The Other One

A few years before I met my spouse, Matt, I met the perfect man for me. It was a casual, work-related meeting that sent me spinning. He was gorgeous, smart, funny, loved theater as much as I did. We clicked immediately. I had been so busy with work, and so disappointed at the fish in the ocean, that he became the first guy I dated in about ten years.

We started seeing each other, going out, spending time together. He told me he loved me, he wanted to be with me, that I was the one for him. I felt exactly the same way. I thought this was it. For the first time ever, I thought this was the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.

We dated a couple months, then one day, over lunch, he said the following: “I hope I haven’t said anything that would make you think we had a future together.” What do you say to that? I was devastated. I crashed so low I didn’t think I would ever get up again. I found out he had been dating someone else at the same time he was dating me. He invited me to their “wedding” in a couple weeks. They exchanged rings and had a commitment ceremony (sans me).

A while later, he called and told me they had broken up, and that he’d been thinking of me and wanted to see me. Well, what do you say to that? I told him I was genuinely sorry his other relationship had failed (I was), and for him to call me next week and we’d do lunch.

He never called.

A few years later I met Matt, who turned out to really be the perfect man for me.

Another Night Before Xmas*

'twas the night before xmas
in the year '68
When a young boy was eager
but forced to wait.

Xmas was around the corner
and presents were near
when suddenly a door bell
the boy did hear.

He raced to the door
"Was it Santa, perhaps?"
No, a chap in brown shirt
and matching brown pants.

"I'm looking for Christopher,
might you be he?"
I didn't at first realize
he was talking to me.

"Um, yes sir," I replied
always taught to be nice
"Sign here," he said,
I think he asked twice.

I signed the receipt,
and returned it to him.
He gave me a box
and a sly little grin.

"What could it be?"
I wondered aloud
and walked to the living room,
my mind in a cloud.

I opened the box,
it didn't say to delay,
and found twelve sea creatures
and a boat with which to play.

Requested so long before
I did nearly forget
from Nabisco I had ordered
his neat sea animal set.

I played with it for years,
in the bath and the pool
and on not a few occasions
was actually late to school!

So thanks to Nabisco,
and the UPS guy too,
my xmas was happy
and very special, too.

Here's wishing a wish
to you and you and you
that your special sea creatures
will arrive in time, too.

*this is a true story 

Crazy Dancin’ Christopher (No, Really)

I remember dancing at a very young age. As I grew up, I danced in theater, taught dance, and danced for recreation. I mean I danced a LOT. (You can see very early footage of just how crazy I was about dancing here.)

When I was young, our summer vacations always ended with a huge Labor Day picnic for the employees of the company where my father worked, Western Gillette -- sorta like the big company fete you see in the movie musical Pajama Game. It was always held in Paradise Valley (Arizona) at the Paradise Inn (pictured) -- a big, old, sprawling resort that opened in 1944 and had a real Western feel to it. It’s now long gone, with the Phoenician Resort sitting where it used to be. I loved those picnics because they had a big bar-be-que, games for the kids, drawings for prizes, swimming and lots of fun stuff.

One year, when I was about the same age as the above video, I entered a dance contest at one of the picnics. It was open only to kids, and there were many rounds where the winner worked his/her way up. Kinda like a March Madness of dancing. It was a tough slog that finally got down to me and this little blonde girl a couple years older than me. Well, I whooped ass and won! For my efforts, I got a huge box of chocolates.

The picnics -- and, really, my childhood -- ended sometime in the early or mid 1970s when Western Gillette was bought out by the Roadway company. I don't think they ever had company picnics again. If they did, I know I didn’t go to any. Isn't that sad?

Another San Francisco Storm

Looking at the images of the huge storm battering Northern California today, I’m reminded of a massive storm that struck while I was living in the San Francisco area.

It was Friday the 13th (really), November 1981 and I was working at my bank job in Rossmoor, California. A huge storm had come in during the day and I kept my ear glued to the radio at work, wondering whether I would be able to drive home (I traveled the 4 highway to my apartment in Pinole). There was talk of mud slides, driving rain, etc. Well, finally, 6:00 p.m. arrived. The bank closed and I started home.

