On the Frontier: Paris Part One

I flew IcelandAir, Paris by way of Reykjavik. Immediately I was impressed by the overnight setup - pillows and blankets on the seats. The last time I flew IcelandAir, it was 2001, and we got free, delicious hot meals with real silverware. This time I ate me some pre-packaged sliders and took sleeping pills so I could get to Paris refreshed and keep going. Jeff booked the AirB&B and it was awesome. Everything IKEA and we stood in the kitchen and ate the cheese he'd bought from Barthélémy, the most famous cheese shop in Paris. I made it my mission to get there eventually. Taking my first bite of the Roquefort, it finally locked into me: I was in Paris, my first time in a place where they spoke a different language. I wasn't fluent, but I came equipped with the language of cheese, and we danced in our rented kitchen eating Roquefort.

The trip to Disneyland Paris was about 45 minutes. Two transfers; not bad. I didn't really know what to expect. I had this expectation that it was going to be DIFFERENT, not necessarily BETTER. We stepped off the train and there it was at once: Disneyland Paris (not EuroDisney; that name changed over a decade ago). That was one similarity with Disneyland in Anaheim. The real world bumped up right against the fantasy, and Jeff and I worried if we'd be able to fall into the "bubble," that automatic feeling you get at Walt Disney World in Florida: the sense that Disney is all around you, and that you are fully immersed. We needn't have worried. The second we stepped through those gates, we didn't look back.

I wasn't prepared for how BEAUTIFUL the park was; the landscaping is the best in any Disney park I've seen. (Well, Animal Kingdom gives it a run for its money). It sprawled out in front of us like a glorious dream of symmetry. The castle - Sleeping Beauty Castle, reimagined with a sloping hillside of cube-cropped trees, waterfalls, and a dragon cave near the moat - commands every view. It's asymmetrical, too, which sets it apart from everything else. It's leagues better than its sister castle in Anaheim, and is almost as impressive as Cinderella Castle in Orlando.

Jeff asked if it was important what we rode first. I nearly said the teacups - that's my first ride in Disneyland (Space Mountain is my first ride in Disney World, but Space was closed for renovations during this trip) - but left it up to him. He chose Pirates of the Caribbean. It was the best possible choice. Pirates won us over immediately - logically sound, a little scary, with a storyline that makes more sense than any of the other versions. Plus it skirted a restaurant - the Blue Lagoon - that absolutely prepared us for the biggest crime of DLP, the mind-bogglingly terrible food.

We were unprepared for the biggest shocker of them all: Frontierland (good in WDW, almost an afterthought in DLR) was the best part of all of Disneyland Paris. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Phantom Manor (DLP's version of the Haunted Mansion) were not just the best versions of those rides anywhere. They served to anchor a land in which no expense was spared in placemaking, theming, and knock-out beauty. There's a whole coda to Phantom Manor that takes you to honky-tonk hell. Oh, the busts are singing "Grim Grinning Ghosts," but this is scaresville and no fooling. Big Thunder plunges you into pitch black TWICE and then put you on an island to swoop and dip and scream. They are perfect.

We finished off our first night in Disneyland Paris wandering through the steampunk insanity of Main Street and its twin arcades. Our feet were killing us and I was having that cascading exhaustion I get when I've stayed out all night or traveled to Paris from Boston and then immediately went to a theme park. Back to the Air B&B for 5 hours of sleep; we had to be up at 5:30 AM for our first full day at Disneyland Paris, and we couldn't wait.

Hitting My Goal & What Comes Next

First off, I'd like to thank each and every one of you for donating to my book. You're all bastions of humanity and supporters of the arts and I love all of you.

Here's what happens now: I am in the process of finishing my 20th novel, a book called THINGS HAVE CHANGED. When that's done, I have some edits to do on a few of my other books - my last novel, MY AGENT OF CHAOS, and a new version of a nonfiction book called CHART OF DARKNESS. My desk should be clear in mid-April, which is when I will launch into the first draft of EATING ANIMALS.

The through-line (I don't really do plots unless I'm writing a mystery or crime novel) is similar to a few of my other books: people who are roughly my age are trying to deal with love and life, despite the unnerving persistence of the past and their fleeting brushes with success. If you wanted to sum up what I'm about, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. However, there are differences: of the four main characters, two are chefs - a profession I've been wanting to write about for some time. These two guys are also both straight; I've been wanting to write about straight adult male friendships for awhile and one of them always ends up being a woman or a gay dude.

I've written about two of these characters in the past. One of them, Alicia Stander, appeared in two of my past novels - WOLVES IN THE BLACK and THE LEGEND OF JENNY MCCABE. Her journey almost seemed complete. She started off damaged in WOLVES and in JENNY she'd healed herself. I wrote both those books in the Aughts. Wade Gimble, her boyfriend, appeared much earlier, in a short story called, "Last Night at the Bear," which I wrote in the mid-1990s. Wade was an analogue to who I was back then, and when he showed up (completely unplanned) in JENNY MCCABE, it was interesting to catch up on who he's been and what he's been doing. He and Alicia found each other and helped each other. But Wade's been in my mind a lot lately. I've begun wondering if there's a chance for drama - for conflict, for a good story - after healing. I think there is.

There's also a character I want to use who mirrors Kathy in Steinbeck's East of Eden - one of my favorite novels ever. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to build a character like that without feeling sexist, and I think it'll be a good challenge for me as a male writer.

I'm also delving into stuff like technique and structure in this book. Normally, I start off each book having a vague idea what drives the characters and having some vague conflict they need to deal with. I've plowed through a lot of books that way and it usually works. This time, I want to have an interesting structure, and an interesting way to introduce the main players. My books have usually employed a three-part structure. Most recently, the parts consist of: characters start somewhere / ROADTRIP / come back home changed. This ... likely won't change that paradigm. But I'm going to be dealing with the past of the characters in a more personal way, because Wade's past is MY past.

So that's where we stand on EATING ANIMALS. I'm currently weighing the pros and cons of releasing the novel in segments so you can all read along as I write it. We'll see how I feel come mid-April and it's game time.

Thanks again for giving me the urgency to finish this novel. I already have some ideas for book #22 coming up (it's going to be very short), and I have to start writing it in November, so let's hope EATING ANIMALS has a quick gestation. You've all supported me and the concept of independent writing and publishing, and I can't tell you how gratified I am.

Read well, write well, and let freedom ring!

Migrating Animals

Things were weird for me in 1994. I was living alone in a rooming house, along with a sore clutch of dying old men and junkies literally itching their way into overdoses. I supported myself with two to three retail jobs at the local mall, minimum wage at all of them, and the bus came intermittently - sometimes not at all. The cliche of eating Ramen to survive was my real life - Ramen and store-brand soda and Little Debbie snacks, because they were affordable.

During that time, I wrote a short story about two guys my age - 19 going on 20. It was the first time I used my own name as the lead character's name in a story. Kev was the hero of the piece, sort of. He has a work friend named Wade, a miserable, sad wretch of a guy, who tries to kill himself in Kevin's car. A melee ensues. Things end up okay. Back then, it was wish fulfillment. The last line of the story is, "This kid's got places to go." And I did. I ended getting out of the rooming house I was in and moving into a studio. I got out of the relationship I was in that ... he wasn't a bad guy, we just were wrong for each other. I made my life better through sheer force of will, which made me believe that Kev was the main character, and that knowing he was on the righteous path was enough.

But it wasn't.

Wade appeared again in a novel I wrote a decade later, a very long book called The Legend of Jenny McCabe. He's had a rocky road to get where he was. Along the way, he's discovered some weird sexual stuff about himself. And he's become a chef. It was around this time that I started to realize what that long-ago short story, called "Last Night at the Bear," was really all about. Kevin was who I wanted to be. Wade was who I was. And in 2007, Wade was still who I was.

