Ghost Peppers - Yes, Very Scary Indeed

Here's the confession of the day: I thought I was prepared for the "Marine" at local burger joint Killer Burger.

I love spicy food. I ask for extra jalapenos on my tuna sandwiches; I eat kim chee like candy; I pour sriracha sauce on my morning waffles. Okay, not really the last one, but you get the idea.

But this...this was not spicy. This was something totally different.

At Second Player Score practice one day, for some reason we started talking about ghost peppers. I'd never tried them before, but the word was that they were incredibly hot. I thought, "Mm, sounds good." So when, a week or so later, I saw an article in the paper about Killer Burger that mentioned their "Marine," a burger that contains ghost peppers, I thought, "Hey, we should try that!" So we put it down on the calendar as something fun we could do one day after practice. It even turned into an official band event of sorts, with band members' relations planning to bring cameras and such.

Weeks went by, and the event kept getting postponed by schedule conflicts and last-minute show opportunities. In the interim, I noted that Killer Burger makes you sign a waiver before you eat the burger, which I thought was a brilliant marketing move. "Oo, a waiver, how scary!" I also spent the time ratcheting up my Tabasco consumption, to the point where it hardly registered a tingle on my tongue. I was going to be ready for this.

Anyway, the big day finally arrived. We got there and saw the warning on the hand-written menu above the registers: "The Marine Hot! - DON'T ORDER THIS!!" I smirked. The cashier tried to talk us out of ordering it. I smirked again as I reflected on the genius business tactic of telling your customers not to buy your product. People will always do what you tell them not to do.

Ten minutes and a signed waiver later, they brought the burgers out with the same fanfare reserved for birthdays at chain restaurants. People looked at us like we were nuts. I thought, "Okay, seriously? Come on now, it's a spicy burger. Everybody relax."

I decided to start by dipping a french fry in their "lava sauce," which also apparently contains ghost peppers. THIS WAS A BIG MISTAKE. The moment it hit my mouth, I could tell that this was no ordinary kind of spicy. You know how, when you're eating spicy food, the heat seems to accumulate over time? Well, there was no "time" involved here. This was an entire Thai-green-curry-with-the-"hot"-option-reaction condensed into a single second.

And it got worse from there. My eyes started to water uncontrollably as I tried to remain calm. My lips were on fire, but my mouth and head weren't - instead, they were on something beyond fire; it was like they had been transported to some kind of unholy realm of torture where someone was inserting power saw blades into my skull.

And it wasn't just my facial region feeling the wrath, my stomach was a helpless victim as well.

Stomach: I'm hungry, isn't it dinner time?
Stomach: Okay, great, here comes something.
Stomach: Whoopee, it's a french fry. Can't you do better than that? Wait, it's covered in some kind of sauce that -
Stomach: AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEE

And mind you, I hadn't even started eating the burger yet. Through my haze of agony I could barely make out some kid at a nearby table egging us on, saying things like "C'mon, it's like Man Vs. Food!" I figured, okay, I have to at least take one bite of this thing. THIS WAS A BIG MISTAKE.

After a tiny bite, I was done. The pain and nausea increased exponentially until I was in a Homer-Simpson-Guatemalan-Insanity-Pepper-like state of psychosis. All I could do was sit there, staring into space, as my intestines quickly shriveled up and turned into dust. The kid at the nearby table was now saying things like "blrkjkg alijoit ghlkj ahiogh," or at least that's what it sounded like to me.

And it wasn't over. After feeling like I had recovered somewhat, more waves of pain ensued. This evil cycle continued for about an hour afterwards before I was finally confident that I had escaped from the ghost pepper dungeon.

So yeah, they weren't kidding about the waiver.

Once coherency had returned, I did some research and found out that the ghost pepper, or Naga Bhut Jolokia, is roughly TWO HUNDRED TIMES hotter than Tabasco sauce. And that it can be used as a weapon. Well, duh.

I thought I could handle spicy foods. Turns out I had absolutely no idea.

The Flow

This past Saturday I woke up in the Flow. Basically speaking, Flow is the state of mind where you are fully immersed in what you are doing, to the exclusion of the outside world. There's been a lot of research and discussion on this topic, which I won't go into simply because I'm too lazy and it's already well-documented in this Wikipedia entry.

Anyway, I got out of bed way earlier than I intended to because there was a melody swimming in my head. I rushed over to my guitar and searched for a chord progression that would fit under that melody. Once I found it, a chorus immediately suggested itself and I started working on that. To my dismay, after I nailed down the chorus, I found that I had forgotten the original melody that inspired the whole thing to begin with (when this happens, I try to make myself feel better by saying, "If I can't remember it, it must not have been that good in the first place.")