The rain was driving very hard. I turned on my windshield wipers and one promptly broke. I pulled into a gas station and got a new blade, then started home again. The normally 30-minute drive took me more than two hours. The downpour was so thick I couldn’t even see the front of my car let alone the road. So, I drove very slowly. I drove around a couple small mud slides, other road debris, etc. I don't remember seeing any other cars at all (who would be so stupid as to be on the road in THAT weather?).

Finally, I got close to home and came over the hill that would lead me down into Pinole. I looked and saw nothing. Nothing at all. Where there should have been lights (from the houses and the huge oil refinery near by) there was nothing. I was disoriented until it dawned on me that the power had gone out in all the cities in the area (San Pablo, Richmond, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo, etc.). I made my way toward my apartment through the rain and howling wind. I got into my apartment and relished being safely out of the storm for the first time in hours. It was nearly 9:00 p.m.!

Later I found out I had driven through the biggest storm to hit San Francisco in years. It was the first storm identified as part of what would later be known as the "El Nino" effect.

“A Chorus Line” and Me

There was a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s that I ate, lived and breathed “A Chorus Line” -- Michael Bennett’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning musical from 1975. I can’t even tell you what about it drew me in. When it opened on Broadway, I was an impressionable 15-year-old boy who had been active in grade-school and high-school theater for years. I loved being part of the world of theater: I loved singing, I loved dancing and I loved acting.

And then came “A Chorus Line.”

Everyone knows the story: an audition for dancers for a new musical, the appearance of a once-great dancer who had fallen on hard times and needed a job, and the director who was once in love with the dancer who had the power to give her a new life. It’s so simple and yet, at the same time, incorporated every hope, dream and disappointment ever felt by anyone who ever wanted to achieve anything.

The characters in the show were all me, one facet or another of the young boy in Phoenix who wanted nothing more than to perform on a stage. I had parents who didn’t understand it, friends who made fun of it, and a fantasy world where it all became real.

I watched excerpts from the show on the Tony Award telecast in 1976. I bought the record and sang and danced to it “around the living room” every chance I got. I sang songs from the show at auditions. Everyone around me got sick hearing about “A Chorus Line” and I don’t blame them. I talked my chorus director into letting me do a solo of “The Music and the Mirror” at one of our shows; and my theater director in high school gave me the final song at a variety show. I stood on stage and sang “What I Did for Love” like I was on the stage at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway.

Then, after months of begging, my parents took me to Los Angeles to see the Broadway cast at the Shubert Theater at Century City. The anticipation virtually made me sick. We drove to California. We arrived at the theater only to discover that some of the original cast had just left the show -- including Tony Award-winning star, Donna McKechnie, who left to marry Bennett. I was crestfallen; but the show was still phenomenal.

I dropped out of college after a few years, determined to go to California and make good on my theater dream. Instead of heading right to the Great White Way in New York, my plan was this: go to San Francisco and make a big noise in theater there. Then head down to Los Angeles and became someone. THEN head to New York with one foot on the stage, ready to conquer the theater world with an audience ready to embrace me.

Quite quickly reality crept in. I was in San Francisco only a little while when I saw the kind of talent I was up against. Wow! I was nowhere near their level. My lifelong, dearly cherished dream died a quick and painful death.

On one return visit to my home in Phoenix, I happened upon a small antique store. I was chatting with the owner and kept thinking he looked really familiar. Turned out it was Cameron Mason who played Mark in the original company. We chatted briefly about the show, but I got the impression he didn’t want to talk about it.

My life’s ambition turned to writing shortly after that. I found in writing the successes I was never to find in theater. I got a couple newspaper columns and began reviewing theater. I found it to be nearly as rewarding as performing.

Through all these years “A Chorus Line” has remained an integral part of my life. I saw the show performed six times, including finally getting to see McKechnie in 1989. I interviewed her twice and got to meet her backstage after one performance.

