BLAKE NELSON TEEN NOVELIST

2012-02-24T14:05:00.001-08:00

2012-01-28T19:20:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else “in the know” in high school, I looked to Blake Nelson’s Girl like it was my bible. All the confusing feelings and twisted emotions I was having as a nonconformist teenager were documented perfectly in this book. My friends and I passed around our one collective copy, each signing it like it was a sacred artifact.

There’s something about Blake Nelson enthusiasts, but Girl and now Dream School fans in particular—you can spot them from a mile away. Like there's an underground code, a secret handshake, a fight club without the fighting. I ran into my old friend Tyler the other day on the subway and I held up my book for him to see, wondering if it meant anything to him. He seemed like a would-be fan. He held up his own copy of Dream School and we laughed. I wasn’t surprised.

I recently got the chance to interview Blake Nelson over email and his responses were yet another reminder of how much I love his work, his decisions, and his characters. Warning: If you haven’t read the book yet, this interview may contain a few spoiler alerts. And, uh, what are you waiting for?

Jesse: Andrea left Wellington on a pretty abrupt and dramatic note. Did you have a similar experience at Wesleyan?

Blake: Yeah, I left Wesleyan kind of hastily. My situation was more based around the band I was in. We were always getting into trouble. It reached a point where we needed to not be there. So we left.

Jesse: In general, how similar was your Wesleyan experience to Andrea’s at Wellington? Did you have a Vanessa, a Carol, an Andrew, a Paul?

Blake: It’s somewhat similar, not those actual people though. The thing about her not finding her own people at first—that did happen. When I first arrived at Wesleyan I thought it was going to be all these East Coast hipsters. But most people had, like, Bob Marley posters in their rooms. It was, like, this prep school time warp. It took until my sophomore year to find ONE person who was into the same stuff I was. He was wearing a Bad Brains button. What a relief that was . . .

Jesse: When you first started writing the book, did you know Andrea was going to wind up leaving college early, or more importantly, that she was going to leave feeling “unchanged” to a certain degree? Like, changed, but not changed in the end-all-be-all way she had anticipated?

Blake: No, I just started the book and let it flow and take me to wherever it was going to go. I didn’t even know she was going to be a writer! As for being unchanged, I think she was changed a lot actually. I’m not sure, if she’d gone to Oregon State, that she could have ever taken herself seriously as a writer. That was the secret benefit of Wellington. Because people at places like that take themselves so seriously. They think they could be writers. It makes it easier for someone like Andrea to do so well.

Jesse: Andrea is pretty comfortable with herself, confident in her decisions, and able to “go with the flow.” She doesn’t seem to sweat the small stuff or obsess over everything the way some girls her age might. Where did the idea for Andrea’s character, her sophisticated and wise attitude in particular, come from?

Blake: You think of her as wise? Ha ha. Well, that’s a compliment I guess! I think of her as . . . well, she’s from a small city, Portland, so she has that small town common sense thing. I don’t know if she’s sophisticated. She does feel grounded to me. But also naïve. She’s obviously some composite of me and other people I’ve known and the kind of people I enjoy meeting. But I don’t really make decisions about her personality. She just is.

Jesse: Another thought about Andrea’s character . . . I always thought (in Girl first, and now in Dream School) it was really interesting how she straddles both the punk and mainstream worlds so seamlessly. It seems like a very conscious decision on your part; why did you make it? Were you like that at all growing up?

Blake: Yeah I was like that. I’ve got the classic writer personality of being able to blend in and sort of exist in different worlds. I think for Andrea it’s more part of the process of becoming herself. She starts off being this totally normal person, on the surface, at least. And then slowly she makes the transition to something less mainstream. I love remembering people I knew in high school who made dramatic shifts. Guys who would show up at shows and be, like, the most normal nerdy types. And then they’d come back the next week and be totally punk or whatever. They would totally change in one week.

Jesse: This is kind of a predictable question, but . . . Why did you wait so long before writing the sequel to Girl? And had you always known there would be a sequel?

Blake: I wrote the sequel around 1998-2000. Then I couldn’t get my original Girl publisher to publish it, (it was a little late in their eyes). Over the next couple years, I brought it up with different publishers, but could never get the right fit. Then in 2008 I met Lauren Cerand who was this really smart media person and a Girl fan and she helped me find Figment, which is an online writing community for teens mostly but older people too. Figment was just starting and they were looking for something fun and interesting to help launch their site. They had the idea of serializing it, like we did originally in Sassy. When Figment saw the numbers of people who were reading it on their site, they decided to publish it. It was really a good fit, especially in that Figment is all about helping young writers find their voice and Dream School is essentially about Andrea finding her writer’s voice.

Jesse: Another popular question, I would imagine, but I still don’t know the answer . . . How do you, as an adult male, get inside the head of a teenage girl sooo well?

Blake: I don’t know. One thing: I don’t think it’s so much about gender. I think gender is overrated. I think boys and girls think most of the same thoughts . . . In my case, maybe I’m confident enough in my belief that gender is not that profound, that I can let Andrea be, and not try to make her overly “female.” I let her be a person first, then I sprinkle a little girl-ness on top.

Jesse: Todd Sparrow, ABlakeOne.jpgndrea’s hot rock star boyfriend in Girl, was obviously a hugely integral part to the book. Did you think about putting him in Dream School, or was it always clear there was no place for Todd Sparrow there?

Blake: Going off to college, she is pretty removed from Todd Sparrow’s world. So it seems natural that they wouldn’t bump into each other. Maybe he’ll show up in a future book. Todd Sparrow was always an enigmatic figure for me. I had trouble getting him clear in my mind as I wrote Girl. I solved the problem by remembering Courtney Love—a fellow Portland scene person. She could be so charming and funny even though she seemed like a borderline street person. So when I struggled with Todd, like, “Why would Andrea like him so much?” I would think of Courtney at her best, being brilliant and magnetic and having this quality of sweeping you away into [her] world, which was so much more interesting than the ordinary world.

Jesse: How did the movie adaptation of Girl come about, and what did you think of it?

Blake: A production company called Muse Productions—they had done Buffalo 66, which I had loved so I was hopeful. Some interesting people were involved at different times. Sarah Jacobson—who has since passed away but was this amazing figure in the indie film world at the time—was going to direct at one point. But they kept changing people. When they finally finished it, it wasn’t quite what I had hoped for. It was nobody’s fault; that just happens with movies sometimes. But it was shown endlessly on cable, and got the book a ton of publicity, so I was happy.

Jesse: Have you thought at all about further continuing Andrea’s story line still? Even if you never write about Andrea Marr again, do you feel like you have a sense of what happens to her after the book ends?

Blake: Yeah, I’ve thought about doing another book. I don’t know where she’ll end up or what will happen to her. I’m not sure that matters to me that much. I feel like her youth, like with most people, is probably the most interesting part of her. After that, she’ll get older. She’ll be like an old person. She’ll still be who she is but in a more sedate manner.

Jesse: Cheers to that.

From FIGMENT.COM

2011-12-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

It’s official: the 90s are back in vogue. You know that Figment has recently published Dream School, the sequel to Blake Nelson’s 90s classic Girl, about Andrea Marr: grunge rock princess turned elite liberal arts student. As Andrea faces college–preps, professors, parties, and all–she’ll struggle to find her own path to cool. You can read an excerpt of Dream School for a limited time on Figment here, and you can read more about Blake’s inspiration and style below.

How did you come up with Andrea, the main character in Girl and now Dream School? How much did you know about her before you started writing, and how much did you discover along the way?

Originally, Andrea was just there to tell the story of Cybil, who shaved her head as an artistic/rebellious statement. But then as I continued the story, Andrea started to talk about her own life, and especially her relationship with a senior boyfriend when she was just a sophomore. This relationship, which I just threw in there to give her something to talk about, became the main focus of Andrea’s story at the beginning. Eventually, it took over. Soon the the whole book was about Andrea’s transition to indie coolness, which was actually more interesting than Cybil’s, because Andrea was a more ordinary person. She had farther to go.

You’re a guy writing from a girl’s perspective. What are the challenges in that? Did you ever hear, “You’re doing it wrong!” from female readers?

It has been pretty effortless for me. I really like doing it. I find that girl characters can be a little more honest than boy characters, since boys only really think about a few different things: Call of Duty . . . food . . . girls’ body parts. I feel freer when I am writing from a girl’s perspective.

Any advice for other writers looking to take the gender-bending leap?

If you feel lost or you don’t understand your character, start over using a different person. I feel like everyone has an alternative gendered person that they can talk through. You just have to find that character. Also, try writing from the perspective of someone you would like, or fall in love with. In fact: let yourself fall in love with your character. That’s probably the best way.

Girl was made into a movie. Do you picture your characters differently after seeing them on the silver screen?

Yes, that’s why I didn’t see Girl (the movie) until after I wrote the sequel. But I think it’s up to the movie. Like in Paranoid Park (another of my books that was made into a film), that actor did such a good job that I always see him in my mind when I think of the book. The Girl movie didn’t stick in my mind quite so much. And I only saw that movie once. So it hasn’t affected me that much.

Describe Dream School in four words.

Cool kids at college . . .

Andrea has a lot of fun in college—did you draw on your own college experiences in writing it?

Yeah, I was like her, but I was in bands instead of being a film maker. But my favorite part of being in college was when my band traveled to all the other colleges to play gigs, and that’s what Andrea and her friends do. Andrea’s adventures in college are very close to mine.

We can’t help but notice that Dream School ends on a bit of a cliffhanger–any chance of another Andrea adventure?

My Figment editor, Dana Goodyear, brought that up, and we talked about what would happen to Andrea if she got her book published and went to New York and was part of the literary scene there. That would be really fun to write about. And make fun of!!

What does your ideal writing set-up look like?

Couches are my favorite. I like to put my feet up and balance my laptop on my lap. And then balance my coffee cup on the cushion beside me or on the arm of the couch, which drives people insane because they’re sure I will spill it, though I never do. I like having a lot of things balancing all around me while I write. I also listen to music. Often, a certain record or band becomes the sound track of a book, though I never really plan it. And interestingly, after a long period of never writing in public, I have found recently that I like to write in coffee shops and libraries and places like that.

For those Figment users who were barely conscious in the 90s, what are the 5 most important things to know about the decade?

1-It was a feminist period. Meaning that girls took themselves seriously as a group and a gender. They held themselves aloof from boys. Girls who were preoccupied with boys and getting a boyfriend were considered superficial and sort of lame.

2-People wrote letters. I wrote tons of letters, and got tons of letters. It was almost like a side career. They were long and super fun to write. You would spend a whole night writing someone a letter . . . especially if you were away somewhere, like in a foreign country.

3-The world was pretty dangerous. You didn’t tool around with a stroller in Brooklyn in 1991, unless you wanted someone to steal your baby.

4-You could still be gloomy. A lot of the art and music of the 90s was very dour and “miserabilist.” Nowadays everyone’s more cheerful. At least on the surface.

5-I was young and unknown in the 90s and was just starting my career and that’s generally the funnest part of your life!

NAOMI FRY !

2011-12-10T12:18:00.001-08:00

NAOMI FRY'S PIECE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES "T" MAGAZINE. (T stands for STYLE, for some reason)

The touchstones seem to be everywhere these days: the plaid-wearing, goateed bicycle messengers of “Portlandia”; the grunge heiress Frances Bean Cobain’s recent Hedi Slimane photo shoot; the chortling return of “Beavis and Butthead” to MTV. Yes, the ‘90s are totally back — so much so that some culture observers are probably busy deciding at this very moment that they’re already over again. And there’s no doubt that “Dream School” (Figment), Blake Nelson’s sequel to his beloved 1994 teenage bildungsroman, “Girl,” owes its publication, at least partly, to our current fascination with that halcyon age of mix tapes and Doc Martens. Nelson himself said, “I finished writing the book in 2000, but nobody would publish it, so it sat in my drawer for 10 years.”
Blake Nelson, author of “Dream School.”

Quite apart from the fickleness of retro-focused trends, and regardless of Nelson’s own nostalgia for the ‘90s (“I miss Feminism! The whole culture is so 1950s right now, so conservative and conformist”), “Dream School” is first and foremost an enduring account of what it looks, feels and sounds like to be young. While “Girl” told the story of the Portland, Ore., teenager Andrea Marr and her adventures in the Pacific Northwest’s indie rock music scene, its sequel follows her east to Wellington, a snooty liberal arts college modeled on Wesleyan, which Nelson also attended. Parts of “Girl” were published in Sassy, and the passages gave readers a first-person voice so realistic they might have had to remind themselves that not only were the excerpts fiction, but also fiction actually written by an adult man. Were the oft-missed magazine around today, it might have serialized the new novel as well, which is told in an equally convincing voice.