I'm entering into a new novel called Eating Animals, whose title is a bit of a description and a bit of a metaphor. In the book, Wade has to go back home to confront his dying father - a father he hasn't seen since 1997. And I realized that this was the perfect time for me to actually go back and confront the guy I was back then. I kept records and journal entries and stories from 1997. I want to know who I was then, and how that's shaped who I am now. I want to figure out Wade from two different sides of the spectrum.

I'm nervous to start. That's part of why I decided to set this up as a Kickstarter - because I always finish my Kickstarter projects, meaning that having an advance on this book means I have a responsibility to write it. If you'd like to help me on this journey into my past, why not kick a few dollars my way? Check out the project, watch my goofy video, and consider backing me. I'd really appreciate it, and thank you!

Eating Animals, by Kevin Quigley: A Kickstarter Project

Eating Animals: Kev's writing a new book!

Hey everyone!

The world of publishing is changing, and on my long, rocky trip through it, I'm changing, too. It used to be that publishers, upon accepting a new novel, would provide an advance for the writer in order to keep writing and focus on her or his craft. That doesn't happen as much anymore, and as self-publishing has gained both traction and legitimacy, I think it's important to maintain some hold on what originally made publishing so great.

I write books. I write a lot of books. Eating Animals will be my twenty-first novel. In the past, I've gone the more traditional route with publishers. Sometimes I've gotten published, sometimes I haven't. It's always a crapshoot. You do it because you love the work, you love the craft, and you love the sense of accomplishment watching the stuff in your mind coming together on the page. It's a thrill unmatched anywhere else.

But it sure isn't lucrative.

Eating Animals is a passion project for me. It involves a character named Wade Gimble I've had in my mind since 1997, when I wrote my first short story about him. Since, I've touched on him lightly in other books, but I've never really explored who he was - and, by extension, who I was - when I first made him up. I want to go back to those two young guys, both the nascent character and the nascent me, and find out who they were, and why they needed each other then. It's also a book about chefs, and cooking, and fathers and sons, and the sometimes destructive nature of love. Some of it's gonna hurt, but I'm aiming for laughs.

Why should you support me? Because even though I write my books for free and for me, sometimes it helps to have a little more money to keep the gears turning. I do a lot of work every day, and I don't get paid for any of the creative stuff. It'd be nice to have that advance, in order to keep doing what I love, and in order to feel like what I'm doing is worth it.

Thanks for supporting me, and my novel. Eating Animals is going to be a rollercoaster of writing, and I'm glad to have you with me for the ride.

Eating Animals is on Kickstarter!

The Ink Journals

The why, where, and how of my body art.

1. Bear With Me (May 10, 1999) - Bear Claw

2. Stand In the Place Where You Live (November 13, 1999) - Stephen King's The Stand

3. Man Without Fear (October 4, 2004) - Daredevil

4. We Can Make It If We Run (September 24, 2005) - Bruce Springsteen Sneakers

5. Boldly Going (February 18, 2006) - Star Trek

6. My Flirtation With Obscure Punctuation (April 8, 2006) - Interobang

7. Howl (November 8, 2006) - Cycle of the Werewolf

8. Red and Blue (January 29, 2007) - Blue October

9. Pinch Me (February 18, 2007) - Barenaked Ladies

10. Thou Mayest (July 19, 2007) - Timshel

11. Sorry, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle (January 28, 2008) - Super Mario

12. Lucky Thirteen (June 9, 2009) - Anchor 13

13. If We Can Dream It... (July 22, 2009) - Horizons

14. A Bear Can Rest at Ease (April 2, 2010) - Baloo

15. The Pepper Engine (July 20, 2010) - Steampunk Dr Pepper

16. The Eagle Has Landed (August 2, 2011) - Bob Seger Eagle

17. It's Great to Be Alive (April 14, 2012) - Drive-By Truckers

18. I'm the Wind, Baby (July 31, 2012) - Tom Servo

19. Hardy & Arbuckle (March 29, 2013) - Comedy & Tragedy

20. Don't Panic! (July 5, 2013) - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

21. Dream Baby Dream (August 22, 2013) - Irving + Springsteen = Sketch

22. Like a Grand and Miraculous Spaceship (December 18, 2013) - Spaceship Earth

23. My Unending Fury (February 8, 2014) - Christine

24. For the Love of Moose (April 12, 2014) - Moose Mason

25. Flying Over Water (July 19, 2014) - Disney Cruise Line

26. Heave Ho (December 30, 2014) - Blitzen Trapper

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (December / Love the Way You Walk Away)

And here we come to the end.

As I write this, I’m sitting in my favorite Starbucks. Playing Barenaked Ladies because they’re what was playing at ImprovBoston, as I finished my year.

December: I started the month rewarding myself for the trials of the rest of the year. There’s an inherent danger in that sort of reward, and I knew that going into it. You can put too much on the good thing you’re felt you’re owed. You’re chasing a totem, a talisman, something that underlines and underscores that the stuff you lived through and the shit you’ve swum in and the absolute hell you’ve managed to make your own life needs some reward. That’s the way fiction works. It should be the way life works. But life isn’t a book. It’s not a song. It’s not a play or a sitcom or an hourlong drama. It’s life, and sometimes life is hard, and sometimes you don’t get what you want or need. Sometimes you do, because that’s reality, too.

I took in my final Bob Seger concert as December showed November the door. I say last because Seger isn’t doing for me what I need concerts to do for me. I love him, and he’s meant a lot to me over the last few years, and he still means a lot to me, but it’s not what Springsteen or Drive-By Truckers or Blitzen Trapper do to me when it’s live and you’re right there. I had great seats to a pretty good concert, and Seger played all the hits I wanted to hear (except maybe “Still the Same”), and played stuff from his new album I never ended up connecting with. “Hollywood Nights” transported me and that was great, and “We’ve Got Tonite” was moving, and of course “Mainstreet” and “Night Moves” thrilled me. It’s probably not the music. I could blame it on the venue if I hadn’t seen Barenaked Ladies or Springsteen there and experienced the verve and the joy that I need to get from these shows. It’s not necessarily that he’s older. It’s maybe that new album thing. I keep finding stuff to love on all of Springsteen’s new records, and he plays the hell out of those new records in concert, and it feels like a dynamic, rich experience. This was good. This was fun. But I don’t want to go again.

A day later, I was on a plane to Disney World for my longest trip in a good long time. I was meeting my buddy Jeff for a night at Magic Kingdom, followed by a four night cruise on the Disney Dream, followed by four more nights at Disney World. This was what the whole year had been for. This is what I get for living through all of it.

And it started out that way. That first night with Jeff was amazing, and the cruise turned out to be as relaxing and fulfilling as the last one. No one noticed my Disney Cruise Line tattoo, but whatever. One night on the ocean, Jeff and I got dolled up in our finery and sat down to a seven-course dinner at Remy, the ship’s signature French restaurant. I didn’t really feel out of place in my suit and tie, and our waiter was cute and explained everything, and they kept bringing out plate after plate of six-bite delights: tomato soup balls, actual ratatouille (I surprised myself by trying a lot of the tomato and onion dishes, to discover to my actual amazement that … well, that I could be a little adventurous and still not like tomatoes or onions), pigeon, duck, three desserts; exactly the type of restaurant experience I’ve wanted for years. And it was all easy, you know? It didn’t mess with my head. I brought my book into a hot tub once and read awhile. Jeff and I did spa trips and got massages (good) pedicures (amazing) and facials (oh my God, no no no no, never again, no, stay away from my eyes). We rode the Aquaduck water coaster and waded in the warm Atlantic just off of Disney’s private island of Castaway Cay, and I rode a rented bike around the paths and played Darkness on the Edge of Town at top volume from the basket of the bike. It was wonderful. Top to bottom wonderful.