“A Chorus Line” eventually closed on Broadway, but not before becoming the longest-running show in history.

A Woman Named Betty

In my elementary-school years, we lived down the street from a woman about my parent’s age. Her name was Betty. She was German and had a very thick accent. She and her husband were very gregarious, invited my parents and me over all the time, especially for a lavish holiday spread each December.

One time, she was very somber and began to tell us a story that has haunted me ever since.

When she was a very young girl, her family was hounded by the Nazis because her father published a newspaper. Betty and her family were sent to a concentration camp. She managed to escape the camp thanks to a group of nuns who had come to visit. The plan was for one of the sisters to secrete her out of the camp under her vestments. The other people in the camp scrawled messages to their families all over Betty’s body. The nuns hid Betty and they exited the camp. The nuns put her in a suitcase and put the suitcase under their seat on the train. And this was how Betty was able to leave Nazi Germany.

If I remember the story correctly, she was the only member of her family to survive the camps.

One Thanksgiving

Here’s a story I think about every Thanksgiving:

I lived in a certain house for the first six years of my life. In the house directly across the street from us lived a man and woman significantly older than my parents. The woman was really nice. She was constantly inviting me into her house to take my pick of candy from a giant bowl she had that was always filled -- almost as if it was forever Halloween.

I remember her very clearly. Here is an image of her (with me and my mother) from a home movie from about 1963.

Many years after we moved from that house, my parents told me about this older couple. They had a child, a boy, who had grown up, gotten married, moved away and had at least one child. One Thanksgiving, the son and his family came to visit. Driving home, the entire family was killed in a horrible car accident. The parents were devastated and apparently never recovered. I guess this is why she was always so super nice to me.

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Twenty Years Ago Today

A Most Important Person

Everyone has someone in their life who was important to them as a child, aside from the obvious of the parents. For me, that person was Gwen Lysek.

She was born in 1928, the youngest of nine kids who moved with their parents from Alabama to Phoenix in 1935. Her father was a farmer.

For the first six years of my life, Gwen took care of me during the day because both my parents worked. She was like my nanny and was always cooking really great southern food including fried chicken, real mashed potatoes, peach pie, vanilla pudding with banana slices and "Nilla" brand wafers around the pie edge, black-eyed beans and real fig jam.

Many years earlier, her older sister Rose was dating Ed Lysek. Ed sent to his brother Joe a picture of Rose’s sister Gwen. Joe was in the military and they began a correspondence. In 1946, Joe moved to Phoenix and in August they were married.

Gwen and Joe moved into a house in 1957, and my parents moved next door a couple years later and a few months before I was born. My mother took a bus to work and was concerned about taking me on a bus. So, she arranged to have Gwen take care of me.

Rose lived with them at some point. She made really neat pleated pillows which I really loved. At some point Joe had to have his feet and then legs amputated because of diabetes. He was in a wheelchair for many years. After he died, Gwen lived alone. I kept in touch with her for years, and then suddenly she never answered the phone again. I went to the house to see if she was there and it was empty. I know she had family who lived near by, and they knew about me. I guess she died and no one thought to call me and let me know. It was very sad to have missed her last days.

Some years before I lost touch with her, I took my spouse, Matt, to meet her. She was very old and frail, but I am glad the two of them met before she died.

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Death in Palm Springs, A

I recently returned from a couple days in Palm Springs, California -- the land of movie stars, golf courses, desert landscaping and storage units. I was not involved with any of the former, but lots and lots of the latter.

The reason for my trip was the untimely death, a couple years ago, of a friend of mine. We had known each other more than fifteen years and shared a common passion for vintage melamine. It was something I’d been interested in for about fifteen years; but he had me beat: he’d been collecting and researching it since the mid-1970s.
 
His intent all these years was to write the comprehensive encyclopaedia of melamine to be exhaustively researched, documented and compiled with the help of several other researchers, including me. We exchanged notes for more than a decade. I, and the others, kept encouraging him to get going on the encyclopaedia. Despite the fact that he had thousands of pieces of vintage melamine stored in two huge storage units, he didn’t yet have enough. He kept buying and assembling, hoping to have everything in place before he started writing.

