June
In mid-June, for the first time ever, a real publisher (Cemetery Dance) published my fiction. Not one but two of my books – the short-story collection This Terrestrial Hell and the poetry collection Surf’s Up – were released as ebooks and became immediate sensations. Actually, I don’t know how they sold. My royalty statements only come twice a year.
Seeing my books for sale by an actual, real-life, honest-to-God publisher overwhelmed me emotionally. For long minutes, I just stared at the computer screen, unable to comprehend what I was seeing. Sure, they were “just” ebooks, but that had a different meaning in 2012 than it had when I first tried e-publishing in 1999. I know for a fact that at least some of my friends bought at least This Terrestrial Hell (poems are a tougher sell, even though they’re scarier), and most who bought it said they liked it.
On June 7th, I took the stage with the Sketch Avengers in my first headlining show as director. For a full 45 minutes, every Thursday in June, the people I’d rehearsed with and directed and helped get ready got up and made real-life audiences laugh. Even I got into the act during one or two sketches, doing that screaming thing that I did. On June 21st, one of my actors had to go to the emergency room (he’s fine now) and I actually had to step in and fill in for most of his characters. I have no idea if I did a good job, but Jesus God, was it fun.
I began brainstorming with Chris Cuddy, who still ran A Night of Oral Tradition. Would she like to do a whole monologue show later in the summer? At once, she said yes, and suddenly I was stepping into the role of producer and co-director of The August Monologues. I assembled a dream cast and gave them free reign to make the monologues as funny or as serious as they wanted. We would start rehearsing in July. Cuddy, apparently intrigued by my drive, asked me if I wanted to co-produce A Night of Oral Tradition with her, too. Immediately, I said yes, and we got to brainstorming.
Stephen King and Joe Hill published part one of a long short story called “In the Tall Grass,” which I reviewed for FEARnet. I also wrote three poems: “Something In My Shoulder,” “Spine,” and “Puddles.”
My love of amusement parks stoked by Canobie Lake, I decided to travel out to New York and finally go to Coney Island. Because I apparently love assembling people from different parts of my life to get together and do stuff, I asked Mark, Duncan, Marty, Kristen, and my new friend Jeff to come along. I hadn’t seen Jeff since Reunion at Disney World nearly six months before, but we’d maintained a casual friendship online and I thought it would be fun. Five gays and a Kristen, what could go wrong?
Answer: nothing. It was a delightful sunny day. We rode the Comet. We ate on the beach. We bonded. As with most of my New York trips, later on there was Barcade, and karaoke, and of course Rocky Horror in Chelsea – something that was steadily becoming a tradition. (And a good thing, too; there were rumors that they were going to be shutting down the Harvard Square Loews Theater, and my local Rocky with it. We had no idea what the future would bring.) What’s neat is that I was at different stages of friendship with all these people, especially Duncan and Jeff. Because I was now coming to New York regularly, I was finally seeing Duncan on a consistent basis, and we were hitting it off. And Jeff, who I didn’t know very well at all, fit in so easily and was so fun, and it was the start of a really terrific friendship.
Oh, and I started thinking about a four-part sketch show that celebrated all eras of sketch comedy. But what to call it, what to call it…?
Books Read: Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck; The Halloween Tree, by Ray Bradbury
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