Recently, one of my favorite writers, Lawrence Block, relayed a story about him taking a five-week cruise and writing a whole new novel. That concept thrilled me. The idea of being able to do a five-week cruise thrilled me. Getting my sea legs and keeping them. Writing on the high seas. Making real my imagination in a place with no land, and few responsibilities.

With these thoughts, we disembarked and soon found ourselves in Disney World proper again. And it was great. I need you to know that it was great. I rode Space Mountain probably eighty or ninety (or five) times. I hung out with some great friends, including Paul, and David and Toby, and amazing local Robert. I got to ride Spaceship Earth and casually wander around Epcot and get my last glimpse of the Sorcerer’s Hat. And then … then it all got too much.

Folks, we all have our triggers. Mine come in different guises. I don’t want to go into what triggered my meltdown at Disney World, but much of it was that I needed some alone time and some routine, and that I missed home. I hadn’t written, I hadn’t gone to the gym, I hadn’t had much time to myself at all. Add that to the ethos of pure relaxation I’d been inside for nearly a week, and … well, you know that Stephen King novella, “The Langoliers”? There’s a part that talks about when someone who is used to pressure – who thrives on pressure – is finally pressure-free. Those people tend to explode.

One night, it came to a head. All I wanted was to be home. I called the airline and tried to book a flight, but it was just too expensive. I shut down. All I wanted was to be alone, just for awhile, like Greta Garbo.

Of course I bounced back, but it took awhile. And I hate myself a little for flipping out on vacation, and for putting my friends through the worst of who I am. It’s never my intention to get internal or get overwhelmed. I don’t want to be sad. But sometimes I am, and maybe it’s okay to be sad sometimes, even in the place I go to to be happy. But maybe I need to strike a balance with Disney World. I don’t want to get blasé about it, but making it the panacea to my bad moods is never going to make it the most easygoing place to be.

I’m taking most of 2015 off of going there, in part because I need to reset my longing, in part because I need to figure out what the place means to me and why I like going, and in part because I need to set the Disney Twitter part of my life on the backburner for awhile, and let the negativity drain off fully.

The big show opened. The ImprovBoston Holiday Spectacular launched to a mostly polite (if sold out) Dad audience, and then kept getting bigger and bigger. We ran for eight shows, and only one didn’t sell out (and that was only by eight seats). Audiences responded mostly well, which was a boon for us, because the show was unusual in structure (sketch, improv, and music) and content (we deliberately avoided any holiday clichés and occasionally got weird). I was in the theater for most shows and laughed right along with everyone else.

My Sketchhaus run took off. I was worried (terrified?) that doing “regular” shows after the event stuff would diminish audiences. But the shows kept either selling out or near-selling out. Either the acts were bringing them in, my marketing was going better than expected, or word had gotten around that I was a pretty good producer and that I knew what I was doing. I would love to believe the latter. I also hooked up with my friend John Serpico and standup superstar Kelly McFarland to produce a new experimental variety show called LaughterRisk, starting in January. And my Johnny D’s nights just kept on keeping on.

I hung out with my Dad a lot. Ever since I became a real adult, my relationship with my Dad has been kind of awesome in every way. We drove up to visit my Grandma and Grandpa one weekend before Christmas, and my only regret was that I lost my really nice expensive headphones on the journey. The following weekend, Shawn and I went up and had our nice Christmas dinner and gift exchange with him and my new stepmother Donna. I gave my Dad a book featuring lady superheroes in fetish situations and he got me a tattoo. We’re basically the Waltons.

Our Christmas Eve tradition continued with Tracey and Liz, where we go over there and spend time eating all of the food, all of it, and give each other awesome presents. Early in 2014, I decided to call it “The Year of Christine,” given my Christine tattoo and the movie I showed on my birthday and re-reading the novel. The Year of Christine officially ended when Liz unveiled my big gift – a framed poster of Christine, the film. I could have wept. (For my part, I did make Tracey weep with my intuitive gift of a book of Louisa May Alcott’s letters to her husband. Sometimes, I still have it.)

Christmas, often a tense time for me because Shawn’s friends come along and we have Many Plans involving food and movies and gifts and everything, worked out pretty damn well. Shawn gave me Guardians of the Galaxy on Blu-Ray and a Daredevil action figure (and eventually a new Springsteen live record and my Zelda calendar), and my grandparents had gotten me a Starbucks and a Disney gift certificate and things were good. Easy. I was easing into the end of the year.

The last night of the year, I spent chugging comedy at ImprovBoston, and at the stroke of midnight I kissed a straight bald comedian on the head, because I do those things. It was great, but the capper of the year came three days earlier, when I went to Chameleon Tattoo and met with tattooer Matt, who had never inked me in the past, and got myself my long-sought Blitzen Trapper tattoo – an amalgam of three of their album covers. I wrote an entry about it and took pictures and everyone (including the band themselves) proclaimed it awesome.

I’ve been talking a lot about Blitzen Trapper a lot in these entries. More than Springsteen and more than Drive-By Truckers, both of whom gave me great records and great experiences this year (DBT’s might be one of their best albums, near flawless and a great way to jump into new material after being into them for years), but for myriad reasons, Blitzen Trapper really defined 2014. They were a major bright spot, a reason to believe in being creative in the face of adversity. They broke my depression in half. They were half of the best rock shows I saw this year, and the fact that I could see them with a wonderful friend who had moved far away was even better.

My favorite song this year is one that came out in 2011. It’s a song called, “Love the Way You Walk Away,” and much of the reason I latched onto it was because of a line that goes, “when you find what you’re looking for, you want it less.” It’s a melancholy line, because it describes so much of how I interact with a lot of my life. I can get blasé about the stuff I’ve worked for, and I can get overwhelmed with the places I go, and I can be petty about my victories and sore about my losses. Sometimes when I grab hold of the things I thought would make me happy, it turns out that happiness is as elusive as smoke, as illusory as false memory.

But as I reflect back on the best memories of 2014, another line from the song rises up. In 2014, I rode a bike around Denver with the Rockies in the distance. I saw the Overlook Hotel – the real one – for the first time, with my friend Beemer. I rebuilt my sketch team, constructed a night of comedy out of thin air, took back a different night of comedy, and became the kind of producer people ask for by name. I took a cruise with one of the best friends I’ve ever had and looked out at that giant ocean and had one of the best meals of my life. I learned more about cheese. I went to Disney World with my sweetie and we celebrated fifteen years together. I went to the 12-hour Halloween Horrorthon. I got my own bike from one of my other best friends. I took another friend to Disneyland for the first time. I got free Chuck Taylors and got Shawn an art showcase for his paintings for his birthday. My book of short stories was announced as a paperback. I ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for a novel I finished, and did NaNoWriMo for another novel I’m in the midst of writing. I got big at the gym. I got a new iPhone. I got some. It wasn’t the worst year ever. It just sometimes felt like it.

The other line of the song is the one I want to carry into this new year, the magical, mystical, science fiction year of 2015. It ends the last chorus: “it’s a sign or a symbol for the things in store.” I want to hold onto those good memories, the bright shining spots in a challenging year that helped me be okay and not totally lose myself. 2014, I survived you, but I love the way you walk away.

Let’s go.

