What's Dave-o Been Up To? Sleepy Babies, Writerly Advice, and Clockwork Sexbots!

Hey Mojonauts and Mojoketeers,

Just a quick post about what I've been up to between tweets, diapers, and soul-crushing research about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (*SPOILER ALERT* Things have been pretty uncool in Afghanistan since 1806, apart from a brief OK-spell from 1923-1979).

Anywho, I continue to write a regular column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle; latest installment covers babies, sleep, neuroplasticity, and DSM-IV-TR 300.21 (more so than other columns, this one is all in the footnotes):

Three years later – a period during which I never slept more than four hours at a time, and little of it “restful” – I started having panic attacks. If you delve into crowds and find yourself squeezed by the visceral conviction that you’ll likely need to fend off a pack of bears at any moment … well, it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that the best course of action is to stay in the damn house. “Hypervigilance” was ultimately listed among my symptoms.

(Just to clarify: I didn’t have an irrational fear of bears; I had the sudden, irrational sensation of some impending mortal threat, and I had it basically all the time, and I basically just wanted to be the hell away from people. Hence DSM-IV-TR 300.21. To this day my fear of bears – when bears are verifiably present – is entirely rational.)

My psychiatric history notwithstanding, here’s the point of this interlude: The above essay celebrates the adaptive advantageousness of sleep-deprivation-driven neuroplasticity, but fails to acknowledge the dark side of that coin, because when I wrote the original essay I did not yet know it was one of those two-sided sorts of coins. I know better now.

This week I'm also blogging about Voice for Shimmer:

Listen: Voice isn’t gravy.

It’s not something you pour over a story once the meat and veggies–the plot, the characters, the setting–are cooked and ready to plate. Steampunk isn’t alt-history slopped with a ladle of cogs and dirigibles; literary fiction isn’t YA with the last half of the final chapter cut off and a schmeer of 50-cent words.

The voice of a piece–and your Voice as a writer–arises from stripping everything else out, not piling more crap on.

Right on the face of it, I’m sure this sounds absolutely absurd. . . .

(Attentive Mojonauts will recall that Poor Mojo's Giant Squid has been featured in this same fine publication, both in print and online. Check that out!)

Finally, I've *finally* gotten to the second stage of my steampunk sexbot novella scheme: Releasing the damn thing for platforms other than the Kindle.

You can now enjoy the escapades of Dicker Tucker--that much-celebrated, crippled, alcoholic Johnny Reb--on basically any device, or even paper (*gasp!*). Details here: "Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate" Pick-What-You-Pay ebooks

So, click those links! Then reclick them! Tweet them and retweet them! Share them until you are exhausted by your sheer volume of shares! You have my appreciation and my blessings!

Thanks!