Pocket Hole is available

Buy Pocket Hole in paperback here through CreateSpace or on Kindle or paperback here through Amazon.

If you want a little backstory on this, uh . . . story, read on.

+Alex Bell is a friend of mine as well as a talented artist. The cover art for Pocket Hole is his. A few years ago we decided to create a graphic novel and used my novel Boo Noon for the adaptation. Boo Noon is a book, not a huge one, but still big enough that it was a challenge. Boo Noon the graphic novel was going to be really big, and we spent hundreds of hours working on the story and creating thumbnails. We re-imagined the first few chapters at least three times. Each re-imagining was amazing and did really cool things, but in the end it was too big a project.

One night, after a frustrating session, Alex called me on the phone (I think he was in his car driving home) and said that we just weren't going to get this done. We'd bitten off more than we could chew. A year-and-a-half of work wasn't going to see life.

He was right, but that didn't make it any easier. I was pretty bummed for a few minutes, but I had seen this coming. The story was just too big for two people with full-time jobs and actual lives to complete. So what we needed was a smaller story. I decided not to dwell on what wouldn't happen and thought hard that night before I went to bed about coming up with a smaller story. When I awoke the next morning, Pocket Hole was there in my mind. I hurried and wrote down all the highlights, but most everything was there.

I called Alex on the phone that day, pitched the idea, and we changed directions.

Now by me saying that the whole story was there in my mind, I don't mean to infer that what I wrote down that morning didn't change. There were lots and lots of things that Alex and I came up with as we worked on the story, great bits that fleshed out characters, lots of humor and sight gags, and even crucial plot points. The story is as much Alex's as mine.

So our goal was to attend ComicCon in San Diego in 2010, Pocket Hole in hand. After almost killing ourselves for six months we had the first issue, which covered maybe 2/5s of the story. Pocket Hole, Issue 1, was really good and we were proud of it. We went to ComicCon with high expectations, and while we had a good time, sales were less than spectacular. We were both a little deflated.

Another roadblock. This one lasted for a while. Alex and I worked on projects here and there, but Pocket Hole, Issue 2, didn't happen and it appeared it never would. We had a couple other starts and stops on other projects, but that was it. Life gets busy. Alex and I are still close friends, but the attached-at-the-hip project work doesn't happen anymore.

I love writing novels, so I wrote Alone With You Somehow and put together Six Christmas Stories, and then I thought about Pocket Hole. It was a complete story. The darn thing was thumbnailed to the end, why not adapt it to a book? Alex and I had attempted the same thing with Boo Noon but in reverse. Seemed like a good idea.

Writing Pocket Hole ended up being one of the easiest things I've done.

So, if you've read this much, I would expect you are interested enough that you picked up a copy. I hope you like it. I really think you will. It contains the best efforts of a really talented artist/storyteller and a marginally talented storyteller. Together, I think Pocket Hole turned out pretty exceptional. Let me know what you think. I welcome feedback.

And to all a good Pocket Hole

If Pocket Hole were a book, what would it look like? Plato first postulated this in his Dialogue: Holeus Pocketus.

If you have caught yourself at some point in your life asking a similar question, well, catch yourself no longer. The answer will arrive in a matter of days.

I want to express my undying love to +Alex Bell who came up with this cover. I love the cover so much I've begun to think of it as one of my own children. Not my favorite child, by any means, but not my least favorite either.

Pocket Hole will soon be available for purchase on Amazon as an ebook, and for the first time for any of my books, as a paperback via CreateSpace. The paperback will also be available through Amazon.

I am excited to have an actual book in my hands where I can turn an actual page. Dork that I am, I have already ordered the first copy.

So at least I got one sale.

Daily Ambivalence - landscaping rocks

The world teams with marketing genius  . . . let me start that again. The world is plagued by marketing genius.

You've seen Smart Water, right? One day a guy filled a plastic bottle with water and called it smart. You'd have to be stupid not to buy it. You know, pay money for free stuff. That falls out of the sky. For free.

I imagine something similar happened with landscaping rocks.

There was a farmer digging up a rock in the middle of his field just as a guy from the city drives by and has a vision of how that rock would look plunked down in the middle of his yard.

City Guy offers to pay the farmer for the rock, and after a brief battle with his conscience, the farmer says he would charge City Guy 50 cents.

Later that day City Guy, back in his car with a rock as copilot, has an epiphany. "Hey," he thinks, "my neighbor is way stupider than me. I'll bet he'd pay fifty bucks for this rock."

And the landscaping rock business was born.

What's his name in the cubicle next to me says this isn't a sign of the Apocalypse, but I don't believe him.

Daily Ambivalence - putting Baby in a corner

If you're in a saloon and it's the Wild Wild West, being in a corner is exactly where you want to be.

Sorry, wrong movie

I read a lot of Louis L'Amour westerns when I was a teenager so I know that. Only a greenhorn or someone with a death wish ever sits close to the swinging doors.

As a father, I take issue with +Patrick Swayze telling Baby's father that he was doing something wrong by putting Baby in a corner. How do we know that Baby didn't die a week later for the very reason that she wasn't in a corner?

You don't even have to go the Wild Wild West route to make this argument. +Dirty Dancing  wasn't a slasher movie but it did happen at a summer camp, right? Summer camp is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from slasher territory.

And who is it that always dies in slasher movies? Teenagers doing the nasty, of course.

It's been a long time since I saw +Dirty Dancing, and I don't remember if Patrick and Baby did the nasty, but I am pretty sure they dirty-danced the crap out of everything.

I think a guy in a mask holding a cleaver would be drawn to something like that.

Baby should have stayed in that corner.

Putting baby in a corner . . . eh.