Adam Selzer: King of the Wild Frontier

Welcome to the blog! Take a look at the archives for some of the best of the older posts. Or, try these tags:

writing, weird chicago, appetite for deconstruction, pirates of the retail wasteland, I Put a Spell On You

We went down to scenic Normal, IL for the Illinois Young Writers Conference, at which I met with about a hundred or so 6th graders and talked about being a writer. Each kid got a copy of "Pirates of the Retail Wasteland," and the campus bookstore - which was well stocked in advance with both of my books - sold out of everything I had about five minutes after the book signing started. Man, that's a nice feeling. Great bunches of kids, too. I don't envy them having seventh and eighth grades in front of them, but, hey, that's 10 more years til they're out of college - maybe the economy will pick up by then!

Dear Oil Companies:
I'd fart in your general direction, but you'd put it in a jar and sell it. Jerks.


Dear Mr. President:
Bad form, Mr. President. But good news: I still don't think you're QUITE as big a jerk as Andrew Johnson was! Of course, he didn't have his finger on the same sort of button that you do.


Dear. Mr. Roosevelt:
You got robbed in 1912, and I know YOU wouldn't have taken this kind of crap from the oil companies. I'll be back in the ballroom you're supposed to haunt several time between now and election day if you want to make any statementss. The MAINSTREAM press has unfairly ignored you for too long, Colonel.

Dear Oil Companies:
Oh, what the hell... pppppppppppbbbbbbbbbbbtttttttttttttt.

I was pretty sure I'd heard every single song the Oldies stations had to offer. How did I ever manage to go so long without ever having heard "Hats Off to Larry" by Del Shannon?

PIRATES OF THE RETAIL WASTELAND has been named a Booksense Pick for Summer, 2008! This gives me a nice push with indie booksellers, who are fast becoming my best friends.

Here's the blurb sited:

PIRATES OF THE RETAIL WASTELAND, by Adam Selzer (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, $15.99, 9780385734820 / 0385734824) "Pirates of the Retail Wasteland follows the exploits of a group of cynical, disaffected, and talented high school students who rouse themselves from their torpor to try and save the last non-chain business on their town's strip -- a grungy, congenial coffee shop called Sip. Selzer's character are dead-on, and his readers will thoroughly enjoy this one." --Kenny Brechner, Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers, Farmington, ME

I'm reading a pretty nifty book called 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, Debs and the Election That Changed America. It's all about the year when Teddy Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose party candidate - Roosevelt got a lot more radical after his presidency; the Bull Moose platform reads, today, like a template for what the democratic party would become under FDR. Fascinating stuff; as part of my Weird Chicago research, I've gone back and read a lot of contemporary articles about that election lately - the ballroom that was Roosevelt's headquarters at both the Republican and Bull Moose conventions that year is a regular stop on my tours. Roosevelt is only one of many ghosts that are supposed to haunt that room, though I've yet to find a single person who actually claims to have SEEN that ghost. Still, we went in there a while ago with all of our niftiest gear to see if we could get the Colonel to endorse a candidate for 2008, but, uncharacteristically, he kept his mouth shut.

Working on editing the Weird Chicago book today, trying to keep it from turning out to be the size of a phone book. The draft of the first three chapters is about 340 pages long!

So, someone broke into Ronni's car last night. On the plus side, there wasn't anything in there to steal, other than a copy of Highlights for Children and a Les Miz CD set, both of which they left. I kinda wish they'd taken the magazine, as a bit of Goofus and Gallant might have done them good.

Taking it to get fixed later at a low low cost of $160 bucks. For now, I took the opportunity to politicize the event:

One of my only politically-based regrets in leaving Georgia was that I wouldn't have Bob Barr to kick around anymore. He was my congressman for a while. He pandered to racists, bigots, the more maniacal wing of the gun lobby, and, as I recall, was the first to call to grant Bush special emergency powers (like Jar Jar Binks in Attack of the Clones) after 9/11. When, after we successfully kicked him out on his ass, he became a voice AGAINST the patriotic act, I knew his game - he was just trying to get his name in the papers. He was the guy I loved to hate. I drove a long way to vote against him in person so I knew that the vote would be counted - the whole fiasco in 2000 made me pretty sure that my absentee ballot would have ended up in a landfill someplace.


Now he's running for president as a libertarian. Oh, frabjous day! Let me dig up my kickin' shoes...

Woke up feeling fine yesterday, if a bit sore from all that Wii. And some pre-tour headbanging from when the Hard Rock Cafe (where my tour bus picks up) was blasting "Bohemian Rhapsody." That left me sore, too.

But the soreness didn't hit my throat til about noon.

It MAY have been compounded by taking a mile-or-two walk in the rain yesterday morning at 6, or maybe it just felt like it was time to strike. It knocked me out HARD all day, and today doesn't look promising.


