despite the fact that it was two in the morning and I'd been working since nine a.m.—that I couldn’t calm down for hours after. I finally was able to shut my eyes at six, to grab three hours of sleep.

Now that I’m reading the book a once-over before sending it off, I’m really pleased, and a little bit surprised, how exciting it all is. It’s lively, and funny, and action-packed in the parts where it’s needed. I’d been a little worried because The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was a whirlwind of swashbuckling, pirate fights, enemy armadas, and hammy acting, and I thought A Traveler to Nascenza might come off a little slow after that. It’s true that the death toll is three thousand, two hundred, and seventeen less than The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. But there’s intrigue, fireworks, teenaged infatuation, underaged drinking, an adolescent erection, and a whole page of two teenaged boys making nut jokes. How could it be anything other than thrilling?

--

Then the discontent set in. When other media outlets would question Mika on his sexuality, the singer would demur answering and move the topic on to something else. Every time it would happen—every single time—afterelton would report on it. At first they merely chided Mika for avoiding the questions, but gradually the tone grew more peevish. Why wasn’t he coming out? Why didn’t he announce his homosexuality? The cranky tone turned into outright anger, fairly quickly. Who did Mika think he was, teasing everyone with his good looks and then pretending to be straight? Why was the fucker being so coy about it? That stupid little squeaky-voiced nobody didn’t know who he was dealing with!

Honestly, by the time the site reached its shrillest peak, one might have thought that Mika was conducting his interview thusly:

INTERVIEWER: Hi, I’m Mike from Rolling Stone.
MIKA: ‘Allo, Mike. Ask me about my sexuality.
INTERVIEWER: What?
MIKA: Go on.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Tell me about your sexuality.
MIKA: Don’t ask me about my sexuality!
INTERVIEWER: Jeez, sorry.
MIKA: No, really, ask me. I was kidding. For real this time. Ask me.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Are you gay or straight?
MIKA: I TOLD YOU NOT TO ASK ABOUT MY SEXUALITY!

The singer seemed simply to request not to have to talk about his sex life whenever the issue was brought up, but afterelton.com and other media outlets had already invested in the probability that he was gay, and wouldn’t talk about anything but his reluctance to discuss it. They created an elephant in the room by insisting there was a big large elephant in the room, and although no one else outside the site perhaps cared about it or noticed any elephants, they saw nothing but pachyderms. Finally they decided Mika had become overexposed and forbade anyone on their site to discuss him anymore. In other words, when he didn’t do exactly what they wanted him to, they banned him.

I was thinking about the website and Mika week because this the singer has released his second CD, The Boy Who Knew Too Much. After I’d listened to it a couple of times, I was curious about what the reviews were like. After reading a few of the wildly varying appraisals, something popped out at me—it seems as if Mika is one of those pop-culture mirrors in which entities appraise not so much him, as themselves.

The most negative reviews, for example, are dismissive in a way that seems not so subtle in its obsessions. Slant’s review, for example, claims that the singer “croons, belts, and shrieks” like “Adam Lambert in full-on falsetto yelp.” Mika’s “theatrical,” and “repellant.” Rolling Stone talks about the singer’s “sexual neurosis” and “campy excess”, then raises the specters of Freddy Mercury and Elton John. The code isn’t hard to read. These reviewers and their like aren’t writing so much about The Boy Who Knew Too Much as they are saying, Look, this guy sings in a high voice from time to time and therefore he’s probably gay, and I’m straight and therefore uncomfortable with that.

Even the enthusiastic reviews carry the same kind of ciphers, liberally peppered throughout their evaluations. Both Spin and Entertainment Weekly say that the album is likely to make you throw up your “jazz hands”—because we all know the gays love their Fosse jazz hands. The A.V. Club references jazz hands as well, and throws in adjectives like “glittery.” Hey guys, they’re saying. This Mika chap is probably gay, but it’s hip these days! And we’re hip because we’re cool with it!

Mika seems to be one of those unlikely barometers by which a culture judges itself; he’s a mile marker along the road of progression, whether he likes it or not. It’s an odd obsession, though. When I first heard “Grace Kelly” on the radio back in January of 2007, the first thing I thought was not, Hey, is this guy queer or straight? It was, Oh my god. This is a slice of perfect pop.

What do I think of The Boy Who Knew Too Much? It’s good. It’s full of cheerful pop sweetness. Sure, "We Are Golden," the first single, sounds so much like both “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and BWO’s “Give Me the Night” that I’m surprised that Belinda Carlisle and Alexander Bard aren’t lining up to sue, but it’s a good song. “Good Gone Girl” is even better, and the ballad “I See You” is unexpectedly touching. Did I take to it as immediately as Life in Cartoon Motion? No, not really, but after a few listens I've really warmed up to it. It's an aural trip I'll enjoy taking many times.

But have I been inspired to make jazz hands while I listen to it? No, not really. Sorry, reviewers.