Despite the gender switch, “Andrea’s experience in college is very nearly identical to mine,” Nelson explained. Before he went to Wesleyan, he had “never dealt with entitled people before, and I didn’t fit in.” From its first chapter, in which Andrea arrives at Wellington and internally compares her ordinary luggage to her fellow students’ “nice” bags (“it wasn’t the most embarrassing thing ever, but it was pretty noticeable”), “Dream School” establishes its protagonist’s outsider perspective. She sees her classmates as “very eastern,” who seem “used to airports and being picked up and going to new places.”

Though Nelson’s uneasiness in college may have been spurred by his peers’ socioeconomic privilege, the book isn’t overtly political. Much like the author himself, “Andrea’s not ideological. She’s an observer.” Yet what “Dream School” may lack in pointed critique, it makes up for in Nelson’s spot-on, often tongue-in-cheek renderings of the minutiae that fill Andrea’s college experience: the pretentious girl in the creative writing workshop who keeps using the term “metafiction”; the eyeliner- and leather-coat-wearing, sexually confident dorm lothario; the forever cooler, laconic friend who makes an experimental film about ecstasy.

If “Girl” was a book read mostly by teenagers but still considered, Nelson said, “a very adult book, in the sense that people hid it from their parents, marked its dirty parts and frequently shoplifted it,” then “Dream School” straddles the same fine line between young adult and just plain adult. For one thing, it thankfully lacks the often heavy-handed moral arcs that so much teen fiction insists on. (Andrea experiments with cocaine but doesn’t need to go to rehab; she practices non-monogamous sex but doesn’t get an S.T.D.) What’s more, as the book ends, Andrea is in her early 20s and, much like Nelson at her age, is feeling the pull of Manhattan. Could there be another sequel in the works? “I’ll definitely think about it, if ‘Dream School’ does well,” Nelson said.

“Dream School” by Blake Nelson, $10. Go to powells.com.

2011-12-10T12:12:00.001-08:00

FROM http://sarahspy.com/

Interview with Isadora Schappell-Spillman @ TEENAGE FILM

2011-12-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

Why did you choose to revisit Andrea and write a sequel?

Weirdly enough, despite ending GIRL with a total sequel-suggesting ending, I never really thought about writing a sequel. And then many years later, I was sitting around and I just started writing it, mostly for fun, and to see what it would sound like. And then the first chapter turned out really good. So I kept going.

How do you write so convincingly in the voice of teenage girl?

I don't think of them as a teenaged girl. I just think of them as a person, who is in this one particular situation, dealing with the things they deal with. I think, in the privacy of our own heads, we don't have an age, or even a gender. We just are. So you start with that, and work your way outward.

Dream School deals with Andrea's realization of herself as an artist/writer, have you always felt like you were an artist or was there a specific time or place that encouraged you to become a writer?

I started to know when I was about fourteen. At first I was a musician and I did that for a long time. But something about that never felt quite right. And I was worried that I would age out too soon as a musician. I had to do an art form that you can do all your life. So when I was twenty-two, I quit music and switched to being a writer. Which was scary at first, because by then I was a good musician, but I could barely write at all. But I knew I had an artistic calling or whatever, a vocation, and in the end it wouldn't matter what medium I was in. It might even be better to do something that would take me a long time to get good at.

What was your college experience like?

Pretty much exactly like Andrea's in Dream School. I met a lot of cool people. But i was a little out of my element being at an elite college. I wasn't prepared for the "entitlement". But it was something I had to learn about, if I was going to live in New York City and live a life in the arts. So I got through it.

How do you feel like today's teenagers are different from when you were Andrea's age?

I think this current generation of parents is much more invested in their children than the parents of the nineties. The reason 90s Do-It-Yourself culture existed, was because you had to do things yourself because nobody was going to help you. Today's kids get lots of help. I don't know what that means down the road, but I think todays kids are generally healthier mentally then Andrea's gang. And better adjusted, and more positive and trusting and willing to give of themselves. They still have all the usual kids problems. But just in the most general terms, they seem happier and less introverted and sulky then the generations before.

What are some of your favorite books/movies/tv shows about Teenagers?

I love the book King Dork. I love the movie Splendor in the Grass. I don't really watch TV too much. I appear to be the only person in the world who didn't particularly like My So Called Life.

Why does so much of your work focus on the experiences of teenagers? I.E. what can you express through the voices of teenagers that you could not otherwise express?

I like teenagers. That's the main thing. I never get bored with them. They're so funny, and so wise, and their brains are like new cars. Don't let adults tell you otherwise: you are never smarter than when you're eighteen.

Another thing too.....the buddhists talk about keeping a "beginners mind", like trying to stay young mentally, keeping the world fresh, not getting stuck in habits or prejudices in the way you view the world. I think putting myself in the heads of teenagers, helps me do that, it is a form of doing that. Teenagers have the ultimate "beginners mind" and going there, refreshes my own perspective, it makes everything new again, which gives my writing a sense of exploration and discovery, and also just makes for a nice life for me.

--Izzy

I HEART DAILY INTERVIEW

2011-12-10T11:56:00.001-08:00

I Heart Daily: What inspired you to write a sequel to Girl?
Blake Nelson: On impulse, I stuck a cliff-hanger, sequel-hinting ending on the end of Girl. I don’t remember why. I guess to force myself someday to write a sequel? I hadn’t really thought about what she would be doing… I just knew she would not be a typical college student, she would definitely have some sort of indie-alternative-artsy experience….

IHD: What was it like for you to follow Andrea to college?
BN: It was fun. And a little bit sad. And really interesting. It was like I was going back to college myself, remembering all the little details of that first day, first week, first month. I had never been anywhere when I left to go to college. It was a huge moment for me.

IHD: You say F. Scott Fitzgerald has had a big influence on your writing. How so?
BN: He did everything I want to do. He was romantic, but also coldly realistic. Also, his characters were so clearly the cool-kids of his time. The “fast” girls, the crazed overly romantic boys, the ambition, the class striving. My favorite of his books might be his obscure second novel The Beautiful and the Damned… the title kind of sums it up.

IHD: Are you surprised that the Young Adult genre has gotten so popular?
BN: Yeah, I am. And it’s also interesting to watch it struggle under the weight of that popularity. It seems to lurch around from one trend to another. First Vampires. Now Dystopia. I would like it a little better, if it wasn’t such a gold rush. But so many amazing books have appeared during the YA boom, you can’t complain. And there’s a lack of pretension that I really appreciate.

ROOKIE INTERVIEW

2011-11-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

For a certain subset of readers, the story of Girl's publication, first as excerpts in Sassy magazine, is the stuff of '90s alt legend, but for those of us who were in single digits at the time (or not yet born!), can you tell a brief version of how that came about, preferably using early- to mid-nineties slang?

Girl was my first novel and it was about a suburban teenager discovering the alternative music scene in the 1990s.

When I finished it, I sent it to publishers and they were like: “We don’t understand this.” The rejections came pouring in.

So then I tried sending it to Sassy magazine. Of course, they understood it and published several chapters.

Meanwhile, there was one book editor who was still considering Girl. But she couldn’t decide. She kept saying: “But who’s the audience? Who’s going to buy it?”

So then Christina Kelly, at Sassy called and said: “We’re getting all these letters from readers who like your novel.”

So I ran up to the Sassy offices and got this stack of hand-written letters from thirteen year old girls in places like Oklahoma City, and I ran across town to that last editor’s office and put them on her desk and said: “Here is the audience! These are the people who will buy it!”

And that’s how it came to be published.

When did you decide you wanted to write a sequel? Did you ever worry about messing with the sanctity of the original story?

I wasn’t worried, I thought if the sequel sucks, I’ll just throw it away.

It was about six years after Girl when I wrote Dream School. Since she was now in college, Andrea had to be more mature, less chatty then she was in Girl, but I still thought she was interesting, and it was still fun to follow her around and see what she did.

Also describing college was fun. I was really pleased with that. Dream School shows what college is like for smart people. It’s so lame how people portray college as just sororities and guys with beer cans strapped to their heads. College can actually be really great.

Now a lot of your work, including Girl, Dream School, and your other new book, Recovery Road, can be found in the Young Adult section of a bookstore, but I've read that you didn't necessarily begin with those intentions.

It’s true. I didn’t intend to be a Young Adult writer. And a lot of my books fall into a middle ground, of not totally YA and not totally not.

But that’s okay. The books find their way. Recovery Road which I worried was going to be too extreme for the YA crowd, has been embraced. And rightly so, because it’s the best kind of YA book, not preachy, not “message-y” but still a solid story that’s honest and real.

When did you start writing and what were some of your early influences?

I was a musician in my teens and early twenties and most of my energy went into that. I wrote a lot of songs, which was good training for writing fiction. I learned how to keep trying even if your first attempts are terrible!

I didn’t start writing seriously until after my band days, which was my mid-twenties.

What did you read as a teenager?

I read stuff like Jaws or The Doonesbury Chronicles. Just whatever I happened to pick up. Then when I was in bands, I had a lot of free time. That’s what happens when you’re a musician, you sit around a lot. And people started turning me on to better stuff: Kerouac and Henry Miller and Tom Wolfe.

I also re-discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald. He’s been the biggest influence on my career. You could take any F. Scott Fitzgerald story, replace “flappers” with “punk rockers” and you have a Blake Nelson story.

When did you realize that you were good at writing for teenagers?

When Girl came out I got a lot of mail from teenagers. I guess I thought the audience would be a little older. But the letters were great. I was so impressed by them.

I hadn’t planned to write YA books but after that it made sense to. And plus, I like teenagers. I like thinking about that time in my own life.

One thing about me: I didn’t hate high school like some people. I was an odd kid and suffered the usual miseries, but I never got too worried about it. I’d get a big zit and I’d see it in the mirror and I’d laugh. I’d be like: “I’m a teenager! I got a zit!”

I would do things like kiss girl’s hands when I was introduced to them. I seemed to be living in several different centuries at once. I was weird. But I enjoyed my youth.

Sort of in the same vein: Who is an ideal reader for the stories of Andrea, as in what age, gender, and sensibility? I gave my little sister (who I think is very different than me in a lot of ways) Girl as a high school graduation present, but I've been too nervous to ask her what she thought of it, or even if she read it...

Yeah, it’s hard to know who’s gonna like what.

I told one group of high-schoolers the other day: “If you think Keds are cool and Uggs are not, you will like Girl.”

You and Andrea share a lot of biographical details (hometown, college, profession): Is she you? If so, why not just make her a dude?

I did write about boys around that same time. But the 90s was a very girl-oriented time. People really wanted to know what was up with them. “What do teenaged girls think about?” That was the question that was in the air. “Why are girls so cool?” “Have girls ever been as cool as they are right now?” It didn’t seem like they had.

A lot of that was the flowering of feminism, and just the way things worked out. Generation X got screwed in a lot of ways but we had amazing girl-culture. Kathleen Hanna, Sassy, all the great zines…. I was just exploring the same things as everyone else.

How did you inhabit the head of a young woman for the first time and how did you get back into that mindset to write Dream School?

I just tried it. That’s what you do as a writer, or any kind of artist. You try things.

With Girl that female voice just instantly worked. It was so fun to get Andrea talking. She had so much energy, her sentences would loop around and reconnect to things, or end in these funny non sequiturs, or just tail off into total confusion. Her voice felt exactly right. It was thrilling.

If I was hoping to get my brain to a place like that, besides reading Rookie, I would be way into the blogs of teenagers on websites like Livejournal and Tumblr. Girl and Dream School have a real diary quality to them that might remind people reading them today of what they see their peers do daily on the internet. Do you ever find yourself going down the teen blog rabbit hole? What do you think of the pro-sharing culture outside of fiction?

I love to read teen blogs. I go on scouting missions to Lookbook and from there find interesting blogs that I check back in with. Tumblr is great, but it’s so visual, there’s not as much writing, but that’s okay. I love how certain blogs just set a mood. Young people are so inventive and interesting, especially if they are left to their own devices….

Are there any parts of Girl or Dream School that women have taken issue with? For instance, Andrea's first orgasm, or other parts you biologically or emotionally could not have experienced? Did you do research or reporting for stuff like that?