So I came up with a new verse melody, and "Sad & Glamorous" was born. Being still in the Flow, I finished up another song that I had been working on (using some riffs from Dan), and that became "Burn." It felt like only a few minutes had gone by, but after I was done, I realized that a couple of hours had passed and I hadn't eaten breakfast or taken a shower or done any of the other stuff that I usually do when I get up. We ended up practicing both songs that afternoon and playing Sad & Glamorous at a show that night.

I love being in the Flow. Mostly it's a state that just occurs randomly, and the conventional wisdom is that it cannot be forced. But I think that as far as creative endeavors are concerned, you can prime yourself for possible Flow entry by simply staying creative - write or play anything, no matter how silly or stream-of-consciousness it may be. Write aimless blog entries about what you did on Saturday morning. Read books and listen to music to gain inspiration. I had spent time the night before thinking about plot details for Book Two, and I believe that doing so led directly to my Saturday Flow experience.

Just don't forget to shower before you head out the door.

Book Two Status Update

A few people have already expressed their desire for the second book in the Spectraland series. Which is great! I'm really glad that they found Book One to be captivating enough that they want to know what's next in store for Joel and company.

I must confess, though (I seem to do a lot of confessing on this blog)...Book Two isn't anywhere close to being done yet. Rest assured, I am hard at work on it. Really, I am.

As of this moment, I'm pretty sure that I've settled on a title. I had a working title that I didn't care for, but this past week I came up with something that I like a lot more. I won't reveal it yet as it still may change, but once it's set in stone, you, my faithful blog readers, will be the first to know (HINT: it's similar to the title of Book One in certain ways. And it has something to do with Spectraland's astrology. You'll never figure it out. You'll just have to keep reading this blog for more hints.)

But aha, I don't just have a title! I'm also waist-deep in developing the detailed outline. It's a really fun process. No, seriously, it is! I'm not being sarcastic this time. Stephen King compared the writing process to archaeology, where the writer is simply uncovering a pre-existing world as opposed to creating something from scratch. Not to say that I'm in the same league as Mr. King (and I plot in advance while he, as I understand it, does not) but there are definitely times that I feel like I'm doing just that. The same goes for songwriting, by the way. I think Sting may have said something on that subject...like how we're just radio transmitters for these great songs that are floating around. Was that Sting? I can't remember. (If you know, please tell me in the comments. It's driving me crazy.)

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the outline. I have the broad story arc sketched out, and the details of about five chapters are pretty much solid. That is, until something happens in chapter six that will require me to re-shuffle everything that happened before that. Sometimes writing feels like archaeology, where what you've uncovered is a puzzle with many moving parts that change the very nature of what you have as you dig it up. It's...it's a pot! No, it's a spear! Wait, no, no, it's...um, it's a pot again! But this time with four handles instead of two!

Bookingly Yours

I wrote a guest post for the award-winning book review blog Bookingly Yours. Drop whatever you're doing and check it out.

Book Review: The Speed of Dark

Finished reading The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon.

Bottom Line: 4 out of 5 stars; recommended. Best suited for high school readers and up.

For a summary, see the Wikipedia entry here.

My review (includes spoilers):

Lou Arrendale, the autistic protagonist of The Speed of Dark, is very adept at noticing patterns. If he were to read this book, he might recognize a pattern that went something like this: extreme brilliance / kind of slow/ extreme brilliance / a bit dull / extreme brilliance / rather boring / extreme brilliance.

My brain doesn't recognize patterns quite as well as Lou's (or my son's, for that matter), but that was the feeling I had while reading TSoD, the 2003 Nebula Award winner for Best Novel. Elizabeth Moon has a son on the autism spectrum, which I'm sure provided her with a lot of source material for Lou's character, but she goes into a level of detail (on a variety of subjects) that just screamed "hundreds of hours of research." It was awe-inspiring, but also provided moments where I was able to exhale and comfortably put the book down for a while to take a break (my most favorite books are always the ones that I have to forcibly tear myself away from.)

Moon does an excellent job at painting a representative picture of how a person on the spectrum may behave and what they may be thinking. There were a lot of similarities between Lou and Joel Suzuki, the protagonist of my book, and whenever I noticed one, I thought, "cool, I was on the right track." At times, I felt like there were a little too many autism-isms, but that's probably because I'm already familiar with a lot of the characteristics that she was trying to illustrate.

Spoilers coming below!

The aforementioned moments of extreme brilliance are emotional and riveting. I looooved the part where Lou calmly disarms Don by noticing and following Don's patterns of movement. Also very gripping were the parts where Lou ponders whether "normal" people are actually any happier than folks on the spectrum.