Then, one day, he cut his leg at work. It wouldn’t heal so he went to the doctor. They said he had an infection and gave him some medicine. When it still wouldn’t heal, they said it was a different infection and gave him a different medicine. Long story short, turns out he had stage-four pancreatic cancer. He underwent treatments, including proton beam therapy, and came out all cured. Six months later he was dead. Apparently, he hadn’t been as cured as the doctors thought.

Despite the fact he insisted he had a will (years before all this happened), he died without one. His family wanted to sell the contents of the storage units, but no one who had the money was interested in the contents, and no one with interest in the contents had the money. Frustrated after two years of no sale, they told me they were going to abandon the units and I had a week to go there and take whatever I wanted. Living a few hours drive from Palm Springs I leapt at the chance. My spouse and I went over, spent two days going through many hundreds of boxes, found lots of stuff and came home.

From this exhausting exercise, I learned a great many things: have a will (I do), do not have a storage unit (I don’t), if you have to store and organize research materials do not combine many subjects into a single box (each subject gets its own box) and make sure to give people what you want them to have when you’re still alive and not after you’re dead -- that’s the only way to guarantee they’ll get it, will or no will.

But, most important I learned that, if you’re researching something in which you have a passion, don’t wait to publish until you have every last speck of information on the subject. Publish now, either online or otherwise, and change it as new information comes along. No sense spending thirty years researching something only to die before you’ve printed a single word.

You can find my research into mid-twentieth-century plastics here.

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Art Imitates Life or How I Created one of the Main Characters in “Murder at Eastern Columbia”

I had already written six books when I began organizing the mystery novel Murder at Eastern Columbia. I had not yet come up with the “novel within a novel” feature, but I did know my main character would be a writer who would have a fictional alter ego. Through much thinking and planning, this alter ego turned into the unnamed detective who has now co-starred in three of the James Murray Mystery novels.

The main character of the novels, writer James Murray, is a huge fan of the mystery novels of Dashiell Hammett. That mirrors my fascination with the detectives that appeared in film, books and especially radio in the mid-twentieth century: Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Barrie Craig, Johnny Dollar, The Falcon, the Thin Man and countless others. That fascination was channeled into James’s alter ego -- but with one big difference: he’s not a detective and he’s not a police officer. He’s just a guy who wants to help.

And help he does.

He follows James’s lead (literally) in three adventures (so far) starting with the murder of James’s co-worker that sends James and the unnamed detective on a whirlwind tour of 1930s downtown Los Angeles as they each try to solve the murder of the girl with sorrel-colored hair. In the second book, Sabotage at RKO Studio, he goes to work at a movie studio when James gets hired as a junior script writer. They both try to find out who’s sabotaging films being made on the lot -- including the big blockbuster King Kong. In the third book, Abduction at Griffith Observatory, James’s life continues on an upswing, but he’s soon drawn into trying to find the person who was kidnapped from the grounds of the new observatory.

I love writing this unnamed detective because he’s all the things that James and I are not. He’s tough, he’s a chick magnet, he’s good with his fists when he needs to be. But, like James and I, he’s also intuitive, smart, and has a good heart.

My detective also bleeds when he’s wounded -- literally and figuratively. He’s had a tough life, but he’s trying to make it better, to rise above the hand dealt him. He survived an abusive mother and an uncaring father to mature in college. He then struck out on his own and accidentally got into the detecting business trying to help a wealthy society dame find her kidnapped pooch. One investigative job led to another, then another -- and now he’s known around Los Angeles as a man who can get the job done.

What adventures await the unnamed detective? That all depends on what happens to James in his life because, as we all know, writers take the adventures of their lives and turn them into their fiction.

There are some pretty exciting adventures in store for James, and he’ll have his ups and downs -- but so will the unnamed detective. So, is it a case of life imitating art? For the unnamed detective, it’s a case of art imitating life.