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (November / This Is Your Sword)

Here’s what I did in November:

I wrote. I wrote until my tendons ached and my fingers hurt and my eyes burned so bad I could barely stand it. I wrote to the exclusion of real life. I wrote so hard and so fast that sometimes I thought I would go insane with writing. I kept looking at the word count and seeing myself pass a thousand-word mark, and thinking, I could get another thousand out easily. Take it in increments. Eventually that count marker will pass the hundred-word mark, and that means you’re close to 500 words, and when you hit 500 words, you’re over the hump so it’s just easy to hit another 500. You know this. Keep writing, Kev. Keep fucking writing.

It was National Novel Writing Month. I’d been looking forward to November first for months. For the uninitiated, here’s the conceit: you write a 50,000-word book in one month. It doesn’t have to be done, you just have to hit that 50k mark. The first year I tried it, I wrote an 85,000-word book called Welcome to Bloomsbury in the month’s time. Since, my ambition clashed a bit with my drive. I’ve successfully hit the 50k mark on three other books, but only two of those became actual novels. The one I was working on now was an old screenplay concept called Things Have Changed. I first thought of it when I was in my twenties and living in my old studio apartment, but never wrote it. The book was going to be one about identity and death and trying to figure out who you were as a person – some good jumping-off points for a good book, but nothing I could really handle back when I first started writing novels.

You could argue that that’s the trend I’m in now. Roller Disco Saturday Night was another one of my teenage novels, but the main thrust is my characters all trying to figure out who they are and where they’re going; discovering that that’s what my main character, Ruth, was missing in my first draft tied the book together. My Agent of Chaos is all about uncovering your past and realizing you used to be a whole different person than the one you turned out to be. Panic Town was picking up characters I haven’t touched in six years and figuring out who they were now, and how they had changed in the real-time years – and in the story-time seven months – I’d been away. So Things Have Changed, with its triplets and double identities, fit right into my explorations. Just after midnight on November first, I launched in and didn’t stop till I hit almost 4,000 words. The next day I woke up early and started writing at once. I nearly hit 10k on that first day. 10,000 words in one day. This novel wanted to be born.

I wrote feverishly for two weeks … but that pace isn’t really sustainable. I know that. For me, the start of a novel almost has to be a huge initial push, to get enough words behind me so that the architecture of the book has a good foundation to stand on. There are exceptions. My longest novel, The Legend of Jenny McCabe, started humbly, only 2,000 words a day, and ended up a thousand page book. Maybe there’s not just one good way. All I knew was that I was having fun. Intense, obsessive-compulsive fun, but fun nonetheless. I attended some NaNo meetings. Did some write-ins. A gaggle of my ImprovBoston friends tried their hand at NaNo so I organized a Facebook group to try to help inspire them to go further and support one another.

I hit 50,000 words halfway into week three. Had myself a little chai party at Starbucks. Rested for about a half hour. Then bent back over my keyboard and got back to work. My pace has slowed. The book is now around 72,000 words, but I’m deeper inside it now, exploring things I never thought to explore when I was racing. I’m intrigued to see where this is going, because I’ve strayed from the outline, and I only have the vaguest idea of how to end this thing. It’s my twentieth novel, you see, and I want it to be good. I want it to be excellent. I want it to be worthy of being my twentieth novel.

But the rest of my world didn’t end just because I decided to give myself over to a fictional music reviewer and two women who shared a name. I finished the new Stephen King novel, which is the first to actually give me nightmares since The Regulators. At Johnny D’s, I tested the limits of my power and put on the Spank Bank Comedy Hour, a standup night featuring only comedians I thought were sexy. Every single one was a straight guy. If I was a straight guy, I would almost definitely not be seen as quirky and fun for stuff like this.

My show Super Gay Comedy Fun Time premiered at ImprovBoston … and sold out. It sold out. This was the third Sketchhaus show and first SGCFT show that sold out since I’d taken back control of the night, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. We turned away people at the door. Turned them away. I wrote this short piece about why the night was successful:

I have to say - I had my doubts about a gay comedy event at ImprovBoston. Last time I did this, it was in June. The weather was warm and it was happening during Pride week, so it seemed like an easier sell. We're edging into mid-November here, and I'm still not sure what the "gay comedy scene" is like, if there even is one. Comedy changes fast, and the umbrella definition of "gay" changes faster. When I was young and there was gayness, it was always either homo dudes or lesbians, and bisexuals were rumored but not necessarily real. Now there's this whole diversity of fluid sexuality, shifting gender identities (or non-identities), a whole new awareness and embracing of trans folk and genderqueer people. And most of them - most of us - don't want to be defined by our sexuality/gender/personal interpretation of who we are. Sometimes we just wanna go on stage and make people laugh at our funny jokes.

There's a lot of reasons why Super Gay Comedy Fun Time was a success last night, not the least of which because we sold out so hard we had to turn people away at the door (it's cool - we have another show next Thursday at 9:00!) We throw around the word "diversity" like it's an eyerolling thing we have to put up with, but wow, that changes when you see all the viewpoints and interpretations on display at a show like this one. Two lesbian standups went up right after one another and had two completely different takes on the world. We had two sketch groups with straight allies who got hit on by dudes. Bisexuals, trans performers, gay guys, standups, musical performers, sketch groups, storytellers, performance art. All of it funny.

Diversity: sexual. Identity. Format. Comedy. We win because being GLBTQ isn't the only thing about us. It's the jumping-off point. What defines us is how fucking hilarious we are.

I began to dig on a song I’d bought early in the year, one from Springsteen’s latest album, High Hopes. Maybe not his best album or his most cohesive, but it’s one of those that continues to find deep pockets in me, music that fills in the hollow areas where you need music the most. When the record first came out, I responded most to the studio recording of “Dream Baby Dream” – a recording I’d been clamoring for since hearing it in concert during the Devils & Dust tour – and “Frankie Fell In Love,” because I love Springsteen’s pop side. But a vaguely Celtic song called “This is Your Sword” had been rising in my estimation, because it champions hope and ambition and love above sadness and cynicism. “Should you grow weary on the battlefield,” Springsteen says, “do not despair, our love is real.”

It was the message I needed to cling to. More rehearsals for The ImprovBoston Holiday Spectacular and my anxiety was ratcheting up. Would this be a good show? Would we have the type of success that we had with Comedy, America? Shawn and I went to visit my father and new stepmother at their dance symposium and saw Hunger Games and listened to Blitzen Trapper and everything was great until I had a full on panic attack.

I have an idea of what the panic attack meant. The keyed-up Kevin who was throttling through Things Have Changed had relaxed a little and could focus on the big show, which could not fail. I was broker than I had been in a good long while, and I had a long vacation coming up. I’d anticipated having more money than this going into the trip, but the holidays were upon us and everything was only adding to my anxiety. I didn’t know that work was planning on paying us a little early next month, and I didn’t know I’d be paid for a proofreading project, and I didn’t know if money was coming from any other sources. All I knew is that I had a nine-day Disney trip coming up at exactly the brokest point of my year, and that fact was settling into my brain. One night at a pretty inopportune time, I got deep into my skull and started ruminating on all the worst possible outcomes to every decision I’d made. At some point, I knew I was being silly … and I couldn’t stop.

Eventually, with Shawn’s help, I climbed out of myself, and began thinking seriously about medication to help with these issues. They don’t happen a lot, but when they hit, they hit hard and mercilessly. November had been a pretty terrific month, and here I was at the tail end of it, having trouble breathing and believing earnestly that the world was worse because of my influence on it. Did I mention it had also gotten a lot colder?

This is how I leave you going into December, which has almost exactly the opposite footprint as November. You’ll see. Spoiler alert: things end up not so bad. But we’ll get there.

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (October / Shake It Off)

Food poisoning? To start October off right? You betcha!

At this point, I was taking bad news and maladies as a matter of course. But maybe, in retrospect, it was the best way to start the month, because everything got better from there. Like, a lot better. It was as if my October was airlifted in from another, better year, right when I needed it the most.