No research, I just made it up. And I got a lot of it wrong I realized as I got older. But one thing I’ve noticed is that people are insecure about sex so if a female character says: “Whenever I kiss a boy, my ears tingle”, the female reader thinks: “Oh no! Why don’t my ears tingle?” Instead of thinking: “That doesn’t really happen! This is a guy writing this, not a girl!”

Also, I think in some cases, if you have a good story going, people will go with it. It’s like when you hit a wrong note as a musician. If you’re really tearing it up, nobody cares if you make a mistake.

Surprisingly though, I still meet people who have never seen my picture and think that “Blake Nelson” is a girl. That’s weird.

VANITY FAIR

2011-11-06T18:44:00.001-08:00

2011-11-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Dream School

by Blake Nelson

Giveaway ends December 02, 2011.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Christina Kelly and I talking about SASSY and GIRL

2011-10-29T16:19:00.000-07:00

CHRISTINA: I first met Blake Nelson in the early 90s, when I was back at Sassy, and we published excerpts from his awesome first novel, "Girl." That book is now beloved by an entire generation. It tells the story of a suburban girl named Andrea Marr who discovers punk rock and alternative culture.

Blake had an amazing ability to write in the voice of a teenage girl, even though he was a 20-something hipster guy. He has gone on to write a total of 12 books, which is both impressive and gives me book envy. Finally, in December, "Dream School," the sequel to Girl is coming out. It’s about what happens when Andrea goes off to college.

You guys, it’s really good! I recently asked Blake many annoying questions about his books and writing, which he graciously answered ....

Christina: I've been thinking about how we first found "Girl." An intern, Christine Muhlke, who used to screen all the fiction that came in, put it on my desk with a note that said "Evil Genius." I read it and loved it. That much I remember. What I'm more hazy on: Did we run your stories as they were, or did we edit them? Do you remember? Was I a bitch? I hear that I was a bitch back then.

Blake: You were not a bitch, you were a taskmaster, and you had to be, because you were suddenly at the center of the hipster universe. Everyone wanted a piece of Sassy, which you seemed to find amusing but also very stressful. Your overall response to the pressure seemed to be: EVERYTHING HAS TO BE GOOD. And of course everything isn't always good, so I'm sure you had to disappoint a lot of people, hence you are a bitch....

But backing up to how we met: I was of course a huge fan of Sassy. So I wrote a short story called "Cybil Shaves Her Head" and sent it to you. You rejected it, but you called me in Portland and told me that in short stories for magazines: "The character has to change."

So then, since you'd actually called me, (CHRISTINA KELLY CALLED ME!), I thought I might have a shot with an excerpt, and when I finished the book, I went through it and found sections I thought could stand alone as stories, and had "people changing" and I sent them in.

Your editing was very light. I understood the parameters. It was really effortless, which made it hard to drum up excuses to come to your offices, but I still managed go there a lot. I had huge crushes on all of you guys. And I loved your grimy offices. Every time I walked out of there, I was like floating on a cloud.

And then the best part of the story: When the excerpts ran, you got a bunch of letters from readers and you gave them to me -- it was a pretty good stack -- and I was down to one book editor who was still considering the book, so I took the letters to her and that convinced her to offer me a contract.

I still tell young writer types: "Christina Kelly once told me: The character must change."

Christina: Yes, I think it is coming back to me. I remember you visiting the offices, and I remember once going to a Roger Manning show with you and some of the other staff. I didn’t know about the crushes though. So, why did you choose to write in a girl's voice? How did you know what goes on inside a girl's head?

Blake: It started with "Cybil Shaves Her Head" which was supposed to be an updating of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." So I thought one of Cybil's friends should tell the story. A girl. In that first story, I mostly made fun of the dumb suburban mall girls, and how they talked. It was very satirical and pretty unkind to the girls and teenagers in general.

I found though, as I continued with my more serious attempts at literary fiction, that I kept thinking about Cybil and her gang. They were such lively, fun characters. They had really come to life. So I went back and continued their story.

As for knowing what girls think about, that has never been hard. In the midst of the first draft of "Girl," I asked a room full of women from the bookstore I worked at, "What did you think about in high school?" They all, in unison and unprompted, said: "Sex!" I think I more thought about “boys.” But I was very innocent.

Generic author picture of Blake until he wakes up and sends us a better one.

Generic author picture of Blake until he wakes up and sends us a better one.

Christina: Is there anything of yourself in Andrea?

Blake: Oh, Andrea is me. Totally. I mean, the "boy" parts of my character are my worst qualities. I'm egotistical, competitive, selfish ... So Andrea is like me with all the good parts and none of the bad. Which really freed me to let her be herself in the story.

She didn't have any demons really. She's a genuinely good person. And her "journey" is very similar to mine too. Starting off in boring suburbia, discovering, incrementally, that there's this bigger, more interesting world. Taking those first steps into going to your first "show," wearing your first thrift store clothes. It was really fun to relive that stuff. And as a writer, if you're having fun writing it, the reader is going to have fun reading it.

Christina: How much of "Dream School" is based on your own college years?

Blake: A lot. Especially the beginning, that first year or two of college, that's pretty much my experience exactly. I was pretty out of my element at a fancy college like Wesleyan (Wellington, in the book). But probably most people feel that way.

I especially enjoyed writing about those first months when every little detail matters. When you're noticing what kind of watches people have and how they organize their dorm room. And people are reading The Economist and you're thinking, "Oh my god, I don't know anything about the world." Also the loneliness of it, and that sense that "your life is starting." You are truly on your own. It's a real test. It's a real "rite of passage" moment, especially if you didn't already go to boarding school or Exeter or whatever

Christina: When did you write "Dream School"?

Blake: I wrote it somewhere between 1998 and 2000, I think. I don't actually remember. I wrote it at the exact wrong time, in terms of getting it published. It was too late to do a series type sequel and it was too early to do a retrospective type thing. I must have had a lot of faith in it though, because when I dug it out years later, I though, "Oh, I'll have to fix this up" but it was actually very polished and solid and ready to go.

Christina: How did the Figment serialization come about?

Blake: I met a woman named Lauren Cerand who is a very sharp book person and when I told her in 2008 that I had written a sequel to "Girl" that was in my drawer, she got very excited. She thought we were coming into a cycle where people would be very into that. She thought about it, and encouraged me to think about it, and then the Figment people, who were also very smart, appeared and they started thinking about it. And slowly we hatched a plan.

My Figment editor and I are already discussing a third book. Andrea goes to New York and gets her first novel published. I think that would be great. I want to read that.

Christina: In general, do you plan out your books in outline form or do you write them off the top of your head? I write off the top of my head but maybe that's why I can't finish any book. Blake, how do you do it??? How are you so prolific? I need help.

Blake: No, I'm not a planner. It's the characters for me. Finding a character who is interesting enough to hold the readers attention, (and mine), and then introduce that person into various situations or conflicts. I have been getting better at plots, but I don't care that much about plot.

Christina: I don’t care about plot either. Boring! Am I right that "Girl" was not written specifically as YA fiction? Back then YA was not the healthy publishing category it is now. It was more of a ghetto, as I remember.

Blake: Yeah, "Girl" was not YA originally. I didn't even know what YA was at the time. I thought of it as more like "Less Than Zero," or something like that. Or like F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's actually probably the biggest influence. "Girl" has struggled as a YA book, actually. It is a hard sell to paranormal fans and the kind of romance-y type fiction that plays well at the moment.

I have found it an interesting sociological experiment watching today's readers react to it. We are in such an escapist period right now. And very sheltered. I am always warning parents about it. I'll be at a reading or something and some 12-year-old girl will pick it up and I'll have to snatch it away and say: "It's for older teens." Of course, a minority of smart kids really love it, it's like an oasis of something. But a lot of kids don't even understand what the point of it is.

One woman on Goodreads said she would recommend it: "Only to people who like frozen yogurt and casual sex."

Christina: So, like, everyone, then!

2011-10-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

Got to see my favorite graphic novelist/zine person NICOLE GEORGES last night, talking about her work at the super fun Hollywood (Portland) Public Library. Oh my god, she is so awesome.

Martha Grover was her co-presenter, reading from her zine SOMNAMBULIST, her piece was the minutes of her family meetings during a period when her whole family was basically living together, as adult children or whatever. It was really funny. And then it turned out that these three cute women in the back, were her family, the people we had just heard about.

So yes, this post is mostly just an excuse to put up a drawing by Nicole, her pet portraits are amazing, but I am going with the self portrait....

WHAT DOES ANDREA MARR LOOK LIKE?

2011-10-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

So everyone is gearing up for the big release of DREAM SCHOOL, the long awaited sequel to GIRL.

One of the fun questions that comes up is what does ANDREA MARR actually look like?

No cheating, the movie doesn't count, though I thought Dominique Swain was about right, minus the bizarre pseudo-90s hair they stuck on her, that no one in the 90s actually had, except for the weirdos on MY SO CALLED LIFE, who when we look back now, look so fucking ridiculous, it wrecks the show.

Needless to say, in my mind, nobody had hair like that. They all had normal punk rock nineties hair which was just bobs and color or longer or bangs, or weirdo bangs or whatever....

This is what one person thought, and I think this is pretty good too .... black hair, that was the one thing I always had pretty clear in my mind ... other than that it is pretty open to interpretation ....

PORTLAND ! ! !

2011-09-23T02:40:00.000-07:00

Heading up to Portland in a couple weeks for AWESOME wordstock festival. Oct. 8 and 9. My favorite Book Festival. Come by, say hi!

DREAM SCHOOL

2011-09-08T19:12:00.000-07:00

Oh my gosh, here comes DREAM SCHOOL, the sequel to GIRL. In beautiful Trade Paperback form!

Publication date is December 2011. So a good present for any GIRL fans you may know!

Very Excited to be working with Jacob Lewis, Dana Goodyear at figment.com as well as the illustrious Lauren Cerand as we gear up to promote it, and spread the word, etc.

For instance, check out http://herewegirlagain.tumblr.com/

I remain so touched how much people relate to GIRL and how it is still around and still finding new readers even now.

In short: I AM PSYCHED!

Ryan Trecartin

2011-07-13T01:19:00.000-07:00

Oh my god, so I read the review of Ryan Trecartin in the New Yorker and went to his PS1 show expecting the worst, how often is anything with good reviews actually good? The great Chris Archangel show at the Whitney which was also highly touted turned out to be nothing much ...

So I get to PS1 and I go into the show and I have no idea what the hell it is. The review couldn't really tell you. It appears to be some idiot girls yakking away in high pictched squeals into their cell phones.

Anyway, it was great. Now watch big chunks of his videos DAILY. I can't live without it. the only thing that seems to confirm for me what I think I am seeing daily. No, I am not crazy. Another person sees it too!

Anyway, here's a tiny clip.

Ryan Trecartin

2011-07-13T01:09:00.000-07:00

Symphony of Berlin

2011-06-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a week in Berlin, hanging out with my mom and mostly doing tourist stuff. Saw interesting film SYMPHONY OF BERLIN, at the Neue National Galerie.

Hung out with a writer from TAG DE ZEIT and distinguished myself by not knowing anything about American Politics. Not even knowing who was running for president. She said people in Germany don't do anti-depressants, they drink. "It is opposite in your country?" she added.

Funnest stuff was just walking around. I lived here for a month in 1984. During the wall days. Thought about pitching someone an article, something like BERLIN REVISITED, or whatever, "then and now" but found I just liked thinking about it and didn't want to spend a week trying to figure out how to accurately portray myself twenty-some years ago. Impossible anyway. All I could think to say about myself was how I dressed then. Black everything, slicked back black hair, chain smoking, so Berlin was a good place for me back then....

Also in Berlin in 1984 I used to copy people's conversations down in notepads. The english conversations. One time this couple at the youth hostel were having a pretty serious love spat and I was sitting nearby scribbling along, and the guy turned to me with annoyance said "Are you getting all this down?", and I said, "I'm up to the part where she said: You never ask me how I feel."

RECOVERY ROAD REVIEW

2011-06-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

Awesome review from "Picks of the Week" ...

DAY THIRTY FOUR: SISTER SPIT: CHICAGO

2011-04-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

Pictured (sigh), the last set list (or one of the last set lists) from Sister Spit 2011.

So we headed back from Minneapolis, heading sound again, trying to escaped the snow and the bleakness, though I will forever hope to return to Minneapolis again to revisit the Seward Cafe because I think it changed my life, I think from now on I am going to become a partial foodie just because I realize that foodies are the most interesting diners, and it's just time for me to get on board this food stuff.