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The James Murray Mysteries: Now a Trilogy!

What do you do once you’ve written three novels in a series? Why, publish them as a trilogy, of course. That’s just what I’ve done with the first three James Murray Mystery novels: Murder at Eastern Columbia, Sabotage at RKO Studio and Abduction at Griffith Observatory.

Follow young James Murray as he makes his way as a writer in 1930s Los Angeles. First, as a clerk at a swank department store investigating the murder of a friend, then as a junior writer at a Hollywood movie studio investigating some sinister happenings on movie sets, and later as a moderately successful writer investigating a kidnapping at the newly opened Griffith Observatory.

You get all three novels for one great price! (See link in the "My Books" section to your right.)

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Abduction at Griffith Observatory

Yes, it's true: the third James Murray Mystery is now available! (See link in the "My Books" section to your right.)

James Murray is a young man with a dream -- he wants to be a writer just like his idol, Dashiell Hammett. He pens his first novel while working as a clerk at a swank downtown department store. He writes his second while working at a famous movie studio turning his first novel into a screenplay. Now, moderately successful, James is hard at work creating his newest adventure.

And his life is perfect -- or nearly so: he’s living with the girl he loves, planning to get married, and enjoying a life he once could only dream about. But an innocent outing to Los Angeles’s new Griffith Observatory changes all that when a commotion during a presentation leads to a kidnapping. James, witness to the abduction, feels compelled to find out the truth behind it. Why was this person kidnapped? Who was behind it? Why were the abductors speaking in German? And what does Gina Corvi have to do with it?

Abduction at Griffith Observatory -- like its predecessors Sabotage at RKO Studio and  Murder at Eastern Columbia -- is unlike any other book you've read: Not a single novel, it's two parallel novels, featuring two heroes, working two mysteries in two different versions of 1930s Los Angeles. Join James and his alter ego as they each try to find the missing person. His hard-boiled alter ego -- neither a private detective nor a police officer: just someone "who wants to help" -- needs to find out why his life is being threatened because of a piece of paper with some numbers on it. Two men in two stories work their way through 1930s Los Angeles following clews, interviewing people who might know something, going from location to location, with one goal in mind: find the person who was kidnapped.

Along the way, they encounter a rich cast of characters including a hate-filled landlady who doesn’t like anyone different than she, the nervous director of the observatory, the mysterious black woman who was exiled from the country of her birth, the young page working at the observatory, a gentle cleaning woman who has suffered since the death of her husband, the scientist with a deadly secret, and the girl in the blue pumps who tries to hide the scar on her face like she tries to hide so many other things about herself.

Abduction at Griffith Observatory is filled with twists, turns and a final showdown aboard a rusty old freighter moored to a dock at San Pedro harbor.

Come along for the ride in this, the third James Murray mystery: the story of a young man who dreams of something better.

Rachel Carson

Happy birthday to Rachel Carson (1907 – 1964), arguably the most important person in the ongoing fight to protect the environment.

Remember, we only have one planet.

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Writing vs Wages

I’ve been writing regularly since high school: newspapers, magazines, radio news and documentaries, and a little bit of television. For a vast majority of those years, I earned enough money to do it full-time; for a smaller percentage of those years, I had to write while working an official job. (And, during all those years, no matter how successful I was at writing and earning a good living and winning awards, my mother would ask me: “When are you going to get a real job?”)

In the mid 1990s, I lost my regular newspaper gig. I ended up with a good job at a large corporation. Although not part of my official duties, they let me write for and occasionally edit the in-house publication and other communication materials. I continued doing freelance newspaper writing part-time. Before I knew it, I had been at the company fifteen years, earning a great salary and magnificent benefits.

Then, friends of mine, nearly my age, started to die -- suddenly. I was never one to question my own mortality; but I did start to think: if I died today, would I be happy with my legacy?

Despite decades of writing, the answer was a sound “no.” Even with all my professional writing, the works for which I had the most passion -- my novels -- were languishing. Who can work full time and still write novels? I tried and couldn’t make it work. So, I talked it over with my spouse and quit my secure, well-paying corporate job so that I could create the novels I needed to be happy.