Ongoing good stuff: Johnny D’s Comedy Presents was now, somewhat incongruously, an actual thing. Like an event people come to. I started getting superfans, folks who would come every week to see the show, no matter who was on it or what show it was. Stand-ups consistently told me I ran a really fun show and that everyone had such a good time there. By now, my name was a bit of a calling card for good production. I’d done Comedy, America!, Johnny D’s was where it was, and I used to do Sketchhaus at ImprovBoston.

Used to, because I gave up on it at the end of the prior year after two years of success. Another guy, Jake, picked it up and went in a lot of directions I wouldn’t have thought to go in – some I liked, some I didn’t like, at least at first. Then in October, he abruptly announced he was leaving for greener pastures in warmer states. I approached the powers that be at ImprovBoston to see if I could get my old job back. A job that takes a lot of time and energy and doesn’t pay, but something in me was desperate to be at the head of this show again. Sketch in Boston is always a little bit fragile, and it’s always in flux. I wanted to be at the head of things. I wanted to put myself in the thick of it and see if I could put my own mark on it, like I was trying to put my mark on standup and storytelling elsewhere.

I got it. My creative life was in the rebuilding, and it felt great.

One of the things I got handed was another go at Super Gay Comedy Fun Time, a show I’d done the year before to rampant success during Pride Week but had been delayed till November. No big deal … and that in itself was a big deal. I had friends in sketch, storytelling, standup, and improv now. I could book anyone. I rounded up groups and individuals and I gave them places and everyone seemed thrilled at the prospect. More importantly, ticket sales happened almost at once. I was positioning my Super Gay Comedy Fun Time to be an Event, and people were responding to it in kind. At the same time, the new major stage show that Allen and I were launching, The ImprovBoston Holiday Spectacular, had begun rehearsals. The theater side of things was ramping up, and mostly it felt like I was coming back to something that had been missing for a long time. I realized somewhere in the midst of all this that that had been part of my sadness in 2014: stepping away from sketch had caused a void in me. I didn’t know that would happen, or that the void would sustain itself. Now that void was closing, and I was starting to feel whole again.

The first Sketchhaus show happened … and it sold out. Then the second one happened, and that sold out. Not back a month and I was already winning back the small world I’d once ruled. Did I feel vindicated? Yeah, I did. I was good at this. I’d known my whole life I was good at one thing – writing – so to discover this late in the game that I was good at something else was nothing short of a revelation.

I got clearance from Cemetery Dance to expand my chapterbook Chart of Darkness into a real book and got to work at once. Here, again, was something else I’d missed: hardcore research I could spin into words. Nonfiction is slow and hard, but there are so many rewards. Pure research is its own reward – something that was never true in high school but was absolutely true now.

Speaking of writing: I was gearing up for National Novel Writing Month as much as I could. I had the idea in my head – it was a concept I’d been trying to write as a screenplay in my early 20s called Things Have Changed. I was never going to write the screenplay, I’d come to understand, but there was no reason I couldn’t put the cinematic first scene into a novel that would become a lot more internal. I was in the manner of exploring my inside world more and more with my novels, and Things Have Changed would be no exception. I built an outline and waited.

I was also waiting on an agent. I’d sent out a chunk of Roller Disco Saturday Night to a real New York Agent, and she wrote back to me and told me she’d like to see more of the book. That was over two months ago and I’m positive now that nothing will come of this path, but it was one of my best days in October and nothing subsequent is going to change that.

The trips happened: New York City at the Beacon to see my last Drive-By Truckers show of the year. The Beacon doesn’t have a rail, and you weren’t supposed to leave your seat, but I still saw my friends and had fun. Me and Marty, Duncan, Mark, and Jeff didn’t get to Rocky Horror because I forgot that October is sell-out month at Rocky. It was cool. I hung out with my buddies and it was awesome. I had picklebacks for the first time, lost at Tetris to Marty, and found ways to relax.

The end of the month came and I made good on my promise to show my sweetie a good time for our 15th anniversary, which had happened way back in February. His hand had healed enough for him to actually have fun again, and we boarded a plane to Walt Disney World. I know, sometimes, the place overwhelms me and I get in my head about having a good time that my brain works against itself. But this time, I was with my Shawn, and it was the Food and Wine fest, and my buddy Robert was there, and it was nothing but a fantastic time. It’s so rare that I’m completely at ease with myself, and for those five days in Florida, I was. That was cause enough for celebration.

I resist a lot of “generic pop” when it’s happening, only to have it to sublimate my consciousness and own me. It happened with “Roar,” by Katie Perry at the start of the year, and that song ended up being one that made my dedication to standing up for myself in the face of adversity. And then there Shawn and I were in the airport, and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” was playing, and my big thought was that I could do that if I wanted to. I could brush off all the bullshit that had been clogging my life up this whole year and work against being dragged down by it. Yes. That. And when I got home, the new Stephen King book, Revival, was waiting for me, so right there, it seemed my new dedication was working. I could believe the worst was over. I could believe that the rest of 2014 would be smooth sailing.

…I mean, it wasn’t entirely true, but why not let me have my terrific month?

Heave Ho

Being saved at a rock show is nothing new for me. It’s happened with Drive-By Truckers more times than I can count. Ditto Springsteen. Both of those performers bring something new to my life every time I see them. Springsteen usually plays bigger houses – arenas, sometimes stadiums – and for him, that’s what I need for all the bombast and tumult in me when I see him live. There’s no venue big enough to hold all my emotions, and he knows that, and he plays both to the core of me and to the cheap seats, allowing me to scream and explode into a larger world outside my headphones. Eventually I come back to myself, but it’s never immediate, and it’s never without being changed somehow.

DBT are always a more intimate experience. I’m usually right there on the rail, and usually with friends I hang out with when I’m there. They’re louder and more aggressive, and I get that stuff out when I’m connecting with them. We’re often in a small room – the 40 Watt, the 9:30 Club, places like that – and that works for me and them; I can give my energy directly to the band, and they give it right back. It’s major. It’s important.

I don’t quite know where me and Blitzen Trapper are yet, but here’s where we’ve been (without going over the same stories over and over): my year was real terrible until I saw them live in April with my buddy Ian. They were opening for Drive-By Truckers in Washington, DC, and while Ian and I were thrilled for the main event, that first night we’d witnessed the magic of a Blitzen Trapper show and could barely understand the amazing we were witnessing. It’s rare (not unheard of; see IAmDynamite) for an opening act to grab me as totally as the band I was there to see, but it was happening now, and what’s more, I was letting it happen. My mood shifted. My life changed, for the better. And I got lost in a deluge of records and singles and live shows and EPs and …

…and then the band started talking to me. I’m not crazy, shut up. What I mean is that I was posting enough about the band on Twitter (and buying their merch, and telling other people to buy their merch, and records, and everything else) that they started posting back. At first it was just thanks for hyping their band so hard – as I get older, I’m noticing that the bands I like aren’t on the Springsteen level of ubiquity; whether that’s a consequence of who they are, who I am, or how the music industry is, I don’t know – and then it was just talking. And that was new to me. Growing up, my two big heroes, Springsteen and Stephen King, were just too huge to start up a personal dialogue with me. This year, Patterson Hood of DBT added me on Facebook and we’ve talked, but fleetingly. It’s never not a thrill when your heroes treat you’re both regular folks.

I thought that connecting with Blitzen Trapper so much might diminish the power their music had on me, but instead it’s had the opposite effect. The songs seem more direct now, more important. One afternoon, I was rediscovering their album Furr and I thought to mention it on Twitter. The band (mostly Michael Van Pelt, bassist) opened up about the record, talking about how it came to be and what the studio was like. I got to discover the band in real time with the band’s help. This was utterly unique to me, a thing that never occurred to me to want and which simply couldn’t have been possible at another time. I’ve heard it said that social media is actually fracturing interpersonal relationships, especially when you only have 140 characters to communicate. I’m the poster boy for that not being the case.

