Termite Parade Playlist

If you haven't checked out largehearted boy, it's a great site. David, its mastermind, blogs regularly about music and literature, and he does so with insight and responsibility. We should support him by clicking thru his smart pages. It's better than clicking thru crappy pages, and since we're probably going to do that, too--why not "trick" yourself by adding something of substance before checking out the daily filth?

I have trouble sleeping. Insomnia has always been something I struggle with, but with the book launch, it's been particularly unruly. Normally, I like insomnia because it means I write more: midnight to 5 a.m. tends to be my sweet spot (no noise, no cell phone, no email)... but with all the chaos this week, I can't write a word. So I'm just up. And it sucks.

I keep trying to write a play, but the main problem is that it sucks, too. Hmmm. What's with all this sucking? Any playwrights out there wanna give me a pep talk?

Anyway, the Termite Parade playlist represents what I listened to when I wrote the book, but then I started wondering if people have certain bands/styles of music they listen to while they read. So do you?

Rhonda & Kurt Cobain

Writers always love hearing praise from other working authors. And the review that fictionwritersreview.com just ran of "Some Things that Meant the World to Me" is really amazing. In it, the reviewer draws a comparison between my book and Nirvana's "Nevermind" which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

Except maybe the guy in that men's room in Miami...

Or that despondent heiress in the airport bar after Mardi Gras...

Or the devious former child-actress I met at the Kentucky Derby last year...

From the review: "Fifteen years ago, when asked to explain the unprecedented and unanticipated success of Nirvana’s "Nevermind" album, an editor at SPIN magazine suggested that the music industry had simply ignored people in their twenties for far too long... But if you’re one of those anachronistic thirty-somethings that still quaintly reads books—let alone, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century form like the novel—then you may know the rare and exquisite pleasure of stumbling across one that seems to be written by, for, and about your contemporaries. I had that experience recently when I read Joshua Mohr’s debut novel."

To someone in my demographic, being mentioned along with Nirvana--even if the comparison is undeserved--is incredibly meaningful. I'm thankful to the review's writer, Tyler McMahon, for the wonderfully kind words.

Largehearted Boy

Largehearted Boy is a fantastic music and literature site, and they ask writers to put together playlists for their novels/story collections. I just finished mine. You're about to find out just how much I love Tom Waits!

I also used a quote of his for the novel's epigraph: "It takes a lot of whiskey to make these nightmares go away."

Here, here, Mr. Waits.