Anyway, got til Friday to be over it.

Whoooo just got a tip equivalent to a week's pay at Starbucks for running a really fun three hour tour?

Back in the old days, when i worked for the other ghost tour company, my usual driver was an improv comic named Hector. Over time, we developed a regular two-step routine in which I was (usually) the straight man, and had a GREAT time giving fantastic tours. He's a major "character" in the ghost book I'm doing for Llewellyn, even.

But it all went to hell after that company split up; we stayed friends, but couldn't work together.


Til tonight. Tonight was our first time working together in about a year and a half.

It was great - we kicked back old times, brought some of the more venerable jokes out of storage, came up with a couple of new ones. Hit a couple of old haunts, if you'll pardon the pun, that aren't usually on my tours anymore.

Weird Chicago Tours have gotten WAY better in the last several months, as we've developed enough solid stops that we can run different tours every night and never have one fall apart, and as we've incorporated more of the research that we'd been sitting on. Having Hector back makes me feel like we've got the band back together.

...on September 8, I'll be releasing I Put a Spell On You, my first middle grade book. It's a satire of the spelling bee genre, based upon Watergate and Our Mutual Friend (though a lot of the latter, now that I think about it, got weeded out in editing).

It is, by far, the hardest book to write I've ever done. There are four main narrators (two male, two female), including:

Jennifer Van den Berg: An over-scheduled, Shakespeare-obsessed free spirit who dreams of running away to be a hippie while her dad plots a break-in to steal the master word list for the bee from the school.

Chrissie Woodward: the school snitch who realizes that she's been working for the wrong side all her life after she uncovers a web of corruption in the principal's office.

Harlan Sturr: a class clown who spends his nights planning his own funeral, he sees the all-school bee as his last chance to leave his mark on Gordon Liddy Community School.

Mutual Scrivener: a new student, previously home-schooled by his fanatical parents, who has been enrolled in school just to compete in the spelling bee; he befriends a headbanger and a wannabe-witch and becomes fascinated with heavy metal - and Jennifer van den Berg.


This was a tough one (and the sequel was even harder). The plot is WAY more complicated than most of the other books I've written, and tying all of the threads together and setting up the sequel was a lot of work. Sometimes I felt like I was collapsing under the weight of the thing. I wanted to satirize the spelling bee genre, but I wanted it to work kind of like, say, 'The Princess Bride," in that it's a satire, but it still stands on its own. I remember seeing Princess Bride in a theatre when I was a kid and being absolutely swept away by the story. I caught a joke here and there, but had no idea that it was really a comedy. Obviously, few kids are going to get jokes about Richard Nixon's secretary, but I stand firm in my belief that what happened to Nixon is one of history's greatest farces. You need need to get the references to enjoy the story - it's just a special bonus that'll pay out dividends to kids who come back to the book when they get older. To some kids, the book can just function as a really ripping mystery story with a lot of jokes thrown in.

In "work that I AM qualified for" news, I got to run a GREAT tour for a student group last night - a group of 16 7th-8th graders. I love doing tours for that age group; they always get into the tour, and always have a lot of good questions to ask. About mid-way through, I'm always thinking "See? THIS is why I write for kids this age!"

No one looks back at middle school and thinks "boy, those were the best years of my life!" But I look back on it fondly for three reasons:

1. I had a good group of smart friends, who helped me become who I am.
2. It was at least better than high school for me.
3. I've blocked out 90% of it.

In my parents' day, or perhaps just a decade ago, employers might see that you had a degree and years of experience working at a restaurant and say "yes, you seem smart and you obviously have a good work ethic. You can handle this job." That doesn't really happen much anymore; employers just look for 3 years of experience in the field. A business degree right now isn't much less useless than a philosophy degree. I could have quit school at 13 and racked up a police record and I wouldn't be any less employable than I am.

There are probably a few degrees left out there that will get you a job (education, perhaps), but if you want to get a good job now, your best bet is really to skip (or at least delay) college and get an internship instead, with a part-time job at night to pay the bills). Let's look at the breakdown:

4 years unpaid internship:
- a marketable skill and experience in the field
- no student loans

4 year degree:
- no experience, even if you do learn a skill.
- years of student loans.


Maybe there are places out there where it's different - in some cities, I imagine, a college student can get a paid internship. In the towns where I went to college, those didn't really exist. To pay the bills, we had to work regular old nametag jobs.

This doesn't mean that I'm telling people not to go to college - no, no, no. I don't regret going, because I came out smarter than I was when I went in. It's simply time to re-evaluate WHY we go to college. You go to college to become a smarter, happier, well-rounded person, not a more financially successful one. People in college who aren't there to get any smarter really, really ought to rethink their path.