As Michelle Tea said about several things over the course of the trip: "You don't want to be on the wrong side of History" meaning your little jealous corrupted brain full of prejudices and preconceived notions and what not, cannot always be trusted.

I didn't like foodie-ism because I didn't feel like it fit in with my curmudgeonly view of myself, but it's time for me to adjust and change and try something that might stretch my brain.

This is why I quit smoking in 1989. Because I sensed that the smoking days were over. Smoking was going to change and become alienating and expensive and uncool. I was not going to want to be smoker in 1999. And I was right about that one.

The Foodie thing though I have been wrong about, and too cheap to indulge in and will probably remain so, but I am now officially interested in it or at least looking at the people who are .... which is a long way of saying I think I like the vibe of vegan restaurtants now .... I sure liked Seward Cafe.

So anyway. Back in the van. We land in Madison. The space is small, a cool little collective, sort of grungy and Portland-esque. Everyone was ill or something so poor BESSIE our host had to do everything herself, including setting up the chairs which I re-spaced for her because people often don't know the secret to setting up chairs is SPACING. Nothing worse than stuck in a chair with no room in front of you.

So we dicked around and got food at this super comfort food diner called Monty's that was Queer friendly, or at least had a queer waiter, and a highly eclectic menu. We came stumbling out of there late and got back to the space and had that wonderful SISTER SPIT occurence of A TOTALLY PACKED HOUSE. As a writer and goer to of writer things I have never seen anything literary consistently PACK THE SPACES like SS. Anyway.

So all went on. We killed. The standing room only crowd gave us a standing ovation!!!

Afterward I met Kelly from STACKED.COM which is a cool book site .... that interviewed me. That was fun. And some other fans. I never quite got the hang of hanging out after the show, I often hid in the back room, but whenever I did I always seemed to find several fans milling around. GIRL lives on, which is so cool, and so flattering.

The next day it was on to Chicago for our final gig. Things started slow as we all stood outside in the freezing cold waiting for the SUBTERRANEAN CLUB to Open. This was in trendy Wicker Park. Michelle was shaking with cold. They let us in finally. Things looked bad at first and there was a big blow up with some club people. But everything got done, as happens...

So then the show. We KILLED. AGAIN. It was great. I read the final scene in RECOVERY ROAD where Maddie tries to talk to Stewart and I CRIED !!!!!!!

Well I didn't actually shed tears but I kept having to step away from the mike and re-compose myself. I finally told the audience: "I'm sorry. I'm a cryer." I don't know if they were won over by that. They seemed to be with me though, in terms of the story. I did achieve that great thing of total silence from the crowd which is hard to do in a bar. But that scene is good and heartbreaking .... anyway, so that was the end of the tour and the end of the book and everything kind of wrapped up nicely.....

I am so glad I went on this tour. It was so fun and so interesting in so many ways. And I will never forget my crew!!!! What a great time. I am sad it's over but feel exhausted in a good way, in the best way. I LEFT EVERYTHING I HAD OUT THERE!!! Awesome!

DAY THIRTY-ONE: SISTER SPIT: MADISON, WI

2011-04-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

Ali Liebegott, one of our fearless leaders, was alas not able to pass through Wisconsin without paying a price for culinary crimes....

MARYS! We only have two more dates on the tour!!! Everyone is so sad!! It's been SO FRICKIN' FUN!!

"Mary", by the way, is what everyone calls each other in the van. It is one of those spontaneous slang things that happens in such group situations.

One can be addressed as "Mary". "Can you hand me those cheese balls, Mary?"

One can express things to the Gods in the form of Mary. "Mary, is it ever going to stop raining?"

And one can simply say the word to oneself as a kind of protection from all human trials and tribulations. "Mary!" And it works.

BACK TO THE TOUR: So we left Bloomington and drove up to Ann Arbor where we had PHOEBE GLOECKNER as a guest performer!! MARY!! We are all INSANE fans of hers. The gig was weirdly not packed--we are spoiled--but it didn't matter and created a loose fun, whatevs kind of atmosphere which I like.

Phoebe went on last and told us about her knew project and she was a little tired but spoke interestingly about her life as an artist. It was more like a big conversation really, all of us chirping in, asking questions, etc. And then we had a great dinner after, paid for by the awesome gay bookstore COMMON LANGUAGE who helped put on the show.

Then back to one of the less nice hotels, but comfy for us as we all have gotten used to each other and don't mind stepping over each other's underwear on the way to the bathroom ... etc....

Then to Milwaukee where I found the greatest bookstore ever. RENAISSANCE BOOKS, in Milwaukee, google it, go there, make a special trip.

It is like Powell's used to be before it was online, and there was still crazy first editions of your favorite books, hidden behind a stack of UFO books. Plus it was HAUNTED. Plus NOBODY SEEMED TO WORK THERE. And then when you did find an employee they couldn't really talk to you because they were busy listening to Crystal Castles on their headphones. When I first walked in I thought I had walked into some crazy HORDER nightmare but everything turned out to be meticulously in place and findable. The whole experience was just extraordinary. I wished I had more eyepower left to read and poke around there, I lasted about three hours but your brain gets fried on tour and your eyes go ....

The Milwaukee gig was fun, it was in a nice newer bookstore called Boswell's. I read a piece from my memoir about meeting and hanging with Courtney Love in Portland when I was a wee little Portland scenester. I thought the local queer kids might notice who I was reading about but they didn't seem to, having been born after the whole Kurt and Courtney era. And probably not caring anyway, despite the HOLE-worship still practiced by Tavi and her ilk. (Self Constructed Freak)

Then it was back into the van and onto Minneapolis which holds an important place in my history and yet which I have never been to! Also F. Scott is from here and Garrison Keillor. Mostly I think of it through F. Scott's eyes though, but of course the world of rich kids riding around in motorboats on the lake is not anywhere I am going to be. Isn't that always the case? You go to some famous spot that is so alive in your mind only to realize, Truman Capote's New York is not on the subway....it's no where you can get to .... that's why people love it so much .... inaccessible ....

We did get to see a little bit of rich kid cool at Seward's Cafe though which is the trendy foodie hipster restaurant that Sister Spit frequents on all trips to the Twin Cities. I don't go to such places usually, but I have to get over that because this place was full of such interesting people, the Volvo/Oberlin/Crafter crowd as far as I could tell. Beautiful young women in their Minnesota Woolen Chic. MARY! I was dying with envy and falling in love with everyone. Why do I have such little interaction with this world? So nice. So cultured. So FOODIE FRIENDLY. Why can't I be a normal person!!?? I want to be like these people. Saturday brunch with friends! Everyone equal and happy and well adjusted and having good jobs and having just graduated from excellent liberal arts colleges. Oh I am such a mess compared to these people. But perhaps I am comparing "my insides to their outsides" which is never recommended....

Oh yeah, the gig. We sold out Bryant Park Theater, or whatever it was, in the Uptown section of Minneapolis. It had a bowling alley/bar/restaurant/theater. I'm totally serious.

And it was fucking cool. We packed it. Kicked it. KILLED IT. We were great. The people loved us. Then we hung out all night until the wee hours. Kirk Read and I bowled. More beautiful kids .... hanging out ... on dates ... with friends ... smoking cigarettes outside the club in their $400 MARMOT down coats. Maybe F. Scott's dreams are still alive here. Despite the strange feeling at times that no matter how hard we row, "We are boats being born backward, ceaselessly into the past."

Karaoke

2011-04-12T21:28:00.002-07:00

Michelle sings Fleetwood Mac ...

Sister Spit @ UMASS

2011-04-12T21:28:00.001-07:00

Big crowd at UMASS.

HOTEL TIME

2011-04-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

An hour of work time in a hotel seems to be worth about two hours of work time anywhere else....

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: SISTER SPIT: LOUISVILLE KENTUCKY -- BLOOMINGTON INDIANA

2011-04-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

We just got to Bloomington in time to catch the Lil Wayne show. But we all fell asleep ....

Here's a shot (pictured) of us doing a little Sister Spit Yoga, ("from each according to his ability, to each according to their needs")

We finished at College of William and Mary and all piled into the van and drove 11 hours to Louisville, Kentucky which was very fun even though we got caught in the middle of a monsoon.

A local spoken word group opened the show at Louisville. they were called S.H.E. and it was interesting to see them, because it made me realize how just doing the tour had kind of forced us to hone our skills. Not that the S.H.E. kids weren't good, they just weren't quite as individualized as we have become. But a great experience for them I'm sure and for us to see what they're thinking about and writing about ....

Afterward, we went to a girl named Lex's house and karaokeed and were invited to hot tub with some people in their underwear, which none of us managed to do. .... they were super nice though and their house was filled with the signifiers of indie queer-ness: cool Bratmobile poster. Joy Division poster. Fever Ray on the stereo. Tons of interesting books to look at. Generally I'm finding college kids to be a bit more clueless than I expected but these Louisville people seemed kind of awesome.

Also Louisville itself kicked ass, being older than I expected and just having a real sense of character and history. Many of the tour people expressed this. Who would have thought?

We ended up that night in a gross rooming situation and Beth Pickens the road manager, got us out of there and into a super nice hotel downtown for super cheap. What a deal. The place was amazing and right downtown and had WEIRDLY NICE ECCENTRIC people working there which is the mark of greatness as far as I'm concerned when it comes to hotels.

I started saying a couple years ago that as you get older and you don't want to go to clubs anymore, you will go to Hotels to meet people and hang out. I LOVE HOTELS. I should have stayed in my band. I would have got all the hotels I wanted....

Anyway, so now we are in a gross Super 8 on the freeway by Bloomington, INDIANA which was FRAT PARTYING out all around our show. Nice though to be in the midwest. I have some weird connection to it too. I know I keep saying that. But it's true, my dad is from iowa and I dress just like him, and so when I'm in the midwest, I look around and see millions of versions of myself. American Prep. I think I would like to live in the midwest.

If you run a writing program in the mid-west and need me to teach there for a year, get in touch.

The College of William and MARY!!

2011-04-10T13:11:00.001-07:00

This is not an actual Sister Spit gig but this is what they look like.

Tonight I am back in the fold and we're rocking William and Mary College in beautiful colonial Williamsburg ....!

DAY TWENTY THREE: UMASS - HOUSTON

2011-04-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

At Colby Sawyer College, after the show, we hung out with some co-eds from there who told us about school and what they were studying. There were several Women's Studies majors and they were telling us about feminism and rape culture and stuff like that, a lot of which sounded very similar to the stuff we talked about when I was college.

So the next night I decided to bust out my Details article "HOW TO DATE A FEMINIST" at the UMASS show. (This instead of reading the part in RECOVERY ROAD about UMASS-- Maddie goes there when she can't get into SMITH, even though she's from Oregon and it doesn't make sense to go that far to go to a big state school, but you have to read RECO ROAD to understand ....)

Anyway, I have never read HOW TO DATE A FEMINIST in public. It was considered pretty controversial when it came out, making gentle fun both of feminism, and the kind of dumb men's/women's glossy magazine articles about how to date different stereotypes. Anyway, it went over big, and got a lot of laughs and though it was clearly dated in some of it's references, ("doc martins") pretty much all the points were still perfectly valid. "Almost all smart women are feminists, but not all feminists are smart".

The rest of the show was great, including the finale in which a witch put a spell on all of us ... and the best part there were like 500 people there. We filled a whole BALLRROOM!!

And I came to like UMASS too, despite what I said about it in my book. It is a HUGE state school, but it is very Massachussettes, meaning it is just a little smarter than your average state school, and not pretentious and full of nice little nooks and crannies to hang out in and work in and nod off, and drink coffee. They had a PEOPLES MARKET thing in their student union that was some sort of student run co-op, full of that distinctive Western Mass kind of hippy kid/queer kid vibe that seems familiar to me.

At one point we also went to Emily Dickenson's house where Ali Liebegott dazzled the tour guide. When asked if anyone was a fan of Emily Dickenson, Ali pulled up her shirt sleeve and showed the older woman her full arm tattoo of Ms. Dickenson's portrait. The woman--thus energized--was great, full of gossip and conjecture. The best kind of tour guide. And we got to see Emily's white dress, goddess like and ethereal. Dresses are so awesome.

Then on Friday i got on a plane and flew to Houston for a TEEN BOOK CONFERENCE that was super interesting and held in a huge contemporary public high school which was brand new and full of nice kids. A night out of TEX MEX that night completed the fun. There were a bunch of cool people on hand but Stephanie Perkins and Lindsey Leavitt and I closed the bar, or at least the shuffleboard game thing, new friends, yay.

