Back Home, with Books--and Content!

(For detail shots, click here. Questions?)...And now returned refreshed from the sun-throated azure of the Hilton with the blessed and besotted balcony, those quiet slow still days merging into soft nights with breezes seemingly conjured up from holiday brochures...yes, from all of this refreshed despite the conviction that the people next-door might have been from some other, older dimension--the hint of infernal claw caught in the door hinge, the strange molt of almost-plastic, almost-skin, the stacatto cough so similar to the secret signals of clandestine organizations, the face appearing for a moment from behind the opening door so pale and lacking in curiosity that it could not conceivably be from our Earth--and the two a.m. jackanapes, tanned and muscled like college students but circus freaks nonetheless with their long voices and clumsy footwork, rejects from an MTV Real World produced by Dali and the art director of Barbarella...yes, even with that and my need to yell to drown out the noise, flinging open the door half-dead asleep, to bellow at, unexpectedly, the lone be-glittered girl crumpled in our hallway, the others parodied by noise not sight, protected by a curve and a corner...even, yes, with all of this, refreshed and sun-glazed and sun-stupid and sun-educated, we return now to a summer of content. Both content and content.Over the next few months, as I work on my novel I will also be bringing you, blog-readers, the Exploits of Juan Mandible Sick-Eyes, more writing tips, snippets of my nascent memoir of life growing up in Fiji (thought I'd try it out to see how it feels), and, maybe, between Books Received, hints of far-fabled Finch, hard at work determining his own fate.So, that's the coming summer. Mostly PR-free and almost all content-driven. I'll be less performing monkey than content-driver. No doubt you will abandon me in droves, only to return in the fall, when the pratfalls are more to mass liking.(First, though, starting next week Matt Staggs will be guest-blogging.)