Ok, so first thing's first: I've got a genre-bending novel coming out at the end of this month. It's called Drip: A Gothic Bromance, and I've started this blog because, apparently, I have to. Hopefully my musings will entertain and provoke, and sell copies.
Cute comments aside, I did not write Drip for money--at least not today-money, tomorrow-money, or any serious next-year or year-after-that money. The way I figure, a really good outcome would be a lot of people dig the book so much, we all want to read more of my mishugas (yiddish; roughly translated: busy-ness), and then maybe I get an opportunity to write another novel, novella, or short story. What I've wanted most for Drip was to tell a great, quirky coming-of-age story about the middle-class heartbreak that graduating college and entering "the real world," has become.
Most of my adult life has been in filmmaking; a lot has been said about great films challenging us, but I also feel like a lot of my favorite movies gave me a kind of social comfort--particularly at a dark time (like now, if you follow the national press)--a sort of countercultural wink--a sense of "thank God: someone else sees how messed up things look--I'm not the only one who thinks this way." What movies am I talking about? Donnie Darko, Chinatown, Harold and Maude, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, RoboCop, Punch Drunk Love, You're a Big Boy Now, some of the best of 1970's cinema, along with a precious few contemporary torchbearers. Anyway, that's the sort of feeling I wanted to evoke with Drip.