Then onward, back to meet the SISTER SPIT crew back in William and Mary tonight!

DAY EIGHTEEN: SISTER SPIT TOUR: BARD COLLEGE (Yeah Yeah Yeah!)

2011-04-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, so we show up at Bard and it's like ... our gig is on the back porch of a barn ... outside ... in the freezing rain ... at night! ... next to woods which Kirk Read who is our resident gay redneck hunter/outdoorsman, wanders out into ....

But no it turns out it's a garage... a garage with a really crappy skateboard ramp on a muddy road just outside the maintenance compound where they ought to maybe pave the street they are on. We're all like, okay, this is cool, as we step through the mud in our useless California shoe wear .... (I'm wearing white vans... good call!)

So we set up our crap and then someone lets us in to the main garage area which actually turns out to have a stage and such, so not as weird as it first appeared. All of this running like an hour behind so that weird cool Bard people started appearing and disappearing and wandering around. One awesome girl with a WENDY O haircut, brilliant, and the weirdest coolest face ever, should have tried to chat with her but why ... they are just kids the college kids ... you talk to them and there just isn't anything there yet.....

I mention this girls' haircuts because I think that YEAh Yeah Yeah's were formed at Bard, or partially at least.

And also because HAIRCUTS MATTER. And a cool haircut by a single audience member makes a "medium" gig into a "good" gig. And this girl had a cute dress too. Wear cool clothes people so that I can have something to live for!

Anyway so then my friends Sally and La showed up and we had a reuninion and Sally got to meet everyone from the TOUR and La kept driving off somewhere because his wife teaches at Bard and needed a piece of pizza for some reason. La was a struggling photographer when Sally found him, now he is a big shot at the New York Times and married to a brilliant beautiful magazine editor ... The Sally Effect. In her effortless way she attracts the best and the brightest ....

So we did the Bard gig and hung out and the Bard kids were awesome and cute and strange and quiet. I spent a lot of time standing on the nearby Lacrosse field trying to channel my beloved dead grandfather in the darkness. He coached high school sports for forty years in New England. I am I suspect more New English than I really know. There's a strange sense of home for me there. I love kids too. Though I am constantly complaining about them (see above).

So we drove the next day to Colby Sawyer college in New Hampshire and had another subdued gig which was nevertheless fun and we went ape-shit at the college cafeteria in any event. I had ALL the dinner options. Meatloaf. Fettucine. Hamburger. And just kept eating until I couldn't move because I LOVE INSTITUTIONAL FOOD OF ANY KIND. (A food fascist I must be. I want my cottage cheese contained and supervised and not "free range".)

During my performance, I read a bit of RECOVERY ROAD which went well though I started to get choked up reading about the tragic love of Maddie and Stewart. I almost started crying!!! On Stage!!!! You get a little raw emotionally on the road.

And Michelle read a great piece about rad-ass teenagers from her Rose Of No Man's Landwhich I love hearing from. I love all the books people have been reading from. Everyone on the tour is a great writer, which makes it fun no matter what the weird circumstances or varying crowds....

DAY SIXTEEN: Sister Spit Tour VANCOUVER BC

2011-04-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so we got out of Seattle, which was so great and drove up to Vancouver, where I have never been as an adult, and don't know much about except Doug Coupland is from there and D.O.A. was from there, D.O.A. containing Chuck Bisquits who famously tried to steal my friends drums stool when they played together when we were all in high school.

So we get up there and we're staying in this hotel complex/outpost out in an outlying pretty area....it is a trendy ACE-like hotel, a restaurant, a hair salon and a big theater underneath. A very interesting place, very Euro in it's concept. The people that worked at the hotel were a little useless, but we have been spoiled and when you're doing the hotel thing you kind of need things sometimes from the people and it sucks when they are busy buying shoes on Zappos.

Anyway we had a couple hours and I got restless and walked into the city, a long walk through Vancouver's skid row and then along the docks where some shady dudes pulled up beside me and tried to interest me in a home entertainment system and also some artsy kids on bikes were doing a photo shoot in Vancouver's very interesting alley system. They put all their electric wires down them. It all looks sort of cool and skeletal ....

So then when I got to the city I ended up under the city in this strange parking lot tunnel thing. And then I couldn't get out. And it was dark and scary and deserted down there and people were drag racing. The same sci-fi Masarati kept driving by. I could not make heads or tails of this. And got deeper into it. And the one person I could find could not help me and finally another tourist, a young woman, came upon me and she and I were both bewildered and lost and we finally found a trap door in a parking structure and then had to hike five floors up and opened a door and found ourselves in the middle of downtown Vancouver's central square. Very weird. But it was cool. I really loved the city. Interesting people walking around and I eventually found this big strip where everyone shopped and hung out and it was awesome. Reminded me of Hong Kong, which is apparently where about half of Vancouver is from now, since that was where all the Chinese business people from Hong Kong fled to when they turned it over to Communist China.

But I digress. The city was really fun and cosmopolitan. Miles better than Seattle. Interesting to see the Pacific Northwest done up right. Seattle and Portland seem so grim and depressing lately. Maybe because I am contemplating moving back for a period. whenever I think about returning to this area I sort of freak out.. And yet I continue to do my best writing there. My best writing spot in the world remains my parent's kitchen table in Hillsboro OR and the couch next to the TV in the living room....which is where I wrote RECOVERY ROAD. my newest and seemingly best book since GIRL.

We turned around from Vancouver and drove all day and did another show at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. Some friends showed up including Kevin Sampsell and Barb and Kari Luna and some others and we all hung out, though you tend to be so fried it's hard to always have an intelligent conversation with people, even though you are SO GLAD to see them.....

Then back in the van for the eleven hour drive to SF and then onto a plane and now I am sitting in a hotel near JFK, waiting for our ride up to Bard for our first East Coast gig.

KING KONG THEORY

2011-04-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

Riding in the SISTER SPIT van from Vancouver to San Francisco, and getting bored, you start rummaging around for stuff to read ... picked up KING KONG THEORY that one of my comrades was reading and had my mind quietly blown. It's by Virginie Despentes, a french feminist writer who is apparently famous for a book and movie she wrote called RAPE ME, which I had not really heard of.

Wow, this was a fun read, maybe the first feminist text I've ever read smiling through every page ... it never slowed down ... interesting ... funny ... compassionate thoughts on the the men's side of things... reflections on her punk rock life ... her rape ... the weirdness of being famous as a feminist author/film maker and the shit storm the inevitably rains down upon you ....

And it also reminded me eerily of my own book DESTROY ALL CARS which also has a rythym of strident manifesto, then quiet personal reflection. Kind of like Kurt Cobain's guitar style, stepping on and off the SUPER FUZZ pedal. Just when you don't want any any more bone crunching declarations you are suddenly hanging out with the 17 year old author, going to punk shows, drinking beer....being young and kind of out of place in the pretty girl world ...

Loved it. Total recommend. This is one of the fun parts of Sister Spit being kind of immersed in stuff I used to follow more closely than I do now. And getting a chance to check it out again ....

DAY THIRTEEN: SEATTLE - HUGO HOUSE -

2011-03-31T06:43:00.000-07:00

So we drove to Olympia and had what seemed like a week there. It rained. It felt like Eugene. Wet. Cold. Grimey kids in the street with dogs on ropes. We stayed in a cheerful hotel called The Governor where the people all seemed to hesitate for a moment before addressing us in their cheerful hotel tones.

(PICTURED: Amos Mac, publisher of Original Plumbing Magazine.)

The show was at the Voyeur. Very nice staff. They fed us. They had cool shit on the stereo (Flipper "Sex Bomb Baby") and unrelated 80s videos playing on various broken TVs.

Audience was rain-soaked. Standing in the back of the club it felt like a not very responsive crowd but when I got to the front and stood at the mic I found myself surrounded on all sides by a carpet of floor-sitting queer kids, I realized how full it was... and though they didn't say much, they were weirdly attentive and there was a lot of love in that room. Magical even though quiet and subdued. I read from GIRL, the relatively subdued Chapter 17 about Cybil playing soccer. Not trying for anything. And it kind of worked. Reminds me of my music days. Some days the audience doesn't want a show... they just want the music ....

Afterward sitting around in the dining area, watching college-aged Olympians drinking Rainer Beer and shooting the shit and being cute and young ... not a care in the world.

We make fun of the gold mining pioneer look that is popular out west right now. Much of what we see is somehow related to McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Then into the van and up to Seattle. Checked into the Roosevelt Hotel which is nice... then up to Hugo House for the gig. Oh the cute Seattle-ites. The show shaped up nicely. Hugo house was cool. Nice literary folk running things. Girl at the front desk, NOT wearing low rise jeans but some other kind that sat way high up her waist, and looked AWESOME. Not that I spend my days looking at girl's jeans or anything. But I hate low rise, always have .... and am eager for next thing.

Then the show started and we suddenly realized we had THE PERFECT AUDIENCE. Don't know why. They loved EVERYTHING WE DID. We were standing around in the back, looking at each other with bewilderment, what had we done to deserve this? Everyone KILLED. We could do no wrong. People were laughing, making out, crazed screaming at the stage. By the time we were done people were exhausted, wrung out, high on life. The best show yet, it was called. And it was!

As a people watcher and youth culture watcher it was also one of the best shows too. Loved the people. The cute dykes. The old-timey young dudes with their bushy beards. Imagining what it would be like to be young and to have moved to Seattle, from Bumfuck, USA. Wearing weird shit. Drinking coffee. Talking about poetry. The BIG CITY! Great fun.

DAY ELEVEN: PDX - STUMPTOWN - GOLD RUSH TOWN

2011-03-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

So we survived SANTA CRUZ but just barely. Naturally, some raver, satan worshipping, drunk twenty-somethings ended up in our hotel, THE TORCHLITE, (avoid) so there was some problems there. Nothing KIRK READ couldn't handle though.

So then we packed up our crap and got the hell out of there and went to beautiful ARCATA California, home of Humboldt State College, where we performed for a movie theater full of locals. This is the legendary POT BELT part of the country. I don't know where the buckle is or where exactly the belt part goes, but Humboldt county is famous for it's pot and the hotel smelled of pot and the town smelled of pot and the people we all met all appeared to be high. It was weird small town-esque. But nice.

I started having some sort of physical reaction as we continued north toward Portland. The cold the damp the rain the sadness of the sky, I just couldn't take it and started having seasonal disorder depression almost as soon as we drove over the border. And of course whenever I see woolen wearing older men get out of their mudsplattered pickups I think it is my dad for a second who has passed away but lives on in the black earth of the oregon woods....

But then we did our Holocene show and it was GREAT. Packed room, as per usual. Kirk started us off dressed as an insane leopard. Everyone was killing it, as the crowd was right with us ...

And then my favorite part of the night: NICOLE GEORGES! (pictured) I love her stuff so much. She just IS something, she represents something, I can't say exactly what, our times, our world, Portland, whatever, and then besides doing that, her writing is so sharp and fun and dead on, her cartoons at the show were of her doing substitute teaching and her interactions with stoner boys and bimbo high school girls were so fucking funny and right. I was in heaven. She could have gone on and on.

Now on up to Legendary OLYMPIA, today .... one of the fun things about SISTER SPIT is it kind of vibes you up. Like since it's mostly women, and people with extra amazing radar (Michelle Tea) it makes you extra sensitive to weird IN THE AIR shit, that you might not be picking up on ... is any of this making sense .... just to say that hitting olympia on this tour will not be like stopping there for a cup of coffee....and it is sort of world historic anyway, as the two great focal points of a certian kind of nineties youth cultural flowering ... or whatever you want to call it ... DC being the other place ....hmmmmmm .... we'll see.....

DAY NINE: BOOKSHOP SANTA CRUZ

2011-03-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

So we drove home from "The Sac", and then did a big show at ELBO ROOM, which was killer.

Then back on the road and down to LA to Pasadena City College. It is becoming clear there is no predicting which gigs are going to be amazing and which are going to be merely good and fun.

At PCC we were late. We called ahead to tell them and they were very worried about us, and we got the idea right then that this was going to be a special show.

As we drove around looking for the proper parking lot, we spotted some queer students jumping up and down on the corner waving at us. Then they ran down the sidewalk wildly pointing us into the proper parking lot, sacrificing themselves for the good of the others, since now they would have to run all the way back to the student center. It was a profound act of personal bravery and selflessness.

Inside the PCC crowd was huge to bursting and very into it and great energy. Simon our brilliant and oh-so-British liaison guided us through various obstacles with his sharp wit and impeccable organizational skills.

