Are you going to let the intellectual elite tell you what to think about my book?

Right now, there are only three reviews of In Search Of and Others on Amazon, and fourteen on Goodreads. I’d like the world to hear your voice, be it criticism or praise, so I’m running a contest.

Post a review of my book on Amazon or Goodreads by 6pm on June 28th, 2013, tell me about it, and your name is in the running for one of these fabulous prizes:

This is a rare (no, really) framed 11×17 poster from one of my readings for the ISO book tour this spring. I’ll sign it for you!

This is a double-pack of my current short story collections, the most current one and the embarrassing one my publisher won’t let die. I’ll sign both for you!

This is a bound copy of my first novel, written as my MFA thesis, and bound as a Christmas present for my mother. There are three in existence. One can be yours, and I’ll even sign it.

Lethe Press has offered up two (2) $20 certificates for any title in their catalog!

If you post a review (or already have), contact me here or via Facebook to let me know that you’d like to be in the drawing for the prizes. On June 28th at Willcon, my mother will pull three winning names from a hat using her nascent psychic ability. The first name gets first pick, the second name gets second pick, the third name gets third pick.

So what are you waiting for?

(Negative reviews also count, by the way. Though remember: Mother’s psychic powers, etc. Also, you get one entry for Goodreads and one entry for Amazon, so double your chances! I also accept Barnes and Noble.)

God knows I have lots of practice.

Stop by the site and take a look!

I’ll be reading on Friday at 8:30am (yes, that’s AM) with John Kessel and F. Brett Cox, so come on by if you’re there!

To reward early risers, I’ll be giving away a collector’s Advanced Reader’s Copy of In Search Of and Others. I’ll even sign it, though I’ll likely write, “What the hell are you doing up so early?”

It’s at Chamblin’s Uptown on 215 North Laura Street in beautiful downtown Jacksonville. Come for the reading, stay to pay bums to fight each other for pocket change!

Originally broadcast in December 1981, the Future Life episode of In Search Of was eerily prescient about our day-to-day life in the 21st century.

Yes, there is eerie Moog synthesizer music played everywhere we go.

Yes, we spend much of our time staring into lasers.

Sometimes on the weekends, we drop by Leonard Nimoy’s futuristic rumpus room for Sangrias.

Sure, we live in vast self-sustaining arcologies.

Everyone knows how to program in BASIC.

I have a high-tech job tending large cabinets full of magnetic tape.

And of course, mass drivers propel materials to and from space to supply our new era of plenty.

Okay, okay, you’re right. It isn’t fair to make fun of In Search Of‘s predictions of a 21st century curing all disease, living for hundreds of years, and routinely sending ordinary folks into space. After all, in 1981, I was predicting I’d be a famous movie director married to Ramona Quimby by now and look how that turned out.

Alas, the future…that magical place where we think we’ll all be better than we are.

Futurists these days pine for the Singularity, that moment when our accelerating technological development (new tools building new tools in an exponential progression) changes our world so much that we’ll need that very technology just to evolve enough to understand it. We’ll have nanobots enhancing us from our bloodstream, network connections in our brains, and perhaps even a total submersion in virtual reality where we can live forever as whoever and whatever we want.

Here’s my question.

When the Singularity comes and we’re all lining up for the Uploading booths, what are we going to do with this gentleman?

• Should we upload him, too? What server is he going to be on? I’d try another one, if you don’t mind.
• Should we leave him behind? Great. He’ll find our secured data center and just rip out all the hard drives for fun, killing trillions.

See, the fundamental problem with utopia is figuring out what to do with the assholes. And if your theory of the future doesn’t account for assholes — either the deliberate fuckers who want to hurt other people or the poor accidental halfasses who are just distracted and self-absorbed — it’s never going to come true.

I challenge any Singularity evangelist to spend an afternoon at a Wal-Mart or a state fair and still maintain the belief that we’re going to all ascend to a glorious future as flickering orbs of pure intellect. Or that we all want to.

That’s not the Rapture of the Nerds they’re talking about. It’s the Genocide of Everybody Else.

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first.

