Wait, It’s Possible To Grow UP???

I’ve grown a lot of things in my day, from dachshunds to beansprouts, but up was never one of them.

That’s why I’ve got my eye on What it Means to be a Grown-up: The Complete and Definitive Answer, the new anthology from Commonplace Books (publishers of A Commonplace Book of the Weird, which–sporadically–includes my short story, “The Corpse Who Moves About”). Well, that and the fact that, according to this entertaining and informative Table of Contents, one of the first stories in the anthology is titled “My Dad the Ghost Rider,” and any story titled “My Dad the Ghost Rider” is a story I need to read. Commonplace Books’ first venture, as I mentioned in my review, featured a compelling mix of styles, from the elegant to the eclectic. Many were funny, many were beautiful, and a few were quietly disturbing; the only constancy was that almost none of them were written as Lovecraft would have probably liked.  What It Means… promises more of the same (that is to say, more of the different), bringing in authors and artists as diverse as stand-up comedians, New York Neo-Futurists, Onion A.V. Club head writer Nathan Rabin, and the editors from FoundMagazine.com.

Because I’ve tried to focus, in this blog, only on the venues where my own writing appears, I feel obligated to mention that I am not featured in What it Means to be a Grown-up. I wouldn’t know where to begin, except with the observation that I just, epiphanically, realized the double-meaning behind the title for that Pixar feature with the dogs and the dying and the stilty-birds and the zeppelins. However, Commonplace Books would like to remind you that A Commonplace Book of the Weird is still available, in print (at a discounted rate, no less) as well as Nook and Kindle e-book formats (hint: the e-books are guaranteed to include “The Corpse Who Moves About”). Why not pick up both books? Then you can learn how to be a weird grown-up.

I wish my dad was the Ghost Rider. We could eat jelly beans out of wineglasses and jump helicopters on our tricycles until the cows come home.