“Weeping Underwater Looks A Lot Like Laughter”: Strange Title, Promising Debut

By: Sleep Sunshine

Michael J. White’s first novel begins, “On our debut night in Des Moines, Nicholas Parsons murdered a high school senior in the hotel room directly beneath us.  The following morning we received a call from the front desk receptionist announcing a cancellation of the complimentary breakfast buffet, due to the conversion of the hotel restaurant into a provisional police headquarters.”

Since I’m a writer I like to think about what made me pluck a book from the seemingly endless stacks at B&N or Borders, and fork over my dwindling cash-flow to bring it home.  Many times I don’t remember.  This time, I recall reading those first two sentences and being interested enough to continue down the page, from their George Flynn, White’s narrator did the rest.

George Flynn and his family (undeveloped, minus his older brother Zach, who is, but not far beyond the lines of jock-stereotype) move from Davenport to Des Moines, Iowa just in time to begin his junior year, in a brand new high school.  George quickly finds himself alienated from his new high school peers, who he describes as “disproportional, with oddly shaped craniums packed with perversions,” and put-off by their hazing in passing notes about him around class, one of which reads: “Please put the fire out in your crotch.”

By page twenty, though, the primary focus of the novel is revealed.  Emily Schell.  Beautiful, intelligent, unbridled…all the qualities of an excellent literary muse.  George is smitten on sight.

Mr. White, though, isn’t done.  Coupled with the “dream-girl” is her younger sister, Katie Schell, whose precocious, witty, sardonic humor really pops off the page.  Katie is also in love with George, and this element–a love triangle, but not really–is fascinating to witness developing.  George can’t help his physical attraction to Emily, while he can’t ignore his intellectual and spiritual infatuation with Katie.  And lurking under the surface is an even more compelling element, which isn’t ever raised: George’s obsession with the Schell family, as a whole.

Katie Schell suffers from MS, which flares and ebbs as the book progresses; when not sick, Katie is only mobile through the use of a crutches or a wheelchair.  While physically limited, Katie’s mental capacity is limitless.  In every scene Katie is in, she steals the spotlight, especially from her older sister, who’s not all to happy about this yet struggles with the emotions of being jealous of her handicapped younger sister when she received a genetic Power-ball relative to Katie’s losing ticket.

The narration is told from present-day George’s POV.  His life is in ruin and he looks back at these several years with the Schell sisters as the point where his life climaxed and began it’s descent.  One of the weaknesses of the book is George.  He serves as the narrator, yet his characterization is not given as much weight as the Schell sisters, or even the Schell family altogether.

The story is so focused on this dynamic it leaves out what could otherwise be a very interesting and revealing character study of George and his relationships with his parents (not even touched on after page 2) and his older brother Zach (a couple scenes with Zach near the end had great potential).  Mr. White imagined George as a red-head, which, for me, made him inherently interesting, due to the stigma red-haired men in our society deal with; yet Mr. White stopped there, as if this were enough to establish George.  Other than the passing-notes near the beginning, we do not witness George dealing with much adversity.  This can be explained with the fact that George is portrayed as kind of an easy-going fella (who wouldn’t like him), but that retards his character depth, especially in contrast to the fascinating, complicated Schells.

The book doesn’t strive too far.  All you believe is going to happen, does in fact happen, with little surprises along the way.  The hook which captured my attention on the retail floor of B&N–the Nicolas Parson’s murder–turns out to have no greater significance than a repetitive fascination for George and other Des Moines characters.  But, for some reason, neither deficiency left me wanton at the end.  Through reflection, I’ve come to commend Mr. White’s instinct to not muddy the water.  The central plot arc involves George and the Schell sisters and all the emotional highs and lows having met them bring, and that, for this reader, was enough of a meal to chew.

All in all I found this novel to be an excellent read, recommend it for those Confession-ers who enjoy coming-of-age, contemporary type literature, and look forward to Mr. White’s next effort.

Wishing, as always, great words to y’all.