My intent was to get a part-time job (twenty hours a week) and write the other twenty hours. That sounded fair and was financially doable. Of course, it took me more than a year to find a job I was interested in doing that would only require twenty hours a week. But before I found that job, I wrote like a fiend. I polished off two manuscripts and published them; I polished and published a handful of short stories; I turned a screenplay of mine into my third novel; and then embarked on my first “new” novel. That was followed by the first novel in a planned five-book series about a boy detective in 1930s Los Angeles. [You can see them all listed on the right hand side of this page.]

Now, I work three days a week and write two; that makes it pretty easy to shift gears between my (non-writing) part-time gig and my personal writing. I have a boss who not only supports my writing, but has also bought, read and enjoyed (she says) nearly all my novels. Sure, my salary is significantly lower than it was, and I get no benefits; but, I’m doing what I’ve always loved (writing), focusing on what’s really important to me now and actually creating a legacy that I would not be embarrassed to have represent me after I’m long gone.

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Hollywood in the 1930s: Change is in the Air

I’ve long had a fascination with vintage Los Angeles -- especially the 1920s and 1930s. I can’t explain it; it’s just one of those things. I travel to Los Angeles extensively and seek out every piece of history I can find, whether it’s a restaurant (my favorite, Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard), a building (the Eastern Columbia at Broadway and Ninth Streets) or a “place where it happened” (the long-gone Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard).

Historic Los Angeles has played a major role in three of my novels: the 1920s in Sarah & Gerald, a novel of Paris in the 1920s; the 1930s in Murder at Eastern Columbia, the first James Murray Mystery; and my newest Sabotage at RKO Studio, the second James Murray Mystery.

Those decades between the wars were so important to history in general, but to America and Southern California specifically. The 1920s saw a major push to have people move to Southern California to take advantage of the virtual year-round sunshine, the open land and the endless opportunities. The movie industry had essentially relocated there only a few years before. Soon, all roads led to Hollywood, as far as filmmaking was concerned.

All the fun and excitement came to a temporary halt, however, with the crash of the stock market in 1929. Apple sellers made their presence known on the streets of Los Angeles as well as New York. It was a tough time for everyone; but, like the war years that would follow in the next decade, it was a time of a major shift in how Americans saw themselves and how movies would portray them.

In the early 1930s, people would attend a film and see the rich and privileged dealing with their “problems” of finding enough alcohol (Prohibition was in effect) and enough beautiful “dames” to squire to the fancy parties in penthouses and exclusive restaurants.

As the Depression deepened and things went from bad to very bad, the movie studios had to retrench and rethink. Soon, every motion picture studio requested and got concessions from its employees to reduce hours and take a fifty-percent cut in salary. It was meant to be only a temporary effort to help the studios survive the hard times; but, in many cases, the salaries were never restored.

Films themselves started portraying grittier and more realistic times, perhaps no more famously than The Public Enemy (Warner Bros.,1931) featuring James Cagney as a gangster. The bad times of the Great War were featured (perhaps by way of contrast to the current bad times) in several movies including All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal, 1930), Hell’s Angels (United Artists, 1930), and the classic, A Farewell to Arms (Paramount, 1932).

The 1930s also saw the rise of the monster films, with Frankenstein and Dracula (both Universal, 1931), and the remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931). Of course, the biggest monster film of them all would turn out to be the great King Kong (RKO, 1933) which is featured in my new novel Sabotage at RKO Studio.

But the 1930s were not all a time of desperation and strife. There were still films that ably demonstrated how the rich are different from the rest of us including Grand Hotel (MGM, 1932) and The Thin Man (MGM, 1934). Perhaps the brightest star to appear in otherwise grim times was Shirley Temple, who wasn’t quite yet four years old when she first stepped in front of a camera. Her fame was quick to come with such classics as Bright Eyes, in which she sang On the Good Ship, Lollipop (Fox Film Corporation, 1934), The Little Colonel and Curly Top (both Fox Film Corporation, 1935).