I’ve been thinking about a Blitzen Trapper tattoo for awhile now, because when I love something I always want to inject it into my skin forever. The problem was that Blitzen Trapper doesn’t really have a single iconic figure. Sure, the lightning bolts are cool, and the cover of Furr has a sort of heavy metal font set in woodgrain, which looks great, but I knew I didn’t just want the band’s name on me. It took me some months of planning and listening to the band to hit on what to do. Most of it came to me while I was riding my rented bicycle on my last day in Denver, with the Rockies off in the distance and the song, “Wild Mountain Nation” in my ears. I fucking love that song, in part because it describes a part of the country I’ve never visited and had never really thought about. It’s exotic to me, in the way that Los Angeles is exotic to me. And the phrase itself – wild mountain nation – is so damned evocative, calling up all these images of caves and deer and rivers and things utterly foreign to my city boy life. It hit something deeper in me, something primal. You know that wild mountain nation’s rising up and going home, lead singer Eric Earley sang, and he would find no disagreement from me.

I wanted that phrase, but not that album cover. But what about the first record I ever bought from them, American Goldwing? That was a kick-ass album cover, with a night highway straight out of a Springsteen song, especially “Open All Night” with its talk highways as lunar landscapes. If I took the astronaut out of the picture, I could even fit in an approximation of the Furr font. Yeah. Yeah.

My tattooer John had moved back home to Michigan, and my next guy was a guy named Joe, who will feature in the narrative of my life at some point, I’m sure. But my Dad decided to give me a tattoo for Christmas – the only thing I really asked for from him – and it was becoming more and more important that I get this idea on my skin before the year was out. Shawn wondered time and again why it was so important that I get it done so quickly, and before the year was out. Then he stopped asking. He’s not as into signs and symbols and markers as I am, but I think after almost sixteen years together, he gets what they mean to me.

There’s a Blitzen Trapper song called “Big Black Bird” that starts off with the words, “heave ho.” It opens up into something of a nautical song – we all know how much Kev loves nautical songs – but those words keep repeating. Earley does this thing sometimes, usually when he’s saying “yeah,” when he’s using words as addenda, as punctuation, and there’s something about the internal “heave ho”s that feel like inevitabilities, shrugged off thoughts because it’s easy to toss away the stuff you don’t need. And sure I’m conflating, of course I am, but what’s music for but to find yourself in the songs? It’s been a … fucking difficult year, guys. I’m ready to get rid of it and do something awesome with my fortieth year on earth. Heave ho.

I went to Chameleon because I always go to Chameleon, and when I discovered Joe was attending a convention on the other side of the planet, I asked after Matt. I’ve been getting ink with Chameleon for over a decade, and I’ve done plenty of research into all the artists. I knew from his portfolio that Matt was good at what he did, and I had confidence that he could do for me what I needed. I consulted with him and he drew it up and a week later, I was lying down in his studio. I thought it would feel weird being under someone else’s tattoo machine – especially in John’s old office – but Matt has a great tableside manner and a steady, swift hand. The pain… Well, the pain was about a 5 on my tattoo scale. Where Moose was about a 2 and Barenaked Ladies was definitely a 10. Especially up near my collarbone. But Matt had me breathe and I laid as still as I could with him, and we were done with the new work in about an hour.

I stood in the mirror and looked into my reflection and that highway stretched into the distance. I wasn’t just on that highway; now I was that highway. The future stretched out into something warm and inviting. I was in a windless place on the edge of space, and I was ready to get moving toward my next amazing self. I know it’s ridiculous to think the calendar changing means a changing of life, but I’m willing to be a little ridiculous to wrap my mind around this year. I’m ready to be me again. I’m ready to stop being sad. I’m ready to move on and let go.

Heave ho.

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (September / Get Hurt)

Day one and I’m drunk at a rockabilly show. My friend Allen occasionally plays in a band called Old Hat, featuring my other friend Andy who I have a thing for, and I just knocked back some bourbon and I’m starting to feel it. And then I’m starting to not feel it. Or anything. It’s a good thing I’m not a drinking man, because it’s been a hard summer and I know my troubles aren’t over, but I’m feeling too loose now to care.

Of course, the world came back in a rush an hour later, because I get drunk easily but I don’t stay drunk, not usually, and my life is insistent. Shawn’s hand was still broken, my other friend still had a weird virus and still needs me to come to the hospital a bunch, and I had a show every Monday night at Johnny D’s and a World of Hurt showcase run for which to prepare. Because that wasn’t enough, I got called in to pinch-hit produce the big Best of Boston Sketch show. I threw myself into that with a fervor that surprised me; I was still trying to prove myself, still trying to make people think of me as a go-to producer that got stuff done. I got stuff done. And then I found more stuff to do.

I was still feeling my losses, you see. Writing for FEARnet.com had been a dream come true, and working that second job that made me temporarily rich-ish had made my life easy. And my novel was done. Oh, I still had a mess of edits ahead of me, but the fact is that I’d glommed onto Panic Town with the same fervor as I was approaching all my creative projects. Now it was over, the main thrust of it anyway, and I was adrift. On the other side of Panic Town, I was desperate for ways to pass the time that kept my mind off of those things, and Shawn’s hand, and my other friend’s illness, and my own existential struggles with identity and gender and my constant battle of being a good person who does bad things versus being a bad person who does good things.

I launched into editing My Agent of Chaos, the novel I finished before I wrote Panic Town. I got to have conversations with my past self about my tense changes and character shifts, and I was having fun doing it. I clung to my gym routine and my Saturday night routine – writing or editing in the early evening, then Mainstage and Face Off at ImprovBoston, then Rocky Horror before a bike ride home – with such an intensity it worried even me. After my bumpy August, with its existential crises and real-world issues, the need to return to something approaching my normal seemed necessary.

That’s when I got sick.

Like sick sick. I’m talking lying on the couch for hours just staring ahead into the void sick. I’m talking, drug me out and make me not feel because all feeling hurts sick. I forced myself to go to rehearsals and my Johnny D’s shows. This got me sicker, especially when I forced myself to ride my bike. I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to slow down. I knew I had to, I knew that my doctor asking me how much rest I got in general was in itself a sign that I was doing too much … but you know how it is with Type As. I didn’t have strep, thank God, but some sort of lunatic viral infection, partially caused by my lack of sleep and rest. You’d think I’d learn. I never do.

Add all this to the fact that I was suddenly having a knock-down drag-out fight with a friend I was not prepared to be fighting with. All of it added up to me getting low and staying low for half a month. I didn’t leave the couch much, unless I had to produce or rehearse something. Meals fell by the wayside. I felt useless.

Because I listened to my body instead of raging against my uselessness as I usually do, I started feeling better mid-month … just in time to go to my first Boston concert in a long time. The Gaslight Anthem was playing the House of Blues, and though I had balcony seats, I found myself on the main floor. Groups of people were pushed together and talking excitedly about the opening band – a group called Against Me!, who I knew about mainly because the lead singer was once a man and was now a woman. A couple of bro dudes behind me were talking about this very thing, and I kept expecting to hear a whole host of homophobic and transphobic missives. Here was the conversation:

“I used to really dig Tom as the lead singer, but Laura’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, the new album has an agenda, but it’s good, so who gives a fuck, right?”

“Want another PBR?”

And that was it. It was kind of a revelation.