Maybe things will change when the economy starts to recover. But as of right now, an undergrad degree is about like having a high school degree thirty years ago. Go to school to get smarter, not to get richer.

Coming this summer to a bookstore near you (if you live in Chicago, especially):



Check out that fine photo in the main frame - it's by Ronni!

1994:
slim jim - .99
can of jolt cola - .65
Spider-man comic book - 1.50 or so.

2008:
slim jim - 1.20
thing of jolt - 2.99 (they don't make it in cans anymore - just big 24 oz things)
Spider-man comic book - 3.99


But the simple joy of a Slim Jim, a Jolt, and a Spider-man comic book hasn't changed a bit.

The whole thing they did lately where Peter Parker and MJ made a deal with Mephisto to erase their marriage from memory (along with whatever else Marvel thought was convenient) to save Aunt May's life was one of the bigger cop-outs in comic book history. And that's saying something.

BUT now Peter Parker is a single guy in his mid twenties struggling through life, trying to make ends meet and deal with his groovy, How I Met Your Mother-eque group of pals (with Harry Osbourne as Barney to Peter Parker's Ted), dealing with the pressure of having been a fast-track gifted student with nothing to show for it as an adult, is, quite frankly, MUCH better than having him be married to a supermodel. They've been trying to write their way out of that for years. Getting out of it had to be messy. But from what I've read so far, it was worth it. It helps that the newer issues have been a whole lot funnier than Spider-man has been in years.

Spidey is back where he should be: a wisecracking everyman that I can identify with, with Gwen Stacy dead (and never having had an affair with Norman Osbourne, which was just icky) and J. Jonah Jameson barking out orders.

Sent out some resumes to see if I could get some free-lance work doing writing, light graphic design, etc. I've been pretty much self-employed these last few years, but I've been published by major publishers and run print ad campaigns for my companies, etc.


Unfortunately, I'm just as unemployable now as I was a few years ago. By then, a college degree was worth about the paper it was printed on; the only thing employers were looking for was specific experience in the field. My 11 years of experience in the retail and restaurant industries actually worked against me; people would look at my resume and suggest that I apply at the new Starbucks. Eleven years of work, a college degree and a spotless police record might have gotten you a job once. Now, it's about the same thing as having a high school degree and some light babysitting on your resume twenty years ago.

Let this be a lesson, kids: don't go to college to get a job. Go to college to become a smart, well-rounded person. Your education is all you're likely to get out of college these days - take advantage of it. Entirely too many people get out of college just as stupid as they were when they went in.

Nope. Being self-employed is the only thing that's ever worked for me. I have three sold-out tours this weekend, plus a step-on (that's where I just show up, get on some group's bus, and tell the driver where to go) for a school group that had me last time they were in town - back when I worked for a different company - and wanted to have me again.

I've done 40 in all. Here're a few more:

Working on the Weird Chicago book is totally unlike doing stuff for Random House. for one thing, the turn around time between finishing it and having it for sale is going to be a matter of weeks. We intend to have it out shortly, and we still have time for new ideas.

The cover, like most of our print ads, is based on old EC Comics:


Just the other day we got the idea to have some comic-type ads in it that related to the content, so I've spent the last couple of days happily crankin' 'em out. Here're a few:








We intend to have a page at the beginning of each chapter, mixing in a few actual newspaper ads for events that ended in disaster, performances of Hamlet downtown starring John Wilkes Booth, etc. I've made about 30 so far.

Hey, is anyone reading Spider-man since they did the whole retcon? I thought the ret-con was about the dumbest thing EVER, but, hey, making the last 15 years of Spider-man never have happened isn't all bad. I picked up one issue during Free Comic Book Day that also had a new "series bible" and all of that, and I'm intrigued. Whoever's in charge of this may be going for the ultimate deus ex machina, but could the end justify the means? They HAVE been trying to get themselves out of the corner they were painted into for ages, and I like the idea of having Peter Parker as a 25 year old single guy living paycheck to paycheck.



But I still say Aunt May should have stayed dead after issue 400.

Finished two rough drafts in the last week, including one yesterday that has spent a full year kicking my ass - middle grade books are hard! This one was especially tricky, because I had to figure out what sort of "world" it inhabited.

The book, "Lost and Found" is about a kid who wants to be a spy and tries to break into the lost and found room. I had to figure if this was going to be the kind of book where...

... the lost and found room turns out to have some sort of treasure in it
... there's really nothing there but old mittens
or
... it turns out to be only the antechamber to a secret room where the janitor is holding a polka band hostage.

In other words, is the kid REALLY spy, does he just THINK he's a spy, or what? There are a lot of subtle choices that have a huge impact on how the book works as a whole here.

I tried it each of those ways (and a few more, besides) before finding the right way to do it. But, after draft upon draft, I've got one that I'm excited about.


