I’m not surprised to find out that there are a lot of bits of sushi etiquette that I didn’t know about, but some of these I think I’ll purposefully ignore moving forward.Now I like me some sushi, but the biggest problem I run into is with rolls. There’s a joint I frequent in Atlanta called Aqua Bistro in Buckhead, and I love a roll they have on their menu called the Yummy Yummy roll. I can be found there pretty much any Monday night that I’m in the ATL, because it’s 2 for 1 roll night, and fat boy likes to eat. But the rolls that I get some places are so big, it seems like it’s impossible to get it all in my mouth in one bite without cramming my mouth full and looking like a huge boor.
Now typically I don’t care, because in many cases I am a huge boor, but I wonder why the rolls are made so huge that I have to try to bite through it, which typically leads to a huge fail on my part. So I try to eat as delicately as possible, but often end up making a huge mess. But back to the rules – some of these just don’t work for me. For one, I like dipping my rice in the soy, so I’m going to dip my rice in the soy. And if you don’t like it, deal with it. And if I’m given disposable chopsticks, I’m gonna rub them together. That’s just the deal. If I get high-tone chopsticks, I’ll trust them to be splinter-free. And sometimes I like dropping a little wasabi in my soy. Not always, depends on the mood.
But more importantly, where are there some other good sushi joints that I’m missing? In Charlotte I love New Zealand Cafe, and Rousan’s is always harmless. But I’m always looking for recommendations in Charlotte and Atlanta, since those are the cities that I eat most of my meals in.
It’s a busy week, and we got some spectacularly good news right before the Just Do It performance last weekend, so here’s what’s up.
Tuesday night – Charlotte Writer’s Club meeting at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at SouthPark. I’ve been going to this for a few months now, and am still deciding exactly what I’m getting out of my membership. The people are all very nice, and the speakers are usually pretty interesting, but there’s not a lot of sharing of member’s work that goes on. I did meet Jessie there, and I’ve since started to enjoy her blog daily, so that’s good. But I think it might not be something I invest too heavily into long-term. Just enough to get a little boost now and then.
Sometime this week I’m trying to get out to CAST to see Our Lady of 121st Street and review it for Charlotte Viewpoint. I like the script, and several of my friends are in it, so that should be fun.
Saturday afternoon I’ll head over to the Charlotte Comic Mini-Con put on by Heroes. I actually worked at Heroes for a while some years back when they were still on Central Avenue. This was back when I was playing Magic the Gathering a lot and I ran the tourneys at Heroes and basically made enough money working there to pay for my comics and my Magic cards. I’ve recently gotten back into reading comics, so there’s another cash-suck in my life, but these little cons are usually good for picking up trade paperbacks ridiculously cheaply, so I can get a lot of volume reading in. Comics have been a part of my life on and off forever, and this weekend I spent a lot of time curled up with Volumes I & II of Absolute Sandman, reminding myself how absolutely beautiful those books are. I think I’ll bust out my Chris Bachalo Death T-Shirt for Story Slam Saturday night in honor of the books.
Yeah, everything is leading up to Story Slam for me this weekend. 8PM kicks off another Carolina Writers’ Night, and this time I’m sharing the stage with a novelist, a guitarist/short story writer and a columnist. It oughta be fun, and there’s always enough beer at Story Slam to make me seem witty, so come on out. It’s only $10, and then you can buy a book later and one of us will sign it for you. If you’re lucky, the one that wrote the book will sign it!
So last weekend, just before I went on for Just Do It, Suzy pulls me aside and tells me that the testing lab called. Now most of you don’t know that Suzy was recently tested for the breast cancer gene, and given the fact that her mother, aunt and grandmother all died of breast cancer, I figured the odds of her not having this particular gene were pretty slim. And her doc had already told her that if she had the gene, then she should seriously consider a double mastectomy.
Now a lot of you have met my wife. There’s a lot of boob there. And I’m a boob man. So telling the two of us that the girls might have to be removed was NOT a happy statement. Besides the scary genetic stuff, and bringing back memories of her mother’s death, telling a woman she’s gonna have to have her breasts removed is a pretty big damn deal. So it was with no small measure of delight that she told me that the test came back negative, and she does not have the genetic deformity that typically indicates a prediliction towards breast cancer, so we can return to our regularly scheduled program of mammograms and routine maintenance. So that was our good news for the day, and it was good indeed.
Talk with y’all later, and I hope to see you at Story Slam this weekend!
