Tod Goldberg

Good Things, Good People: Crime Edition

You'd think that since my brother was in charge of the Edgar Awards this year that he'd throw me a bone and let me know the winners in advance, particularly in the case of those who were nominated who also happened to be my friends. But alas -- it was just like when I was a little kid and I always asked him to take me to the arcade in Concord (The Great Entertainer, I believe it was called) and he never did, claiming her forgot all the while. Each time I asked him, "Hey, did my friend Susan win for best short story?" or "Hey, did my friend Matt win for best television script?" he'd feign memory loss. Fortunately, unlike when I was a kid, he didn't then make me smell his armpits. Well, tonight, despite his best efforts at secrecy, they gave out those damn Edgar Awards and I'm pleased to say that my friend and colleague Susan Straight won for best short story for her piece "The Golden Gopher" in Los Angeles Noir and that my friend and colleague Matt Nix won for best television episode for the pilot episode of Burn Notice, which he wrote and is executive producer of and which I better not fuck up in book form. (Not to self: try not to fuck it up, it's winning awards now!).

The full list of winners, along with some photos, are available on that lying scum bag Lee's blog.

Good Things, Good People, Part 982

The latest issue of Night Train features two stories by former students of mine, Carol Test and Scott Doyle (and, now that I think about it, they were classmates with each other, too). If you happen to remember when Swink published regularly (and here I wonder: whatever happened to Swink? I don't remember hearing about them going out of business, but they haven't updated their website in almost a year and they haven't published a new print edition, either. Anyone know?), Carol won one of their initial contests a few years ago, while I think this is Scott's first published story, which makes it all the more cool. Both of these stories were workshopped in a class I taught at the Writers' Program last year, which also produced one of the finalists for Storyglossia's fiction prize last year, Elizabeth Farnum's "Turtle Eggs"  as well as a few stories from other writers which will be appearing in the next couple of months in other journals, too.

And to tie it all together, one of the editors of Night Train is Alicia Gifford...who was in the first class I ever taught. Eventually, the entire world will be peopled by writers who've come through my classroom, which hopefully means a lot less adverbs in dialog tags, he noted ferociously.

I Am Michael Westen

Since the first week of December,  when I sat down with Matt Nix to talk about writing the first book based on his show Burn Notice (called The Fix), I've pretty much spent all of my writing time, my waking time, much of my sleeping time, a considerable amount of free time, trying to think like Michael Westen. This means I spend a lot of time imagining I am doing spy shit. I now know how to blow stuff up really well using household items. I'm pretty handy in a fight. I've got witty rejoinders coming out of my ass.  I know the streets of Miami like I'm fucking Philip Michael Thomas (I mean that literally -- I imagine if I were fucking Philip Michael Thomas that he'd drive me around a lot showing me places where he filmed episodes of Miami Vice, pointing out precisely where it all went so terribly, terribly wrong...).

In the past, I've generally written fiction without a deadline, which is actually a far more preferable way for me to work. I like to navel gaze. I like to ponder. I like to play Madden for three of four hour stretches. And the result is that it took me three years to write Living Dead Girl, two years to write a book that I ultimately decided sucked, ten years to write Simplify (of course, those were all stories...), a year and a half to write Fake Liar Cheat, about 18 months to write a new collection of stories (which I'm putting the final touches on now, too) and I imagine it will take me about a year or so to write the next big book I plan to write, which, as I've told many people over the years, will be about the Salton Sea in the 1960s. I've done the research. I know the characters. I have the story. But for a long time, I haven't been prepared mentally to write it. It's not a tremendous amount of fun to write a novel -- it requires monastic patience from those who love you and monastic personal patience  -- particularly not a novel like Living Dead Girl, which really took the wind from me for a long time. I imagine this Salton Sea novel will be like that, too. I need to write it. I yearn to, really, but I also don't look forward to the kind of mental torture that sort of work puts on me. It happens the same way with stories, really -- there were two this year that did it to me -- one in Barrelhouse called "Walls" and one in Hot Metal Bridge called "Palm Springs", both of which got nominated for the Pushcart, so maybe I did something right -- but at least with a story, it's done with in two weeks, a month.