And now I don't know what the heck to do with myself this morning. Hence, I'm working on some new Back Row Hooligans songs. I have a real itch to do another album right now, and hoping this'll cure it.

Here's a new song for today; I don't think it'd fit in on the album, but I sort of want to record it just because it would really fun to film a video for it. It's an instructional dance number.

THE POUR IT ON YOUR HEAD POLKA

Take a gallon of milk and pour it on your head, pour it on your head
a bottle of cola, gotta pour it on your head, pour it on your head
nice, cold lemonade, pour it on your head
iced vanilla latte, pour it on your head
and don't blame me when you get grounded!

Take a bowl of dog food, pour it on your head, pour it on your head
a box of cereal gotta pour it on your head, pour it on your head
refreshing apple juice, pour it on your head
communion wine, pour it on your head
and don't blame me when they kick you out of church!

I'm not really a memorabilia/antique collector. Or, anyway, I try not to be. But some things I can't pass up. Among the stuff on my wall:


- A coat hanger bent into a neat shape by Bob Dylan
- the doorbell from a house where Jim Morrison used to live (I built this into my desk)
- a strand of Charles Dickens' hair (also now built into the desk)
- souvenir key from the 1933 World's Fair
- Copy of the Des Moines Register announcing Nixon's resignation (I'm holding it in the author photo on my next book)
- Counting Crows guitar pick from the 1997 tour
- Chunk of driftwood signed by all three members of Ben Folds Five

I've really got my eye on "battle flag" waved by supporters of the Bull Moose party in 1912, but, you know....memorabilia doesn't really MEAN anything. It's just cool. I can't really pay THAT much for cool stuff. Unless it's a wii. Which is more than just cool.

What better way to pull yourself out of the doldrums than buying your first new game system since you got an 8bit NES in late 93?

The best part of my last two albums have probably been the backing vocals (I know, it sure hasn't been MY vocals :) ) by Vixy Dockrey. TheVixy and Tony album is finally out, and it's AWESOME! Tony did a fantastic job on the production - better than I ever could have imagined, especially considering Vixy could sing along to someone playing a nose-flute and the result would have been fine all by itself without a single reverb filter. So many acoustic groups have "produced" albums that just sound like a mess. This one doesn't have a wasted note or beat. Not a one. Even songs that have been recorded live before, like Persephone (which has been a playlist staple of mine for three years now) sounds like it should have always sounded the way it sounds now. That's hard to do.

In fact, I suspect this is going to be one of those albums that gets into my brain and makes me deconstruct it until I think there are grand designs and concepts underlying the whole thing until it becomes a sort of epic that is intertwined in my imagination. One of those albums that comes out every now and then. You know the kind, probably.

Go buy this record. You can go to Itunes and have it in under a minute.

I have it in my head to write a Charlotte's Web themed song to the tune of "If I Were a Carpenter."

If I were a spider
and you were a piggy...

You'd have to sing "spider" with a third syllable - drawing out the i sound oughta do it. I haven't gotten past that first line yet, though.


I sort of have it in my head to start writing songs again and recording another album, but most of my brains are telling me "NO! Don't do it! No time! No room! You didn't even sell half of the first (very small) printing of Clark Street Carols, and you know you aren't gonna wanna go play in bars again to plug it!" "Yes," I say back, "that's very wise, but I still sort of feel like making an album again, if only to make sure my hands are always busy." And it shouts back "You wanna keep your hands busy? Why not finally get your guitar skills past 'advanced beginner?' Maybe even get THAT far on piano! THEN maybe you can think about an album again!"

My brain makes some good points sometimes.

Perhaps no mosaic in the city is cooler than this one - the outside of St. George's Cathedral on Wood Street in the Ukranian Village features a big, shiny mosaic of St. George slaying a dragon.



Does this dragon look like Trogdor to anyone else?

I'm New and notable at amazon!

Click now; this can't last long!

... written three pieces for the Weird Chicago book

... biked out to the West Side to get a picture of Crazy Pipe Man for the Weird Chicago blog

... polished off a few chapters for a fantasy book proposal

... played a little bit with the top secret middle grade project

... did a bit of promo work for Pirates.

... started compiling the podcast we recorded at the old courthouse / gallows site on the overnight ghost hunt the other day, and worked on an ebook about the Chicago gallows.

Been a pretty productive day, over all.



So why do I keep feeling like such a bum?

Someone just pointed me to a really bad review of How To Get Suspended and Influence People. I don't mind the odd bad review, since the vast majority of them were so positive. The book is bound to rub SOME people the wrong way, after all. This review, in fact, amuses me to no end. First of all, there's this sentence:

"No student in the gifted pool would ever put their A at risk by making a video they know would offend their teacher. Not in Marin County where I work, at least."