But, change was in the air. The rise of the Nazis in Germany was well underway at this point, and the sounds of war could be heard in the distance. Soon, filmmakers in America would begin to rally against the oppression in Europe, and the Great Depression would quickly become nothing more than a bitter memory.

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Fashion Through the Ages

Anatomy of an Award-Winning Book Cover

Recently, I was a guest panelist at the Changing Hands third annual Indie Author Conference. The panel in which I participated was about lessons learned from being a published author. I spoke to a lot of attendees before and after my panel and many were interested in what goes into making a great book cover.

Luckily for me, I have an in-house designer (my spouse, Matt) who’s been a professional illustrator and graphic designer for many years. He’s done the covers for all eight of my books so far and another dozen or so covers for other writers. 

Matt's first award-winning cover was the one he did for my book “Sarah & Gerald,” a novel of Paris in the 1920s. I think this is the best design he’s done for me; so, I thought I would give you a little overview of how he created that cover.

As usual, Matt and I talked a lot about the story of the novel and what I envisioned for a cover. Luckily, Matt usually ignores my suggestions -- and did in this case.

In the first image, you’ll see some of the illustrations Matt did. I loved them and saw the possibility inherent in the images.

He added a stock watercolor background (second image) and colored the illustration to come up with the final cover image (third image). With the addition of a perfect font (Fontleroy Brown), the cover was done.

This very brief summary does not fully capture the many hours of work that went into this cover: Matt’s illustrations and the (many) suggestions I offered to alter the cover design. For example, Matt’s original design had the title at the top and my name below. I suggested it would have a neater look swapping them.

It’s very important to work with a talented cover designer. It’s equally important to listen to your designer. I know how to write. I’m no designer -- and you’re probably not, either.

Not so Super Commercials

Commercials for the 2014 Super Bowl were generally tepid and uninspiring. I was disappointed that there were no clever animal spots from Bridgestone (“Screaming Squirrel” anyone?), that the only CarMax commercial (“Slow Clapping”) wasn’t funny, and we never found out what happened to the GM robot who lost its job back in 2007. Did it get it’s job back? Is it flipping burgers somewhere?

There were three spots that rose above the rest. The top three were, in order, clever, subtle and innovative.

My early favorite, weeks ago, was the Doritos time machine spot made (for $200!) by a fellow Arizonan. This additionally won the Doritos contest because it’s clever, funny and just basically brilliant. It catches the entire point of humor: something unexpected happening in an unexpected way.

Second, also an early favorite, was the spot for AXE body spray. I love how it took a very old slogan “Make love, not war” and put it into so many (otherwise) cliché images of hostility and aggression. In addition, I totally agree with the sentiment.

I’m surprised that my third favorite is for a soda. Soda and beer spots are usually so dull, but the Pepsi “Half Time” commercial makes excellent use of computer graphics to tell the story (rather than just show off the technology, which is such a problem with films today) in a clever way. (The Guggenheim as a drum? LOVE IT!) I love how the buildings were used to show sound levels. Excellent.

Runner up: Radio Shack addressing it’s fuddy-duddy image with a very smart retro-themed spot wherein the 1980s come to visit and take back their store.

You can see the spots here:
 
Doritos 

AXE 

Pepsi

Read more about the winning Doritos commercial here.

Books I’m Reading

Am reading this.

Just finished reading this.

Hell at 5:53

I needed to get up at 6:00 this morning to do some work. I woke up, turned my head and saw the clock: 5:53. I was happy to have seven more minutes. Five minutes went by. I looked at the clock. It was 5:53. I closed my eyes. Ten minutes went by. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was still 5:53. I remained in bed, staring at the clock for another fifteen minutes. The clock remained at 5:53. “This is it,” I thought to myself, suddenly realizing. “I died overnight and am now in hell. This is how I will spend my eternity: forever anticipating getting up at 6:00 to do something important, and a clock that never changes from 5:53.” Then the clock changed to 5:54.