Sometime after her final “confirmed” transmission at 8:43am on July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart’s transcontinental flight ended when she ran out of fuel and landed her Lockheed Electra 10E on a reef off Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). As tide waters rose, she continued to signal for help — her transmissions were reported from across the Pacific and the United States — until the low-mounted electrical system aboard the plane finally shorted out from the sea water.

There’s some evidence that she might have survived on the island briefly but later perished. Among the artifacts found over the years at Nikumaroro were the heel of a size 9 Cat’s Paw shoe like Earhart wore, a piece of Plexiglas curved like an Electra’s window, a piece of aluminum consistent with the skin of the aircraft, and a jar and two bottles of skin care products dating from the 1930s.

Yeah, there are a lot of things washing and swirling around the Pacific, but it sure is odd how so many that correspond to the size, shape, and era of Earhart and her plane would happen to swim their way to Nikumaroro.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has mounted several expeditions to the island and summarized its findings and research.

I find it pretty convincing.

No, Amelia Earhart didn’t just ditch in the ocean and sink like a rock. No, she wasn’t taken to Saipan by the Japanese where she later died in custody. No, she wasn’t Tokyo Rose. And no, she didn’t return to the United States and assume another identity.

(Though all of those are wonderful theories. I do kind of suspect that Earhart might well have been asked by the U.S. Government to take some pictures of Japanese territory, though.)

The real answer to the Earhart mystery is that she was left to die by incompetent dicks.

In the years since her disappearance, certain kinds of men have gotten a perverse glee from declaring that Earhart was incompetent. They cite her landing in Ireland instead of France for her trans-Atlantic flight as an example of botched navigation. They mention her first flight across the Atlantic was as a passenger instead of as a pilot. They mention that she took a particularly risky route across the Pacific.

It’s interesting that it’s always men who say that.

It’s interesting, too, that Earhart’s critics usually fail to mention that thousands of brilliant, strong-jawed, well-endowed military men from the Navy and Coast Guard failed to follow her signals to her location. They don’t dwell for long on how the crew of her escorting Coast Guard signal ship the Itasca dismissed her as a publicity hound (bitch?), either, its captain later citing Earhart’s incompetence, negligence, and “frantic” behavior as the cause of her loss.

All because, being a skirt, Earhart failed to compromise her professional judgment to follow that captain’s orders.

(I live in a Navy town. 10% of people emerge from the Navy as badasses. 90% emerge as dumbasses, and if their ability to navigate Chamblin Bookmine is anything to go by, I wouldn’t follow their orders, either.)

I think the great “mystery” of Earhart’s disappearance is how a man’s mistake is a challenge and a woman’s is a sign that she shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Actually, what am I talking about? That isn’t a mystery at all.

Right before she died, Amelia Earhart wrote this to her husband G.P. Putnam:

I hope the day comes when women all over the world from every profession and walk of life rise up against their male oppressors and color the streets and the skies with blood sprayed from severed penises.

No, that’s not true. What she really said was:

Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

The greatest hazard, I guess, is being remembered by men as an uppity broad who flew too close to the sun.

[I wrote a Postcard Story about this once, by the way.]

Mr. Newell followed Officer Shattuck into a large stale room with rows of desks stretching across the scuffed white tiles. Late as it was, only a handful of other policemen sat typing two-fingered on their Underwoods, sometimes with a handcuffed man squirming on a chair across from them.

“Did Bridget say that you’re here to report a missing person, Mr. Newell?” said Shattuck, leading him to a desk in the far corner.

Newell smiled, hoping to look totally sane, and raked his fingers through his hair. “Well, yes, I think. Or really a found person, when I think about it.”

Shattuck motioned grandly toward a metal chair. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Newell sat down and leaned forward. He felt like a kid, and that wasn’t helping. “My daughter has her own radio, see–”

“That must be nice,” said Shattuck.

“Well, she built it herself. For a school project. Saved up all on her own to buy the vacuum tubes, the case, the big silver microphone, everything. She built it with plans out of some magazine.”

“Industrious for a girl,” said Shattuck.

“She’s only eleven, too,” said Newell. “That seems to be going around these days. In fact, it’s related to what I’m here to talk to you about.”

“Right, right,” said Shattuck. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Well, my daughter–”

“What’s her name?”

