Up and Down Colfax Avenue

They say you should never meet your heroes, that you’ll only end up disappointed. They could be right. For one thing I’m a little long in the tooth to have a hero in the first place. I’m also too cynical to believe I could have my heart broken by a book, but Willy Vlautin has done that at least twice. Last week I had the opportunity to meet him after a Delines gig in Newcastle and I wasn’t about to pass that up regardless of what ‘they’ might say.

If you have landed here by chance rather than design and don’t know who I’m talking about then allow me to enlighten you. Willy Vlautin is an author and a musician and one of the world’s best kept secrets. His band Richmond Fontaine have flown comfortably under the radar for years, and now his latest project, The Delines are rapidly becoming the best Alternative Country outfit you have never heard of. The combination of Willy’s story-telling lyrics coupled with the glorious world-weary vocal of Amy Boone produced one of the best albums of 2014 in Colfax. Given the fact that I’m unlikely ever to see Bruce Springsteen play a set at the Stone Pony then hearing those songs performed in a small, intimate venue like Newcastle’s Cluny 2 is about as close to perfection as live music is ever likely to get for me.  

But I digress, as much as I enjoy Willy Vlautin’s music, it’s his words that I really dig. I discovered his work by accident when looking for books set in my adopted state of Nevada. His first novel, The Motel Life (recently made into a darn good movie starring Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff & Dakota Fanning, which again went largely unnoticed) had a pretty big influence on my own stuff. His second, Northline is the novel I wish I could write. So when I noticed him hovering by the mech table after the gig I had to go over and risk both making a dick of myself and shattering my illusions of a guy I have admired for the best part of 10 years. I needn’t have worried, while I may have still been a dick, Willy was great. You couldn’t wish to meet a nicer, more genuine guy. We talked books for a while, discussed a mutual friend and to top things off I got a personally signed copy of The Motel Life.   

I’m not sure this story has a moral, but if it does then perhaps it’s that you shouldn’t believe everything ‘they’ tell you, or maybe just that it is still okay to have the odd hero, either way you should really go check out Willy Vlautin.  

A 2013 Selfie

2013 has been a pretty good year for me. I wanted to do more, but real life kind of got in the way of fiction. Ah well, there's always next year. I would just like to say a big thank you to all the good people who spent their hard earned cash on one or more of these books. It's okay if you didn't, I still love you, just not quite as much.

Happy holidays folks!

I love the smell of paper in the morning

As much as I like the convenience of e-books, nothing beats holding a real honest to goodness book in your hand. That's especially true if the book in your hand just happens to be your own.

The print edition of Zelmer Pulp's HEY, THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY!  is now available at all good pan-galactic booksellers. Well, those that have the letter Z in their name anyway.  Analog may be old school, but if like me, you enjoy drawing handlebar moustaches on pictures of Chuck Regan, or if you want to underline all of the F-words in Brian Panowich’s story with your My Little Pony fountain pen, then this is exactly what you've been waiting for.   


In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that while the book is partly mine, the hand in this picture belongs entirely to Brian. Except on weekends.

Hey, That Video Pimped My Book! #2

Here’s a very cool trailer for the latest Zelmer Pulp Release HEY, THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY! This one was an inside job created by our very own digital Jedi, Chuck Regan.

The Zelmer office is a hive of activity at present. Well I say office, it’s really just a rusted out VW van parked on Ryan Sayles’ front lawn. We were going to move it to a better neighborhood, you know one with fewer meth labs, but Brian Panowich sold the tires to buy himself a Batman utility belt from Toys R Us, so it looks like we’re stuck here for now.

Anyway, back to the whole hive of activity thing. The print edition of HEY, THAT ROBOT ATE MY BABY! will be available in a couple of weeks. Then it’s on to our next venture, which is due to hit the bookshelves this summer. I can’t say too much yet, but we have some awesome guest authors lined up for it.

In the meantime, why not click on the linky-thing to the right and buy this one while you're waiting. You would make an old man very, very happy if you did. No, not me, I'm talking about the old man who lives in my garage, he's easily amused... and he smells funny, and spits at the neighbors. But this is all besides the point, forget I mentioned him and just buy the book. It's guaranteed to amaze and offend in equal measure.