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My friend Ben Segedin recently alerted me to Jacob Lambert’s very funny “The Road: A Comedic Translation,” published on The Millions, which I missed the first time around. It’s a highly accurate skewering of Cormac McCarthy’s distinctive prose style. (Or should I have written, “prosestyle”?)

Later in the day the boy turned to him. Can you tell me about apostrophes?

What do you want to know about them?

I dont know. Where did they all go?

I dont know, the man said, and it was truth. He didnt know where all the apostrophes had gone.

Ben knew I would appreciate the humor as, last May, I published my own parody of The Road, called, “The Read,” in Booklist. Doing a quick search to see if Road parodies were any kind of trend, I stumbled across these incredibly kind words on Read Red. (And to think a colleague queried my use of “unadhorn”!)

I’m a big fan of The Road — heck, I was one of the first to go on record calling it a “masterpiece” — but you know what they say: parody is the sincerest form of flattery.

Well, if they don’t say that, they should.

It is currently my pleasure to serve as a judge for the literary competition of the Society of Midland Authors. If you are an author of fiction for adults, and you were born in, live in, or have strong ties to Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, or Wisconsin (click here for the rules), send me your book! (If you write something other than fiction for adults, send your entry to the appropriate judges.) The deadline is February 15, so hurry.

I had the pleasure of meeting James Grady, author of Mad Dogs (and, of course, Six Days of the Condor) at the Montana Festival of the Book a couple of months ago. Somehow it had escaped my attention that Grady is a fellow native Montanan! He read from his recently serialized novella, “What’s Going On: A Political Fiction in Nine Episodes,” and really blew the room away. I read the whole thing later, of course–you should, too. That is, if you like The Wire, the novels of Richard Price, and politically astute fiction in general.

“What’s Going On” is a day in the life of a besieged man who holds the oft-maligned position of community organizer. It’s a good thing for you that the whole thing has already been published, so you won’t have to wait a day for each new installment. You won’t want to wait.

A cynic might say something cynical regarding the juxtaposition of these two stories about the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, both of which appeared in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune.

“BusinessWeek names Tinley Park best place in U.S. to raise a family,” by Kristen Schorsch:

Turns out there is life south of 95th Street, despite what some North Siders might think. And it’s a slice of “real Midwest Americana,” according to Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki.

“Tinley Park woman charged with hate crime for tugging on woman’s head scarf,” by Kim Janssen and Joel Hood:

A suburban Chicago woman has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly yanking the head scarf of a Muslim woman in Tinley Park two days after the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.

Good thing I’m not a cynic.

I began writing The Price of Liberty while George W. Bush was still in office and war profiteering was still front-page news. Since the banking meltdown, however, the nation’s attention has turned from corporate malfeasance to more immediate concerns. And Afghanistan and Iraq still make the news, but the endless endgame of the “War on Terror” has become an abstraction or even background noise to Americans worried about their jobs and pocketbooks.

After the election of Barack Obama, as half the nation celebrated the dawning of a new era, there were times when I thought about abandoning my novel out of fear that it would soon seem out-of-date. But even though a new administration can quickly change the tone, actual change is harder to accomplish. Old contracts must still be honored, old appointees must be replaced, old business drags on and on. A promise to close Guantanamo isn’t as easy to deliver as it seemed. Political resistance aside, a proper location must be found (”Illinois the Next Gitmo?” by Christi Parsons, Chicago Tribune).

A near-empty prison in rural Illinois has emerged as “a leading option” to house suspected terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an Obama administration official said Friday.

Suddenly, my novel about a prison for terrorists in the American heartland doesn’t seem so eighteen-months-ago anymore.

It’s been a long time since I updated this blog. Yes, there have been some technical issues–a WordPress update gone horribly wrong–but the biggest technical problem has been my lack of initiative. Does that qualify as a technical problem? Technically, probably not.

But travel with me now, if you would, back to May 15, 2009, when the world was a little younger, a little less cynical, a little more ready to laugh, and a scrappy prepublication book-review journal called Booklist had just offered an amuse-bouche with its Spotlight on SF/Fantasy–a short story by yours truly, called, “The Read.” A loving parody of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with a book reviewer as its antihero? Yes, it’s all that, but it’s also so much more.

Well, a little more, anyway. Read on!

Fascinating article by Robert McCrum in the Sunday Observer (”The masterpiece that killed George Orwell“):

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay “Why I Write”, he had described the struggle to complete a book: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.” Then that famous Orwellian coda. “Good prose is like a window pane.”

In one minute and nine seconds:

It seems odd to quote my own blog post, but I never find the time to get all my different projects widgetized. I blog almost daily at Likely Stories and tweet almost hourly (well, it seems like it, anyway) on Twitter. So those are good places to check for more frequent updates, should you desire them. (The Designated Drinker site is under reconstruction; apparently the software I was running was too primitive to survive the latest php upgrades at Bluehost.) At any rate, here’s what I wrote yesterday, reflecting on the death of J. G. Ballard:

After paying some bills last night, I clicked “headlines” on my browser bar and saw that J. G. Ballard had died. There’s no shortage of news about this now, but as many of the obits seem to focus on his role as an influencer (see “Author J. G. Ballard dies after lengthy illness,” by Ben Hoyle, Times), I’ll add a few words about Ballard’s influence on me.

Which makes sense, because it’s spring. Still weeding the old stack of papers (will anyone say that a generation from now?) I came across the August 1, 2005 issue of the New Yorker, which my brother Sean had given me, folded back to George Saunders’ short story “Commcomm.” It’s about a government flack and I wish I had written it and you absolutely must read it. It’s brilliant.

Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don’t kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.