Newell smiled. “Tammy. When we moved down from New Jersey, my wife was pregnant and we wanted to give her a name that fit with our new home, and that seemed–”

“You named her after Tampa? That’s cute.”

“Well, her name isn’t literally ‘Tampa,’ but yeah,” said Newell. “Anyway–”

“They ought to put her into a parade or something, ‘Tampa’s Sweetheart’ or something.”

#

KHAQQ, please respond. Do you read? KHAQQ, this is Tampa, Florida, receiving you. What is your position?

#

“Officer Shattuck–”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

Newell hurried now, afraid Shattuck wouldn’t let him finish if it didn’t just club him over the head. “My daughter talks with people all over the world with that radio, and if she can’t do that, she listens to them. Last night, later than she should really be up, she came running in and told me she heard a lady calling for help.”

“On the radio?”

“On the radio.” Jesus, thought Newell. Should I ask for another cop? “So I sit down with her while she turns all her dials and adjusts some wires or whatever — I really don’t understand any of that stuff, I run a newsstand — and she holds down the switch on her microphone and says, ‘Unidentified woman, please say again. Unidentified woman, come back?’ She says that a few times and nothing comes through the speaker but static.”

Shattuck nodded, mercifully mute of comment.

“But after about five minutes, sure enough, I hear this thin voice come through, almost like it’s crawled a long way across a desert or something. It says, ‘KHAQQ calling Itasca…281…north…Howland Island…Not much…above water…long…power.”

Shattuck rubbed his chin. “Not sure I’ve heard of Howland Island. That out in the bay you figure?”

“Well, Tammy’s a clever girl, more like her mother than her old man, thank God. She explained that sometimes at night, radio signals can bounce a long way around the world. She tried her best to calculate a bearing, but the best she could do was west.”

“West.” Shattuck leaned back. “Well, that narrows it down by, what, fifty percent?”

Newell nodded. “I know, I know. And I wouldn’t have come in if that’s all I had. The thing is, Tammy says that it’s Amelia Earhart.”

#

KHAQQ, are you there? My name is Tammy. Are you okay? We’re going for help.

#

Shattuck leaned forward. “Earhart.”

“Right.” Newell unfolded a piece of paper. “Tammy told me to say that the voice is transmitting on 3105 kilocycles, an aviation frequency according to one of her books.”

“That’s got to be exciting for a headstrong little girl, talking to Amelia Earhart like that.”

Newell didn’t follow what Shattuck was saying, so he shook his head. “I guess, sure. But Tammy thinks she’s in trouble.”

“Haven’t heard anything about that,” said Shattuck.

“Neither have I. Nobody has. But if there’s a chance, maybe we should tell someone officially. That’s what I told Tammy, anyway. We tried calling the Navy and the Coast Guard, even by radio, but nobody would respond. I thought maybe if a police officer were behind it, maybe…”

“Well, I can’t make a report I’m not sure is true,” said Shattuck. “I haven’t personally heard these signals.”

“I have. And so has my daughter.”

“Right,” said Shattuck. “Right. It could be a hoax, of course. Or a publicity stunt, like that whole idiot flight to begin with.”

Newell turned his hat in his hands. “But if there’s even a chance–”

“Not sure why women have to do things men have already done. They do their things, we do ours. That’s what I say.”

Newell wasn’t caring much what Shattuck had to say. He knew this wasn’t going well, that he was blowing it. Maybe if he’d brought Tammy…but she wouldn’t come. She had to stay at her post, she’d said.

#

KHAQQ, last message garbled. Say again. Say again. Say again. Please say again.

#

“If that woman’s lost, I say there’s not much we can do about it.” Shattuck lit a cigarette. “She’s already got all them Navy ships tied up helping her across the world. They’re on the scene. If it is her, and I’m not saying it is, but if it is her, she’s got a lot more help than most men flying get, don’t you think?”

Newell narrowed his eyes. How did that matter? “You’re not going to do anything,” he said.

“Not sure it’s my place.”

“Who cares whose place it is?” Newell stood up, leaned over the desk. “Are you going to let my daughter listen to a woman die?”