Then the moshing started. I stayed out of it, mainly because I didn’t know anything deep about Against Me!. Plus, I mean, who wanted to jump in and maybe get hurt? I’m 39. I’m well past moshing age.

But then Gaslight Anthem took the stage and launched right into “Stay Vicious,” so hard and dense and rocking, and one of my favorite songs from the new album. The first time I’d heard new Gaslight Anthem this year was on my last day in California. Josh had dropped me off and I was missing him. My flight was delayed and delayed and delayed, and while I waited, my email told me that if I preordered the new album, Get Hurt, I could get the first single, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” right now. My flight eventually came an hour late, but already I’d listened to the new song six or seven times. The rest of the record came out months later and I fell inside a lot of it, especially the title track and the song “Selected Poems,” which went:

And all I seemed to find is that everything had chains

And all this life just seems like a series of dreams

Selected poems and lovers I can’t begin to name

And all in all I find is that nothing stays the same

They crashed into that song midway through their set – not really the kind of hardcore moshing – and I felt isolated in the middle of the floor, pinned to my spot with tears flowing down my cheeks, wanting to stop feeling useless, wanting to stop feeling like shit, wanting to be alive again. My year was one of upheaval, and here we were in September and nothing was as it had been the year before. I was sad a lot more, I was feeling a lot more tired, and maybe – just maybe – I was feeling a little bit old, too. 39 is young enough, but it’s not twenty.

Except … except when Gaslight Anthem blasted off into “Rollin’ and Tumblin” next, I didn’t hesitate. I threw myself right into the middle of the mosh pit. I screamed, “I’m almost forty!” Elbows bashed me. A knee jammed into my leg. Sweaty men and women on either side jostled me and I jostled back, and there was energy in it, and aggression, but no malice. A trangender teenager looked at me warily for a moment, then threw their hands in the air and screamed with wild abandon, then they were up above my head, and I was helping them surf.

Maybe I came here to get hurt, but I got healed, too. Just a little. Not enough. But I was learning that this year really was a series of dreams, and I had to keep waking up.

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (August / Knock Yourself Out)

And now we come to the rollercoaster of intensity that was August.

There’s a song that came out years ago in 2004 as part of the I Heart Huckabees soundtrack. It’s by Jon Brion, and it’s called “Knock Yourself Out.” When I was going through my hard year of 2005, I listened to it a lot, constantly. The whole song is great, but one line – “And you’ve gotta find a way to be okay” – kept rising above the rabble of my brain. I discovered it again in August, and I put it into a lot of my new playlists – ones featuring new music by Drive-By Truckers and Blitzen Trapper and Springsteen, and one-off songs by Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. Buried in the middle of everything is something telling me – commanding me – that it’s not a choice. That I have to find a way to be okay. It’s not a choice. It’s not an option. Maybe you can’t always hit terrific. Maybe you can’t always be your best self. But you have to be okay. You have to be okay. But sometimes it’s so damn hard.

Shawn injured himself, that was the start of things…

Well, no. The start of things was that I was having a really bad day August 1st and I don’t remember why. It’s all over Facebook. I was having a terrible day and even though I was working out and writing and putting on shows – doing my routine – and none of it was helping. It was just my brain being my brain. Part of it was because someone had read my article about putting on a woman’s comedy show on the sly and being told it didn’t mean shit because I was a man. I’ve had a little more time dealing with this, and talking with women, and getting some input, and I’ve come to some conclusions. I did the women’s comedy month and didn’t tell anyone it was a women’s comedy month and then wrote an essay about why it’s important to feature women in comedy, and how I went about doing it, and why the status quo should be all different comedic voices at all times. Most of my response, from men and women, had been very positive, but all it takes is one negative. Someone telling me that I should feel bad because I have a dick.

Now, look. I get it. The world would be awesome if either I was a woman, or a woman had made manifest this comedy experience. And maybe the thing I was doing by writing an essay about it – one that might have come across as “see what happens when a man lets the women talk?” – was gloating or reveling. But … okay, goddammit, I did a good thing, and it was something other people weren’t doing, and I wanted to be an example. Selfishly, too? Yeah, I wanted credit. Sure I did. Not as a man, but as a booker. As a producer. As someone who came up through the ranks in comedy and finally had the power and the means and the will to enact good, positive change. I felt – and I guess I feel – like I deserve some credit. Maybe that makes me a bad feminist. Maybe this is the definition of “mansplaining.” But my essay tried to underline my flaws, my questions, my nervousness at dipping my fingers into potentially volatile waters. But what I come away with after all this is that I, as a human, did something I thought was necessary, and it benefitted a lot of other people who felt the same way. I’m never going to apologize for doing it, and while I probably shouldn’t be all, “look at me, world, aren’t I awesome for doing it,” I’m not going to feel sorry for feeling good about doing it, or for talking about it. I’m not a damn saint. When I help an old person across the street, I tell people I did it. I also tell people that I threw a brick through a synagogue window when I was eight. I live a live wide open, and if I’m going to own up to all my shit, I’m going to take credit for the good stuff I do, too.

So, the good stuff I do: a friend of mine got a rare virus (not AIDS) in August, the day before a big work trip to Denver. The emergency room called me at 10:00 at night because he’d been found on his floor, unable to get up or call the ambulance. I got on my bike and drove the five miles out to the hospital, where I stayed with him until he was conscious, and answered all the doctor’s questions. After I got back from Denver, I went to the recovery center every other day to check up on him, and bring him stuff, and try to make his life better.

Of course this was when Shawn hurt his finger. For most of the summer, he couldn’t use his hand. It fell on me to do all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the chores. The cooking was a big deal for me. I decided I didn’t want Shawn to get bored with the same old food I’d been making lately, because at home, the kitchen is usually his, despite the fact that I’d shown something of a flair for French cooking a few years hence. Now, though, I could jump back into things. The kitchen became my domain, and I didn’t stay French. I decided to go worldwide, finding interesting recipes from countries all over the world and serving them up, trying to keep Shawn engaged and happy and not bored with things.

In the midst of all this, I went to Denver, for my big work trip. There, I skipped out on the baseball game everyone else went to, and I finally – finally – met up with my friend Beemer, who’d been my buddy since the heyday of LiveJournal, but who I had met only fleetingly, at a Panda Express near my office like 7 years prior. A little tentatively before my trip, I’d asked him if he’d be into driving up to Estes Park, about two hours out from Denver, so I could fulfill a lifelong dream of seeing The Stanley, the hotel that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining. Literally a lifelong dream. I’d wanted to visit The Stanley since I was fourteen and read the novel for the first time, then read all the backstory on it. I could picture Stephen King and his family in the lobby in 1973, being the last guests of that hotel, and King looking out at the Rockies as the winter came on and getting the idea for the novel all at once. The story and the story behind the story have been inside my DNA since I was a teenager, and with Beemer’s help, I was going to see it.

Of course, I was nervous that he and I wouldn’t get along, or that the conversation would dry up, or that I’d annoy him with my fanboy lunacy. But the best thing about knowing people through LiveJournal first is that they’re already used to your weirdnesses, and are prepared for an onslaught of you. I met Beemer like an old friend, and that feeling never went away. We climbed up and up into the Rockies, talking and growing closer and better, and slowly the hotel of my dreams and nightmares made itself visible on the horizon.

We did the ghost tour, of course, and it was fine, but mostly it was cool because it got me going through the hotel more. I’d been on Stephen King tours in Maine before, and they were all fine, but for the first time ever, it really felt as if I was wandering the hallways of my writing hero’s imagination.