They were so EXCITED to have us there. I was deeply moved by it all.

We then hit USC the next night, it was a terrible rain storm which I think dampened the crowd a bit, also it was a huge room so despite having a respectable turnout it felt a little defuse.

I did have a fun moment asking a USC student what the essential nature of USC was and without blinking she offered something like: "It's a school of privileged entitled white kids spending four years partying on their parent's credit cards ..." I love it when people say stuff like that. I hated everything when I was in college. Including my college.

The following afternoon we went back to PCC to hang with the queer alliance which I skipped, which was a total mistake as the PCC kids were just so into shit and I should have known not to miss this but I did but they gave me one of their awesome t-shirts anyway ....

Then we drove to LONG BEACH and checked into the the Queen Mary and had a great gig at a coffee shop in Long Beach where Gerbz is from and so she had a big crowd and sold a million of her cool new chapbooks that Kevin Sampsell sent down from Portland. (I love it when my old friends are the publishers of my new friends. We're all one big family it turns out, unlike what I thought in college when I thought the world was evil, and my only chance for survival was to destroy everything)

The Long Beach gig was in a great homey coffee-shop that was awesome and PACKED and everyone sold a lot of crap at the merch table. How did my band survive without a merch table back in the eighties? It's where you make all you money apparently.

Kirk Read read his response to Myriam Gurba's wildly popular new piece: "I Would Be a Better Lesbian If:" with his own: "I Would Be a Better Queer if:" Kirk often writes amazing poems on the spot, and performs them like ten minutes later. It is fun to see him furiously pounding something out at the last second....

Some GIRL fans cornered me and got me to sign a VERY OLD copy of GIRL. "I've read it many, many times," the fan said. The cover was literally about to fall off. That was really nice.

Then a night of hi jinks running around the Queen Mary which was great retro fun and seriously impressive as a physical object. We build miraculously tiny things now, (microchips or whatever), in those days they built miraculously HUGE things.

Then a long drive through the endless END TIMES style rain storms hitting the west coast. And tonight a big show at BOOKSTORE SANTA CRUZ. Gonna be good I think ....

DAY FIVE: SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER

2011-03-21T17:06:00.001-07:00

On DAY 4, we hit the Echo in LA. This is a big cool rock club on the East Side that always has good bands.

Weird to arrive in a city that I supposedly live in but which looked very alien and new to me. LA has such a strange otherworldly vibe to it. I still don't understand it. I am so not a Californian ....

BUT THE SHOW. IT WAS GREAT. The other Spit veterans said it was the best LA show Sister Spit has ever done, and it did indeed rock. There were some great guest performers, Raquel Gutierrez and Amber Benson, plus we were all especially good for some reason. Michelle Tea read from Rent Girl which I am now reading in it's entirety--you know a reading is good when you go running for the book ...

The next day we hid out in our hotel, as it was freaking out outside weather-wise... then we cruised up to Sacramento in an unbelievable monsoon, where a theater full of locals braved the weather and came out to see us. So impressive how SISTER SPIT draws no matter what. The place was nearly full!

I read from DESTROY ALL CARS and cracked myself up, being a little giddy from the long van ride, but the crowd seemed to enjoy my lack of professionalism.

Then back in the van and cruised home in the wee hours of the night. Amos Mac had the genius idea to get a hot chocolate out of a rest area vending machine. Vending Machine Hot Chocolate is the best!!!! I will remember to get one myself in the future.

Tonight, (in a couple hours) is the Elbo Room in the mission. This is where Lauren Cerand and I saw our first SISTER SPIT show last year, and it KILLED. Hopefully we will be worthy of that show! Anyway, it is ground zero for Sister Spit. Right in their backyard. Should be a great crowd ....

Thanks to Mari Naomi for the picture! And her awesome livejournal diary is here

LA TIMES REVIEW FOR RECOVERY ROAD

2011-03-19T15:13:00.000-07:00

The LA Times, (my hometown paper now, I guess, though who reads papers?), gave RECOVERY ROAD a great review today, see the whole review here.

Here's the beginning:

We live in a society filled with temptation, where drugs and alcohol are illegal for minors but still easy to obtain. They're so readily available, in fact, that 11 million American youths need treatment for substance abuse, according to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Yet few teen addicts get the help they need. And those who do are likely to relapse before they truly recover.

It's these hard truths that are tackled in two new books for young adults, each of which handles the subject slightly differently. Blake Nelson's "Recovery Road" is a fictional account of 16-year-old "Mad Dog Maddie," whose rap sheet includes drinking alcohol, downing OxyContin, smoking hash, snorting coke, stealing a car, getting arrested and being thrown out of her home and sent to a halfway house.

DAY THREE: SISTER SPIT TOUR OAKLAND, CA

2011-03-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

This is the awesome, super adorable ROCK PAPER SCISSORS collective we did our show in tonight.

When I enter places like this I feel like I am entering a humble monastary of perfect girl essence. They had sewing machines, and fabricy stuff and textures and on the wall a great photo piece of local kids in various degrees of hanging out....and everyone present is (and becomes upon entering) super gentle and kind and polite and I always feel like I am some sort of peasant in the face of such cultural excellence and generosity, and I seem always in such places to have a little moment of grace of: "wow, look where I am."

There was a whole upstairs with a shockingly huge library of zines including my favorite COMETBUS where Aaron discusses the ways that Portland resembles a bad mood.... What was I thinking not doing some serious Cometbus reading before I even came down to the bay area? Someday there will be high schools in the East Bay named COMETBUS. Not in our lifetime maybe ... but someday ....

But I digress.

RSP was great and it was of course, packed, cute sister spit girls piled up on the staircase, sitting on the floor, packed on the couch. Really a great audience. Myriam "Gerbz" Gurba was especially good tonight. I had a little panic about what I was going to read, I am going to have to figure this out ahead of time in the future.

Babbled about skinheads when I went on. Like what is the contemporary equivalent. Is there any subculture that is scary and bullyish now? Except like oil companies...?

Riding back in the van someone mentioned the west coast might be evacuated while we are back east, my brain commences to spiral into disaster ....

BACK in SF, I had to help load some PA equipment into a sex club which had nicely lent it to us. That was fun for me, having never walked through the showers of a gay sex club carrying a PA speaker before. Ah, the bucket list slowly fills!

Anyway, good night, good gig, everyone in good spirits. Off to LA first thing tomorrow!

DAY TWO: SISTER SPIT TOUR: SAN JOSE, CA

2011-03-17T23:49:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a generous grant from someone Sister Spit Tour hit San Jose for the first time in it's history. We were told this might be a smaller than usual turnout, but it wasn't that bad. Also the art space we were in had a show up by Jamie Hernandez of LOVE AND ROCKETS fame that was fun to look at.

It wasn't packed but the performances were awesome and my sister and nephew Misha got to come and meet everyone.

Afterward we cruised the deserted streets of San Jose, which is apparently unpopulated for the most part. An interesting concept for a city: no people. We found a VOODOO DONUTS rip off called PSYCHO DONUTS, or maybe it's vice versa, where I had a joke donut of some sort which I did not particularly enjoy.

Oh well, another day, another ten dollar per diem ....

DAY ONE: SISTER SPIT TOUR: MILLS COLLEGE, OAKLAND, CA

2011-03-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Sister Spit tour is underway. First stop last night was Mills College, in Oakland, pictured here some time ago, because I didn't bring my stupid camera because I brought a FLIP camera because everyone keeps telling me that everyone loves video but I don't, because I don't have time to look at it, and I especially don't have time to film it.

Anyway, so we rolled into Mills and asked some super-cute hipster girls (who were hanging around the parking lot like fashion JDs) where the student center was. We found it. It was classic beautiful college-style dark wooded room, the likes of which you don't even notice when you're a student but later in life you think: wasn't I supposed to end up in beautiful dark wooded rooms? What happened to me?

Then we ate. In the cafeteria I couldn't figure out how to order because I don't know anything about food, and colleges have gotten pretty sophisticated about that stuff I've noticed. Really. I couldn't figure out how to order SPAGHETTI with red sauce.

[Note to college kids: It's kind of up to you to save the world from Global Self-Destruction, so maybe a little less time foodying and a little more time reinventing human society? Thank you.]

So then the show commenced and it was the first time the 8 performers all got to see exactly what the others did. It was great. People were GOOD. And FUNNY. I was laughing my ass off the whole time!!

The room was packed. And it was a big room. This is apparently normal for Sister Spit ....

Afterward, we loaded out and drove off into the night, chatting happily and watching San Francisco glitter beneath us as we crossed back into "the city" as I seem to recall bay area people call downtown.

Then I got to wake up this morning surrounded by Michelle Tea's amazing book collection and found the ADDERALL DIARIES which I have been meaning to read for ages and so spent the morning with that.

To hell with beautiful dark wooded rooms. I have a dream life now!

SISTER SPIT STARTS WEDNESDAY:

2011-03-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

SISTER SPIT TOUR STARTS TOMORROW!!!

Some Press here.

Full schedule here.

Coming up immediately:

Wednesday, March 16
7pm, Free
Mills College, Lisser Theater
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland CA
With special guest Tara Jepsen + Kirya Traber!

Thursday, March 17
7pm, $5-$10
Movimiento de Arte 6 Cultura Latino Americana
510 South 1st St.
San Jose, CA

Friday, March 18
8pm, $10
Rock Paper Scissors Collective
2278 Telegraph
Oakland, CA

Saturday, March 19
Doors 6pm, $5
The Echo
1822 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
With special guests HBO producer/writer Jill Soloway (TINY LADIES IN SHINY PANTS) + performance artist/filmmaker Zackary Drucker + writer/performance artist Raquel Gutierrez (Butchlalis de Panochtitlan) + Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Amber Benson (DEATH'S DAUGHTER, CAT'S CLAW)!
Post-show party at Stories down the street!

HORN BOOK REVIEW

2011-03-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

The illustrious Horn Review gave RECOVERY ROAD a STARRED REVIEW in it's new issue. For you non-kids book people that's really good.

And fun too, as when I was in fourth grade, some teachers got together and got me hooked up with HORN REVIEW as a kid reviewer because I liked to read. So they sent me a book called ... I think ... JULIA OF THE WOLVES which I tried to read and instantly got distracted from because there was a dirt-clod fight raging across the street that I had to be part of, or something else ...

But here is the Horn Review popping up again in my life ....

[STAR] Recovery Road
by Blake Nelson
High School Scholastic 310 pp.
3/11 978-0-545-10729-7 $17.99
Narrator Maddie, full of anger and loathing, is sixteen and in rehab when she meets Stewart, a cute boy with whom she feels an immediate connection. Maddie and Stewart try to connect after rehab, but circumstances keep them apart. Nevertheless, they maintain a close friendship and provide each other support in the difficult process of recovering from addiction ...jonathan hunt

There is more but as a kindly reader has pointed out, it gives the rest of the book away! So check it out!

The Millions

2011-02-24T00:48:00.000-08:00

A nice piece at literary website THE MILLIONS by Jessanne Collins, a GIRL fan and journalist who is worried that DREAMSCHOOL might suck but then is happy when it doesn't!!

READING AT BOOK SOUP

2011-02-19T00:30:00.000-08:00

Reading at my favorite LA bookstore, BOOK SOUP Friday the fourth of March. Yay!

Head Injury = Children's Lit

2011-02-11T13:07:00.000-08:00

I know I'm supposed to be offended by Martin Amis's assertion that he would need to have a head injury to write children's books, but somehow I'm not.

MARTIN AMES ON CHILDRENS LITERATURE

Plus I'm always glad when someone actually says something they really think and not just panders and makes nice.

MATERIAL CONCERN

2011-02-09T13:43:00.000-08:00

Check out this awesome interview which I did with Lizz Wasserman at Material Concern.

Topics discussed: Does "I wrote GIRL" work as a pick up line? What is the most common comments I get about it? Are teenagers cooler now than in the nineties? Are they smarter? Do they have more sex?

2011-02-01T17:49:00.000-08:00

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Recovery Road

by Blake Nelson

Giveaway ends February 14, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Prime of Miss Jeane Brodie

2011-01-29T22:34:00.000-08:00

Oh my god, I just found my new favorite older (ish) writer, that I should have read before, but somehow missed.

Muriel Spark!!!

Why do I not pay more attention to UK writers? JUST LIKE WITH MUSIC, whatever we're doing, they do better.

After one page of Miss Jean Brodie, I felt like I had found my new best friend. Oh I can't wait to slowly read this book.

