oh captain, my captain
7/28/2004 @ 7:18 pm Comments (22)if you’re like me, the last time you heard that particular refrain you were sitting in the dark with somebody you were about to break up with and ethan hawke was standing on a schoolboy’s desk declaring his homoerotic allegiance to robin williams.
the reason I quote it here is purely utilitarian. my new publisher, the esteemed MacAdam Cage, has concocted a guerrilla marketing plan to recruit street team captains from media markets big and small. said team captains will take to the pavement with advance review copies, hustle assorted phineas poe paraphernelia, hound their neighborhood bookstores to give Phineas his due, talk to strangers, and otherwise push the books of Poe as hard as they can without actually breaking the law, for which they will be rewarded rare collectibles and tasty swag.
I’m told that anyone interested in becoming a street team captain, and for that matter anyone who can come up with a remotely less goofy name for the position, should contact jason@macadamcage.com, who will be pulling the trigger on all street team protocol with exactly the right amount of misanthropic savoir faire. jason will require all your vital stats: age, real name, mailing address, viable phone number and so forth. but be advised. jason believes zombies will one day inherit the earth, and let’s just say he’s been waiting a lifetime to launch his own private little project mayhem.
last, I had a shot of good medicine today in the form of the first dose of advance praise for Hell’s Half Acre.
‘An over-the-top Grande Guignol thriller that breaks every rule of fine literature without ever once descending to the lowest denominator… Bruising stuff, screeching on the knife-edge of acceptability… Baer writes like an addict continually rediscovering the dark, bloody depths and boozy, coke-jangled heights the language can bring readers to. These pages hurt.’
-Kirkus Reviews.
to the pain.
will chris baer
earthquake weather
7/26/2004 @ 12:29 pm Comments (17)some bad voodoo in the air today. the sky is heavy, oppressive. feels like that city under the bubble in Logan’s Run, like death is on the wing. saw three freak traffic accidents on my way to work and two perished birds. and when the birds are falling to earth you know some untoward shit is going down. satellites are crashing somewhere over the former soviet union and every human I’ve spoken with this morning so far was afflicted with the visible jitters and a nasty fuck you I got mine vibe. now, it could be my internal sonar is askew but it just feels like something biblical is going to happen and all I can say is keep your head down if you woke up in southern cal this morning. or better yet go back to bed with a cup of tea and whiskey and somebody warm. but if you’re stuck waiting for the end of the world in a subterranean office situation like me, take five and read the opening chapter of Hell’s Half Acre, posted here for you and yours. read in good health. I hope it brings you back for more.
sweet nothing,
will chris baer
welcome to fort logan
7/19/2004 @ 12:48 pm Comments (29)some six years back Phineas Poe stumbled out of my skull bloody and bruised, half crazy with heartbreak, malnourished, addicted to junk-with staples holding his raped guts together. I didn’t think he was long for this world. and as I approached the last few chapters of Judas, it crossed my mind more than once that he was never gonna make it back to Denver. I reckoned he would hang on long enough to confront the puppetmaster and meet the dying boy, then cross the border into mexico with Jude, and just vanish. I would never see him again. maybe his starved and broken body would finally give out, maybe Jude would yawn one morning, stretch her long yellow arms, and just say fuck it-I love you baby I love you not-and put that stiletto through his left eye and poke out his brain. but Phineas held on like a cockroach waiting out the plague, and kept on kicking. then, when I started working on penny dreadful I was pretty sure he would buy the farm soon, as it just seemed like Phineas had a deathwish. And for me writing a novel is like unfolding then re-folding a massive origami bird in the dark. by which I mean, the continuum of the story already exists fully formed inside my head-I just haven’t gotten it out of me yet, and so I don’t always know how it’s going to end. I may have my suspicions about what lies around the bend, but I’m generally wrong. and by the time I was halfway through the first draft of dreadful, I had seen flashes of that final showdown with Theseus and had a feeling that Phineas would by chance move two steps to one side at just the right or wrong moment and take that bullet meant for Eve. but he surprised me, and never so much as flinched.