Bwhahahaa! Most of the gifted kids I've run across (and knew back then) LIVED to offend their teachers. Can Marin County really be so full of wenises compared to wild and crazy suburban Des Moines? Half the point of the book was to point out that most "gifted kids" aren't weirdos who tuck their shirts into their undies - they're miscreants who read from the adult section at the library.

But the BEST part is that the guy read it after a librarian had asked him to - apparently, some teacher objected to said librarian letting a sixth grader read it. In other words - I've been challenged in another library! That's just about the finest badge of honor in the YA field!

I'm giving twitter a try.

Another fine entry to the contest from the Kankakee library!

I'm off to an old Chicago landmark for an all-night ghost hunt to be chronicled in the Weird Chicago podcast and blog. As usual, I don't expect to see any dead guys floating around, but poking around old buildings is always a real kick. Never know what you might find in a joint like this!


My job rules.

I'm hoping that this can mess with my sleep schedule a bit; lately I get tired and head for bed WAY to early, and get up WAY too early as a result.

Today on the Cereal Report, we'll examine Aldi's take on cheerios, and the "darkberries" variation on Fruit Loops (or, as my soon-to-be-stepson calls them, Fruit Poops).


ALDI CHEERIOS - there are some cereals that you can get the off-brand version of and never know the difference - Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Frosted Mini-Wheats and Sugar Crisp come readily to mind. Others can occasionally be better (certain off-brand versions of Cap'n Crunch are less likely to tear up the roof of your mouth than the normal incarnation), and others are hit and miss (frosted flakes, peanut butter crunh, lucky charms). Given the general simplicity of cheerios, one would THINK they would be hard to mess up, but I've yet to find a good off-brand version. The off-brands tend to be a bit...insubstantial compared to the real thing. Trader Joe's probably comes closest, but I can still totally tell the difference. Aldi generally does a fine job of duplicating name brands (it's often the stuff from the same factory as the name brands and happens to be in a different label), so I gave their cheerios a shot - no dice. I've had worse, but they lack the substance I expect from cheerios.


FRUIT LOOPS with DARKBERRIES - the "darkberries" look lke blue-and-purple versions of the regular cereal bits. When I had a bowl of this stuff, I THOUGHT I detected a slightly more black-berryish taste than you normally get from Fruit Loops. It may have just been my imagination, but, in any case, here we have a cereal variation that's actually at least as good as, and possibly even a tiny bit better than, the original. That's not something that happens every day! Sure, now and then you get that rare off-shoot, like the late, lamented frosted version of Rice Krispies that had marshmallows in it. Often you can't tell the difference, like when they add a new charm to Lucky Charms. This may be like that, but without a bowl of the normal stuff to compare it with, it's impossible to be sure. Worth a shot, though!


Next time on the cereal report.....well, it depends on what's on sale next time I hit the store. Rule number one of cereal buying: never pay full price for the name brand stuff. Wait for it to go on sale!

I've finally broken out the demos and click tracks to the songs that I wrote for the Back Row Hooligans project last year, and I think I may go ahead and start work on finalizing things. Ideally, I'd like to replace ALL of the tracks I've recorded (or most of them) with musicians more proficient than I am, and maybe have some other people sing some of the songs. SOOOOooooo.....anyone wanna be a Back Row Hooligan?

I can't add much to my Passover post from the last couple of years, so here it is again:

I've always thought that, while Passover is, by nature, a religious holiday, it's a holiday that can be just as meaningful without the religious angle. No matter who you are or where you came from, it's a sure bet that somewhere along the line, the people who came before you had it worse than you do, and, no matter how hard you've worked, it's useful to remember that you didn't get where you are all by yourself. Everybody has had help - if not from a slave who fled Egypt and wandered in the desert for forty years, then maybe from a teacher or a parent, or even from some politician or pamphlet writer two hundred years ago. Probably all of those and millions more. Because of something they did, your life today is better. And it's nice to be reminded of this and appreciate how good we have it today; to become accustomed to luxury is a sad thing indeed.

Passover is a holiday similar to Thanksgiving - the main idea is to stuff yourself and be thankful that you can. If you're not religious, you can still be thankful to your forefathers, or Squanto or Thomas Paine or whoever - the point is that you didn't get here by youself. No one does. And remember that the way you live can help other people down the road get to a better place than they would have been without you, whether they ever realize it or not.

A couple of years ago there was a letter to the editor in the New York Times from a Rabbi reacting to a recent study in which people prayed for hospital patients to see if it affected the health and/or recovery of the patients (which, for the record, it didn't). He pointed out that prayer is not an ask-and-you-shall-receive sort of vending machine - there are lots of different ways to pray. He related a story of a doctor telling a woman that he was sorry she had to go through all of this right before surgery, which made her feel as though she could go through anything. That was a prayer, and it worked.