Welcome to the “John experiments with the built-in webcam on his Mac” portion of the blog. Since I’ve been writing about writing, and trying to sell my books, but I haven’t been doing a very good job of sharing with you what’s in my books, and since they’re already considered published by most literary journals and are therefore verboten, I thought I’d (in one very excellent run-on sentence) start recording them here and sharing them that way.
And of course because I’m a cheap fuck I didn’t buy a tripod for my new handheld HD camera, so I’m using the built-in cam on the Mac. Here’s the first one, the quality may improve as I go along. Or I may decide this is a huge pain in the ass and just watch football. Frankly, after I get this uploaded I’m watching football regardless.
I’ve been onstage for twenty years now, since my first role in high school when I was 16. In that time I’ve played supporting roles, character roles and leading roles. I’ve done contemporary shows, Shakespeare and modern drama. I’ve performed for full houses and crowds of half a dozen. There have been shows that moved me and shows that barely touched me. By this point, I can walk out in front of a theatre crowd of pretty much any size in pretty much any capacity and treat it as just another day at the office. It’s still special, but it’s not new.
But reading my work in front of people scares the bejesus out of me. It’s very different when I’m reading stuff I wrote. The stuff I do with theatre is someone else’s creation, someone else’s guts and blood spilled out onto the page. When I’m reading my poetry and other writing, it’s all me. And that’s a different level of scary than anything I’ve ever experienced in theatre.
Last night I had a blast at Just Do It. I read two of my pieces that were written specifically for the event, which was themed “Nobody Told Me.” One was titled “Girls Like You” and the other was “Octogen.” Suzy shot video of the performances, but it was overexposed and didn’t look good, so I won’t be posting that here. The first one was a lighthearted piece about getting dumped, and the second was a more serious piece about my aging mother. They were very well-received, and I sold a couple of books at concessions, which is always a plus. It’s always funny to me when theatre people who have known me for years read my stuff or see me read, because most of them have no idea that I write. I’ve written poetry much longer than I’ve done theatre, but with theatre taking up so much of my life for the last dozen years or so, many of my friends are shocked when they see me read poetry that I’ve written. It also helps that I don’t look like the average poet. So while I love reading my stuff, there is still an element of stage fright involved. Not gonna stop me, of course, because that’s the best way to promote my book. So come on out to Story Slam next Saturday to see me!
So last night I was the featured speaker at the Charlotte Storyteller’s Guild meeting, and it was a blast. I read a couple of selections from Returning the Favor, and answered questions about self-publishing and things like that, and that got me to thinking.
I did a lot of things ass-backwards along this journey, and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not. The typical route to “success” as a poet in the US is to write a bunch of stuff, polish it either in workshops or solitude, and submit a bunch of stuff all over the place, collecting rejection letters by the pound until a few things start to get published. Then after you’ve had some things accepted by literary journals, who don’t actually pay anything for the publication, or make any profit themselves, you might get one of the small presses that print books of poetry to publish your collection instead of having to do it yourself. Then you buy a pile of the books to sell at readings, and hopefully your publisher can sell a few as well. In the meantime, you continue your life as a stay-at-home parent or English professor, because the number of people who make a living as a poet in the US is smaller than the number of people who actually are profitable on the major poker tournament circuit.
But instead I printed a book, ordered 100 copies, and got seriously motivated to sell them. Turns out that I’m not out much more money from doing it my way than I would have been if I’d gotten a book published in the traditional method and bought 100 copies from a real publisher. Maybe a couple hundred bucks, but not much more than that. I was tech-savvy enough to do all the layout myself, and even though I still missed some typos, I’ve found typos in mass market books as well, so that just goes to show that human beings have to read these things, and we miss things.
The polish is what I missed. I really do think that writing begets writing, and if you have any talent or skill at all, the more you write, the better you write. So obviously I think the stuff I’m writing now is better than what’s in the book, but that’s not the case with all of it. Frankly, if I hadn’t published the book, I wouldn’t have done nearly the work I’ve done getting out there in the public eye as a writer, and that has led me to a lot of good associations, like joining the Charlotte Writers’ Club and things of that nature. It also led to a rollicking adventure yesterday that I’ll write up when the time is right. Suffice to say I could go a couple weeks without eating any more fried chicken.
So I did plenty of things out of order, but I’m okay with that. What I’m not okay with is the paradigm of there being no commercially successful poets except for Billy Collins. Let’s face it, poetry is the same as songwriting, only accessible to those of us that can’t sing. And if Springsteen can get rich playing his poetry, I should at least be able to figure out how to make a little extra coin playing mine. I’m thinking on it. I have no answers right now, but there are a few percolating. If I can make it work, Story Slam will be the place it will happen, because I think they’re on to something big over there. I know I pimp that joint a lot here, but it’s for two reasons. First, I agree with a lot of their stated goals and think they’re cool people who deserve my support. Second, they let me come by and play, and have supported me, which is hard to find. I have no official capacity there, just a belief that there’s something going on that I want to be part of.