–SS
Michael James Greenwald (Sleep Sunshine)
Born a Jew, though through his fellow confession-ees, now firmly committed to this cathartic concept of confessional (at least in the agnostic literary sense), Michael James Greenwald is a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and waffling daily (sometimes hourly) on To-MFA or To-Not-To-MFA, that is the question. He’s focused on his Summer of Michael, ’10, where healing mentally and spiritually is the order of each day, and moving forward, onto The Next Step. His debut novel The Rainbow Child and short story collection Celebratory Gunfire are due to be published in the next several years. His personal blog site is sleepsunshine. Feel free to venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

PLC’s 500 Club Presents: “Chocolate Birds”

Each Thursday, Parking Lot Confessional hosts a writing workshop, of sorts.  Once a week, we encourage our dedicated readers to get off their asses and write!  We present two distinct writing prompts, and urge readers/writers to create 500 word shotgun stories based on one of our prompts.  Put the story on your blog and link it to our blog and there you have it.  This week, I led the workshop.  I presented fans of PLC  with these two prompts…

1.

OR

2. Music Video Link

Below you will find my 500 words…

“Chocolate Birds”

By: Sleep Sunshine

“But Mummy, I want one, I want one!”

“Hush now, Charlotte,” I say, my five-year-old’s face swollen to a point where I know, any second now, she’ll fling herself on the ground and throw a atom-bomb of tantrums, her specialty.  I lean my face to within inches of hers, smelling the tears on her cheeks, the sour milky smell of her breath.  “We talked about this.  Remember?If you get all upset like you’re doing, you won’t get anything.”

We stand in a crowd of twenty to fifty people, on the shore, absorbing a frigid crosswind, air a mix of salt and brine and oil–even the air saturated with the chemical.  Off in the distance, over the Gulf, a billow of smoke covers the water as though storm clouds had rolled in, those these clouds contained no rain.  Oil rigs, like iron sentries, stand, miles off in the water.  The rig in the middle listing to the side, Coast Guard powerboats surrounding it, two Coast Guard helicopters in the air above.

I watch my husband in a tiny rowboat, our next-door neighbor Bob Ardsman with him, rowing out from the bank to the island townsfolk called Bird Island.  The ends of Al’s beard flap in the gusts of crosswind, as though his face had wings.  I watch him row, strong muscles in his arms and back ripping his oars through the water, along the channel he’s navigated ever since he’d been a boy.

“I want one, Mummy, I want one,” Charlotte reiterates, and I know my focus should have been on Al’s orders as he was untying his rowboat, Bob coming down from his house, next door to ours, Bridgette, his wife, in tow, to help.  Get her back in the house, Al had said.  Now, remembering that, I know he was right and I take my daughter’s hand and try to lead her back up the hill to our home, but she squats on the ground and the wails begin.  “I WANT A YUMMY CHOCOLATE BIRD,” she screams.  “I WANT ONE NOW!”

Heads of our neighbor’s turn, eyes cast upon us, eyes that have always conveyed inner feelings of disapproval, at me, at Charlotte, at Mia, at Russ–all evidently contaminated by British origin.

A fog hangs over the channel.  As my daughter grabs clouts of dirt, soiling her pudgy arms and white Sunday church dress, I lift binoculars on a rope around my neck to my eyes and see Al about twenty meters from the tiny island; dark, lined face from fifty-hours-a-week on an oil rig furrowed in desperation.

Beyond Al I see the birds.  Pelicans, egrets, swans.  All slick and black, like, as my daughter thought, they’d been dipped in chocolate.  As I watch an egret standing in the shoals takes flight; giant wings flapping, black ooze dripping off of him into the water.

“Look!”

“There he goes!”

“Oh, Jesus, I can’t watch!”

The egret rises maybe fifteen feet off of the water.  Al quits rowing, throws up his arm; his mouth open, shouting.  Then the great bird’s right wing dips; his head jerks to the right, as though not understanding the sudden shift.  Then the bird dives sideways, angling, flapping his wings desperately, kicking his feet.  He smacks side-ways into the black water, disappearing below.  We all wait for him to buoy to the surface, but after a couple minutes a crest of water laps onto the tiny pebbles of our shoreline, staining them black.

Al and Bob have their arms out, as if still waiting to catch the bird.  Then they both lower hands to oars and begin again to row.

In the huddled crowd on the shore, people sob.  Women.  Their husbands.  All tied to the oil rigs that stand miles out in the gulf.  I man lifts his bifocals to his bald head, brings a kerchief to his face.

“Mummy!  I’m hungry!  I want a chocolate birdy!”

A lady from down the way lifts her face from her husband’s shoulder.  “I’m sorry, but would you shut her up,” she hisses.

