Wombats Dig It

My Overnight Success Story

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Head Wombat

http://rickriordan.com/2007/12/my-overnight-success/

I can’t get over how similar Rick Riordan and I are.

I may be actually boring Adam and David to death, here... — I may be *actually* boring Adam and David to death, here…

I’ve been lucky enough to have a couple readings… some of them in editor Adam Pacther’s hometown of Arlington pretty well-attended, Waltham, the awesome Booklovers’ Gourmet in Webster… others not so well attended. My favorite moment* was when we arrived at the Arlington Center for the Arts and one poor lady, who I don’t think intended to attend the reading, was seated in our room and bravely stuck it out while Adam and I read. Or the time I had a reading booked at my local, my hometown library, the Charlton Library (the library which banned Mark Twain’s “Eve’s Diary”… probably not for the pictures, as claimed, but probably for him being a bit full of himself) and my old boss from Ronnie’s Seafood showed up with one of his sons and… no one else. So we skipped the reading (sorry, Adam), and just chatted about what we’d all been up to.

My reading series as a young a**hole where I just showed up in parks and read from my dreadful roman à clef-in-progress God Coffee, I Miss You was similarly successful, hitting parks in Brooklyn, Seattle, and Los Angeles, with a grand total of none audience, but maybe that was to be expected.

So if some lucky agent wants to pick up Trip to the Quiet Room, this might be a great time to get in, as I’ve got loads of stories about how long the road to overnight success actually is. The book is an excellent beach read, because some of it takes place down in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where William Murphy is in hiding from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and ‘Jimmy’ is in hiding from Old Sturbridge Village and the proprietors of the Magic Funtime Butterfly Ranch are in hiding from the Internal Revenue Service

It could be your next Percy Jackson… ?

* By this, of course, I mean my least favorite moment, the moment when my stomach drops through my toes and leaks out onto the floor in a sad little stomach puddle.

The Making of: Indu in #VOOM2016

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Head Wombat

Indu VOOM
There’s a worthy Irish startup out there called Indu, and it’s been trying, for the last week or so, to get people to vote for it in a contest, at the end of which they’d get to pitch to Richard Branson. If they get in the top 80.

Well, I told a series of Twitter stories, starting with a real-life, live-tweet of the time Carol, the founder, got locked in a hospital. I followed it up with another live-tweet of the time VOOM’s website wouldn’t let you vote and we assumed that Indu had broken the internet. And then I had the idea that Indu’s marketing was hard at work on a sequel to the popular Liam Neeson vehicle, Taken, in an effort to appeal to more people.

And, like all ideas that suck up all your time, I thought, “Hey, let’s make a real film for Indu…” I’ve been on a real scriptwriting kick for contests like NYC Midnight’s short screenplay contest, I enjoy the work, I have two children I can employ as cheap labor, and my wife loves directing them, so I figured we should give it a shot.

My Name Is Carol

We started with a rough idea of a script, the kids found some Lego characters we could use to represent Carol, Richard, and a whole slew of them for the other people pitching to Richard. We even had a green screen-ish platform if we flipped over the slats on the Lego table the kids have had for 8 years.

With the rough notes, we used an app called iStopMotion, from Boinx software, to shoot our scenes. iStopMotion lets you use an iPhone as a remote camera, so we used the iPad to capture the shots and moved the iPhone around on a little stand we got from Target where you can adjust the legs and angle at which the phone is pointed. Setting up the table

We tried a couple shots on the Friday night, but in the cold light of Saturday morning they were a little blurry… and someone didn’t consider the messy closet behind the shot, so we figured we’d have to re-shoot a good deal of it. As we weren’t using a Lego base we were essentially building a set of Lego dominoes… when we repositioned an arm or leg or head to make the characters look more alive we were under constant threat of the whole line of people falling over. After a day of soccer, volleyball, and baseball, we got back around 4:30 to start our principal shooting, working off that rough script.

