Owning It

There's a famous line from the Kevin Smith film Clerks: "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" That's how I felt when strolling into my spot behind the teller line at the bank branch located inside of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. I wasn't supposed to be here. I wasn't supposed to be inside of a Wal-Mart--I hated Wal-Mart. The branch I had been working at, close to home with a great bunch of co-workers, wasn't supposed to close down. I was supposed to be home, with Abby, enjoying a Saturday, a perfect summer day. I wasn't supposed to be working when I had already worked the last two Saturdays.

I wasn't supposed to be, but I was there.

Worse, I had screwed up. A small pile of work awaited me, left behind from the night before--checks, deposit slips, loan payments. There wasn't much, sure, but every piece represented a transaction that wasn't processed for a customer. I hated making mistakes like that. It was embarrassing.

I slumped down in my chair and began the process of crediting customer accounts. I had done it many times before when other bankers had made the same mistake. For the most part, the errors would go unnoticed. Other than one account, the customers had healthy bank balances and a couple hundred bucks gone missing wouldn't have effected them over the night. As long as that one customer didn't notice, it would be smooth sailing.

Then the phone rang. About that one customer. . .

"Yeah, I just went through the checkout line and my blankety-blank card wouldn't work, so I couldn't get blankety-blank breakfast this morning. I know I put a blanking deposit in there and should've had plenty of blanking money in there and would you tell me what the blank is going on there? I'm through with this bank and I'm going to tell everyone I know what a bunch of idiots you all are."

Turns out he noticed.

My first instinct was to lie my ass off. It was easy enough. All I had to tell him was that something must have gone wrong in the back room, there's no telling what, and dang it, I'm as mad as you are about those idiots. The back office was a bunch of nameless, faceless people that he couldn't call and cuss at while I was living, breathing person that could be cussed at, and quite vehemently. So what if the backroom was innocent? They made terrific scapegoats. The words were right there; I only had to say them.

Rainbow Blog #5

One chapter today, which would be….

 

Chapter 12

*Roommate’s boyfriend appears and begs her to read him some of her fanfiction. Things are heating up indeed…

 

*Nick shows up later and he also got a bad grade on his assignment. Empathy occurs. UGH! This will only make Cath and Nick closer. We don’t want them closer.

 

*Roommate’s boyfriend “ran his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in the middle in sandy blond plumes.” Hmmm.

 

*But “(roommate’s boyfriend) wasn’t even that cute.” Uh-oh. I would kill for some italics here, because italics could change everything. You know, if Rainbow wrote he “wasn’t even that cute” it implies he’s cute, just not that cute. We can work not that cute. But the way it is written it implies he is not cute at all. Not sure we can work with that when my prediction is for Cath to end up with roommate's boyfriend.

*This will be the last one of these for a little while as I have a little project to work on for a bit...back with more soon though!

Rainbow Blog #4

Busy day today, yet I managed to read more than I planned so we'll make this one quick and dirty. These were workmanlike chapters, moving the story forward but not a lot of stuff to really go on tangents about.

Chapter 8
*Short chapter here, lots of talk about Nick's lips.

*Wren is on something called a Skinny Bitch diet. Good for her.

*Cath has gone boy crazy, apparently, but so far this has not resulted in her dating or doing anything freaky with boys. Which is OK, because that might make things a little awkward between Cath and me.

Cath wonders why the boys around her seem so different from those in high school, and wonders how it is possible that they have changed so much. They now have a "heaviness in their jaws" and their "chests (now) buttressed." I'll have to ask Abby if my chest buttresses. 





Chapter 9
*Cath is going back to Omaha to see her crazy and weird dad, but before that she decides to go get a Starbucks, which just so happens to be where roommate's boyfriends works. He gives her a drink...free. Big thing happened there and really took their relationship to the next step.

*Stuff happens with her dad and he tells her to talk to her mom, and Cath gets way too mad about it. I feel like I don't even know Cath right now seeing the way she's taking this news.

Chapter 10
*Some stuff happens, but only 4 pages worth. On to chapter 11.

Chapter 11
*Cath fails a writing assignment for submitting a piece of fan fiction. I agree with the bad grade but disagree with the professor's contention that it is plagiarism. Using someone else' characters in new scenarios is not plagiarism. This major setback for Cath leads us to a moment where I realize I have no idea of what it means to be a freshman girl in college...

