Jupiter Is Back (or, A New Book! Sort Of)

I'm publishing a new book! Well, in a way. Here. First, check out the new teaser site for Enemies:

Ready? OK. So here's the story.

Last year, an editor named Liz Miles asked me if I'd ever written any stories that were a little funny and a little edgy. Hey, I said, I do edgy for a living.

A few months before, my awesome agent-at-the-time, Suzie Townsend, had sent around my manuscript for Enemies. It wasn't a direct sequel to Losers, my last book, but it had the same lovable Russian hacker/geek/girl-anti-magnet, Jupiter Glazer. She'd tried to sell it with remarkably little success. Most publishers were reticent. The few candid ones told a remarkably depressing story: They weren't buying books for teenage boys. Most Young Adult (marketspeak for "teen") fiction was selling to girls. Guys were either buying adult books, or they weren't buying anything.

I took a chance. I sent Liz the first chapter. She liked it.

And now it's the first story in her new anthology, Truth & Dare, which is coming out next month in the US (but which is available on Amazon now!) and also in the UK with a much bubblier Britpop cover.

  
butwaitthere'smore...
So that's just the beginning. Chapter 2 is going to be published in Apiary this spring. And the other chapters are going to be pouring out, bit by bit -- five chapters are in upcoming anthologies. One is already out. It's sort of like a scavenger hunt, except that we're all on the same page.
Thanks for reading this! And, hey, thanks for paying attention to Jupiter and to me in the first place. You rock the rock.
(And one more thing: if this isn't too desperate a plea, please like the Enemies page on Facebook! And send the page around to everyone you know! It's pretty easy, http://bit.ly/heyjupiter. I know it's ridiculous to hope that, if a million people click "like," then Scholastic or someone will publish it. But I'm a ridiculously hopeful person.)

Downtown Seder

Last night was a culmination of good fortune, good luck, and -- as always -- my wife running late. The good fortune came in the shape of a dinner invite on the night after we finished cleaning our kitchen for Passover. The good luck was our good friends Miriam and Alan from the band Stereo Sinai inviting us to the Downtown Seder. And the running late ... well, we just won't go there.

The Downtown Seder is a creation of Michael Dorf, half postmodern religious ritual and half cabaret. Rock stars and stand-up comedians and various random famous people are each assigned one step of the seder. And then it's you in a room with bands like Stereo Sinai, comedians like Rachel Feinstein (who was on Last Comic Standing with our boy Myq Kaplan), half-band-half-comedians like Good for the Jews, and Dr. Ruth. Yes, I said Dr. Ruth.

DID YOU HEAR ME? DR. RUTH WAS AT MY SEDER.

(Yes, she's that short pink dot in the picture. We weren't sitting that far, but she is short, 4'7". My Holocaust-survivor grandfather who's 4'11" looks down at her.*)

And she read the Four Questions, too. Granted, she was not the youngest one in the room (she'll be 83 years old on June 4) but she did it, and she did it up. Backed on a bluegrass guitar by C Lanzbom, she sang the first question solo, and then instructed the audience to accompany her. "If you sing with me," she said in that undeniably adorable German accent, "I promise that you will have good sex for all the days of your life." And if we don't? "Remember," she told us, "I used to be a sniper in the Haganah."

Did I sing? You'd better believe I sang.

A few of the guests were esoteric. Others were total crowd-pleasers. Here's Stereo Sinai, courtesy of my cheapo camera-phone:

Their take on the Son Who Doesn't Know How to Ask a Question was one of only two all-out dance numbers (the other being, of course, Joshua Nelson and the Kosher Gospel Choir) -- but each act was so well-thought-out and cool and unusual that I kept wanting to call someone and let them listen. I'm not a bootleggy type of person, but I wish I had a bootleg of last night. I kept wanting to write things down. I kept wanting to remember them. Joshua Foer* summed it up: "Our tradition demands not just that we eat matzah, but that we interact with it and explain it." Or, to paraphrase Faulkner: Not only is the past not dead, it isn't even past.

Because we're Hasidic and don't get out much, this is probably the closest I'll ever come to a non-religious seder. Boxes of Manischewitz matzah on the table. Behind us, Rachel Feinstein was getting down with woman in a severe Florida-retirement hat decked with flowers. The singer of Good for the Jews was wearing a ruffled tuxedo shirt.