You didn't get here yourself. And whenever the people who came before you did something to help us get where we are today, intentional or not, that was a form of prayer. And it worked.

I've been tagged.

Seven songs I'm into right now:

1. Valentine's Day in Juarez - The Ike Reilly Assassination
2. Cowboys - Counting Crows
3. When I Dream of Michaelangelo - Counting Crows
4. Lost in the Shadows (The Lost Boys) - Lou Gramm, I think
5. Nothing Came Out - The Moldy Peaches
6. Thief - Belly
7. Thunder On the Mountain - Bob Dylan

I think this one ought to be pastable, as well:

<a href="http://www.adamselzer.com"><img src="http://i267.photobucket.com/albums/ii284/weirdchicago/fromvicky2.jpg"></a>

From the contest gallery

Angelique from Denver sent us this:


Robert Abbot from Michigan got this great shot:


Indie Street Cred Points all around! Most people are putting them in three places: where the book ought to be, a blank space on one of the tables, and near the "title search" computers.

The BE A PIRATE CONTEST is really firing up!

Here's some great artwork from Vickie Stankewicz of the Kankakee, IL library (which is one of our great nation's best libraries):




Paste this in your blog for one point!

<a href="http://www.adamselzer.com"><img src="http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c154/adamselzer/fromvicky.jpg"></A>


Longtime readers might remember that if I ever run for congress, Greedo is in my Stump Speech, in which I'll introduce The Han Shot First Bill. Finally, some legislation on which we can all agree!

Here're some pics from entrants in the BE A PIRATE CONTEST!








Add this banner to your blog, webpage, etc:

<a href="http://www.adamselzer.com"><img src="http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk122/piratescontest/piratescontestbanner.jpg"></a> And click the banner for MORE ways to join in the motley crew of buccaneers! Extra prizes will soon be announced!

Adam here with your Cereal Report. Today, I tried two new cereals: Chocolate Peanut Butter Pops, and Dino S'mores Pebbles. Both of these are flavors that I adore; to quote a book of mine that isn't out yet, I don't know who first thought of putting chocolate and peanut butter together, but I hope he won a Nobel Prize or something.

CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER POPS
The logo here implies that these are a chocolate peanut butter flavored version of Corn Pops - they left the "corn" out, perhaps wise to the fact that the mixture of chocolate and corn wouldn't turn people on much. The best cereal of this flavor is still the late, lamented E.T. cereal. The recent champ, of course, is the Reese's Cereal, which is pretty good. This new entry from Pops doesn't look like Corn Pops at all, and doesn't have that chewy texture, either. Instead, it looks, feels, and, frankly, tastes about like Cocoa Puffs. There's to MUCH of a peanut butter taste - even less than there is in Reese's, in fact. There IS, however, a corn taste. If you want a good choco-peanut butter cereal, your best bet is still to mix peanut butter Cap'n Crunch with Cocoa Puffs; doing it that way has the added benefit of letting you control the chocolate to peanut butter ratio.

DINO S'MORE PEBBLES
Back in the 80s, there was a smores cereal that was essentially Golden Grahams with some chocolate and marshmallow added. It was GREAT. But eventually it went the way of O.J.s (the cereal that tasted like orange juice) and the Ice Cream Cones cereal (YUM!). Some years back, it was replaced by another S'mores cereal that really screwed up the graham cracker part. I LOVE Smores. But smores flavored stuff is hard to nail - the Smore candy bar is awful, and even the Ben and Jerry S'mores ice cream leaves a little to be desired. The get the chocolate, all right, but the marshmallow lacks the necessary "toasted" flavor, and the graham cracker taste gets drowned out by everything else. So I wasn't that hopeful about Smores Pebbles, which are mostly chocolate shaped chunks a bit more substantial than your average pebbles, bone shaped graham cracker pieces, and "marshmallow boulders." And, in fact, the stuff is terrible. The bone shaped pieces don't taste like anything, and the chocolate pieces taste more like cardboard than anything else. The marshmallows DO have a pretty good taste, but they're few and far between and so tiny that I don't know who they think they are calling them "boulders." One bite had the perfect Smore taste, but the rest of them didn't taste like much, and the texture is more like gerbil food than fruity pebbles.

I'll finish the box of pops. I'm not sure about the pebbles yet, but I won't throw them away immediately, like I did with the sugar-free alpha bits a couple of years back. Someone had BETTER have gotten fired over that one.

Next time on the Cereal Report, I'll be seeing what this "darkberry froot loops" business is all about, and try Aldi's take on fake cheerios, which no one YET has managed to do well.