See, to take her mind off her bad grade, Cath decides to hold an "Emergency Kanye Party." This involves blaring Kanye West music while dancing on top of your bed. Apparently she used to do this with her sister, but since they're not getting along so well right now, she's going solo.

So yeah, I have no idea what's really going on here. And I wonder what Kanye tunes she's playing? His music isn't particularly...danceable. I can't imagine dancing to Kanye west music. Not really. I guess there is a Fangirl playlist out there so I'll have to see if any Kanye tunes made it. (Two did: "I Wonder" and "Paranoid".)

Of course, I can't really imagine myself dancing to any music. Nobody wants that.

As you can imagine, roommate's boyfriend happens along and joins in. They dance... together (although Rainbow is sure to tell us "not too closely or anything"). This is turning into quite the love triangle. Nick, Cath, and roommate's boyfriend.

After the Emergency Kanye Party there isn't much more I can say about this chapter, my mind was kind of blown after that. It ends with Cath dining with roommate's boyfriend, so this was a big chapter for my prediction.

But I don't really know what happened here. The Emergency Kanye Party was not something I had expected. It's going to take me a little time to digest it. Guys don't have Emergency Kanye Parties. But maybe freshman college girls do...? This was a tough chapter for me--it almost felt a little voyeuristic. As a guy, it was as if I was given access to a world in which I did not belong. Sure, roommate's boyfriend was allowed in, but he's super sensitive, and blond, and constantly waving his hair from his eyes. There is no hair being waved from my eyes.

But Emergency Kanye Parties might become a thing. I mean, people are holding Emergency Kanye Parties on Youtube.

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This is getting heavy.

Rainbow Blog #3

Let's just jump right in. See the prior installments if you want to know what this is all about. And if you find out, let me know because I'm not quite sure what it's all about myself.

When last I wrote I had just finished up chapter 5. Hey, you know what comes after chapter 5? That’s right: chapter 6. Here we go.

 

Chapter 6

 

*Things are moving fast in the Nick-Cath relationship. Matter of fact Nick is doing a full-on Tom Cruise right now: “His eyes were set so deep, it made everything he said more intense.” If that doesn't sound like a Tom Cruise description than I don't know what does.

 

*Cath and Nick got an A on their group assignment. And now they’re going to be writing together…for fun. Hot and heavy indeed.

 

*Something’s going on with Cath’s twin sister Wren, but both Cath and myself are a little in the dark as to what.

 

*Hey, there’s a Husker game going on in the background during this chapter. I love the little references to local stuff like that. In a prior chapter, there was a mention of Valentino’s and I was all "hey, Valentino's, yeah!" I'm really looking forward to the first Runza mention.

There better be a Runza mention.

 

*All right, Cath goes out with her roommate and roommate’s boyfriend. Keep it on the back burner with this guy, Cath, and prove me right…you are supposed to end up with roommate's boyfriend!

 

*Cath is not calling her sister Wren and I have a feeling she is going to really regret that. Where did this come from? Seems kind of out nowhere for Wren to flake out in the way I think she is flaking out.

 

Or maybe it’s nothing. On to chapter 7.

Hey, here it is already--chapter 7! The bankruptcy chapter. (Lame little banker's joke for you there.)

 

Chapter 7

*I don’t know if I mentioned this, but Cath technically already has a boyfriend, Abel. But see, I knew early on that they weren’t going to last much longer, so I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. And yeah, they just broke up. See? He wasn't worth mentioning. Screw that guy.

 

*One of the justifications ex-boyfriend uses for the breakup is because her ACT score was 2 points lower than his new girl. Well, points for creativity…and points for douchebaggery.

 

*Rainbow, accurately, portrays text messages as not using proper capitalization and so forth. Am I one of the few people that try to be grammatically correct in texts? Well, as best I can anyway…

 

*OK, Cath and her sister are hanging out—false alarm.

 

I think.

 

*Cath thinks about both roommate’s boyfriend and Nick when they talk about love. This one might go all the way to the finish. She could end up with either one of them now and I would buy it.

 

*Uh-oh, roommate’s boyfriend is kind of macking on Cath’s sister Wren. Identical twin sister Wren. Hmmm. Not sure what that means. Perhaps all will be revealed in chapter 8...but probably not, we've got a long way to go.

Rainbow Blog #2

Ready to get owned Lincoln?

All right, on to chapter 5 of my reading of Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. This is the first chapter I am doing after coming up with this idea…the previous four were done after the fact. So these are my thoughts as I read!