Home awaited me, of course, and all my old and new responsibilities. And it was hard. I don’t mind saying it was hard. And I don’t mind taking credit for doing all of it, either, because maybe I am a good person, okay? That’s a thing I’m learning to be okay with this year. Maybe I am a good person, but maybe I’m not a selfless person, because good people can have bad stuff in them, and questionable morals. I’m not the best person, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have to be. Sometimes in the past, I didn’t live my best life because I didn’t want to be all prideful about doing the best I could. That’s … maybe that’s fucked up.

I want the credit. I want to be recognized for a job well done. I want people to like me for being good at who I am, what I do, how I help. Does that suck? Maybe it does. But this is me, being me. I’m tired of pretending I don’t care if people know I’ve done something good. I’d be a terrible superhero. Daredevil and Buffy never wanted a standing ovation for saving the world, and here I am wanting people to say how awesome I am for making chicken cordon bleu because my husband broke his hand. I don’t know what kind of person that makes me.

One final thing: I finished Panic Town. Midway through the month, I finished the first Wayne Corbin book in over five years. It was my nineteenth novel, and I wrote it in three months flat. I got some of it right, some of it wrong, some of it bloated and some of it too compressed … but it was finished. I’d given myself until October to finish it and managed to get it written in five months flat. It was the fastest I’d written a novel since the mid-2000s, when I wrote an 80,000-word book in under a month. And I was proud of that too. It needs editing and it needs more editing, but that first draft is always the most important. Being able to stand with your art and say, “this is something I did, this is a thing I made that didn’t exist before,” that’s something.

Writing is something, and helping is something, and being a good person is something. And it’s taken me such a long time to get to the point of this, because I have so much doubt in my own abilities, and so much anxiety about being good, and so many problems with the man I am and the man I was and the man I will be. But I think, after all this time, I’m learning how to be okay with it all.

You gotta find a way to be okay. You gotta.

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (July / Team)

One of the ways I’ve been writing these things is by going through my Facebook for the month indicated to sort of jog my memory. I tend to document my life pretty thoroughly in the perpetual present; Past Kev has been really helpful in getting Present Kev up to speed.

Something I’ve noticed in July is how many comedians decided to add me as a friend in July. People I book regularly now, folks I talk to and put on stage and work to make visible and awesome – we became friends in July. If nothing else, that serves to remind me that the big stuff that happens always starts off small; sometimes someone clicks “add” and then we’re all on stage together and laughing until we can’t stop.

Speaking of comedy: I put up a new storytelling show called Hook, which was all about music and stories and it was a moderate success. World of Hurt continued with “Return Engagement,” and I acted on stage again, and it’s apparently something I enjoy doing. I put up a musical comedy show at Johnny D’s as a way to honor Keytar Bear, a local busker who performs in a full on bear costume who got beat up for no reason. That became something of a turning point show: a lot of people came to my night because Keytar Bear is popular, and a lot of those people just kept on coming. My little comedy night had forged its own identity and it just kept doing it. Comedy, America!, the show I produced and co-created with my comedy partner Allen, came to its rousing and sold-out finale, and it ending left a void I was desperate to fill.

I decided, late in the month, to stop thinking of comedy as a hobby, as something I dabble in. It became obvious midway through the year that it was actually a calling, something I was as fully invested in as my writing. Like my writing, it was a passion that didn’t pay much, but I was going to keep doing it anyway. Because I loved it. I keep loving it.

I kept writing. Panic Town had caught hold. At first, I was frustrated because I found I could only write at night and only about 1,500 words a day. Then I was pushing myself to 2,000. Then 3,000. One day I wrote 7,500 words without breaking a sweat. The book decided it wanted to live, that was all. It wanted to live and thrive and be real. And who was I to stand in its way?

On the writing topic: I found all the fanfiction I wrote. All of it. The angsty slash. The genfic. The bonkers wingfic. I threw it all up on a page called The Kevidence and called it good. I was fully invested in owning my fiction again for the first time in a long time. The year before, I’d written my first novel in four years, My Agent of Chaos, and it was a troubled and troubling book that was sort of oddly constructed and was mainly just me masturbating about my adolescence (unlike all my other novels, ha ha ha), but it broke through a wall and now we were on the other side of that wall. I wrote poetry. Or songs. I never know which is which.

My pop culture loves hit some milestones; this doesn’t seem personal, but only if you know how deeply entrenched in my life the stuff I love is. Born in the USA turned 30 and I wrote a series of posts about my Top 20 Springsteen albums. Also I listened to Born in the USA on a continuous loop for about seven hours. One of those things you learn as you get older is that just because something is lunatic popular doesn’t mean you can’t have your own intense personal reactions to it. Also, Archie died. Not the Universe-1 Archie, but the alternate future Archie from Life With Archie, which actually hit me harder because that was the one I earnestly loved the most. Of course, everyone on the internet sent me their condolences (or, sometimes, just confused shrugs wondering why Archie was still a thing, because that’s cool), but it was another one of those headline-grabbers that everyone was aware of, but which actually hit me pretty hard. I wrote a whole thing about it, because I was getting used to writing everything out again.

And I turned 39.

For my birthday, I booked a screening room at my friend Tom’s theater and screened a couple of movies: John Carpenter’s Christine and the MST3K episode “Werewolf.” My friend Jeff came down from New York for his first hangout in Boston with me, and we did Rocky Horror (because that’s something I do with my New York and New Jersey friends, pretty much always), and the day he arrived, I rode my bike (my bike!) to the local Super Fancy Cheesemonger and bought a hundred dollars worth of artisan cheese, because I’m weird. In the theater, I set it all out on tables and labeled it and there was tupelo honey and cherry jam and, like, raisins. A whole passel of friends came, some I didn’t expect, and they heckled Christine, which I was apparently perfectly okay with. My friend Paul had sent me some panniers for my bike (my bike!) and I made use of them pretty constantly. Jeff and my buddy Dennis lost it at “Werewolf,” and Shawn didn’t leave in the middle of things, even though he was clearly not into MST3K. We make sacrifices for each other’s birthdays, sweetie.

The next day, I took Jeff to Chameleon and I got me engraved: for my final tattoo with John, I got myself a Disney Cruise Line tattoo. Yes, it’s a corporate logo and that’s a little weird … but I got it because taking a cruise with Jeff the year before had been so fun and relaxing and thrilling for me, and I like tattoos that commemorate my friends and the great times we have together. Plus, because it was John’s last tattoo with me, it was sort of a bittersweet bon voyage. He played me Springsteen. That was good.

I spent a lot of bike rides listening to the song “Team,” by Lorde, but performed by Postmodern Jukebox with Puddles Pity Party, a nearly seven foot baritone sad clown. It’s supposed to be sort of ironic; a sort of swinging, jazzy version of Lorde’s dark pop, but that’s not how I took it. I rode that bike down Mass Ave, the wind in my face, my music turned to the precise volume where I can totally hear the road sounds but I can still rock out. My bike rides were almost always solitary, but I was often going from one place alone to another place with people. Whether it was from Starbucks to ImprovBoston, or to rehearsal, or to Rocky Horror, or to meet Shawn for comics, I was usually going to a place with people who liked me and who welcomed my presence. It began to strike me that I had a life all over the city, places I could go where people knew me and thought well of me. I was a buddy, a booker, a host, and a producer; a director and a brother and a fan. And I wasn’t alone. I didn’t have to be alone unless I wanted to be.

Did I want to be? Yeah, still, sometimes. And I was learning to be okay with that, too. That impulse to not always be surrounded by people, even as I was learning that I could be surrounded by people, any time I wanted to be. The hardest thing in this world is discovering people like you … and that it’s okay to be okay with knowing that, instead of always having to make them prove it.

Trying. I was trying. And succeeding more than I thought I would way back in January, when everything fell apart. Success is hard, though. You can’t coast. It’s not the endgame. You have to keep working at it. I kept working at it.

I keep working at it.