I made up my mind that I was going to write 15k words this week for the fantasy project, which is sort of a modern day suburban Faust story with a skewed version of Celtic folklore backing it up. I got off to a good start, but today I'm simply tanking. Keeping up with third person limited after years of writing in first person is a bit of a trick (though I've TRIED every project I've done in third person to see if it worked better that way). I've decided not to make the narrator a character himself, but the narrator needs to have a voice of its own - I'm trying to make it a sort of Henry Fielding in Tom Jones voice, or Dickens in A Christmas Carol - particularly those first few paragraphs, where Dickens is at his absolute snarkiest.

The problem is, right now I feel like the main character is coming off like Oliver Twist: flat and uninteresting in an interesting world. I need more on him than this. It's a step up from having him be Paul Dombey (imagine Tiny Tim staying alive for a few hundred pages as a main character instead of being a footnote - by then, you're ready for the little bugger to hurry up and die already), but not where I want him to be. And making the narrator Dickens/Fielding AND modern is quite a balancing act.


side note; I'm still digging this song "Cowboys" on the new Counting Crows album like crazy. Certainly the most exciting and dramatic song they ever did. One wrong move and it could have sounded like a comic book rock song, like, say, Meat Loaf or My Chemical Romance. But through a regular balancing act, they kept it in that Springsteen's Nebraska / Flannery O'Connor vibe. Never thought I'd hear them do a song in which the singer re-imagines himself as a murderer.

The BE A PIRATE CONTEST is a officially launching this morning - help promote PIRATES OF THE RETAIL WASTELAND, pirate-style, and earn "indie street cred point" that can be traded in for valuable prizes!

There are lots of ways to enter:

1. Copy and paste the following text into your blog or webpage <a href="http://www.adamselzer.com"><img src="http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk122/piratescontest/piratescontestbanner.jpg"></a> to post this banner:
.
That's worth one indie street cred point. You can also make your own banner - just make sure to link it to adamselzer.com. Extra points MAY be given, especially if you generate a whole lot of linkage.


2. Download the official "pirate flier," make a few copies, and plant them in the YA section of any book store that isn't currently stocking Pirates of the Retail Wasteland. CLICK HERE to download the flier as a pdf file, or CLICK HERE to get it as a jpg. Two fliers come to each page - just print 'em up, cut the pages in half, and get 'em in the stores! Send in pictures of the fliers in your local bookstore (or coffee shop, library, etc) to us here. Each store you hit is worth 2 indie street cred points! All pictures will be posted in a special gallery soon!



3. If you've already read and enjoyed the book, post a review on amazon for two points!


4. Make your own promo video on Youtube - there are a few of them available here as examples. Send us a link - you'll get 2 indie street cred points right away, plus a bonus point for every 50 views you get! Send a link to the video here - we'll have links to everything here soon!


5. Send in "fan art" for the book (or for How to Get Suspended and Influence People) - the number of points each piece of art is worth will be determined by Adam after you send it in. Art will be posted online!


6. Come up with your own creative way to promote the book, pirate-style. Email us your idea for approval first; we don't want anyone running around naked and shouting "Pirates!" and expecting to get street cred points for it. That kind of thing doesn't get you points, only citations for indecent exposure. And it'll make Adam look like an alleged smut peddlar - just like Leon in his first book, How To Get Suspended and Influence People. Points awarded will vary depending on the stunt.

EXTRA POINTS MAY BE AWARDED FOR CREATIVITY!

Prizes include everything from eyepatches and fake mustaches (fool your friends! baffle your teachers! get into r-rated movies!) to signed copies of the upcoming book I PUT A SPELL ON YOU. And EVERY prize comes with a certificate of Indie Street Cred, a link to download mp3s of Pirates Always Cheat at Bingo by The Back Row Hooligans AND at least one other song, and a coupon for a discount on a Weird Chicago Ghost Tour.

For a complete list of prizes and all of the "void where prohibited, part of this complete breakfast, etc" fine print, go to adamselzer.com.

YARRRR! I'd be remiss if I didn't credit kidlit_kim for this!

Now that I'm dispensing indie street cred, I think I can now make the following formal proclamation:

Polka is the new alternative music.

That's right. All you emo kids can just go cry in your cereal! I'm chatting with a comcast representative (who I'm pretty sure is a robot) right now about getting them to add RFDTV so that I can watch The Big Joe Polka Show. Big Joe rules.

In fact, if you spin around his website, polkacatalog.com , you'll find most of the bands I name characters after. Why, just about every character in the upcoming "I Put a Spell On You" was named after a polka band. THe rest either came from "Our Mutual Friend" or the Nixon administration.

I've gotta use my ability to determine what's hip now, because I'll be selling out soon!