Chapter 5

-Good news, roommate’s boyfriend is back! And he’s alone, with Cath, in their room. And she’s sharing her food with him. Feeling much better about the chances of him ending up with Cath now.

-Cath and her roommate are making fun of people in the dorm dining room. They really need to stop being so unlikable if I am going to like them.

-Cath wonders how old roommate’s boyfriend is, but she’s also examining his receding hairline awfully close. She is clearly into him, but maybe not end of the book into him. I could be wrong about them being together at the end…

Rainbow Blog #1

For those not aware, Rainbow Rowell is an Omaha author who is freaking huge right now. How huge? Like they are making a major movie out of one of her books huge.

That's pretty huge.

I find this pretty awesome. Local writer makes good. What's not to love? Yet as big as she is, and as cool as that is, I have yet to read any of her books. I mean, I'm not her target audience, right? Her niche (a rather large niche) is that she understands females, particularly young adult females.

I am not one of those.

But I did follow her work in the Omaha World-Herald as a columnist. Rainbow is somewhat of a controversial figure in the circles I run with, for some reason, but personally I found her columns entertaining, particularly her exploits deep into geekdom, with stories about sampling the butter beer at Universal Studios or thoughts on the latest Star Wars film. It was a nice break from some of the other, more serious columns the paper runs (i.e. boring). 

Still, her column wasn’t for everyone. In fact, I have had actual arguments with people about whether or not Rainbow Rowell is a good writer. These arguments were silly because of course she is a good writer. The fact that you don’t like someone’s columns does not make them a poor writer. There's no denying that she was a good columnist.

But is she a good novelist? Well, tons of people like her, so…probably? Art is subjective. One man's trash, another's treasure and so forth. Of course, her target audience is primarily teenage and "young adult" girls. In other words, not me. Still, I'm curious. What does she have that I don't have? Why is she so successful when I'm so...not.

I don't know, and probably never will, but I'm going to give one of her books a read and figure it out!  (I am guessing it has something to do with the fact that she gets a segment of people, in this case those above mentioned girls, and I don't really get anybody, including myself.)

I decided to start with Fangirl, mainly because it was her latest release on the day I purchased it. Like most readers, I have a stack of to read books. Finally, this one came up. Then a thought occurred to me.

That thought? Simple: wouldn't it be funny if I kept a diary of sorts with random thoughts I experience while I read Fangirl? Sure it would. So here goes nothing, starting with the first four chapters. These are going to be pretty much stream of consciousness, so there's a good chance it will be terrible. Oh well. 

After planning on calling it Rainbow Diaries, it seems to me that Rainbow Blog sounds better--kind of reminds one of Rainbow Brite, no?

No?

Anyway, here we go. For those unfamiliar with Fangirl--like me, really--before I start here's a preview from our evil friends at Amazon. 

At first glance Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl has a lot in common with Eleanor & Park: idiosyncratic girl with troubled family meets good, normal boy and falls in love for the first time. But this is why Rowell is so talented--from the same basic ingredients she can create something new and special. In Fangirl, quirky introvert, Cath, is safe within the immensely popular Simon Snow (think Harry Potter) fan-fiction blog she writes with her twin sister, but college turns her life upside down, leaving her feeling like an awkward outsider. When she writes, Cath knows exactly what her characters should say to each other, but when it comes to forging real-life friendships, much less a romance, she hasn’t a clue. An immensely satisfying coming-of-age novel, Fangirl deftly captures the experience of discovering your true voice and clumsy, vulnerable, remarkable, first love.

Chapter One

The name of the dormitory is Pound Hall. That seems…dirty. Is this symbolism?

Page 9 and we’ve got a Soylent Green reference. If it was me, I would have explained what Soylent Green is seeing as it is an old Charlton Heston movie from the early 70s that most of her target audience will not be familiar with. But Rainbow doesn’t, and you know what, I respect that.

For the record, I love post-apocalyptic Charlton Heston movies from the late 60s and early 70s. I’d rate them Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Soylent Green, and finally, Beneath the Planet of the Apes as a distant fourth.

Tthe Soylent Green reference has expanded to the main character's dad making a crack about his daughter Cath potentially eating an eyelid (for those who don't know Soylent Green, google search Soylent Green is People!!!). Eyelid one threw me for a loop—I think I would’ve went for a finger or something. An eyelid seems kind of random.

So far, the only character I like is dad (single father, widower, not ashamed to be a little cheesy). But, he's dropped his daughters off at school and now he's gone. On to chapter two.