With stop motion the part the kids had the most fun with was dropping little Easter eggs in the production (like the moving AT-AT walker in the background that became an integral part of the story or the little kid who gets chased off by an assistant during the glamping person’s pitch). We wrapped up shooting around 6 o’clock and stitched the separate movies for the different scenes together in a rough cut in iMovie on a laptop in a matter of minutes. At this stage, we needed to record some audio, and the kids are far cuter than me, so I wrote up a quick script (you can download an autographed copy! You’re so lucky!) and we recorded their separate parts in Garageband on the laptop. Some people had trouble with their lines.

The audio took a bit longer… titles, transitions, but by 2am, kids long in bed, their contributions done a little earlier, we had our finished film.

We hope you enjoy our little film. And please vote for Indu in the VOOM campaign, this is the last day to do so, and she really deserves a spot in the top 80.

Indu in #VOOM2016 from Matthew Hanlon on Vimeo.

Young Man Discovers New Mayan City… Inspired by “The History of the Mayan Ball League”?

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Head Wombat

So this young man in Quebec has discovered, without leaving his home, mind, a new Mayan city. He did it using the Mayan constellations, laying them down on the map and figuring out that there seemed to be one corresponding city missing.

But I suspect he may have just been studying his “The History of the Mayan Ball League” texts:

“The All Stars versus locals match ended very badly in Quebec, their first stop on the tour. The traveling referees, misunderstanding the intention of the tour, beheaded the local players, whom had lost, 15−1, and the All Star team was driven out of town by the first of what would become many generations of angry Quebecois, justifiably so.”

Excerpt From: Matthew Hanlon. “The History of the Mayan Ball League.” iBooks

The short book mentions many other expansion cities for the Mayan Ball League, and while this teenager’s approach of using the stars and science to discover hitherto unknown Mayan sites, I do hope that the scientific and archaeological community will spend a bit more time reading up on their fake histories and investigate.

“However, the next year the Board of Governors overruled Chichen Itza and added two new franchises to the League; San Juan and San Diego. San Diego was not particularly ready for a franchise, but a wealthy tribal king in the area promised to have a 20,000 seat arena completed by 270 A.D., and for now the team would play its matches at the downtown market, which could be cleared out on Saturdays and removable hoops would be installed on the side walls. The removable hoops were something of a hazard, to both players and bystanders. Even non-bystanders were at risk, as the hoops had a tendency to break off their moorings and roll down the streets for some distance before coming to a stop in a fruit stall or on a collection of people discussing politics or the weather. The tribal king insisted the new stadium would be ready within five years, and how many people would die in hoop-related deaths in that time, anyway? It turns out the answer was 117.”

Excerpt From: Matthew Hanlon. “The History of the Mayan Ball League.” iBooks.

In the Jungle — Who knows what other ballparks are out there to be discovered?

The book is free from the iBookstore and $0.99 from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. So start your research today, and you may just catch up to a fifteen year old from Quebec, in terms of Mayan archaeology.

Hockey Comes Back to Worcester

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Head Wombat

As the author of the wildly popular* Trip to the Quiet Room, a story about loss, time travel, the life of a hockey player, a little bit of magic, and Worcester, Massachusetts, I’m really happy to see that Worcester is getting a minor league hockey team back. I’m even happier to see that the owner is investing so much in the hockey culture in and around the downtown area in Worcester.

“I’m kind of smitten with Worcester. It’s an unpolished gem,” he said. “It’s affordable, it’s smack in the middle of commerce. It’s got a lot of potential.”

I remember going to see Worcester Ice Cats in their inaugural season in 1994 with some of the gang at the seafood restaurant I worked at. The AHL was such a different beast than the NHL… that bit sloppier, scrappier, and perfectly suited to a town like Worcester. It made such an impression that even nearly twenty years later, when I started to write what would become Trip to the Quiet Room I thought that the stories of those guys, particularly when their professional hockey life was done, would make for a great character. And the line, the theme I had rattling around my head while I was writing was from fellow Worcester-ite (and Vassar-ite) Liz Bishop‘s opening lines of “In the Waiting Room“:

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early.

So it’s very nice to see hockey on its way back into Worcester to fill those dark winter nights and encouraging to see such a commitment to one of my favorite cities, that rough gem.

