Gerard Jones's Blog
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Dec.21.2010
Well, it worked. I finished that draft of my book before the end of October. While I was plowing through it, I imagined that I'd be here on November 1, crowing about it. But here we are 1.75 months beyond November 1 and I haven't said a word.
See, there are four ways I got it done:
1. I...
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Oct.16.2010
Just thought I'd call attention to an interview with me about the new graphic novel and related social issues on Examiner.com by Sona Avakian. Mostly about internet privacy and corporate control. It was fun, and I like how she pulled it together. It's here, in case you want to check it out.
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Oct.14.2010
Some book signings are good because customers are lined up out the door and the store owner sells enough copies to pay the rent for the month. Others are good because interesting people show up and have time to talk. More salon than signing, they’re good reminders of why we do the work.
Mark...
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Oct.08.2010
Tomorrow night, Saturday the 9th, from 7:15-8:15 PM, Elizabeth Bernstein and I will be emceeing the San Francisco Writers Grotto reading at LitCrawl, which is basically a gigantic literary block party on around Valencia Street in SF, the concluding event to LitQuake. The theme is "...
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Sep.03.2010
Although it is undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed must maintain a presence in the blogosphere, it is also undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed has to get his...
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Aug.20.2010
I was sitting at a bar and grill on Michigan Avenue, eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my little Moleskine notebook while the guide to the Chicago Art Institute that I'd been using as a bookmark lay on the table next to it. In small-...
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Aug.14.2010
Although The Undressing of America plugs along, it's lately getting less attention in my life than this graphic novel that's just coming out, Networked: Carabella on the Run. Which I still find disorienting, because it wasn't so long ago that I thought I was out of the graphic novel and comic...
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Jul.21.2010
Where am I? The Central Valley of California has a real geography, of farm roads and rivers and cities, but the the long, thin twilight zone of Interstate 5 has only its own reference points: about an hour downwind from the doomed, stinking cattle of Harris Ranch, between the two closed state rest...
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Jul.14.2010
I go to Comic Con every year, but lately it's just been to hang out with my friend Joe and look through old yellowing comics and feel that sultry San Diego air. Oh, and the drive. I love driving alone down I-5 in the summer heat, staying at some shabby motel at the bottom of the big valley, then...
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Jul.13.2010
It's been a crazy stretch: London and Chicago, friends in from out of town, a film festival and more travel coming, a book coming out, multiple projects to juggle. In times like these, especially when I'm traveling, my mind seems to jump to a new level of nimbleness. I've had a series of...
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Jun.27.2010
My friend Meghan Ward wrote a post on her blog Writerland (one of my favorite blogs on writing and publishing) called "My Writing Journey," in which she describes how, starting at the age of six and proceeding through a series of adventures, misadventures, wrong turns and right turns, she...
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Jun.20.2010
My dad lives in a series of old moments, endlessly looping. At the nursing home we talk about sneaking into the Foothill Theater in Oakland, Sea School at the San Diego Marine Base, shenanigans at Waikiki before the war, driving the length of old Highway 61 with an injured dog in the back seat,...
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Jun.15.2010
Just when I'm finally chugging away diligently on The Undressing of America, life decides to distract me. First it was a financial mess, which wasn't particularly welcome. But then came the trip to England, which sent me home wanting to start a new book (among other things), and now comes a graphic...
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Jun.05.2010
I just came back from London. Mostly talking to game and comics people in connection with a book I wrote a while ago (Killing Monsters) and a book I'm contemplating starting (a sort of sequel to Men of Tomorrow), but also squeezing in some research on The Undressing of America, because London is...
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May.26.2010
This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life: dreaming that I was explaining my book in progress to somebody, and discovering upon waking that what I was saying actually makes sense. So much sense, in fact, that the dream conversation gives me some understanding that I'd never reached...
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About Gerard
Right now I'm writing a nonfiction book for FSG, The Undressing of America, about the bizarre cabal of cultural fringies who revolutionized publishing in the '20s with the original "reality media." I have a graphic novel, drawn by Mark Badger,...
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