“Come on, hunny,” I say, grabbing her under her arms, lifting her, carrying her like Al used to when she’d have a poopie diaper.  “I think we have chocolate in the house.”

Behind me my husband rows to save the birds, as I carry our petulant child back to our home.

<The End>

On Therapy and Artistic Immortality…On a Tuesday, At That

As posted Tuesday on the Parking Lot Confession.  Make-up work for missing my regular Sunday post.  Thanks for reading…

SS, in full Blackhawk "Playoff Beard" Regalia

Good morning, Confession-ees! I’m confessing today from strange places and times. Tuesday morning. Not my usual day.

You might be thinking: WTF, him again, we know to avoid PLC on Sundays as to not subject our eyes to his ridiculous blabber, and now he’s tricked us; posting on a Tuesday! Look away, Eyes! Look away! WTF! WTF!

As am I. As am I.

(Or…you might not be thinking that at all. Who knows what we think, right?)

Yesterday, I attended my very first therapy session, with a therapist who one of my best friend’s recommended. To be truthful, the decision to try therapy (again) wasn’t a shot from the hip, I’ve gone back and forth for a while now on it’s necessity. I settled down many a night on my mother’s verandah, sucking on a bottle of Knob (“Knob Creek, the only bourbon Sleep Sunshine will pass-out from“…still waiting for that check, Knob Creek; remember Cheyenne Drive is spelled with 2 N‘s), staring out into a Chicago rainstorm, going back and forth:

To Therapy, or Not-To Therapy; the question.

During this debate, I recall an instance, another of my best friend’s likes to retell, about a time when I was in college, and one buddy, lets call him Goro, and another of my best friend’s, let’s call her Silvanopolis…yeah, that’s what I said: Silvanopolis. She’s part Russian, part lost city at the bottom of the ocean. A Russo-opolis mix. Very sexy.

Here’s the interplay:

INT. Living Room–College Apartment–Day

Beer bottles and fast-food containers and passed-out individuals lying around on a beer-stained carpet, top-less girl sprawled on an adjacent couch. GORO and SILVANOPOLIS sitting next to one another engaged in a heated DOOM battle, smoking four-foot glass bong between them.

Goro: Yo, Sil, what shall we get Mike for his birthday?

Silvanopolis: I don’t know. A psychiatrist.

GORO nods his head.

Fade to black.

My College Yearbook Photo: Gosh, I looked so much younger then!

Harkening back, I question if I’ve always been sorta crazy, and come to the conclusion I guess I have.

But now I’m doing something about it. Kudos to me.

Really, what I seek out of therapy, what I expressed to my therapist, lets call her Fredreicka Goldenfarb (what is with me and Russian names this morning), was my desire to have the ability to de-clutter my brain to a point where I can make some Big Choices in my life. At the moment I feel so buried, mentally, so over-extended, that it’s hard for me even to decide on what to have for lunch, much less figure out what career I want to do for the next ten years, what state I need to live (as in geographical area; not mental, IE–catatonic), who I will marry and have children with, etc.

The only part of my life which has remained relatively constant is my work, my writing, and I wonder if the roller-coaster of productivity I’ve experienced–weeks of 70,000-word-production coupled with weeks of struggling-to-write-a-decent-page-of-prose–can be aided by this de-cluttering of brain.

For her part, Fredreicka stated her confidence that we’d get there, that she’d do all the heavy-lifting (then proceeded to ask me how much I’d pay for her services; to which I wrote down the secret password to my trust fund on a slip of paper and handed it to her. Then she mentioned how it would get worse before it got better and I snagged back the slip of paper and emptied the change out my pockets onto her nice therapy table, instead).

One of the touchstones for me has always been, can I be “normal” and still hold onto my artistic edge?

Fredreicka again seemed confident. She said, not only would my artistic edge not be affected, but I’d be a happier person, which would allow my creatively to flow more freely, and I’d have more control over it, eliminating, or at least tempering, the frustration of never knowing which Sleep Sunshine will settle down to the keys–the Manic-uberProductive-SS, where the sentences flow like I’ve possessed Jonathan Lethem’s fingers; or the Depressive-NearIlliterate-Nicholas-Sparks-clone.

We hang onto this creativity like it’s something that will hold us to the earth when the tornado of our lives rages around us. It’s what we have. It’s what keeps us sane. It’s who we are, isn’t it? Non-artists don’t get that, do they?

