by john | May 3, 2011 | Music, Real Life
I’m back from the Fest that was Merle, and while I appreciate the fact that I say this every year – holy crap what a show! Seriously, Robert Plant, Sam Bush, Lyle Lovett, Joan Osborne, Doc Watson, The Waybacks, Peter Rowan, Tony Rice, Tim O’Brien, and more, more, more! And we didn’t even go to the festival on Day 1!
I will admit to having a religious experience on at least four different occasions throughout the weekend. I’ll give you those highlights, but for the full experience you’ll have to go with me next year!
#1 – Hartford Tribute Band – if you’re not a John Hartford fan, its just because you don’t know you’re a John Hartford fan yet. In a tribute to the late great Hartford, Sam Bush, Allison Brown, Laura Boosinger & Tim O’Brien got together for an awesome rendition of “Steam Powered Aero-Plane,” one of my favorite Hartford songs.
#2 – The Hillside Album Hour – over the past four years, The Waybacks have created a tradition of covering a classic rock album with a host of special guests every Saturday at Merlefest. Past albums include Led Zeppelin II, Sticky Fingers and Abbey Road. Being raised on The Allman Brothers, when they tore into Eat a Peach it was a particularly special moment for me. That I shared with probably 15,000 of my closest friends. This year’s special guest vocalist was Joan Osborne, and man, that chick can wail!
#3 – same set – at the end of the set, they decided that Little Martha was too mellow to end with, so they ripped out a monstrous rendition of “Whipping Post” that must have caused tremors miles away from all the concentrated dancing and clapping. I wept a little. Just a little.
#4 – Sunday – Robert Plant and The Band of Joy – the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame made an appearance at the bluegrass festival, and it was amazing! From the opening number (Black Dog), Plant and his new Band of Joy – Buddy Miller, Patti Griffin, Darrell Scott, Byron House and a drummer who I forgot because I suck – killed it. The closer for the set was a beautiful version of “Ramble On.” I wept a little again, and danced like a happy fat man, which I was.
At some point I’ll get around to telling the traumatic story of trying to get home, but for today we’ll accentuate the positive. It was a great weekend of music with great friends – hope to see you there next year!
by john | Apr 27, 2011 | Return to Eden, Writing
Not as silly as some, but I really want to work on two stories at once, one in a completely different vein than Knight Moves (pun intended, of course). So each week I’ll present a new segment of Return to Eden, another work in progress. This stuff is so very first draft, but I think it might go somewhere interesting. It will be presented here in bite-size chunks, not even chapters, and when I’m done there should be a book in it.
So here’s the beginnings of a new project, because I just don’t have enough to do, right? All feedback is welcomed!
Return to Eden
The day the world ended started off just like every other Thursday. Christin Kinsey got up after the alarm went off for the third time, staggered to the bathroom in her t-shirt and pajama bottoms, went about her morning business, took a shower, brushed her teeth, yelled at her brother Matt to drag his sorry butt out of bed because she wasn’t going to be late on account of him again this week, went back into her room, got dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a Kings of Leon T-shirt she’d borrowed from her boyfriend Kent a week or two ago, and beat on Matt’s door a couple more times before heading downstairs for breakfast.
While Christin was settling in behind a bowl of Lucky Charms and a Coke, her mom was in the kitchen in dress slacks and a bra, ironing a shirt that had obviously spent the night in the dryer and mainlining coffee with CNN on in the background. There was some other big fuss going on somewhere in the world with people that hated Americans shooting Americans, and Americans going in to stop them from shooting too many other people, and some talking heads with French accents whining about the overbearing American policies.
“Mom,” Christin asked between mouthfuls of cereal and marshmallows, “why don’t French people like us?”
“Because all frogs are douchebags” answered Matt, clumping down the stairs in baggy cargo shorts and Doc Marten boots, the uniform of his whole bunch of loser friends.
“Matthew!” Shrieked their mother, putting on her shirt and zipping up her slacks while simultaneously trying to butter a bagel and put away the iron. “We do not use terms like ‘douchebags’ or ‘frogs’ in this house! There are some French people who would rather eat Brie and smoke stinky cigarettes than do what needs to be done in the world, but that’s no reason to condemn the whole country. The French contributed some wonderful things to society,”
“Yeah,” Matt interrupted, “like eating snails and the guillotine.”
“I can think of some times when the guillotine would be useful, muttered Christin.
“Alright you two comedians, get your butts out of here or you’re going to be late. Again.” Their mother hustled them out of the kitchen and thrust some cash into Christin’s hand. “This should get you some gas and cover lunch for both of you. There’s frozen pizza in the fridge for tonight, I’ve got to go to Charlotte for a meeting with the B of A people about the loan.” She had been negotiating with the mortgage demons at Bank of America for months about refinancing their home, and it was, in her words, time for someone to “shit or get off the pot.” Sandra Kinsey didn’t swear often, but more and more often lately when she did, it involved someone with the mortgage company.
Things had been okay when Christin and Matt’s dad had been around, but Jacob Kinsey had died of lung cancer three years ago, and things had gotten tight with all his medical bills. Sandra had mortgaged the house to the hilt to pay off all the doctors and hospitals, but when the housing market in Asheville, NC went into the toilet like it did all over the country, they owed a lot more on the house than it was worth. President Obama’s plans to help American homeowners sounded good on TV, but didn’t always work out so well when reality hit the fan, as Sandra had become increasingly fond of saying. So today she was headed down to Charlotte, and she was determined to come home with some answers, or at least with a pound of flesh from some useless paper-pusher to make her feel better.