A Worcester three decker, William Murphy’s apartment

* Warning: May not actually be popular. Contains sucralose, which has been shown to give rats and dogs a real headache when taken in quantity. Do not spray on crops.

The History of the Mayan Ball League Returns?

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Head Wombat

The Author at Chichen Itza — The Author (and assistant) at Chichen Itza

Submitted as evidence, that the author of The History of the Mayan Ball League (available at fine bookstores in your phone) actually visited the ball court at Chichén Itzá, so heaven help you all that there might be a sequel to that thrilling story of sport, rampant salaries, lockouts, and other labor negotiations!

Or maybe just a new version of the same old story with pictures. Who knows?

So if you haven’t read the original, maybe now is the time to go download it (it’s free on Apple’s iBook Store and $0.99 on the others). There are a surprising number of facts in the story that hew incredibly close to the truth, which is something you don’t often get from me. Go, read, enjoy.

Time Travel, Red Sox Style

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Head Wombat

I’ve been away from my inbox lately, but this morning I ran across this message (from the past, but also from the present):

Here’s hoping 1927 turns out different for the Red Sox…

Letters to a Literary Agent

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Head Wombat

As special bonus content, I’m giving you a sneak peek into my current hunt for an agent. This week, I’m showing off my latest query letter, which is the all-important first impression you make on an agent or their assistant or perhaps the occupants of the same subway train they ride because they left the printout on their seat as they exited the train. Your query letter, well, potentially, your query letter will go through many revisions as you get rejection upon rejection, keeping them all in a safe box to trot out when you do finally land an agent, publish your book, and start making the interview circuit and get to quote a J.K. Rowling-esque number of rejections before your genius was finally understood: “Yes, I was rejected 197 times before Lisa Finklebottom saw enough in my manuscript to sign me and the rest is New York Times bestseller history!” Of course, given that, in my experience, you get no response at all from an agent makes it a little more difficult to collect, but still. The empty shoebox will make for great television, like Geraldo Rivera opening up Al Capone’s vault.

So you tweak your letter, design it to get a response, until finally you get agents asking for manuscripts to read, and then you wait some more. Based on the overwhelming lead the Empty, Soul Sucking Void of No Response has right now, I’ve changed my tack with my very latest efforts. This, dear readers, is my very latest and greatest query letter making the rounds at the moment:

24 March 2016

Matthew Hanlon
*** ****** **
**********, ** *****
m******@***.com | http://www.wombatsdigit.com/b/

Illustrious Agent
Literary Agency 123
123 Hudson St
New York, NY 10007

Re: Trip to the Quiet Room, a novel

Dear Agent:

GREETINGS, ILLUSTRIOUS AGENT, I AM A PRINCE, EXILED IN A STRANGE LAND, AND AM IN NEED OF GREAT HELP AND ASSISTANCE. I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION $450,000,000.00 WHICH I CANNOT GET OUT OF THE COUNTRY IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF.

IF YOU SEND YOUR MAILING ADDRESS, BANK DETAILS, SO I MAY WIRE YOU THE FUNDS, YOU MAY KEEP HALF, OR INDEED ALL, OF THE MONEY, SO LONG AS YOU REPRESENT MY NOVEL, trip to the quiet room, WHICH IS A NOVEL OF GREAT CRASHING AND BASHING, LOVE, LOSS, HOCKEY, TIME MACHINES, AND 1989 (NOT THE TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM, FOR LEGAL REASONS).

PLEASE, I BELIEVE I MAY HAVE ANGERED TAYLOR SWIFT BY APPROPRIATING HER YEAR AND MENTIONING IT IN A NOVEL AND NOW QUERY LETTER AND MY TIME IS RUNNING SHORT. PLEASE RESPOND WITH DETAILS AND WE WILL MAKE A GOOD DEAL (15%?) AND ESCAPE THIS COUNTRY IN WHICH I AM STUCK AND PUBLISH trip to the quiet room, A SUREFIRE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, BOOKER PRIZE WINNER, AND REAL GOOD BOOK.

MAY I PLEASE SEND COMPLETED MANUSCRIPT AND YOU SEND BANK DETAILS?