Yet, our creative endeavors won’t feed us (literally and figuratively), won’t cloth us, won’t hold us when tragedy strikes, won’t love us back (not in the way our human-ness needs), won’t grab a beer with us, won’t provide us children (real children), won’t allow us to feel the great stimulations living, real living, has to offer: eternal love, friendship, family, orgasm…

Often I think of some of the greatest artists of Time, and note how many of them, outside their art, lived miserable existences–failed marriages, estranged children, friend-less, penniless, drug and alcohol addictions, shotgun chokings–and I wonder, I do, if that is the price we must pay for greatness.

And if it is, will I make this sacrifice? Can I? Should I?

Fredreicka seems to think not.

Me? I hope not. I want the love, the marriage, the baby-carriage. I want all the gifts I bestow on my characters and with them all the pain they bring. I want to feel, in real-life, viscerally, not just on the page, through my creations. But mostly, I want artistic immortality. And if I can’t have both–if we all really must choose Red Pill or Blue–I remain unsure of what choice to make.

My hope is Fredreicka will help me de-clutter my brain enough to make the best decision I can.

Thank you for reading.

As always, I wish you great words!

-SS

For those of you in the Chicago-land area, Sleep Sunshine (Michael James Greenwald) will be reading his poem “I Am Lane” at 42 Degrees North Latitude on Thursday, May 20th, at 7PM. (I’ll have two, no three, therapy sessions under my belt by that point, so the chance you’ll witness some on-stage weeping is really good!)

Click here for more details.

Thanks for supporting your local Chicago artists!

You Mean I Have to Sell T-Shirts? Richard Nash, the Candide of Publishing, and the Glorious Future Ahead

My Sunday confession at PLC is a profile of Richard Nash, the former publisher of the indie house Soft Skull and currently the Che Guevara of the publishing industry.

Check it out here.

Wishing good words to y’all.

–MJG

Kicking You When You’re Down: PLC Interviews Michael James Greenwald

NOT Michael James Greenwald

By: The Parking Lot Confessional

Hello, and welcome to the Sunday edition of the Parking Lot Confessional Interview Series. Today, Amy K. Nichols, S.C. Green, and Amy McLane (PLC) will be tossing questions at the sometimes-cagey, chronically-complicated Michael James Greenwald.

We met him on a sunny Sunday morning at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Indian School in Scottsdale, Arizona. Michael showed up twenty minutes late wearing a blue “I’m Like a Superhero Without Powers or Motivation” t-shirt, ripped jeans, and dark bug-eyed sunglasses. We were sitting at an outside table and he walked right by us into the coffee shop, emerging at least ten minutes later, with a medium chai, one pump vanilla, latte and an odd grin on his face.

“I knew that girl in there.” He took a seat, sipped from his hot drink. “We took a writing class together at ASU with Ron Carlson. She wrote these amazing sci-fi stories. Stuff that would just blow your mind, man.”

He took out a pack of Parliaments, lit one with a skull&crossbones Zippo. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you,” he asked, exhaling a cloud away the opposite direction from where we sat, watching the grey cloud shifting and shaping in air. “She said she applied to like nine MFA programs, got universally rejected. Send out over three hundred short stories and got back three hundred rejections. Ran up ten grand on her credit cards and ended up crashing at her sister’s apartment until her sis married some real estate tard and they ditched the apartment for a house with a pool in PV.”

Michael shook his head. “Now, she works here on the weekends, temps at an office during the week. Taking classes at Scottsdale community for criminal studies. Hasn’t written word one in two years.” He shook his head. “Man, if you let it, the writing life’ll kick you when you’re down.”

“Any suggestion for writers in our audience?” we asked.

“Yeah. Don’t fall down.”

Michael James Greenwald’s novel-in-progress, Haply, first in his Worthington Series, is one-part family-saga, one-part ghost story, spotlighting a young family dealing with inevitable loss. His short story collection, Stories from a Bowling Alley, catalogs lives of working-class people from and around his hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago.

He has a family house in Scottsdale, that his grandfather bought thirty years before, where he escapes “the pressures of societal life”, as he put it, in Chicago. He took his sunglasses off to reveal eyes creased beyond his thirty years. Well into his third smoke, we began the interview.

PLC: Let’s start out with a softball. How long have you been pursuing a writing career?