First I chopped tomatoes and basil from the garden and mixed them with a touch of oil and garlic so I could chill them and serve it as a bruschetta for dinner. Then I made some yogurt brownies. And finally, because I had the ingredients and the nerve, I made dog treats, intending them for Clark and Jeffrey’s dog, Stella. Because no matter how mean Mike and Brian are about the shirts I wear, their dog is always sweet to me.

The dog biscuits involved mixing peanut butter in hot chicken stock to break it down, then adding egg and molasses and cooking oil, then stirring in cornmeal and whole wheat flour. When it was somewhat cohesive, I rolled the dough out into a log that I cut into slices, and then halved each slice before putting the bite-sized nuggets on a cookie sheet for baking. The scent of peanut butter and chicken stock baking was, oddly enough, not reminiscent of a chicken satay or anything savory. Mostly it was pretty stanky, so I was grateful when the little morsels had been reduced to little cookies and had cooled, so I could seal them away in a plastic bag to take down to Clark and Jeffrey later.

When the Mont came home from school, I was back to work. “Hi honey,” I called out from the sofa in the den, where I was writing.

“What have you been doing?” he asked, putting down his briefcase. “Mmm. Brownies,” he said, after seeing the pan sitting on the oven. “What are these chocolate things?”

“Chocolate things?” I asked, a little muzzy-headed from making fiction.

“These.” He walked toward the den with the bag in his hand.

“They’re not chocolate,” I said.

“What are they?”

“Well, smell them,” I suggested. He opened up the bag and inhaled. Not finding anything out of the ordinary, he stuck his hand inside and, before I could stop him, popped one in his mouth and began chewing. My jaw dropped open. Barely able to contain my laughter, I said, “They’re dog biscuits.”

Oh, the look on his face. There are too few moments in life as fully satisfactory as the few seconds immediately following my announcement. I haven’t laughed so much since the Mont was mistaken for my father.

Later in the evening, when I burst into a spontaneous fit of laughter remembering it, he glared at me from the sofa. “It wasn’t as if you put dog food in them,” he complained.

He didn’t have a retort when I pointed out the obvious, however. “But you didn’t know that!”

--

Unfortunately, it was also the kind of store that stocked very little in my spindly size. From the small section of the rack I plucked a shirt that normally for which I’d never fork over legal tender. In my head I rapidly did some calculations, then double-checked them on my phone’s calculator. “What do you think of this one?” I asked the Mont. “It’s a ninety-dollar Perry Ellis shirt. Now it’s six dollars.” Even my depressed wallet could afford six dollars.

He looked up, then startled back. “AIEE!” he shrieked.

I blinked a few times. Sure, the shirt was a little . . . well . . . loud, with its busy pattern of cornflower blue poppies on a bright white cotton background. Yes, it was the kind of obnoxious shirt one ordinarily sees on party boys out for a night of shots and tapas. But I liked it. “I’m buying it,” I told him, ignoring his eye-rolling.

Once home, I tried the shirt on with some jeans, and rather liked the effect. It suited me. I liked the inner lining, and the way it was made. I walked downstairs and stood in front of the Mont in the den. “How’s it look?” I asked.

He glanced up from his computer and flinched away. “Good GOD!” he yelled. “Don’t do that to me!”

“Oh, come on,” I chided. “It’s not that bad. Is it?”

He smiled in a conciliatory manner and said, with the utmost of sincerity, “No, it will be absolutely fine once you have a sweater over it.”

Butt-wipe.

Saturday night, feeling feisty, I announced, “I am wearing the shirt.”

“You’re not really,” said the Mont.

“Yes. I am.”

“Airplanes will mistake you for a landing strip.”

“I’m wearing it!”

I must have sounded determined, because he shrugged in that sort of it’s your funeral way and let me go change. I put on the shirt and looked at myself in the mirror. It fit well. It didn’t billow around the waist, the way so many slim-fitting shirts tend to. I still liked it. It was in that kind of proud and feisty mood that a couple of minutes later we pulled up in front of Clark and Jeffrey’s house down the street, to pick them up before we went to the bar. “Good evening, Clark and Jeffrey, people to whom I am speaking this evening,” I said.

There was a moment of silence as they both settled into the back seat. Then Clark said, “Oh, are you not talking to the Mont because he said something about you wearing his mother’s blouse?”

The whole, long evening was like that. My so-called friends had the bar’s owner come over and ask me if I’d like him to find a tablecloth to match my shirt, and enlisted the karaoke mistress to call me to the microphone using my drag-name-if-I-had-a-drag-name. (If you must know, it’s Pansy Pots. Because once we were driving by a garden center that had a sign advertising Pansy Pots 3 for $5, and I said, “You know, that would make a great drag name.”) By the end of the night, even my friend thirdreel's partner, Stee, was in on the joke. When the Mont went up to the mic and ended up soloing “Something Stupid,” on which we normally duet, I complained loud and long that ordinarily he asked me to sing with him.

“Maybe it’s the shirt,” said Stee, sounding apologetic.

I don’t care. I like the shirt. It was six dollars. Maybe there was a reason it was discounted so steeply, sure. But I’m wearing it, dammit. I'm going to wear it ALL THE TIME.

--