Lucky for Us, Ricketts Has Been a Failure

Lucky for us, so far Pete Ricketts has been a massive failure in his short term as governor.

Lucky, you say? Jeremy, what kind of Nebraskan are you, rooting for the failure of your governor? Certainly a true Nebraskan would still see fit to root for your governor to be a success despite not agreeing with him on many issues.

And well, that is true. I don’t want my governor to be a failure. I want him or her to be successful in ways that will help Nebraskans. Of course. But when you’re Pete Ricketts, and your agenda is about 25 years out of date, and out of lockstep with sensible Nebraskans, well, for the most part, yeah, in a lot of cases I am going to be rooting for you to fail. So I say again: lucky for us, as so far, we have been awfully lucky that our governor is failing.

How exactly is he failing? Let’s take a look:

*You’re Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie

Look, is it really fair to judge someone for not fixing the prison system when they’ve only been on the job for 5 months or so? No. But when one of your major campaign promises is that you can fix our broken prison system, then yeah, it makes it a little more fair to judge someone on it at this early juncture. When you go out and hire someone for big bucks to fix the prisons ($180,000 a year), and then a week after that highly paid guy takes a tour of a prison a very serious riot straight out of a Sly Stallone movie takes place, well, then it becomes even more fair to criticize someone. 

To make matters worse, after a prison riot that led to two deaths and nine guards walking off the job, yesterday Ricketts visited the prison. When he was finished, he decided to channel George W. Bush in the Katrina aftermath by saying something almost impossibly stupid: "You’re doing a phenomenal job managing this very difficult situation."

 

Well, I just don’t know what more to say.

*The Gas Man

Despite countless campaign promises to lower taxes, Rickets was unable to muster enough support in the legislature to prevent a gas tax increase and even saw his veto overriden, despite the fact that our legislature is strongly represented by the GOP. (Technically, Nebraska has a non-partisan legislature but it is made up primarily of registered Republicans, who hold 36 of 49 seats.)

The Prologue to The Adventures of Braxton Revere

Aw, it's that time all of us writers love, when you get to share an excerpt from your novel, hoping to entice readers to give your work a shot. But where to begin? I spent a lot of time thinking about it, desperately searching for that one place where I had written something so clever that masses of people would go running to their computers to load up Amazon and find my book in order to devour the rest. After some time searching, it became clear that it was best to just start at the beginning.

Genius.

Without further ado, here is the prologue to The Adventures of Braxton Revere. The story is told from Braxton's perspective; the prologue is to bring you in to his world.

Prologue

When Marianne finally found him, frightened and alone, his face painted in tears and grime, he came running and buried his head into her small frame. All she could do was hold him as he sobbed out the awful news: his father was dead, killed at the hands of Ralugard. She could hardly believe it. The famous vampire-killing Revere family was reduced to this boy, Braxton Revere. Special, and certainly Revere blood, but a boy all the same. The burden now fell on her to not only slay this demon, but to train little Braxton. It was a grave task; how could she succeed where the great Fenton Revere had failed?
  

Before the thought could overtake her further, young Braxton choked back tears and his story continued. Special? A Revere? Indeed he was, for he went on to describe how he rose up from his grief, driven by a surge of anger, and seized the mantle of his heirs before him by thrusting a stake through the black heart of his father’s killer. Once again the plots of Ralugard were laid to ruin, another chapter ended in his long saga with the Reveres.

It was an astonishing tale, and Marianne resisted the urge to scold him when it was finished, for following this display of great courage, Braxton had erred grievously. It was not his fault. He was a boy, after all. How was he to remember, amongst such unspeakable tragedy, that the body of the vampire was to be secured, and kept safe from enemies? That ultimately, to fulfill the family destiny, they must forever remove the head of the snake by destroying the vampire’s body in the proper way: through fire. To do so would prevent Ralugard from re-emerging the way he always had before, returning when least expected in the fashion of droughts, earthquakes, and other such pestilences that tormented mankind.

Though she knew they would be too late, with all haste Marianne and Braxton returned to the sight of the tragedy. When they arrived, the missing corpse confirmed what she already knew. The boy took no notice, buried in grief as he was, unable to gaze upon anything but the fallen frame of his father. 

Marianne moved to console him, though in truth she could use comfort herself. She knew all too well what the missing corpse meant.

Someday, somehow, Ralugard would rise again.

It would fall upon her, and this boy, to stop him when he did.

Find out what happens next in The Adventures of Braxton Revere, releasing May 29th on EAB Publishing!