MJG: My conscious self has been pursuing a writing career for four years now. I had moved to Arizona to go to law school and in the 11th hour realized if I took on 100,000 dollars in debt I’d never be a writer. My subconscious self has always wanted to be a writer. I guess I’ve been a closeted writer since I was really little, but I was always very athletic and my mother pushed me into sports. I found sports was a mainline route to coolness and girls, which at the time were the most important things for me. But now I’m perfectly happy with be uncool, alone, and poor. And if you believe that I have some land for sale in Utah.

PLC: Utah, huh. My cousin has a house there.

MJG: Then he can literally use that line.

PLC: He does. Trust me. Thinks it’s hilarious. Anyway, back to work, do you have any totemic writing subjects?

MJG: Fathers and sons is a subject that I am drawn to. And mental illness.

PLC: Why those?

MJG [shifts uncomfortably]: What happened to those softballs? Okay. Well, both subjects, I guess, derive from the tumultuous relationship I’ve had with my father, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, and my constant fear–and my siblings’, too, I think–is that someday our brains will short and we’ll end up just like him. I guess you didn’t ask about my biggest fear, but that would be one of them–I’m flush with fear– to end up suffering and struggling as much as my father has.

PLC: I’m sorry about your father.

MJG: It is what it is.

PLC: Any other subjects that grab you?

MJG: Well, I’m fascinated by the inner workings of family and children. I guess that biological clock is really ticking. [chuckles] My current novel and my next novel both center around young families, struggling with finances, balancing career and family dreams, and dealing with events which threaten the delicate connection between husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and siblings.

PLC: What is the worst story you’ve ever written?

MJG: I just mentioned them.

PLC: All of them?

MJG: Yep. I have a big-time loathe-love relationship with all my work. I’m the kind of writer who requires an audience to justify my work. That could be because I’m still learning how to write for an audience, or what works and doesn’t work in my own writing, or because I have been using such an intuitive approach to my work, so I really don’t know what’s funny until a reader laughs, what’s sad until a reader cries, what’s dramatic and interesting until I see a reader’s engagement. I’m hoping I’ll get much better at knowing what works and what doesn’t as my career goes along, because I’ve found that there is a fine line between writing for an audience and pandering to an audience.

PLC: Can you explain that last point for our readers?

MJG: What I mean is, you can’t please everyone. No matter what you do, what you change, a good cross section of readers will not “get it”, will not be able to engage, will outright hate your work. And if you are reliant on external justification in your creative process, you could find yourself in a constant state of editing to try and address every readers’ concerns. As a writer, I warn you to not fall prey to the please all, please no one trap. You need to be like a stomach and become very adept at knowing what criticism to break down into proteins, what criticism to chemically alter for the body to use, and what criticism to just push into the small intestines for excretion–to use a crude analogy. You’re body–in this analogy, your manuscript–can’t use everything.

PLC: Okay, lets switch gears here, a bit, and move from focusing on you–

MJG: Thank you.

PLC: What? You aren’t comfortable with talking about yourself?

MJG [shrugs]: It comes with the territory, I guess. I’d rather my work speak for itself. This, of course, flies into the face of a lot of my goals beyond writing, though, so I don’t know.

PLC: What would those goals be?

MJG: Well…I don’t know if I should be revealing this here. Someone could steal it. I want each of my books to be linked to a cause. For instance, I have a novel which really directly probes a relationship between a son and his bi-polar father and I want a portion of the book sale proceeds to go to either research for mental illness or to organizations that in some way provide support for families debilitated by brain disease. I want to build a platform, both through speaking arrangements and book discussions, to both serve the needs of people in the world suffering in silence through this issue and hopefully raise awareness and make a difference in people’s lives.

PLC: That’s very admirable of you.

MJG: Yeah, well, don’t downplay the marketing potential of it, either.

PLC: Is there a book you find yourself re-reading again and again?

MJG: Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses has some kind of hold over me. I can’t quite explain it. It’s just an amazing book. There are paragraphs of writing in that book that leave me breathless. There’s one page in that book, where Cormac describes this girl riding a horse and there are no sexual words on the page but for some reason the words he chose elicit a physiological sexual reaction I cannot quite explain. He captures a mood in that book, a masculinity, that is so powerful to me. Other people I’ve talked to say, “yeah, it’s a good book,” but for me, somehow that books taps into my soul. Brilliant piece of work.