Yes, it was bizarre having a seder a week before Passover starts. It was bizarre having matzah on the table in Manischewitz boxes instead of knitted sleeves, and celebrating with two hundred people I'd never met. It might have been a celebration of freedom, but it was also a celebration of getting down.
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* - Who also referred to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, as "the great cognitive scientist," which probably nobody else cared about but which absolutely made my night.

1/20 at the Guadalajara Film Festival (photos!)

This week was the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and 1/20, the film I wrote, was an official entrant. Guadalajara is basically the Sundance of Latin America. It's a clearinghouse for everything artistic, political, and a combination of the two, which 1/20 ended up being. Gerardo, the director, is from Mexico, and this was his triumphant return, riding into town on the back of a donkey and all that.

They assailed me with stories of champion drinking and famous-people elbow-rubbing and guerrilla advertising. I started complaining that they left me behind. They reminded me that they had lots of important business meetings, too, which I would have either been too scared to walk into in the first place or vomited with nervousness as soon as they began. "This is why you write the stories," they said. So I settled into my bed and felt better about myself.

Yeah, guerrilla advertising. There were 2,000 films showing in Guadalajara, and exactly one film hung any sort of posters. Sometimes they were minimalist and subtle:

And sometimes they were not.

I think my mind is officially blown, just thinking of my name in another language hanging on a poster on a wall in another country. Once, an anthology I was in got translated into Turkish, and it was so cool, seeing a few words I recognized ("challah," for one) interspersed with entire sentences that I didn't recognize at all, but that I wrote. At least this time, they didn't have to translate the title.

Here's Berwin, the producer, with Damián Alcázar, who's one of Mexico's most famous actors. I don't recognize him, mainly because I basically don't know any actors who weren't on an episode of Doctor Who (ask my coworkers if you don't believe me), but he's in The Chronicles of Narnia and some Gabriel Garcia Marquez film adaptations, which is sort of the dictionary definition of awesome.

And here is an award of some sort, I think.

Or maybe it's a statue? At least there isn't food on the tables behind. Then I'd really be jealous.

Kid Crying Isn’t Real Crying

The morning started out good. First, I woke up at 7:30. Miracle! The kids went to bed late, and then my baby mama and I stayed up late, and I was sure I was going to be zombieied today. No such luck. I soundly ignored my vibrator-but-not-the-good-kind of an alarm clock, heard the baby singing in her cot, and jumped up to get her. Five minutes later, she was soundly clamped on a maternal boob*, the 3-year-old was clamoring awake, and I was simultaneously packing lunch, getting dressed, getting her dressed, and trying to say the morning prayers.

Our older kid is an impossible dresser. First of all, she has a new favorite color every day, and she will only wear that color. Secondly, she has of late developed an aversion to wearing anything below her waist. Also, she is militantly against eating anything until two minutes before she has to leave.

So you can imagine my surprise when she sprints straight for her clothes drawer. She hands me a shirt (weather-appropriate!) and pants (that match!), and patiently waits for me to tie her shoes. I slam down my upstairs prayerbook — I’m up to the point where I need to put on a tallis and tefilin, and that is downstairs — and yell back over my shoulder to her, “Come on! I’ll make you breakfast or you can play with your toys or whatever!” I touch ground at the first floor. Whereupon I hear her voice over my shoulder, wafting down from the second story: “CARRY ME!”

Dude.

Could you not have asked me thirty seconds ago? That’s thirty seconds, one flight of stairs climbed, that I’ll never get back.  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Just walk down yourself.” After all, she’s been climbing stairs for years. She’s a stairmaster.

And the mouth flies open. And the crying starts.

I don’t know if you know about kid-crying. It’s not like grownup crying (or even like teen-angst crying, which I am way more used to). It’s a combination guttural yell, swallow, choke, and burp. It’s totally tear-less, at first. In fact, behavioral scientists in my imagination have hypothesized that kid-crying is genetically related to crocodile crying, which is to say, it’s not actually sadness-related or pain-related at all, but is instead a technique specifically designed to lure in sympathetic victims until they’re in biting distance.