Tonight I’m performing at Just Do It! at Theatre Charlotte, which I’m very excited about. This is a series that gives people an opportunity to get rid of the excuses and Just Do It, whatever IT happens to be. In my case, I’ll be reading two new poems written for the show. Tickets are only $5, so come out and see it if you’re in town.
And not the Girls Gone Wild type that have made Joe Francis a bajillionaire.
I keep track of tiny little tidbits of stories and poems in my notebook. But I keep my notebook on my phone and in my computer. I use a program called Evernote to keep track of my multiple to-do lists, and I use one of these lists for story ideas and things I hear that stand out to me. Then when I’m stuck on something to write, I roll these over and over in my head until something falls out. I also think Evernote is a pretty killer productivity tool since it syncs your electronic to-do lists between phone, web and computer, and if you’re as scatterbrained as I am, if it doesn’t make it onto a list, it never, ever gets done.
So here are some flashes that I’ve got in my little notebook right now –
black burkha in the carolina southern sun
standing on one leg on a street corner with no foot left
tie you to my soul with strands of blood and hope
I leaked milk and cried blood into the snow for you.
fly on concrete angel, let the winds of the city carry you away.
porn for breakfast.
she wore her androgyny like a badge of honor
I have walked through the fires of my souls and come through battered scarred but whole
girl can’t afford seminary tuition so she works as a stripper
He sees the world in colors
Right now, the last two are my favorites, the girl who is working her way through seminary as a stripper and the boy who sees the world in colors. That last one is a reference to autism that I saw on some TV show this week. Somewhere there’s a story about the confessional girl, living in a sinful world, dancing for dollars and working her way closer to God. What should I tackle first off that list? You tell me, I’ll write something tonight and bring it back to you. It might suck, but I’ll take the assignment.
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And not Jerry Douglas, either. Bluegrass fans will get the reference, and if you’re not, you should be. One piece of awful news this week – the Neighborhood Theatre in the NoDa area in Charlotte might be shutting down. I find this particularly distressing because it’s one of my favorite concert venues, and is perfectly sized for a lot of the shows that I want to go see. Some of the best concerts I’ve ever attended were at the Neighborhood Theatre, and it would be a shame if no one could step forward and buy the place. I wish I had the resources, but I don’t, but if there’s a consortium of folks that are looking for someone to help with tech and promotions, lemme know.
But back to great concerts I’ve seen there. The first time I ever saw Robert Earl Keen do a whole set was at the Neighborhood. I’d seen REK at the McGlohon Theatre at Spirit Square, but didn’t watch the whole set. This time I watched the whole thing, and rocked out with all the other hillbillies all the way up til the main breaker blew out in the middle of Road Goes on Forever, and the last piece of the show was done in the dark with only monitors for sound. It didn’t matter to the crowd, we were all drunk and knew all the words, anyway.
The first time I saw Great Big Sea was at the Neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I went alone, and sat in the middle of the room and just jammed while the boys from up north put on a helluva show. The John Hiatt show was another one i saw alone, because Suzy bailed at the last minute. John played alone and (mostly) acoustic, with his guitar, a stomp board for percussion and an electric piano. It was pretty amazing. That was his Tiki Bar tour, and I don’t know how they got him there for a solo show, but it was pretty awesome. So was the first time I saw Reckless Kelly, the first time I saw Hayseed Dixie, the last time I saw Sam Bush, when he played a bunch of cuts off his Circles Around Me album, which I think is his best solo album so far, and when Bonnie and I went to see Peter Rowan. We sat in the seats toward the side of the stage, and I’m pretty sure Bonnie scared Peter a bit when she yelled out for “Rain and Snoooooowwwww!” Peter jumped a little, but he played the song for her.
So it’s been a great venue for music in Charlotte for the last ten years or so, and has had a lot to do with the revitalization of the NoDa neighborhood, so I really hope somebody can come along and pick up the lease and keep the place rolling along. Otherwise it’ll be just another victim of the tightening economy.
