Me on WECK

It's not nearly as good as beef on Weck, but it's also not as messy and probably better for you in the long run. And, it's delivered right to you car, while your driving, tomorrow morning (Thursday, May 1). I'll be talking about my new novel, The Milkman and trying to make your morning commute better.

The Writer’s Pentathlon

To work off the insane amount of pie I eat, I’ve been swimming for a number of years.  When the pool I use closed for renovation, I started running.  So guys at the gym started saying things like “get a bike and you could do a tri” meaning triathlon.  It is true, but why stop there.  What about the modern pentathlon.

What about the modern pentathlon?  Part of the Olympics since 1912, the event comprises swimming, show jumping, running, fencing and pistols at 10 meters.  Designed around Swedish Military cross-training, it reflected skills an infantryman would need in the field.  Oddly enough, these are probably good skills for a science fiction / fantasy writer to master as well.  Going to the range or picking up a sword changes how you write about such things.  If, however, you go down that path you may decide on a different group of sports altogether.

I’m proposing a post-modern pentathlon, more in tune with 21^st century society.  These are the skills a current infantrywriter needs:

Running and swimming (to clear the head and clear out the donuts and Scotch)

Shooting (at some point, your fiction will demand it)

Driving (after your trilogy’s made into a set of feature films, and you retire to a farm in Vermont, you’ll still need to get to the bakery)

Tweeting (it's the new fencing)

My training starts . . . now. 

First Review: The Milkman

In Martineck's (Cinco de Mayo) latest novel, Detective Edwin McCallum, assigned the task of finding Geri Vasquez's murderer, is enough of an idealist to want to catch the killer and enough of a realist to realize the system he works in, one in which the world has been divided between three giant corporations, will likely prevent this outcome. Justice does not matter to a post-Buy Up world divided between Ambyr and its rivals BCCA/Hong Kong and India Group; only the bottom line does. Emory Leveski is unfortunate enough to offer the system a cost-effective scapegoat; McCallum knows Leveski is an innocent man but without funds to prove this, seemingly helpless to rescue Leveski from the prison hell he is consigned to. The system is about to find out just how far McCallum will go to fulfill the spirit of the law and not the letter. Reminiscent of the novels of Michael Coney, Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth as well as Terry Gilliam's Brazil, although with less bitter humor and more outrage than those luminaries, the work is a reductio ad absurdum examination of the increasingly corporatized world in which we all live, an impressive demonstration of the author's skills. (May)

Enjoyment to the Max

Love taking my eight-year-old Max to hockey games.  The Buffalo Sabres are 21-49-9 this season making them the worst team in the conference and arguably the worst team in the league.  None of that makes any difference to Max.

He likes parking and walking under the Thruway.  He likes walking past all the construction going on, with the super-tall cranes and skeletal building forms.  “You can see right inside!”  He likes escalators but he thinks they should be called “recurring stairs.”  I’m in full agreement.  He likes chairs that can fold up on you.  They’re funny.  Granted, he fits better in them than most fans.  He likes LED light boards and ribbons, projections on the ice, horns, bells, whistles and even though he’d beg me to changes channels if I tried playing it in the car – organ music at a hockey game is just fine.

He may or may not like the Sabres’ record this year.  I don’t know.  We never discussed it.  We both like that sound the puck makes against the stick ending a really good pass.

Starting now, I’m going to try to Maximize everything I do.  Should be more fun.