May
May, the quietest month of my adventuresome year, whispered in with my completed manuscript of Stephen King Limited. Brian, my editor, proclaimed it too long for a chapterbook. So he split it in two and paid me for both. That’s how you do it, folks. Don’t double-space stuff or anything, but if you’ve dedicated yourself to a quality story, let it be as long as it needs to be. You will be rewarded. The book(s) went into their editing process, for physical publication later in the year. The collected ebook would be available in 2013. And I’d get royalties on that.
John Irving’s new novel, In One Person, came out. I slammed my money down and got the first copy.
I’m not quite sure when I started reading Archie comics – the Life With Archie stuff was really well-written, and I was happy they’d come out with a gay character with my name. But it wasn’t until this month’s Archie Meets Kiss that I really got into the weekly books. And AMK was so batshit crazy that I decided to start “tweetwatching” the comic, taking pics of panels and MST3King it (though sometimes I praised it, or fainted when Moose showed up). My friend Joe said that type of thing is one of the reasons he likes me so much, so I just kept doing it.
The Avengers came out. Shawn and I saw it opening night. On Sunday, he called and said he wanted to see a movie. I said, “Avengers?” He said “YES!” True love always.
I was so jazzed that Stephen King recorded himself reading The Wind Through the Keyhole that I asked if I could write a separate audio review for FEARnet. My editors were equally enthusiastic. I also wrote two poems: “Caution to the Wind,” and “Inside the Wall.”
Speaking of enthusiastic, my Cemetery Dance editor, Brian, asked me if I'd write an afterword to his and Bev Vincent's new book, The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book. Way back in 2009, I'd written a huge chunk of the Illustrated Stephen King Movie Trivia Book (which remained unpublished ... so far), and I guess they liked what I brought to the table. I wrote an essay called "Trivial Matters," and turned it in.
On May 9th, some of my lady friends – Vickie, Rachel, and Lynn – tweeted at me from the Rosebud Diner in Davis Square, informing me that there was a twice-weekly karaoke night there, and that the place was overrun (overrun!) with foxy hipsters. Well, this was something I needed to be a part of. Besides which – and not to get too weird or deep –karaoke actually means something to me. When we were all going to the Asgard every week, I had to get up there and show my stuff among actors and singers and people who actually use their voices. I forced myself to improve, to the point where it’s not just having fun while I’m up there, but it’s me trying to do an honest-to-God good job.
Maybe even more, though, is the fact that when the Asgard fell apart, I lost my weekly meetup with my buddies, and I’d been missing that like hell. Some things that were important to me – like Rocky Horror had been – had fallen away, and the unsettling truth of life is that sometimes the stuff you love to do just vaporizes, and you can’t get it back. But Rocky Horror had come back. And now, tentatively, karaoke was doing the same. Suddenly, I was seeing Rachel and Vickie again every week, and eventually I would count Todd and Eric and the growing assembled as people I could count on to be there and to sing their hearts out with me.
You think when you’re younger that the stuff you do is stuff you’ll do forever. And when it stops, well, that’s one of the hardest lessons. One of the best things I learned this year is that life might be a little more cyclical than that. You can go back, even as you’re moving forward.
Near the end of the month, our former roommates, Jay and Scott, asked Shawn and I to accompany them to Canobie Lake Park. We agreed immediately. Things had been ramping up for me so much, so quickly, that I hadn’t really had a break since the start of the year, and while Disney is my favorite place in the world, I don’t generally rest there (see above re: 24 Hour Day). We went on roller coasters, had popcorn, and just palled around. May is the quietest, most understated month.
On the last Sketchhaus night of the month, my troupe, the Sketch Avengers, did a short 25-minute opening set. I got on stage and, as the groom of a wedding where the best man was making it all about him, got to scream at people. In 25 minutes, I became a producer, director, and actor. On my way.
Books Read: Hide & Seek, by Jack Ketchum; Too Hard to Handle, by John Perich; and The World According to Garp, by John Irving
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