Sincerely yours,

The Exiled Prince Matthew Hanlon of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Based on my exhaustive research, this style of letter is about as likely to get me a response as the more traditional approach I’ve been taking, so what’s the harm?
NoResponse

Agents, consider this an open letter to you. Would you like to represent me (and my book)?

Farewell to the Community Bookstore

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Head Wombat

The New Yorker has a video and short article up regarding the imminent closing of The

Community Bookstore on Court Street in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the (surely deliberate anachronistic and ridiculous getup of the) New York Times reporter or the man-on-the-street soundbites about what went on in that pretty that I enjoyed, but the walk down my old neighborhood, scene of many a walk while I composed the perambulatory (and thankfully never finished) God Coffee, I Miss You. It was a paean to my time in Brooklyn and those blocks sandwiched between 2nd Place and Atlantic Avenue, fresh out of college and living the life of Riley, where I spent a lot of my weekends and mornings after having worked until all hours at Avalanche, a hip little new media company on Hudson Street (near the offices of Viking Penguin and many a literary agent), home to the venerable BorderEqualsZero, in Cobble Hill Park, watching the nannies from the islands congregate while their charges ran around the grass in the middle of the beautiful brick buildings in that neighborhood.

The Community Bookstore was just down the street from that park, and I’d go in and pick up a used book or two, or three, all in the name of fleshing out this novel, or the next one, or the next. There was the flashier, cleaner BookCourt down the street and the even bigger and flashier Barnes & Noble across Atlantic Avenue, and, of course, I’d browse through those, as well, but with my student-loan saddled shoulders, I came away with the most books from the Community Bookstore. While it was a good deal messier, it reminded me, for sheer volume and the sense that books had digested the room, of the back closet on my grandfather’s porch of a three decker in Worcester, Massachusetts, where books lined every shelf, in all states. It was a sort of magical space, where who knew what you were going to find, but it was likely going to be worth the archeology, whatever it was.

If you’re in the area I highly recommend stopping by for the sheer experience of it.

Version Control: A Book Review

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Head Wombat

As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about time travel and how to use it in fiction, or even place it orthogonal to the story, I tend to dive into books with time travel with gusto and a keen eye towards how someone else might have done it.
So when I saw Version Control on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and had a coupon burning a hole in my pocket, I couldn’t help grabbing it. From the jacket copy it sounded like a quirky, funny take on inventing a time machine with a bit of a heart.

And while the book is funny (the dream of YHWH as the worst of all possible tenants towards the end of the book is hilarious), it’s not as funny as I’d expected. The grief and depression and general unsettledness of the age in which the book is set is far more prominent, but Palmer earns it with a thorough depiction of Rebecca and Philip’s relationship from the very start to the very end(s). Dexter Palmer fits in musings on love in the digital age, race relations and predispositions, scientific progress, our busy, unforgetting world, all swirling around the lovely and sad family story of Rebecca, Philip, and Sean.

The time machine, the causality violation device, around which the novel works isn’t a flash-bang time machine of H.G. Wells, but almost like a harpist, plucking at strings, jumping from this one to the next, the problems of history and continuity handled in an interesting, subtle way by Palmer. In fact, you (and they) are not even sure it *is* working at all. And that’s the same way the book worked for me — not a thunderbolt but just something that felt perfectly right.

It’s a different conception of a time machine from the one Sam and Laura build in Trip to the Quiet Room — their time machine fits in a bathtub, a storage shed, or a barn and tends to shred sheep in a very messy way, but with bubbles — but I loved his take on it, it felt natural, plausible, and fit so well into the story.

Two thumbs up, go and give it a read.

No Booker Prize for William Murphy

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Head Wombat

William Murphy’s tale of time machines and tussles has not, I’m afraid, been selected for the Man Booker International Prize long list.

I know, I know. Stop weeping, please. Especially on the train, like that. People will stare. They’ll wonder. So dry your tears, wrestle in those last few body-shuddering sobs. It’ll be okay. The book’s not even published yet, so you couldn’t expect the Booker Prize folks to add it to the long list.

Could 2017 be our year? 2018?