One thing I've discovered while playing my recent Super Mario Marathons is that you can make a lot of rap songs you would normally not sing out loud by replacing the "n word" with "koopa." As in "rat a tat a tat like that / never hesitate to put a koopa to his back."

This can also be used in conversation, as in "man, that koopa crazy!" and "Koopa please!"

New Kids on the Block fever has broken out at my apartment. We are now watching Ronni's video collection. She has quite the New Kids video collection. She can do the dance moves, too. It's totally hot.

I was young enough when they hit the height of their popularity that there wasn't any social stigma for boys in my class to like them, and, now that I watch these videos for the first time in YEARS, I can see why i liked them - they were like cool older brothers. I didn't have a cool older brother. I WAS the cool older brother. Or, anyway, I was the older brother.

Watching them as an adult, I can usually tell when they're lip-synching in the concert clips and know exactly how choreographed the off-stage clowning around probably was, but these guys sure as hell did work their butts off. Everyone lip syncs in dance shows, anyway. Odds are pretty good that none of the girls at the concerts could hear 'em, anyway. And if they were all on coke to keep going (not out of the question) and had hotel rooms full of naked girls every night (I understand that was the case), I sure never suspected it at the time.

And, of course, it's a rush of nostalgia for me to see all this again. When we think of 80s nostalgia, we usually go for the cartoons, the toys...you know. The stuff we never really outgrow. But let us all be honest - we watched this, too. We grew out of it (I remember hearing kids saying the new kids were "really more of an 80s thing" in EARLY 1990), but we watched it, all right. All of my friends did. Even the ones who, a few years later, were consumed with heavy metal vomit parties, drugs, etc. They were already listening to GNR in 1989. But they owned copies of "Hangin' Tough," too.

Want to help promote Pirates of the Retail Wasteland pirate-style? Want to earn indie street cred points that can be redeemed for valuable prizes? Well, now you can!




There are lots of ways to enter and earn points! Why, you can earn an indie street cred point right now by posting the above flier (or your own version of it) on your own blog. See how easy it is? Just copy and paste the following text into your blog:

<a href="http://www.adamselzer.com"><img src="http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk122/piratescontest/piratescontestbanner.jpg"></a>


Thanks a million to kidlit_kim for the contest idea! I'll be reposting this on monday, when more people are likely to see it.

Anyone else get the distinct impression that Valley Girls are making a comeback?

Went to see Counting Crows play at the Apple Store yesterday - about as intimate a show as having them right in my living room would have been. I figured they'd probably just talk for a few minutes about the new album and maybe play a song or two. In fact, the show went on for two hours, playing a few old songs and half the new album acoustically, with a whole lot of Q&A - enough that I was able to ask two questions myself. How cool can you get?

I don't know what went wrong with Counting Crows - they put on the best live show in the business and that guy can write like nobody's business, but somewhere along the line, it became uncool to like them. People started lumping them in with a lot of really inferior prep rock bands, I guess, or somehow got the idea that the singer tries to pass himself off as "sensitive," which he really, really doesn't.

Since it was acoustic, they didn't play the best song off the new album, which is called "Cowboys," a song about wanting to make a difference in the world and ending up going horribly awry. Which is sort of what happened to them, only they take it to a fictional extreme in the song, which opens with a line that I think could have come right out of Springsteen's "Nebraska:" "If I was a hungry man with a gun in his hand and some promises to keep / who wanted to change the world / what's as easy as murder? / it's all headlights and vapor trails / and circle K killers." And then it ends even better - "come on all you cowboys, all you blue-eyed baby boys / come all you dashing gentlemen of summer / I'll wait for you where saturday's a memory / and sunday comes to gather me / into the arms of God, who'll welcome me / cause I believe / oh I believe." And he's singing it like he just swooped into town jumping off a freight train with a cape fluttering in the wind behind him. In the first song of the album, he's presenting himself as Columbus. By "Cowboys," he's turned into John Wilkes Booth. Which helps him get away with the Columbus part. It's a fun band to deconstruct. Never thought I'd see them write a murder ballad!

"Cowboys" makes the pieces of the album fit together so well that I assumed it was probably the last song written for the album; I was able to ask him about that yesterday. And I was right!

Man, what a song. They're playing a normal show at a club tonight; it's a private show for a college, but I'm gonna see about smuggling my way in.


Anyway, I'm off to do a morning ghost investigation at one of the hardest places to research I've ever found. The tenants of this building seem to have gone their own way on what address to use over the years, and the years (mainly the 1950s) when it was a front for a mob prostitution ring covered up a whole lot of the tracks. It's gone back and forth between being a law firm, a scuzzy hotel, and a strip club many times over the years. Now it's a nice restaurant.

Ronni, Jonathan and I trekked out to the burbs, where Anderson's Book Shop had copies on the shelves. Shopping local over the big guys IS a theme of the book, you know.