I have a little quibble with the ending, which, to me, communicated that once Lou was "cured" of autism, he was then able to accomplish this glamorous dream of becoming an astronaut (leaving his mundane office job behind), and that he no longer felt the same attraction to Marjory. I understand that Moon did not want to romanticize autism, but I would have preferred it if Lou had stepped into the unknown of receiving the treatment, and then found out that he was still largely the same person after all.

Overall, the moments of brilliance far outweigh the slower passages, and my criticisms of the book stem mostly from my personal biases. TSoD is a moving, thoughtful, and powerful work that is well-deserving of its Nebula Award.

The Writing Process

People often ask me, "How long did it take to write your book?" (They are, of course, referring to Secret of the Songshell, since that's the only book I've written so far. I'm working on the second one in the series now. Really. I am. Seriously.)

The short answer to that question is "four months." That's how long it took me to write the first draft. However, I spent around a year prior to that developing the idea, working on an outline (or two, or three) and writing an initial 40 pages that ended up in the recycle bin. After the first draft was done, I then spent another year+ rewriting, editing, and formatting.

So in all, SotS was more like 2.5 years in the making. That's crazy when I think about it. I'm sure that Book Two won't take that long. I'm sure! I will keep telling myself that!

When writing the first draft of SotS, I set a goal of 400 words a day, no matter what. Even if it was 400 words of incomprehensible garbage. Even if it was just typing "Joel Joel Joel" over and over again until I got to 400. The main thing was to get the words out, and then fix them later on if need be (no wonder I spent over a year rewriting.)

That was the beauty of working from an outline - as long as I had a vague idea of where the story was supposed to go, then I could at least stumble my way from Point A to Point B on the days (or late nights) when I really didn't feel like writing. It was like:

Me (thinking to myself): Okay, the outline says that Joel, Felicity, Marshall and Greenseed are supposed to ride along the Coast of Fang on their way to the Caves of Wrath. All right, here we go. Ummm

Me (typing): "Joel and the others rode along the Coast of Fang, on their way to the Caves of Wrath."

Me (thinking to myself): Woohoo! That's, uh, fifteen...sixteen...seventeen...eighteen words! Just 382 more to go! I will take a short break now to drink a beer and watch Mariners baseball.

(For those of you who haven't bought the book yet, please note: I AM BEING FACETIOUS. Really. I am. Seriously. Did I mention I spent over a year doing rewrites?)

So anyway, that was my writing process for SotS. It worked pretty well for me because I'm one of those kinds of people who, if I don't meet some arbitrary self-imposed goal, I beat myself up and feel like crap for hours afterwards. If you're like that too, and you want to write a book, I would definitely recommend this approach. Start now! Go!

Monday Confessional

Okay, I have a shocking confession to make. At a Halloween gig at the Hard Rock Cafe a number of years ago, I dressed up in a blonde wig and I...oh, wait, not that confession. Never mind.

No, today's shocking confession is this: I didn't start reading the Harry Potter series until after Deathly Hallows was already out. There. I said it. Whew.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I loooooove the Boy Who Lived and all of his cohorts, to the point where I'll put on a DVD of Half-Blood Prince just to have as wallpaper and background noise while I do chores around the house.

But this wasn't always the case. During the series' entire hysterical rampage through the literary world during the late '90s and early 2000s, I resisted. I refused to get sucked into the hype. I spent my childhood (and, yes, parts of my adulthood as well) inhaling fantasy books of every stripe, from the requisite Tolkein reading to The Elfstones of Shannara to The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant to the Deryni novels to holy cow this list could go on and on forever, and when I heard the Potter premise about a young boy who finds out he's a wizard and then goes to a boarding school where he learns magic, I thought: meh. How could this newcomer possibly measure up?

And the more notoriety the series gained, the more I stayed away. Now, I myself realize how ridiculous it is to shun something just because it's popular (especially if you haven't tried it yourself), but hey, that's the space I was in at the time.

Then a friend told me: just try it. Give it a chance. I'll even lend you my copies, she said. So I sighed and said, all right.

At that moment, my life literally changed.

Sometimes things are massively popular because they actually deserve to be. What a concept, right? I fell in love with these books (although Goblet of Fire was still a bit of a slog), and they were a huge source of inspiration when I was writing my first novel. By the time I got to Deathly Hallows, I couldn't put the thing down. And that, to me, is the sign of a great book: something that makes you postpone real life - eating; sleeping; caring for dependents - while you read just one more chapter. And one more. And one more.

So, thanks, Ms. Rowling, for creating this wonderfully entertaining and inspiring series. And yes, I bought my own copies.