and as recently as two years ago, I was proof positive Phineas was a goner. in 2001 or so, I had hammered out a very rough draft of hell’s half acre, the third in the poe series. that first version was pretty nihilistic, with an ending that was purely darkness visible. my own agent, the preternaturally wise Dan Mandel, had tagged it a 300-page suicide note, saying it was beautiful but kind of painful too read. I took a pass at rewriting it, but I didn’t really have it in me. I wanted to write something else, and started working in starts and stutters on what I called a fantasy noir tentatively titled Godspeed. at this point I was driving a taxi again to pay the bills, and on a freakishly fateful day met a screenwriter named sterling Anderson who happened to have read Judas and convinced me to hunker down with him and scratch out the judas screenplay. now almost three years have passed since we wrote that script-a hell of a good time by the way-and it’s starting to look like a very real possibility that phineas will at long last have his kidney, and his heart, ripped out on the big screen.
and last summer I had a second fateful meeting. I crossed improbable paths with a guy named craig clevenger, who had written a nasty gem called the contortionist’s handbook. Clevenger said he was a big fan of the phineas books, having discovered them at a dusty little bookstore in Dublin, of all fucking places, and told me that Judas had been one of his bibles while he wrote the handbook. that’s cool, I thought. then I read the handbook and realized that clevenger was not only a sick and twisted fucker and deeply gifted writer, but he was one of my lost brothers. so we took to drinking together on sunday nights, shambling down to a bar called the Firebird-the irony of that name is not lost on me-and one night Clevenger said he’d like to interview me for the cult, at chuckpalahniuk.net, a website devoted to all things Palahniuk and likeminded authors. I said what the hell, and in the course of the interview one of the things we talked about was that lost Phineas book. a few days later, I got a call from my agent, who said he’d had calls from a few editors who had read the interview, primary among them pat walsh, the guy who did the dirty work of editing clevenger’s the Handbook for macadam cage. walsh wanted to know what was the story with Hell’s Half Acre-was it available and could he read it. I immediately said no. I had not so much as looked at the book in two years, but I knew it needed a hardcore rewrite. or a complete fucking autopsy. and that grim reaper ending definitely needed a surgical rethink. so we told Walsh he could have it in three months, and I started working. I wrote like a creature possessed for ten weeks and handed it over. then underwent a half dozen edits and rewrites. now hell’s half acre is slated to hit shelves september 10 along with sharp new reissues of judas and dreadful. still don’t quite believe it, and I shake my head daily at phineas poe’s otherworldly survival skills.
meanwhile, Clevenger had over drinks often given me rightly deserved shit for so grievously neglecting the internet and having no website. He convinced me to at the very least start up a bare bones blog-a concept he had to patiently explain to me. so I posted a few entries under the banner you’re on a need to know basis with phineas poe, but as I have a tendency to be forgetful and easily distracted and was powerful busy doing rewrites on hell’s half, I let the blog wither and die like every houseplant I’ve ever owned. but I had good intentions, and had a vague plan to set up an actual website as soon as things settled down. Enter dennis widmyer, legendary web guru behind the cult. Dennis and I had started exchanging pretty regular emails, just shooting the shit mainly, and he had posted an old short story of mine on the cult site. and echoing Clevenger, he told me more than once that I needed my own site. I eventually floated the idea that when and if I did join the millennium, maybe he could offer some friendly advice, recommend a designer and so on. and maybe he was bored or needed a new project, but one day Dennis offered to be my webmaster. I thought about it for about two seconds and said hell yes. so Dennis rounded up a crew, consisting of the web mistress Mirka, who I’ve never met but whose intelligence and passion I have come to regard with awe, and a couple of ungodly fast and skilled designer slash programmers named Kirk aka sparq and Roland, and you are now looking at the fruits of their collective labors.
so here’s the deal. I promise not to let this sucker die. too many good people have worked too hard to make the site happen, and I by god intend to nurture it. I will post fresh log entries long and short every week or so. I will trot out short stories and essays new and old whenever it feels ripe to do so. I will answer questions, provided I know the answers. I will share whatever news I have about the books, the movie, the comic book, reading tours and all other such relevant shit. I will keep Phineas alive as long as even one person is awake out there, awake and still dreaming.
stay gold,
will chris baer