Shattuck thought on that a moment. “Maybe she should,” he said, finally.

Newell could barely stop himself from reaching for the man’s uniform shirt, but spending a night in jail wouldn’t do any good. Not for Earhart, not for Tammy. He settled back on his heels. “Which do you mean, that a woman should die or my daughter should listen?”

Shattuck didn’t answer.

#

KHAQQ, KHAQQ. I’m coming. As soon as I can, I’m coming.

My students.

What does the future hold? A lot of comma splices, for one thing.

For the rest? Read the article!

Take a look! Adam Mills is an incisive interviewer, the Studs Terkel of genre fiction.

Ghosts are my favorite paranormal phenomenon, so much so that I’m not even sure I’m up to the task of writing an appreciation of them.

Here’s my appreciation: “THEY’RE GHOSTS, THE GOSSIP OF THE DEAD! THEY’RE AWESOME!”

I have never seen a ghost and that fact really pisses me off. If I’m walking in the wilderness someday and I see Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or a trio of gray aliens dry-humping a cow carcass, I’m going to fold my arms and say, “Really, universe? This is what you’ve got for me? Fuck you.” And I’ll walk away and never report it to anyone out of sheer petulant bitterness.

Hell, for all you know, that’s already happened.

Anyway, ghosts.

I’m pretty skeptical about heaven. In fact, I always have been. I once asked my Lutheran pastor grandfather what went on there and he said, “You live in total comfort and happiness, singing hymns to Jesus and praising His name forever and ever.” To which I replied, “That’s it?” He sputtered in a fury about how that was my final reward and my grandmother had to explain that a ten-year-old boy doesn’t want to spend eternity singing about Jesus.

Indeed I don’t. I do want a debriefing like I wrote about in the “In Search Of” story, but I don’t know that I want to hang out with ANYONE for all eternity.

But I don’t like the idea of my consciousness dissipating completely when I finally collapse into a puddle of my own juices someday, either. That’s one of the reasons I write, to haunt all you people forever.

That’s what ghosts are all about, right? The return of stories, imperfect and garbled by time, hazy at the edges, distorted by human transmission AND human reception? The question, of course, is who is transmitting and who is receiving.

Do you hear a story and haunt yourself? Or do the stories somehow stick to the places they happen?

I can think of no mechanism by which a place can “record” strong sensory impressions, but those are the only paranormal phenomena I’ve ever personally encountered. I have gotten bad feelings about places, leaving immediately under the weight of dread, only to find out later that my impression was justified.

Once, I passed a row of old houses nestled back among oak trees with long Spanish moss beards — a common sight in most Florida towns, not particularly redolent with significance. But when we got to the second or third house along the line, I saw a strange flash almost BEHIND my eyes, and there was a silhouette of a house that looked far different than the one that was standing there. It was narrower and more rickety-looking.

I screamed, of course, because that’s what you do. And my mother screamed. And my stepfather, driving, screamed. And my friend beside me in the back seat screamed. And we peeled away in a great surge of the engine and a spraying fishtail of gravel.

We compared notes and discovered that we’d all seen more or less the same silhouette. And after some research among the old-timers, careful not to reveal quite why I was asking, it turned out that yes, there was a history to that place. They’d been narrow shotgun houses once, and a murder had occurred in one of them.

Dunh dunh dunh!

Did that lot somehow absorb the great human passion and pain of that assault? It seems impossible.

Or did I perceive something very subtle, maybe the traces of an old foundation or the same melancholy atmosphere that might make someone more prone to murder in the first place? Did I assemble all of that in my brain in a fraction of a second and play myself a ghost story?

Either way, that’s amazing.

That’s what makes ghosts wondrous.

• If they “exist” as we commonly believe them, spirits or echoes or whatever, that’s an extraordinary sign of the universe’s sense of narrative.
• If they don’t “exist,” if we make them up from fragments and signs and sensory impressions, if we can tell ourselves these stories of great timeless human emotion in a flash behind the eyes…then that might even be better.

Ghosts by definition are the most human of paranormal phenomena. One way or another, on perception or reflection, we wish them into being and use them to tell ourselves stories.

In that way, we’re all ghosts.