Sandra followed her kids out the front door and watched as they piled in Jacob’s old F-100 pickup truck and headed off to school. She’d kept the truck around until Christin had been old enough to drive, then given it to the girl for her sixteenth birthday. Big, blocky and decidedly un-sexy, the truck was nevertheless dependable and certainly better built than anything that had come out of Detroit in the past 30 years. It was a 1965 model, the year Jacob was born, and he had restored it to working order, if not much more than that. So it was a big rolling hunk of steel that Sandra didn’t mind sending her kids off to school in while she headed down the mountains in her Nissan Murano to do battle with the evildoers at the great corporate headquarters.
by john | Apr 25, 2011 | Real Life
So this weekend I’ll be making my annual trek into the hills of North Carolina for the Merle Watson Memorial Music Festival, or Merlefest. Me and tens of thousands of my closest friends will descend upon North Wilkesboro, NC for some of the finest bluegrass and Americana music the world has to offer. This is a huge vacation for me every year, because I don’t take a computer.
That’s right, I will not be taking a computer to Merlefest. I won’t blog for three days, and I’ll barely check email or look at my Amazon stats (yeah, right!). But this is an opportunity to unplug, relax, commune with nature and music, and generally relax. Obviously I’m looking forward to it, as I do every year, but a little more so this year, because this guy’s going to be performing on Sunday, and he’s been on my list of people to see for, oh, my whole life!
That’s right – Robert F’n Plant is closing out Merlefest with his Band of Joy! And there’s plenty of joy for me with that! I just bought the album off Amazon and have been taking advantage of their free cloud storage and music player all day (wish there was an app for iPhone, but I see why that isn’t likely to happen). If you don’t think that Jeff Bezos is a flippin’ genius, then you’re not paying attention. First the Kindle, then the whole thing with giving free access to all the Amazon tv shows to Prime subscribers, now giving 20GB of free online storage to anyone who buys an MP3 album from them. Crazy like a fox, I tell you.
But anyway, I’m looking very much forward to Merlefest for the weekend. A few days of shorts, Birkenstocks, festival food and great music is just what I need before I come back into town to the craziness that will be RENT technical rehearsals. I started loading in gear for that this weekend, and if I wasn’t already convinced that this needs to be my last show for a while, that did it. I haven’t even really done anything yet and I’m tired! But I think it will be an awesome show, if we all survive the tech process :). I’ll post photos as we get into the process, but that will be a while.
And of course the same weekend that RENT opens, which is already the weekend I’m double-booked at the SC Book Festival, my wife has a show opening! Yeah, Suzy decided to go audition for The Edge Theatre Company’s production of Miss Nelson is Missing, and damned if she didn’t land the title role! It’s the first thing she’s auditioned for in probably 5-6 years, and she gets the lead! I’m so proud of her I could bust, but I don’t really know how I’m going to be in three places at once that weekend. I mean, I’m a big dude, but I’m not that big!
Meh, I need a clone. Or a fat hillbilly look-alike.
by john | Apr 23, 2011 | Writing
So it’s been a good month, I think that’s a pretty solid understatement. I’ve sold far more copies of all of my books than I have in any other month, and in some cases I’ve sold more copies this month than I have all other months combined. And in a great bit of circular sales, as my books sell more, they appear on more bestseller lists on Amazon, so they’re easier to find, so they sell more. So they move up on lists, so they’re even easier to find than before, so they sell more. And so on…
It’s been a lot of fun watching my books hover around the middle of most of these lists, but the great part has been watching Hard Day’s Knight skyrocket up the Occult Horror list. It’s currently sitting around #10, and is sharing the list with folks like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, Scott Nicholson, and other big-selling authors. But making these sub-lists isn’t what I’m shooting for – I want to make the big list. The Amazon Top 100.
Honestly, I don’t know what the criteria are anymore for being considered a “best-seller.” It used to be making the NY Times list, and for traditionally published authors maybe it still is. But they don’t count indies, no matter how many we sell, so I think their list is skewed. Obviously the Amazon list is skewed, since it’s only one store, but it is a pretty good barometer for ebook sales. At least I think.But I’ve got a long way to go before I can use the term best-seller with regards to any of my books, at least with a straight face. But sales are chugging along, and if things keep going like they have been, then I’ll probably do fewer book shows and stay home and write more. But we’ll see how I feel after the SC Book Festival and Heroes Con in the next couple months.
Meh, file this under incoherent blog posts, I need a nap. Happy Easter, folks!
by john | Apr 20, 2011 | Writing
Yep, I’m going to try out one of these new-fangled blog tours. I stumbled upon The Bookish Snob while looking for book bloggers to see about getting some love for my books, and I found out that Belinda over there has a service that she offers that is basically a tour director gig. So I checked the rates, thought they were very reasonable, and shot her an email. She replied that my stuff looked like a good fit, and got rolling setting everything up.
So next month I’ll be going on tour! I’ll be visiting more than two dozen blogs all across teh interwebs, ending up here on June 10th. I’ve got a slew of guest posts and interviews to write up, so my output here may be limited during that time. Because between the guest posts and cranking out a pile of words each night on Knight Moves, I’m gonna be a busy boy.
But I finished the outline for Knight Moves last night, so I should be able to jam on that in the next three weeks or so, and maybe (just maybe!) have the first draft complete before I head off to the SC Book Festival. If any of you are in Columbia, SC May 13-15, come see me at this free event! But I do have a couple of things looming before that, including a lighting design for RENT here in Charlotte (not that I’m in Charlotte at the moment, I’m actually in Atlanta for work) and Merlefest! There will be plenty more Merlefest info coming soon, but suffice to say that I’m crazy excited about it for a ton of reasons, not the least of which is ROBERT PLANT.
