This Afternoon In Drama

The Final Countdown

  UPDATED 8/25 (see below)

Just a reminder that the pear thong contest closes tomorrow morning (for details, see the post below this one).  Someone's already taken the approach of writing an essay that kicks off with how he has little to no interest in my book but is entering anyway, so if that was your tactic, time to go back to the drawing board.

Also, the first official review for The Kid Table is in from Kirkus Reviews, and I like it.  I like it a lot.

THE KID TABLE
"Ingrid Bell, one of six mostly teenage cousins in a charmingly dysfunctional family, is a psychopath, according to oldest cousin Brianne. Or perhaps it's just part of the jockeying for position that happens around the Kid Table. Ingrid's psychopathy (or calculated charm and a few dead pets?) provides the thread through a particularly tumultuous year as the family unravels. Ingrid’s first-person narration, especially in those moments when her calm makes the reader wonder if she is a psychopath, is fantastic, and the trials and tribulations manage to be both funny and sad (adult cousin Tish drinks too much, teen cousin Cricket has anorexia, Ingrid’s mother busily collects memories for her scrapbook but forgets to live and Ingrid’s in love with Brianne’s boyfriend). The episodic structure (a handful of chapters at major events throughout the year from not-Jewish Uncle Kurt's post-adultery Bar Mitzvah to a wedding) serves as a metaphor for the family: a whole made of several disparate parts with some unanswered questions. Weirdly whimsical, adult author Seigel’s (Like the Red Panda, 2004) YA debut delights."--Kirkus Reviews

In other book news, word of the Ivan Reitman film deal hit the Internet, with commenters everywhere bemoaning that this project isn't Ghostbusters 3.  So, hey, we'll just throw a ghost in it.  One of the kids at the table is DEAD.  And green.  Solved!

UPDATE 8/25: The winner of the contest is Rachel Jenkins, from the romantic-sounding (I like trains) town of Thompsons Station, TN.  Thank you to everyone who entered.

Hardcover On A Hard Body

Here ye, here ye, aye am announcing a new contest in which I'm giving away one hardcover copy of my forthcoming YA novel, The Kid Table, which will be in stores in a month.  The last giveaway for the galleys hinged on right and wrong, but this time I want the contest to be about self-expression.  I don't know, sometimes I'm a hippie.

So I thought of this one in the shower, where I do some of my most unusable thinking.  Below you'll find a photo of one of my tattoos, which I got a serious discount on because the guy who did it thought I was joking.  Clearly, it's a personally meaningful piece.  But what I decided is that I'd really like to hear from other people what this means to them:

 

The contest is this:

Write me 50-1000 words regarding what this pear wearing a thong means to you. It can be a poem, although I'm not really all that crazy about most poetry, so tread carefully.  It can be a story, an essay, a personal statement for getting into Harvard.  It can be a letter.  It can be impressionistic.  Whatever you want.  I just need it to be from the heart.

The contest will be open for 10 days, ending on August 24, 2010 at 8 a.m.  At that time, I will select my favorite entry, the winner receiving one (1) signed, personalized copy of The Kid Table along with a Perler Bead figurine of yourself (you'll need to send me a photo for this unless you just want me to interpret what you look like based on what I know of your email persona).  If you don't know what Perler Beads are, how sad for you since you didn't have a childhood, but for illustrative purposes, see the Perler figurine I made for my "friend" Dave Bernad, who didn't even come to the reading of my stories last week.

I'm opening the contest to everyone except the people who know me.  Because if you know me, then really, you should should be buying the book when it comes out because it's not only going to be better for me if I'm a success, it's going to be better for you too.  I'll be less moody during our interactions, and I will probably buy more expensive gifts for a wider range of acquaintances if I have a book that earns me some heavy cash.

Please send one (1) entry only to keyboardistslament@hotmail.com.  No preference will be given according to order received because I'm not going to read these things until the close of the contest.  That way if I'm suicidal while reading one, I'll be suicidal while reading all of them, and my frame of mind won't create an imbalance in the judging.  If size matters to you, then I refer you to the photograph below, which gives you an idea of the scale of the pear in relationship to the fork on the front of the book you'll be winning.

 

Talk soon.

Rub A Dub Dub, Unsettling Family In A Tub

There are a lot of ways you could stage a family photo shoot, and "in the bubble bath" is just one of them.  If you were to crop the leftmost 75% of the following picture, you'd have a soapy, whimsical portrait of Joey "The Fat One" Fatone sumptuously bathing with his lookalike wife and their new baby girl Kloey (kind of like a little Joey, but with a K, and a vagina).

 

But then you have to take the remaining 25% of the photo into account, and that's when you realize that Joey thought it would be fun to be depicted taking a candle-flanked bubble bath with his NINE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER Briahna.  I don't know if you were still bathing with your mom and dad at nine-- not just bathing, in fact, but bathing sexily-- but in my family, by this point in my life, we'd given up the communal dip.

The composition of the image is also interesting to note, as Briahna, floating adrift near the faucet, weirdly looks like she's drowning, except her parents are too busy beaming about the new baby to notice, so she's squealing through gritted teeth, "Please!  Please!" at some point realizing that her parents can't hear her over the Barry White music coming from the built-in bathroom speaker system, so she's just shut her eyes tight and is hoping that this will be peaceful, is thinking about how ironic it is that the Fatones have a huge pool out back, and yet this is how she's gonna go.

Maybe, maybe, maybe if we could see some shoulders and some straps and understand that Briahna Fatone jumped into the jacooztub after a big swim meet and that's not a grimace, but a smile on her face because she just nailed her heat, then I wouldn't think that this publicity decision was so fucking weird.  Brent is also disturbed by how "incredibly tan" the family is, particularly the baby, but that really doesn't bother me as much because listen, this bath is in Orlando.

Speaaaaaking of tubs, four actors will be reading four of my stories this coming Sunday evening (8/8/10) at the gallery in L.A.'s Barnsdall Art Park, an evening that you can read more about here (click on event website for online ticket purchases), and one of these stories actually starts in the bath!  No kidding.  (Sad face: I wish I'd had the foresight to put a Fatone in it).  Following yesterday's rehearsal, I feel compelled to note-- after realizing that writing about a gay mortician spitting in his palm before doing a goth teen under a DJ booth is made even more forceful by an actor spitting into his palm before an audience of your 70-year-0ld cousins-- that some of the material is probably not great for your lil Briahna's out there, so leave the kids at home, no matter how much they cry that they love to attend 80 minute literary readings.  Okay?