In other news I have an excerpt from DESTROY ALL CAR at the awesome website io9.com, which is a lot of smart, funny science stuff, (like check this crazy Indian Terminator out here).

DESTROY ALL CARS: Sneaking up behind you in bookstores in February !

2011-01-27T10:39:00.000-08:00

Check it out at Amazon

2011-01-17T22:21:00.001-08:00

RECO ROAD

2011-01-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

Great first review from PW !!!

From PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (Starred)

Recovery Road
Blake Nelson, Scholastic Press, $17.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-545-10729-7
Nelson offers another sharply focused portrait of a teen in crisis in this story of ex-party girl Maddie, who struggles to renew herself after being released from a rehab center. At Spring Meadow, Maddie's best moments come during her fleeting romance with another young patient, Stewart. After returning home, 16-year-old Maddie counts the days until Stewart's release, hoping they can take up where they left off. Meanwhile, she battles loneliness and isolation at her high school where her earlier drunken escapades earned her the nickname "Mad Dog Maddie," and her old friends pressure her to start using again. "It's so weird being straight," Maddie thinks. "You have no defenses. Shit happens and you have to feel it." Predictably, reuniting with Stewart isn't the answer to Maddie's problems, and tension rises as both teens' resolve to stay sober shows signs of weakening. Nelson (Destroy All Cars) gives a hard, honest appraisal of addiction, its often-fatal consequences, and the high probability of relapse. This is an important story that pulls no punches. Ages 13–18. (Mar.)

Check it at Amazon

Pinchbeck!

2011-01-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

Very excited to have scored an advance copy of Daniel Pinchbeck's latest. Was re-reading his first book BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD which is one of my favorite books of the last decade. BREAKING is about Daniel's adventures going to the Amazon and other places and going through various rituals involving hallucinatory herbs, shamanic initiations, etc. But it is more a survey of the whole world of alternative reality and is on a level with Aldous Huxley's works and Terrence McKenna, and people like that. Just really interesting and insightful and like an oasis of intelligent thought on things a little outside our blinder limited normal lives ....

My book THEY CAME FROM BELOW, was based on a lot of these ideas. (And is finally coming out in paperback it looks like, this summer!)

EAST BAY RAY

2010-12-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

I keep finding cool pictures of people from the early west coast punk rock scene on face book and am now in Portland and running into some of those same people.

But my favorite pic of late is this one of East Bay Ray, the guitar player of the Dead Kennedies. Here looking very stylish and not so Dead Kennedies really. Awesome shoes.

FIGMENT !!

2010-12-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Figment has launched! Very excited about this multiple purpose reading and writing post for teens. I especially love the stories and writings of actual teens. And check out the book muncher (pictured), which will have a ton of YA book reviews

And keep in mind that you can continue to read Dream School. I think we're up to Chapter Nine. Dream School is of course the sequel to my first book Girl.

The best thing about Figment is that it's creators are very open about what it will be. They want it to form itself. it's really an all encompassing forum. So check it out and see what you like and--especially if you're a writer, or just want to have a voice--contribute!

Outtakes and B-Sides

2010-12-04T15:17:00.001-08:00

I was looking through some old versions of Destroy All Cars in preparation for the Sister Spit tour, and I found some funny bits that did not make it to the final version.

THE FIASCO OF AUTOMOTIVE TRANSPORT

At my high school, when school lets out, many students have to cross Hillsdale Blvd. to go home. THERE ARE SO MANY CARS ON THIS ROAD, THE STUDENTS CANNOT GET ACROSS. They have to walk all the way to the light on 72nd street. There, they push the WALK button, and stand and wait. First all the left turn cars go. Then all the right turn cars go. Then all the straight ahead cars go. The students observe this endless flow of cars as they stand pathetically on the side of the road with their rain-soaked backpacks and their dripping rain-ponchos. They see the people in the cars, talking on their cell phones, drinking their Big Gulps, but do those people see them? Of course not. Why should they? People without vehicles are second class citizens. People standing on the side of the road are of no consequence. People who walk are laughable. ALL SERIOUS PEOPLE ARE OPERATING VEHICLES. Thus by the process of humiliation, we teach our young people that they must join into the fiasco that is automotive transport or be cast aside onto the pedestrian crosswalks of life.

PROM ANONYMOUS

2010-12-02T10:49:00.001-08:00

A friend writes:

Totally burst into tears on the bus this morning after reading this part of Prom Anon, which undoubtedly alienated the Mexicans around me:

"I think I love Zach, she said quietly.
"You do?" said Jace. "But you just met him."
"I know. That's what's so scary about it."
"How do you know?" asked Jace.
"I just...I just want to run away from him forever and I want him to always be trying to catch me."

THE PERFECT DOUCHEBAG

2010-11-30T04:02:00.000-08:00

I just saw TINY FURNITURE and I know that all the cool people are all over it and Lena Dunham is already a superstar Judd Apatow prodigy, and all that, so I am not going to pile on and say how great it was, even though it was totally great.

I just want to say that this guy on the right (picture), both the actor and the character is perhaps the greatest douchebag in all of the recent cinema. This character was so perfectly slimy and hilarious and brilliant and dead on, he was worth twice the price of admission.

In my head, I am still hearing him whine and smarm his way into poor Aura's life. I am having dreams about him wanting to hang out. He's the WORST. Oh my god, and so fitting that he's reading Woody Allen. Remember Paul Simon's portrayal of the music producer in Annie Hall? That's the level this is on.

TOLSTOY'S WAR AND PEACE

2010-11-27T15:19:00.000-08:00

So what do you do when it's late November and an actual cold snap hits LA and everyone is shivering and hiding in their houses? You bust out Sergie Bondarchuk's 6-hour Soviet era film adaptation of WAR AND PEACE. Winner of the Academy Award for foreign film in 1968.

It's amazing! And beautiful and so shockingly sophisticated and well made and worthy of it's source, you have that thing of "WTF? Someone made a classic film in the Soviet Union?" It's their GONE WITH THE WIND. And just as good.

This sent me back to my own ideas of what exactly the Soviet Union was. Who were these horrible Communists that put artists and other free thinkers into prisons? Was it possible that some of those Party Members were artists themselves? All the "Communists" really were was a class of people who were smart enough or rich enough to weasel their way into "The Party" and who then got to live like all the other elite classes throughout Russian History.

I remember meeting an East German couple, in their early twenties, in Greece a few months after the Berlin Wall had fallen. They were good looking, they had plenty of money, they were having a great time. I couldn't figure them out. They were East Germans? Weren't they terribly oppressed? Weren't they broke? Wasn't their currency worthless in the west?

No. Because they were probably Communists. Or the sons and daughters of. I was uncouth enough to ask them point blank: "Were you Communists?" They got this horrified look on their faces and said, "No, no, not Communists!"

But they could have been. Somebody was. And that would explain their lifestyle.

So who was this guy Sergie Bondarchuk who made this amazing movie? Was he an oppressed artist, or maybe he was himself a member of the party?

It just shows how all the propaganda we absorbed during the 70s and 80s warped our minds to the point we can't picture accurately how the Soviet Union actually functioned. We just think "evil" and dismiss the whole thing.

DREAM SCHOOL IS OUT!

2010-11-17T00:22:00.000-08:00

DREAM SCHOOL, the GIRL sequel is up. Very excited. The Figment people did an awesome job!

This is another picture we almost used for the front page. Funny where we had to go as we looked for good images. Googling "hipster college girls" doesn't really get you where you want to go.

Thanks to everyone for checking out DREAM SCHOOL. And if you know any GIRL fans who might want to see it. Pass it on to them!

DREAM SCHOOL

2010-11-11T14:09:00.000-08:00

So I've been re-reading the sequel to my first book GIRL. It's called DREAM SCHOOL. It's basically "Andrea Goes to College". At a fancy East Coast college.

I'm getting it ready for Figment.com who are going to serialize it when they launch their teen reading/writing site.

I have resisted re-reading DREAM SCHOOL for a while now, knowing myself and that I would want to fiddle with it and change things and get all perfectionistic on it. The novel already had a weird time problem being written five years after the first book ended, but having to start basically right from that same point the first book left off. Which would be like the mid nineties.

And now of course the time thing is even weirder, since it's seven more years, etc. etc.

But so then I did have to go through it anyway, so I did, and I made some super light little changes for technological reasons. Not really updating it just getting rid of things that won't make sense to Figment readers, but leaving it kind of vaguely around the 1997-2003 era. But not really being specific about it.

Anyway, the surprising thing was, it hardly matters. It's just fun classic college fun. And it's really fun to remember it and discover all these characters I'd forgotten about. I totally enjoyed reading it again. It's like more GIRL. which is exactly what it's supposed to be. Except now she's in this new scary environment. Which she does not always find easy to adjust to.

TAVI and OBAMA

2010-11-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

I once heard Billie Joe Armstrong of GREEN DAY use the phrase, "Here today, gone later today" and I always think of it as the never ending streams of new bands, new writers, new films, new everything goes pouring across my computer and TV screens.

But for the moment there are two cultural figures I have bought into and am not going to buy out of anytime soon. The seemingly over-hyped TAVI (pictured), always seems to be doing something simple and interesting on her blog, no matter how "hot" she gets, and OBAMA, our poor beleaguered President, (my beleaguered President, since I actually voted for him), who no matter what happens to him, or what setbacks he must deal with, always seems crisp, calm, reasonable, rational, solid and good.

I am grateful for their poise under pressure.

CHEEVER COUNTRY

2010-11-02T10:03:00.001-07:00

Being a writer all this time, you'd think I would know more about John Cheever than what everyone else knows. The terrible truth is, I know what "Cheever Country" is. It's Westchester and upper middle class people riding the commuter train back and forth to work in Manhattan.

I also knew he wrote FALCONER, which I read in college, in a literature class, and therefor read with almost zero comprehension, and probably never finished and came away from it knowing it was about a guy in prison who comes to love another guy. And it was boring.

But I did remember the huge THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER, which showed up in my parent's house back in the 70s and how this book was a big deal. Partly because it was so large, and had such an elegant cover but also because it had one of those magic buzzes about it. It seemed to glow. Like THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS or, out west where I lived SEVEN ARROWS and a few other things. It was one of those books the grownups handled reverently ... you knew it was important and awesome ... and I must have read that first story, "O My Brother", once a decade my whole life ...but probably never read another story ...

Anyway, so now I am reading BLAKE BAILEY's bio of John Cheever and am sort of having my mind blown. John Cheever isn't some upper class Westchester stuffed shirt, like I thought. He was sort of a wild child. He didn't graduate from high school. He lived on people's couches for years. He was wildly and pretty openly gay. He was a good old fashioned liar. All the great luminaries of his day were all over him. They adored and protected him. It's really an amazing story and it totally changes my thoughts on him.

I always thought he was one of those boring writers that kind of overachieve because they were in the Ivy League crowd. And the critics like them. In fact, he is a chronic underachiever, he was constantly told that HE was the voice of his generation and he needed to write his great first novel that would define his group and make him famous. But he couldn't! he kept writing New Yorker stories for the money.

I won't say anything more because I am only up to age 30 in the bio. But it's great fun. And a great biography, giving all sorts of fun tidbits and giving you a good blast of the feel of the times, which of course make us look like a bunch of new age wusses, which of course we are....

ROCKSTAR SUPERSTAR

2010-10-30T00:48:00.000-07:00

Generally when I sell stuff in foreign markets I never really know much about what happens. I get these long threads of emails that go through several agents in various locations that conclude with my American agent saying: "I think we should take this."

And so we do, even though I don't really have any idea who exactly is going to do it, or who will translate it or what it will look like.

Then a weird contract shows up that is badly translated and has some weird local dialectical flavor to it. Or it's for some large looking amount of money that turns out to be not much money at all. (Or the reverse: it looks like a relatively small amount of Euros, which then, once you calculate the exchange rate, is actually a nice little chunk of change.)

Anyway, so today I got a really nice note from my German editor at Beltz (who have done a bunch of my books now, starting with GIRL. "Cool Girl" they called it.) Oh my god, I thought, an actual person! He sent along the cover of the forthcoming German edition of ROCKSTAR SUPERSTAR.

And so I wrote back to him and told him how as a student in Berlin, I would spend hours at the bookshops checking out the awesome German Editions of all my favorite authors: Bukowski, Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, etc.

I used to be amazed at how the German Shops seemed to ONLY carry my favorite authors. No crap here. And if it was something I didn't know (like Musil's THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES) I could pretty much know that I needed to read it. Sometimes I would even BUY it and read it right there.