But...this Burn Notice book? It's a fucking hoot. Minus the 2 weeks I was in Bennington and the two weeks I had fucking Captain Tripps, I've spent every day from the first week of December writing The Fix. And it's true that not every day is a good day, as Ice Cube would agree, there are however many days where I feel like if I saw the lights of the Goodyear blimp it just might say Tod G's the pimp. I can see the finish line from here, maybe another 10 days to go, maybe slightly longer, and while I'll be happy to stop thinking I'm Michael Westen and  to start thinking about these two short stories I've been putting off since December, I must say that writing this sort of comic noir is pretty damn fun to do. I've got two more to write after this one, each with a substantially longer deadline, thank god, and I've really had to teach myself that I don't need to have an unreliable narrator facing some sort of mortal pain in every line, like many of my stories and novels previously have had, and that it's okay to just have fun, line by line, day by day, writing for the entertainment of it all. I've been asked by a lot of people why I decided to do these books and my answer has been the same each time: It seemed like it would be pretty cool. It seemed like I'd reach about 50,000 more readers than I usually do. It seemed like a great way to learn, again, how to write something completely out of my comfort zone, to challenge myself in new and interesting ways. And the end result? Well, I guess you'll know in August.   

The Visiting Professor of Profanity

From the San Gabriel Valley Tribune:

How many times can you use the F-word in polite company without getting the bum's rush?

Turns out lots of 'em if you're at UC Riverside's Writers Week and you are reading a short story you wrote.

I'll take author Tod Goldberg's word that it's about 40 in his "Mitzvah," an entry in "Las Vegas Noir," a soon-to-be-published collection of fiction influenced by film noir.

When he appeared on Friday at UCR for a reading of his tale, he joked that Writers Week director Susan Straight had ordered him not to swear too much and that on that advice he had counted the obscenities.

Whatever the number, Goldberg's hilarious tale of a former mob hit man masquerading for years as a rabbi in Las Vegas kept the audience of writers, students and general-purpose interested readers convulsed with laughter and filled with appreciation of his art.

I just did an official count. Including "motherfucker" and other more interesting conjunctions, fuck actually appears in one form or another 52 times. All of them, I assure you, tastefully done. You can read for yourself this May, when Las Vegas Noir hits stores. To read the rest of the article -- which includes the first couple paragraphs of the story in question -- go here. 

Good Things, Good People, Part 765

In my quest to only edify my own arrogance and ego, I've forgotten to mention some wonderful news concerning one of my former students. Elizabeth Farnum, who took several courses with me at UCLA, was recently named a finalist for Storyglossia's 2007 Fiction Prize. And though she didn't win, she didn't win in good company, as other finalists for the award included Matt Bell, and the eventual winner was Stephanie Dickinson, two very fine writers in their own right. Even more exciting is that Elizabeth's story, "Turtle Eggs," is also her first published piece. Go here to read the story.

The Year of the Short Story Continues...

As I've mentioned before, I've devoted the last year to writing new short fiction for a new collection of kinda-but-not-really-linked-but-still-sorta-in-a-way stories and have been exceptionally lucky to see each of the stories find a pretty immediate home. One of those is my new story in the latest issue of Hot Metal Bridge, which you can read here, and which is the last story I wrote in the cycle, but one of the first to appear, because sometimes that's how it works. There's also an excellent essay by Roy Kesey in the issue, an excerpt from a novel by Jack Pendarvis, and all sorts of other delectable bits.

The Year Of The Short Story Is Almost Done

I've spent the last year working on a new story collection and last week I started what I think is the last story -- though, well, there might be another; it just depends upon how I feel when this one I'm writing is finished...plus, I wrote a story that I ended up not liking, so I might re-write that one, too -- and the really cool aspect of it all is that I essentially pre-sold all of the stories before I wrote them as a bunch of literary journals solicited me for work. In fact, of the twelve stories I wrote and sold this year, I only sent two out on my own, all the others were from journals and magazines coming to me. It's a slightly different story from when I first started writing, for sure, particularly since "Love Somebody" (which you can read in Simplify) was rejected 65 times before it was published. And that it earned Special Mention for the Pushcart that year has always been a reminder that sometimes you just have to find the right market.

