The Blogspace

You forget, when there are no comments, how public it is. Not that one ever thinks of blogs as private, of course—long lost cousins, ex-girlfriends, old high school buddies and folks from crimespace have all found me here—but one does suffer a bit under the illusion that they're personal, as in separate in some fundamental way from one's work life. I know that some businesses and church organizations track their employees' online activities, but I had no idea we were doing it now in academia.

Ah well. Here's the bunny again. Apparently his name is Stewart.



Cute!

Here's a picture of a bunny.

Cute!

Winter

I'm tired of it already. Let's try something else.

Rust Street house sold

Closed this a.m. Not a bad way to end 2007.

Boston Globe

Not sure what the header means, but they ran a nice little blurb on 12/23.

A debut with feathers

"High Season" (St. Martin's) is a campy debut mystery set in Provincetown. What impresses Kate Mattes, owner of Kate's Mystery Books, is how well author Jon Loomis captures the town in all its out-there glory - from the drag queens to the fishermen to the denizens on Commercial Street. Clearly, Loomis, who lives in Wisconsin, made the most of his time during two fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

On edit: I'm sure FAWC's official position is all congratulations, but it's worth noting that their summer teaching program turned down my offer to teach a mystery writing class for free. For free! That means that if the class filled they'd make around $6,000 clear; if the class didn't fill but had enough students to run, they'd still make plenty of dough because they wouldn't have to pay me. Essentially, they declined a donation of my time worth as much as $6,000 during what is apparently a financially stressed period for them (big deficits, shrinking donations). That's what a bunch of snobby assholes they are. Still, I love the place. Sort of.

Boston Glob

Review this coming Sunday, apparently. Just in time for Christmas. Not.

Bat II

So, bat hides all day in the 1" gap between the bathroom cabinet and the wall. We don't know this. Bat waits until about 1:00 a.m., after the lovely A_______ has finished grading papers and come to bed and turned the lights out, and then scritchy-flutters out of his crack and into the bedroom, where he flies mad loops around the ceiling, one end to the other. Bat is bigger, seems to me, than your standard brown bat. About the size of a pterodactyl, in fact. So the lovely A_______ trots downstairs, more or less to hide; very sensible, given her condition. I watch bat for a minute, hoping he'll land. He does, perching on the top of the window molding where he can keep an eye on me. He looks like a miniature gargoyle up there, all ears and weird, backwards elbows. I go downstairs to get gloves and something to catch him in: a pillowcase.

Back in the bedroom, it's obvious the pillowcase is useless: bat is up too high, the pillowcase opening's too small and floppy. I grab a towel and fling it at bat, hoping to knock him down. He orbits frantically around the room, doing these wobbly figure-eights. I pick up the towel and give it a good locker-room snap as bat flies past. A miracle occurs: I make good contact, bat's furry-leathery self splats against the wall and bounces onto the floor, stunned. Decent wingspan, as I said. I toss the towel over him before he can recover, scoop him up and hustle him outside, where I release him. He flutters out into the night, takes a hard left turn, and presumably flies right back to his nest in our eaves, along with fifty or sixty or so of his cousins. Did I mention the bat guy said they can't do much about a bat colony 'til spring?

Bat

So, I wake up at about 3:30 last night to small, rustling sounds in our bedroom. At first I think it's the cat, farting around; he does a fair amount of running up and down the stairs, clawing the rug, etc. in the middle of the night. "George," I say. "Shut the fuck up." More rustling, about a foot from my head. I look down and a good-sized bat is climbing up the side of our box-spring, presumably trying to get into bed with us (warm in there). "What is it?" says the lovely A_________, half-awake now. "Bat," I say. Hilarity ensues. We jump out of bed, turn on the light. Bat flies in wild loops around the room, disappears. We go downstairs to sleep on the couch (it's a sectional, thank God). A________ drifts right off, but not me. I'm wide awake, listening for more weird shit. Meanwhile, the cat's doing his nocturnal comedy routine, charging around. It's really the cat this time: I can see him. Bat still nowhere to be found as of this posting. With any luck he's crawled back into the wall via one of the missing light fixtures/smoke-detectors. I turned the big walk-in closet inside out: he's not in there. Called the bat removal guy: turns out there's not much we can do 'til spring. The little fuckers are supposed to be hibernating, but tend to seek warmth when it gets really cold in their exterior wall. Ack.

HIGH SEASON to be reviewed by the Boston Globe

on 12/16, they tell us. Better late than never.

HIGH SEASON makes the WaPo's "Best Books of 2007"

Scroll down to "mysteries/thrillers." They mangled the description a bit (okay, a lot), but who cares. It's still a nice thing.

Offer

So, we've gotten an offer on the Rust St. house, thank God. It's a tad on the low side, but we're coming back with a counter that should be acceptable. It is, as everyone tells us, a buyer's market.

The good news is that if it all goes through it'll free up a good bit of cash. We can restore a bit of the account we've been drawing from to finish up the Garfield house, and still have a great Christmas.

Dear Santa,

About that flat-screen TV. Please make it a Sharp Aquos; the one with the fast refresh rate.

Also, I'd really like one of those new Barber Trifecta fuzz boxes.

Thanks a million,

Jon

Good progressives don't buy used books online.

It's not something that's affecting me at the moment (zero used copies currently on Amazon), but it's evidently pretty bad for the biz. Authors only get paid for new book sales, obviously, so the used book thing can really take a bite out of a writer's livelihood.

Buying used books at your neighborhood used book store is fine, apparently.

Moderation off.

Comments back to normal. The recent weirdness outburst seems to have subsided, for now.