The Germans had amazing taste. Or at least the Berlin Bookshops did. Of course that was in the days when the wall was still up, and Berlin was this brave little island of artsy coolness, in the then-dangerous East Bloc ...

Anyway, all I was meaning to say, was how it really is such an honor to get published in cool places. You know you are in excellent company.

SEVERED WAYS

2010-10-28T01:20:00.001-07:00

I just saw the best movie. SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. I don't recommend it though. I can't think of who I would recommend it to. Film students. 19 year olds. People who are smoking pot. It is too weird. But it is absolutely perfect for what it is.

What it is: it is a mumblecore Herzogian black metal prose poem of what it would be like to be alone with a sword and an ax in eleventh century Massachussettes. It is also funny! And brutal. It is so weird and 70s like but also totally up to date and also funny! I don't know how to describe it. Nothing happens. These guys just wander around in the woods. It is beautiful.

The thing I thought as I watched it is: this is the kind of crazy genius shit people do when they are making their first movie, writing their first novel, making their first album. There is weird genius in every scene. And none of the flaws hurt it at all. And there are lots of flaws. But you feel the sparkling energy of "beginnerness" all through it. And an unexpected historical intelligence--that you never see in American film--slipped in almost as an after thought.

What fun. I stayed up until 3:30!

Awesome NY day

2010-10-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

I'm in New York this week and sort of freaking out how awesome it is. And how well dressed everyone is. And how smart. Like on the local Sports Radio, they let the callers talk and the callers always say something intelligent. And then the host talks and he says something intelligent. Or on the street, nobody takes any shit from anybody else, but instead of this resulting in fights, it results in serious conversations which improve all concerned.

In NY men are flexible. Women are shrewd. People know what to do in difficult situations. Almost nobody is stupid. The general excellence of everyone keeps everyone's ego in check. The few people who are genuinely "slow" or overwhelmed, do the sensible thing, they read the bible on the subway and people don't bother them.

Today I saw Michael Musto wearing a zoot-suit and riding his bicycle up Seventh Ave. Today I saw Liv Tyler and her mother chatting with a classy grey haired paparazza. Today I had coffee with Susan Colasanti who is fast becoming the break out star of YA literature. (she's the next Sarah Dessen.) Today I went to my favorite Buddhist meeting and talked to my favorite teacher, who is going to Brazil next week to help open a temple. Today I missed Lauren Cerand's event at Barnes and Noble and blew my chance to hang with Nick Hornby. Today I got caught in the rain and later had to run through Grand Central Station which is my favorite vortex in the universe, and I ran to the train, and just caught it and had to sit with all the Cheever people, who are all handsome and serious and have iPads or read the Wall Street Journal. Awesome NY day.

THE YEAR TAO LIN BROKE

2010-10-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

I am thoroughly enjoying the total blow up of 27 year old author Tao Lin. His books are awesome. He's funny as shit. He takes the piss out of everything. I caught his reading at Santa Monica BARNES AND NOBLE for which four people showed up. (Santa Monica is an old folks home, really...) He did his robot voice answer thing. It was great.

But like in all situations where some cool obscure thing bursts out into the mainstream, you kind of lose your personal stake in it when it reaches a certain level. It stops being something you can excitedly tell your friends about. They already know. They already have their opinions. When other people mention it, you just have to stand there.

Tao Lin is really a singular talent though. And it's funny to watch the mainstream media make asses of themselves trying to fend him off. Charles Boch's silly review of Lin's new book in the NYTIMES confirms yet again, how the Establishment can never really deal when something genuinely fresh and interesting pops up. Josh Ferris they can deal with. The weird Asian bro who talks like a robot, not so much.

Also, for me, I like how Tao Lin is just more genuinely outside of things. Like I love Sam Lipsyte too, they have some things in common. But Lipsyte's somehow more "in" the lit world. He's kind of part of it. It must suck for him, he probably thought, "I'm the most off beat dude on the block". But alas, he's been outflanked!

Someday, Tao Lin might get outflanked too, but right at the moment, he is in a zone. He can do no wrong. Even his worst robot mumblings seem fascinating. Which makes it fun for all the rest of us writers too. It is like a fresh breeze has blown through the whole writing world.

RECOVERY ROAD ARCS

2010-09-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

Just got in the first batch of ARCs for my new book RECOVERY ROAD. It looks great. And the blurbs on the back are a writers dream.

A couple of my friends have already run off with copies and so far the reviews are awesome. Scholastic will send out an official ARC mailing at some point so if you are a blogger or reviewer send me your address and I will pass it on to them.

I think Recovery Road is my best "girl book" since GIRL. Madeline is this really funny, bad-assed girl who parties her way into rehab. She can barely be bothered to pay attention, when dark, mysterious Stewart shows up one night at the rehabs "movie night". The two of them are basically major league f--k ups. But that doesn't mean they can't fall in love.

It is based on a real story a friend told me years ago. I love stories when people meet someone at the worst possible times in their lives. When they least expect it, that sort of thing.

Anyway, I am really excited about this book. I hope people will check it out!!

Ireland Reading List

2010-08-21T18:29:00.000-07:00

So I went to Ireland last month, and had a great time. Really interesting. The people were so awesome. And the country was really a surprise.

Since I was traveling with my hyper literate family we of course had like twenty books between us. I tried to read ULYSSES, again, and got through a couple big chunks of it. The inside-the-mind-of-a-woman part at the end being a lot of fun and extremely provocative for it's time I'm sure, and still kind of amazing now if a little confusing ... and actually, in my opinion, pornographic, despite the judge's opinion in the front of the book. Not that I object. I love stuff like this. When books can't tell you the truth about how people think what's the point. Zombie and Vampire fans, exempted of course. Nerds of all eras flee reality, it is their historical destiny, but I digress ....

Anyway, I tried a bunch of different books but got truly swept up in one nonfiction worked called PADDY'S LAMENT by Thomas Gallagher. An Irish American writer, not able to grasp why his countrymen hated the English so much, investigates the Potato Famine and the British role in it. Well he gets pretty pissed off as he does and this book is his pissed off near-rant against the brutal British gutting of Ireland. (see photo of farmers being thrown out of their houses and into the bogs)

Structurally a little weird, the drive of the book is the great descriptions of the actualities of what went on when the potato crop failed two years in a row and the British used it to genocidally reduce the Irish from being poor to being dead.

Anyway, I generally stay away from "righteous anger" books, but this one totally sucked me in, especially as we poked around Ireland and came to see how TOTALLY DIFFERENT the Irish are from the British. It is two different worlds. So that was my fave read in Ireland.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

2010-08-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

I'm reading this biography of Led Zeppelin this week called WHEN GIANTS ROAMED THE EARTH. It's I guess what they call "exhaustive" since it just goes on forever about every little detail of everything, which I like, and even has these weird interludes where the author creates "fictional flashbacks" wherein various people featured in the book are taken back through their life stories. All of these interludes have the same, "Those sods you knew in your early days, they never knew what you were capable of, but you knew ..." It is a very odd device and I find it kind of fascinating as a writer, because you really shouldn't be able to do that, especially if you are giving everybody the same resentment-based perspective, but in another way, it kind of works and nicely breaks up the story. So funny too, Zep was one of my favorite bands in highschool but was usually put down by my frieds as being kind of lower class, metal type music. They all preferred The Stones and the Dead and crap like that. Which I liked too but I ALWAYS knew that zeppelin was by far the most accomplished band musically, which is what is so fun about reading this book. They really were that good. They were like frickin' Beethoven or something. So now I'm listening to all their records again and getting these weird junior high school flashbacks (white bellbottoms and feathered hair), yes I am that old. And also thinking about the very short life-spans of even the greatest bands. By the time Zep was done the guys were barely thirty!!! What the hell did they do with the rest of their lives. Garden, I guess. That's what Voltaire advised at the end of Candide.....

HOW TO READ HARD BOOKS

2010-07-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

Like many people there're all sorts of "important" books I've never slogged through. This is because, like important people, and interesting new food concepts, these works are intimidating and unintelligible and not relaxing. However I have found ways over the years, to find my way into such works.

1.Don Juan by Lord Byron

I forced my way into Don Juan when I was an undergraduate transfer student at NYU. I had to make up some classes since I'd missed some things when I was in a punk band. So I was stuck in New York City, taking summer school classes, without really knowing anyone and with not that much to do so I would ride the F train to Coney Island every day and sit on the beach and read Don Juan, which, of course, once I got going on it, was a totally awesome, addictive, sexy and hilarious read. Also, much of it is set on beaches where the main character is seducing exotic beauties from far away lands. The combination of being on the beach and having no other choices with me, forced me into it. I can't recommend this book enough. It was beach riding in it's highest form.

2. The Bible by Various Artists

I was in Israel once, just wandering around, and a guy in a youth hostel gave me a bible he had, which cross referenced everything in the index by location. So then, whenever I went anywhere I looked up all the stories that location was featured in and read all the stories about it. This made it all really fun and interesting, and as I had never really been able to crack the bible, suddenly it was relevent and fun and you really wanted to know what happened in a place where you were actually standing. Over the course of the month I was there, I read a big chunk of it.

3. Ulysses by James Joyce

I am about to go to Ireland. I could barely get through Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I could barely get through Dubliners. Now I am going to be stuck with Ulysses and NO OTHER BOOKS for eleven days. Because I have failed to read Ulysses so many times, I am going to START in the MIDDLE, and just read the good bits. And then if it catches hold, which I'm hoping it will, I will somehow become smitten and work my way through.

MY YEAR AT SEA

2010-07-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

When I first got my office down here at Venice Beach, I kept thinking I should write a little memoir thing called, "My Year At Sea" about living on the beach. Everyone wants to live at the beach at some point in their life. Maybe it'd be interesting. I guess it has been, but not so much as I thought. Every once in a while I come up with some little insight like: "People scream a lot at the beach." This I guess is due to the cold water splashing on them periodically. Or the fact that they are already half naked and their friends are trying to pull down their pants. Or they are just very happy and they are girls and girls do like to scream I've noticed. Why is that?

Another observation about the beach, it calms you down. I don't know why more people don't take advantage of the soothing quality of large bodies of water. Why would you take some pill that costs twenty bucks when you can just go walk by the ocean? In NY I used to walk along the Hudson when I was stressing. Always fixed me right up.

So, if those are the only two insights I have I guess I don't need to write an article or a book or whatever. One blog post will do. My Year At Sea.

ANDREA MARR REVISITED

2010-07-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine is reading GIRL, my first novel, and we were talking about it and I ended up reading a big chunk of it the other day.

I hadn't read more than a page or two of it in years, so this immersion was kind of revelation. Mainly I was shocked by the sex and drugs and carnage and brutality of Andrea's high school, the so innocent sounding "Hillside High." There's race riots, rape, murder, suicide, people stopping being friends with people without communicating about it or providing closure. And of course everyone's having sex with everyone all the time. And not in committed relationships!

And in the middle of it is Andrea Marr, who in my fond memories is this charming, lovable, observer just doing the best she can. But NO! Andrea is as bad as the rest of them!

I sort of understand a little better, the shift in Amazon commentary from the 90s when teens were so consistently positive about GIRL, and the newer comments in which today's teens struggle with all the mayhem and loose morals. They just don't know what to think about it, you can tell. Which is fine. I understand. Times have changed. I also don't feel so bad that I've kind of cleaned up my later books. I did the right thing. The whole world has "cleaned up" in a way. And when I think about it, and am honest, I think I'd rather be a kid now, in the Glee era, the time of the High School Musical. It just seems so much easier now.

DESTROY ALL CARS

2010-07-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

So psyched about this awesome new cover for DESTROY ALL CARS. And so funny that I'm the one who gets the "punk rock" treatment on a book, since I have now lived through every version and mutation and re-treading and reworking of "punk" since it's beginning. Oh my god, who will forget the taking over of 77 Poseur Punk by those horrible barbarians the '80 Hardcore Punk revolution. It was practically war!! Well, that was just the beginning it turns out ...

And you gotta love the floating Karl Marx head. That has become a favorite section of the book, (the short essay on Karl Marx's "influence" on main character James Hoff, which is mainly that James thinks "huge beards are rad".) I was so worried no teenagers would know who Karl Marx was. Which in fact is generally the case, but the floating Marx will help the kids. "He's sort of like the Santa Claus of Political Revolutionaries" his head seems to say.

Awesome cover. And big thanks to my bud David Levithan who somehow got it for me ...