One of the stories I wrote in the middle of the process has just been published in the online journal Parva Sed Apta, edited by my friend Vinnie Precht, himself a fantastic writer of short fiction. I've known Vinnie since we took a class together at UCLA Extension Writers' Program in the mid 90s and then spent several years together in the Goat Alley workshop run by Tom Filer, which also included my friends Mary Yukari Waters, Noah Nussbaum, Nancy Matson and many, many others. Looking back, it was an incredible sum of exceptionally talented writers all in one place -- Tom's living room -- and the percentage of whom went on to publish is pretty amazing. 

My new story is called "Lines" and after the jump are the first two paragraphs. To read the rest, simply click here.   

The Dulcet Tones. The Inappropriate Laughing. The Sound Of My Breathing In Your Ear.

In early June, the UCLA Extension Writers' Program hosted its annual Publication Party, a reading that lasts between 2 and 5 hours depending upon how stringently people actually do as they're told in terms of reading limits. The rule is five minutes. Some people read for three minutes, but did not, sadly, fill in the last two minutes with the dance moves they are famous for. Some people read for 37 minutes. Some people read about testicles. Some people read about getting jerked off at the end of a massage. Some people read poetry, which I think we can all agree, is a form of torture we should really be employing on enemy combatants. Remember when we were trying to get Noriega out of his compound and we blasted heavy metal as an enticement for him to give up -- and let me tell you, you want me out of my compound, all you need to do is get some White Lion on the loudspeaker and my shit will be making time for the exit like it was my job -- and yet inside he stayed? I'm telling you, get some black clad-clove-smoking-Tori Amos fan out there reading his free verse in poet voice and we could solve the Gaza Strip issue in five lines:

And the WORDS were like a RASH upon my FECES

AND the feces were like a burning BUSH and Bush was like my FECES

Upon the alter of OIL and THE MAN and the Man was like A RASH

And I am a TOOL of LIFE and LIFE is a TOOL that smells of my fetid waste

WASTE. WASTE. I am a waste. A BURNING BUSH. The hypodermic push of my...Oh, sorry, looks like the Palestinians and the Israelies have figured it all out. I'm off to the hooka lounge...

Anyway. The reading. So, this year the good folks at the Writers' Program, where I've been gainfully employed circling adverbs, crossing out characters' smiles and building writers into glimmering stars of the literary firmament since 2000, recorded all of the readings for the first time and now you get to feel like you were there for the reading minus the three hour wait to hear me read, since I read next to last, after the testicles, the jerking off, the poetry and many, many people reading for more than five minutes. Here, in just over 5 minutes, is my reading of This Is What You Left Behind, which appeared recently in the SmokeLong Quarterly.

Download ucla-writers-goldberg.mp3

Good Things. Good People. Requisite Pimping Part 127

My former student Tiffany Poremba has a new story in the latest issue of the most excellent Smokelong Quarterly. It is, to the best of my knowledge, her first published work of fiction (apart from the ad copy she writes, naturally). Here's a snippet:

It had been one of those days. Nothing terrible, nothing wonderful, just a Friday you knew needed a little help along the way. So you, your best friend Tezha and her girlfriend Josephine decide to go downtown like always. There's the bars, the scantily-clad girls, the derelicts and loudmouths—all the usual attractions, and then there's a movie you heard about right off Central. It's a flick about a nymphomaniac terrorist, and you think, what could be better than this? Nymphomaniac terrorists have to be on the top of the list of favorites, because, after all, it's hard not to adore a woman who's out to change the evils of the world with love, vats of lubricant, and something the reviewer called "the incredible incinerating miniskirt."

You can read the rest, and an interview, here.

10 Weeks Of Me Telling You What To Do

Please pardon the interruption of my absence from these parts -- I forgot to tell interested parties the following information:

If you are interested in applying for Novel IV at UCLA, submissions are still being accepted through this week. I have four spots still open for the course which begins June 26th on campus. You may send your writing sample via email to the program to:

Josh Sitarz <JSitarz@unex.ucla.edu>

or

Mae Respecio <mrespici@unex.ucla.edu>

If you have any questions, you can also call Josh at 310-825-9416.