PLC: We really enjoyed No Country for Old Men.

MJG: Don’t forget about his earlier work. Early on in my career, my best friend gave me Child of God to read, a book about a Lester Ballad, a murderer and necrophile–half your audience just decided they’d never read that book–which only McCarthy can reveal a depth of the humanity we all know is in there, but fear to bring it out, hold it in our hands, and try and figure it out. And only he can make a character like Lester sympathetic to the reader.

PLC: So, what are you saying, deep down, we’re all necrophiles?

MJG: Well, you three are [Laughs] for sure. No, I’m saying there are really dark, darker than most of us can even imagine, parts of ourselves, which most of us will spend a lifetime ignoring, denying its existence, and McCarthy forces his readers to see the evil in his character and at the same time maybe recognize the evil within ourselves.

I mean, for example, lets take Stalin, Idi Amin, John Wayne Gacy, or Osama Bin Laden. They’ve been branded mythic-like creatures of evil, but really they are all human beings, who need to digest food and water, breath air, just like we all do. We have that commonality, too. And to say we also don’t have, somewhere within us, similar depths of evil, is flat-out denial and fear. We recognize their evil, Lester Ballad’s evil, in whatever form it projects, in some way, because every human being–even Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Jesus Christ–possessed and possesses that same evil, projecting in specific forms for each of us, which we either have the ability to control or not.

Evil is evil, is my point. And McCarthy, through Child of God, forces us to look at the evil within ourselves.

If you can create your work to force your audience to examine something they may had been too fearful to see in themselves, force them to examine their life and their world, you are doing an amazing job as an artist.

PLC: What is the best opening of a novel you’ve ever read?

MJG: The greatest opening for me would be Charles Dickens’s magnum opus Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

PLC: Why do you like it so much?

MJG: It’s just a beautiful set-up for the novel. It really captures the period in a brilliant way. I recall being completely floored the first time I read that introduction.

I really love: “Suddenly it was June and there were strange towels in the house.” From Ron Carlson’s short story “Towel Season.” It’s a wonderful thing when a writer can spin your world on it’s side in the opening line. Something about the strangeness of this line, how the words collide in this sentence. Something about the immediacy of this opening line really sticks with me. Right away, you feel like you’ve missed a whole lot and instinctively you’re called to attention to try and catch up. Brilliant. If you want to go to school on opening lines, look no further than Ron Carlson U.

PLC: What about an ending?

MJG: “The End” always seems to do the trick.

PLC: Really? Seems bland.

MJG: Bland can be good. If you don’t have bland how can you appreciate flavorful? No, but I think the best endings, the ones writers strive for, are final lines that propel you to pop the book closed, take a deep breath, then open the book at page one and begin again.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

That might not cause you to begin to read “The Dead” over again, especially because if you’ve made it through Joyce’s story, you’re probably exhausted, but this line takes the story and raises it up to another level. This end sucks the air out of your lungs.

PLC: Speaking of the end, we’ve reached the end of this interview. So, thanks again, for sitting down with us.

MJG: Sure. Not like I had anything better going on. Except drinking, and there’s always time in a day for that.

PLC: We look forward to reading your finished novel.

MJG: So do I. So does my agent, for that matter. I’ll just keep plugging away and see what happens.

PLC: Famous last words?

MJG [grins]: Sure. Any questions?

If y’all want to get to know Michael a bit better, check him out on FACEBOOK, follow him on Twitter, or a his personal blog.

Weekly Confession on PLC

By: Michael James Greenwald

Hi.  I made my regular confession on my group blog, The Parking Lot Confessional and would love if you checked it out.  It’s my own little spin on Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech.  Struggling writer style.

Check it out here.

You won’t be sorry.  Well…maybe a little bit sorry, but not jumped naked onto my horse’s black saddle after he’d been standing all day in the Arizona summer heat sorry.

That’s real damn sorry.

Thanks for visiting (don’t leave!!!! don’t leave!!!!  I don’t want to be alone!!!!  I’ll do a trick!!!!!  Any kind!!!!!! Oh, never done that before…okay, but first let me stretch…)

RANDOM VIDEO!!!!  RANDOM VIDEO!!!!!

My favorite movie scene.

I wish you all good words!!!!!

MJG

By the way, if you all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.