Actually, I think kid-crying brings on real crying if you do it long enough, thus preparing your child for a bright future as a stage actor with the rare talent to cry on command, or possibly as a manipulative future ex-girlfriend to someone exactly like yourself. Did I say that aloud? Okay, moving on.

I tell her, come on, it’s fine, I can make you breakfast if you want, and we have those new organic Puffins that actually taste good and that you love. The onslaught continues. I ignore her. My day-job beckons, after all. Not to mention G-d. So I wrap myself up in tefilin, grab my downstairs prayerbook, and start prayin’ like there’s no tomorrow.

She keeps crying.

There is a thump. A rhythmic thump upstairs, of clumsy wheels guided by clumsy feet. “What that?” my older daughter demands, and I can hear my wife explaining that the baby just got a walker.

“I want a walker too!” That sentence doesn’t actually end, per se, so much as the too fading into another wail.

And then a pause. “You got the baby a present and if you got the baby a present than you will get me a present too,” she says — and you’ll notice, of course, that there is no breath in between the crying and the talking, no wiping away of tears or swallowing of mucous that comes with real crying; it’s been crocodile yells this whole time — “What present did you get me, Mama?”

Alright, there’s no getting out of this. None of that parenting-book stuff we try to adhere to, where you try not to connect the presents with the temper tantrums, either as a reward or as a punishment. A tantrum is a tantrum, and both work and preschool are calling. In a few minutes, she will trundle down the stairs, on her own, and show me her brand-new baby hammock.

But for now, I close my eyes. I pray. Not drowning out the chaos of our morning, but becoming one more voice in the chorus of it.
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* — Yes, she’s still breastfeeding, although we have to supplement. Read here if you’re not yet entirely sick of the whole boob-sucking debacle.

Young Adult Author Plot

The Teen Author Festival was last week, and Scholastic held a big reception for all its local and visiting authors. Which basically meant getting a bunch of us in a room and standing back while we plot together and come up with ways to take over the world.

You think I'm joking?

That was part of a little project that the Scholastic online folks had us do, during a break in signing and scarfing down pizza and orange soda (no pizza for me, since it wasn't kosher, which meant twice as much orange soda). They started a sentence and asked us to finish writing it. Here's what we all said:

While I waited my turn, I searched frantically to make whatever I wrote especially relevant to Losers. As a way of promoting my book? Well, yeah, sorta, because I'm so bad at that. Not sure it actually came across. I'm also not sure, in retrospect, that was the best thing for the stereotypical-looking Jew to write. But, hey, I drew a dinosaur too.

San Francisco in 6 Hours

I was in Ashland, at the Oregon Shakespeare Theatre, near where they filmed The Goonies and Short Circuit. Their airport only had one gate. The plane wasn't taking off. To be precise: It was leaving 1 hour late, which means my connecting flight would be 4 hours late. I would get into NYC at 1:30 AM and have to get home from there. I asked the flight attendant: Could I take a red-eye, stay in San Francisco for the day, and land at 7?

She gave me permission.

Heshy picked me up from the airport. We only had an hour before he left for work, so we did everything fast, even the used bookstores. He found a used copy of Yom Kippur a Go-Go, which somebody'd written a really sweet and meaningful dedication inside. I took a picture, but I'm not sure if it's kosher to share it, or if that would be too invasive.

Luckily, there was a ton of graffiti to distract us.

And some of the more boring variety:

But that's also the church I lived across the street from when I first moved to town.

In high school, I wrote stories about how my friend Adam was going to be a computer engineer and change the universe. And then it happened. I waited for him in this communist coffee shop while I wrote a picture book. I'm not just being conservative, it really was a communist coffee shop.

Then Adam picked me up and drove me around Bernal Heights. I think I spent more time in cars that day than I did in 5 years of living in San Francisco. He dropped me off at the rabbi's, and then I took a look at the new digs. I took tons of pictures of the rabbi's night garden, but none of them came out. Like much of San Francisco, I guess, you just had to be there.

Mendel and the new shul! It's actually a garage and it is so punk, yet paradoxically, so clean. They basically saved my life several times over when I lived in SF. Not to mention my soul. I'm overdue to give them a donation. If you've got a couple extra bucks, please donate too -- they give out free Shabbos meals to anyone who shows up.

Then we all made a mess together. And then the rebbetzin came to tell us to clean up, but I couldn't stick around. I was running late for my flight.