So two things of happiness this evening, as I remain freezing my arse off in Atlanta. It’s been colder down here than in Charlotte for the past several days, and this Southern boy does NOT like the cold. But anyway…
I just got done chatting with the nice lady at the student loan joint, who informed me that the first nice lady I talked with was wrong, and my payment isn’t taking a 25% increase, only to be followed by a 25% increase ten days later. I am still stuck on this graduated repayment plan, which will see my payment increase by 25% every two years, but that means that my payment goes up again in January of 2012. By that time I think there will be little enough left on my total loan balance that I can hopefully just pay the fucker off. Sooner than that if I get anything working the WSOP from home this summer, but who knows what’s going to happen in that regard. So, on the one hand, my payment is increasing substantially this month. But not so substantially that I can’t make the payment and still pay all my bills, so that was a good conversation.
But the much better news is that one of my poems was accepted into the March edition of the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature! The poem “Aftermath,” which was briefly featured here before being taken down to maintain its unpublished status, was accepted after just one submission! Now I know that it’s rare to have the kind of success right out the gate that I’ve had. I won the Charlotte Writer’s Club Board Prize for Poetry right before the end of the year last year, and two of my poems were selected as finalists in the Atlanta Review poetry contest, and now one of my pieces has been accepted for publication on the first shot. This is, as we say in poker, too small a sample size. But these little successes are encouraging, and it’s keeping me writing new stuff. I’ve decided not to enter any poetry book contests right now, because I don’t think I have a solid enough body of work to warrant a book of only poetry. I am going to branch out a little and submit some short stories and non-fiction, and there are a couple of first novel contests that I’m looking at as well. But if I can keep my nose to it and keep submitting, hopefully the list of publications on my resume will continue to grow.
And for those of you who’ve known me for a while, Aftermath was written about my uncle’s suicide. That was my first attempt at putting those feelings together on paper, and I’m glad that the folks at Dead Mule felt that it was worthy of publication. I think it honors Ed’s memory and my family by sharing the universal nature of loss and our common reactions to it. So it’s kind of an important piece to me, and I’m glad that I’ll be able to share it with a wider audience than just here on this little piece of the internets.
Home tomorrow afternoon, then Charlotte StoryTellers Guild Thursday night, Just Do It at Theatre Charlotte Friday night, Charlotte Writer’s Club Tuesday night, Charlotte Mini-Con next Saturday (attending, not showing anything there) and Carolina Writers’ Showcase next Saturday Night. Mark your calendars for anything that seems interesting, hope to see you there!
Warning – the below post includes no pics of hot college cheerleaders, nor does it include any hot pics of men in cheerleader skirts.
Full Disclosure – the above sentence is purely for the SEO spiders in a shameless attempt to increase webcrawler traffic.
But I’m really not going to wear a cheerleader skirt. Even though that seems to be most of my job. I’m a sales manager, which can mean many things to many things. And sometimes different things on different days to the same people. Most of the time, I concentrate on the sales part of the title, as I’m one of the leading sales people in my office. That’s actually the easy part. After 14 years in the same industry, with the same company, in the same location, I know my market. I understand who the players are and how order go to market. I understand what projects to go after and which ones to take a pass on. And I win more than I lose, which at the end of the day is a pretty good marker for success.
The manager part is way harder. Like many industries, ours does not hire managers, we promote them from within. Just like principals that are promoted out of the classroom, this can be a hit or miss proposition. Many great sales people can’t manage worth a damn, and for the first few years I was in this position, I was one of them. On the upside, I was only managing two people besides myself, so my ineptitude was pretty harmless. Fortunately for me, as our group expanded to where I was managing more people, my company realized that we probably needed some training. I balked at some of the training, but what it did teach me was that I needed to learn how to do this thing. So I read some books, and I read some blogs, and I started to work at it.
And what I’ve come to realize is that there are bunches of different types of managers. There’s the minutiae manager, who never misses a meeting or a follow-up call, who has all their reports in on time and doesn’t have any trouble with paperwork. It may come as some surprise, but that ain’t me. There’s the rah-rah manager, who inspires their people to ever greater heights by their boundless enthusiasm and love for the job. That’s not really me, either. I try to be more of the analytical and fun manager, but I end up more the grumpy cheerleader.
I’m snarky by nature, but I have an ability to see complex things in fairly simple terms. This allows me to slice through a lot of BS and tell people what’s really going on. I have to fight my natural bitchiness to keep the message positive, but I am at least able to boil things down into one or two sentences that are easily understood by everyone. This talent for synthesis is something one rep of mine remarks on frequently, and I tend to use it a lot when I’m trying to inspire my folks. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Some folks just aren’t ever going to get it, no matter what, and eventually with them you’re going to cut bait. But most folks just need to understand the process (or maybe have the process tweaked for their talents) in order for them to succeed. So I spend a lot of time being the grumpy cheerleader. How do you manage people?
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