Desolation angels and flat circle freaks

California adventures

Greetings from Soquel, CA!

I’m back at Wellstone in the Santa Cruz Mountains for a week of writing. I’ve covered so much ground in the last few days that last week’s Message from the Underworld feels like a lifetime ago.

On Friday, Nuvia and I drove through the rain from San Diego to Hermosa Beach to pick up some books I’d sent to Saint Rocke for the South by South Bay festival that went down last month while I was in Barcelona. It seems like it was a great event and hope it happens again next year. If you were there, I want hear all about it (Hi Keith! Hi Dina! Hi Chris!)

We continued up the coast to Morro Bay to visit with Sean and Felizon, whom I met in Flagstaff, Arizona, way back in 1994, which doesn’t seem possible. Time is a fat circus.

It was too dark and wet to do anything but go out and eat some delicious caldo. I love talking to Sean about books, writing, and music we stayed up too late doing just that.

The following day we drove up to UC Davis to see Annie. Now Annie knew I was coming, but she didn’t know that Nuvia had decided to join me at the last minute. When Nuvia and I were dating I kept noticing how people’s faces lit up whenever Nuvia walked into a room. Twenty years later, to see that look on Annie’s face when Nuvia popped out from behind a tree is something I won’t ever forget.

We got caught up over pizza and tea and then while Annie met up with some friend Nuvia and I drove to Napa, walked around downtown, and had dinner in the least pretentious-looking place we could find. The next day we all celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by playing board games, doing some shopping, and eating dinner in a British pub on the Sacramento riverfront. (Only a psychopath goes to an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day.)

Nuvia caught the last flight back to San Diego and the following day Annie and I mapped out our next adventure over crepes. Here’s a clue:

Back to the treeeeeeeee…

I’ve been here less than 48 hours and it’s already been extremely productive. Wellstone has several rooms for rent with different amenities. I’m staying in the Library House, which is essentially a freestanding cabin that’s smaller than a stateroom on a cruise ship. There are plenty of windows so there’s lots of light and there’s a book shelf wherever there isn’t a door or window. It sits on top of a canyon and I can see all the way to ocean just about anywhere inside the cabin. I’m pretty much living out my Desolation Angels-era Jack Kerouac fantasies here. It’s basically heaven.

It’s also cold as hell. There’s no electricity, no internet, and no distractions. It gets very, very cold at night. There’s a gas heater I run for a few minutes and it heats up the entire cabin long enough for me to climb under a pile of blankets. My phone sometime works just enough for a message to squeak through and somehow I’ve been able to track the Dodgers game at the Tokyo Dome at 3am like a lunatic. Why not? Time is a felt turtle.

What am I working on? Something brand new. Like Chapter 1, page one new. I’ve had an idea I’ve been kicking around since the pandemic about... Well, let’s just say it’s a crime story. A few weeks ago I tested it out as a very short story and that framework proved to be much too small. This idea has the legs to be a novel, possibly a series, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to turbo charge through these initial chapters to see what I have.

The story connects in a very oblique way to a much older short story I wrote, a story from my first book, Big Lonesome, which came out almost 20 years ago. Time is a smelt purple.

If you guess which story it is I’ll send you a copy of the book but if you already know the story then you probably don’t need it. I don’t know. I’m just some kook in a cabin working on my manifesto.

Combat Lit vs. Attack of the Book People III

Don’t forget I’m going to be at some AWP off-site events in LA next weekend. I’ll remind you again next week but here are the details:

Thanks for reading! If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays (but not last Sunday, but definitely this Sunday). It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.