Amazon's taking orders again

For your holiday book-buying needs. They say they'll ship on 12/4, but they should have them on the dock late this week. Which should mean they'll be able to ship late next week. I think.

3rd printing ordered.

It makes sense—the 1st is completely sold out, the 2nd's already half sold between Amazon's order of 350 and other online sellers' likely orders. Store demand is probably in the range of a couple of hundred, too, and we're not even talking holiday shopping yet, really. Bet we're into a 4th by Christmas, but you never know.

From the Cape Codder

The Cape Codder is a pretty good little weekly paper out of Orleans. The link may not work:

Provincetown sleuth: Local author gains national attention

By Steve Desroches

Provincetown, Mass. - A televangelist is found dead on Herring Cove Beach wearing a multi-colored muumuu and high heels and a Provincetown detective who gets queasy at the sight of blood is not so hot on the case.

In a town that is stranger than fiction this tale may sound vaguely familiar, like it actually happened, but it is the premise for author Jon Loomis’ fun and campy Provincetown-based mystery “High Season.”

The poet’s brilliant first crack at fiction introduces us to Frank Coffin, a former Baltimore homicide detective who returned to his native Provincetown after starting to have panic attacks at crime scenes in tough and gritty Baltimore. The return home was just what Coffin needed, as his new beat’s most sensational crimes are limited to “break-ins, bicycle thefts and domestic disputes.”

After almost a decade on the job in freaky and funky Provincetown in walks Melinda Merkin, wife of homophobic, fire-and-brimstone televangelist Ron Merkin, to report her husband missing. But there’s a secret, the good Reverend has a penchant for wearing women’s clothing. Shortly thereafter, Merkin, clad in over-the-top drag, is found dead, strangled with a taffeta scarf.

Coffin and his partner, tough talking lesbian Officer Lola Winters, enlist the help of townies to help solve the crime. But after interviewing fishermen, drag queens and the eccentrics that stroll up and down Commercial Street, Coffin realizes that the Merkin case is not an isolated incident. There is a murderer loose in the town and it’s up to Coffin to find the killer before he strikes again.

Meanwhile, Coffin’s girlfriend believes she has a stalker, his mother is the Alzheimer’s ridden loudmouthed bully of the town’s nursing home and the townspeople are all busy playing armchair detectives in a town where gossip is a blood sport.

Loomis spent a couple of years in Provincetown as a poetry fellow at the prestigious Fine Arts Work Center. Though now lives in Wisconsin, where he is a poetry fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Loomis accurately captures the lovably twisted character of Provincetown. If you’ve never visited Provincetown, you’ll love this story for its clever twists and excellent writing. If you live in or spend a lot of time in Provincetown, you’ll chuckle as Loomis reveals some of the town’s worst kept secrets.

For instance, though not mentioned by name it’s obvious that the Merkins are in Provincetown for Fantasia Fair, the annual October festival where cross dressers come to celebrate. The locals lovingly call the cross dressers “tall ships” because as the mostly straight men unsteadily walk down Commercial Street in high heels they sway like tall ships in the harbor. Unlike drag queens, “tall ships” shy away from the glamour and settle more on suburban practicality in their dress. Through Coffin, Loomis translates what many locals say in private.

“Drag queens he could understand, sort of; there was something tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, all that glitter and flash, a kind of burlesque-on/homage-to the whole idea of glamour in all its blowzy, tittering goofiness. The straight cross-dressers were harder to figure out – the just plain transvestites everyone in town called tall ships. The tall ships tended to be large men who strode up and down Commercial Street in plus-sized tweed skirts, support hose, and pumpkin-colored lipstick; craggy faced and lonely-looking men with dispirited wigs and five o’clock shadows poking through pancake makeup. Sometimes they had their wives, even their kids in tow. They reminded Coffin of his Aunt Connie after she’d been through several rounds of chemotherapy.”

The dark comedic mystery is a veritable road map of real Provincetown institutions, both visible and hidden, though in many cases given fake names, much like a literary witness protection program. Coffin and Winters sling back coffee at the Tip Top Diner, which is obviously Tips for Tops’n, a favorite townie breakfast place in town. Billy’s Oyster Shack sounds like a mix between Clem and Ursie’s and the Governor Bradford bar; and Dawn Vermillion, a fictional drag queen who sees all and knows all, resembles popular hometown drag star Pearlene Dubois.

Since its publication at the end of September, “High Season” has been creating buzz, likely to get louder now that the New York Times Book Review named it as an editor’s choice.

Loomis, who previously published two books of poetry “Vanitas Motel” and “The Pleasure Principal,” is working on two new books – a mystery titled “Mating Season” and a memoir called “King of Hearts.” His next mystery is set to come out in January 2008.

“High Season” is much like Provincetown, a gleeful mélange of joyous contradictions and peculiar characters in a community with a dark underbelly and glittery joie de vivre.

- Cape Codder

Photo from Volume One

Eau Claire's local alt paper. They did a little story about the book.

Photo credit to Kim Acheson. Not his fault I look like that.

3rd printing on the horizon. Maybe.

Looks like Amazon's ordered 350 of the 1,000-book second printing, so a third (perhaps larger) printing is reasonably likely. So the fabulous K suggests, anyway.

WPR/Spectrum West

So, I taped a little radio interview today out at WPR, which is next to the Shipshape car wash. Which is shaped like a ship. It was fun; nice people there. Should be on shortly after Thanksgiving.

Going to paperback.

In July. The fabulous K just informed me. Don't tell anybody, or they won't buy the hardcover.