Been away, largely because I’ve had loads of writing assignments over the past few weeks. One of them came to fruition last night at The Encyclopedia Show, a very cool show put on by Robbie Q. Telfer and Young Chicago Authors. I think it may be the first time I’ve read to someone in high school since the tour. A great night.

Monday night is the famed No Love for Love, which I’m hosting, and which Peter Sagal is headlining. A couple of years back, I performed there, and did a quiz show called “Guess the Context”, in which I recounted the many terrible things girls have said to me over my lifetime, and the audience had to guess the context of those statements. This time, it’ll likely just be a story, because now I’m married, and my wife is really nice.

After that, it’s all AWP, all the time. We have a big release party planned for AM/PM on Friday the 13th, and The Dollar Store will be a part of that. Here’s the poster, below (click (maybe twice) to make it bigger). Michael Renaud made it. It’s incredible. More soon!

GQ named Chicago as its City of the Year for 2008—thanks in large part to the prez-elect—so I wrote a short piece about why the literary scene here tops all. It was pretty fun, and I hear that Leo DiCaprio is excited to be in the same magazine as me, which makes all kinds of sense.

I’ve been working on some other year-end stuff of my own for TOC, trying to figure out which—of the small selection of books that jammed my radar—I would label as “best.” As soon as I figure that out, I’ll let you know.

Other exciting news: A new Dollar Store. January 9, with a hot as Hades lineup. Please tell your friends.

Tonight, I’ll sit down with Rick Kogan at the brand new Chicago Publishers Gallery at The Chicago Cultural Center. The Gallery is a permanent exhibition, showing off the city’s ever-expanding literary output. That opens up at 5, and the program begins at the Cassidy Theater at 5:30.

On Tuesday, October 14, I’m reading a 55-word story as part of a fund-raiser for Quickies!, one of the coolest reading series in the city. I’ll join 29 other writers, all reading these ridiculously short short short stories.

And then the big one, on Wednesday, October 15, is a reading as part of Writers & Cartoonists for Obama, a huge fund-raiser for our guy, with a ton of great writers on the bill, including Stuart Dybek, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Sara Paretsky and others.

Last year, The Dollar Store and the wonderful Third Coast International Audio Festival partnered up for Dollar Storeys, a short-form audio competition that asked professional producers and first-times to make pieces inspired by junk, just like we’ve done at the show for a few years.

Third Coast’s weekly show Re:Sound took a look back at the project this weekend, and you can hear it by clicking on that link. I had a blast going into the studio and hanging out with the public radio cool kids, and even recorded and old Dollar Store piece, “Aquapad,” for the show. It was such a great experience, and a real honor to be a part of Re:Sound, which I maintain is the most interesting show on ‘BEZ.

And for the record: I wish that every time I read something, I had one of the Third Coasters there to provide the outro music.

A couple years ago, I wrote a story for The Dollar Store called “Eight Permutations on the Binoculars of Power.” It was sort of a funny little piece that takes eight vignettes featuring binoculars and lines them up 1 through 8, then finishes them off 8 through 1. I ended up publishing it as a featherproof mini-book, originally in dearly departed Resonance. It didn’t fit quite right into the main text of Hiding Out so I decided to make it one of the hidden stories (originally, I thought it might run one line at a time, at the bottom of each page). I thought that was probably about as much life as I could expect from the little guy.

But today, I received an email from a guy named Brady Russell, a writer in Philadelphia who downloaded and read a bunch of minis on a train ride to Washington, D.C. (This is what the minis are for, people!). He read and liked Eight Permutations, and wrote his own version, called “8 Permutations on the Electric Screwdriver of Power.” He then challenged his buddies to write one, using the form, and one of his pals has already followed suit.

Russell sort of jokingly claims that the 1 through 8, 8 through 1 style could eventually be called “a messinger.” And considering the amount of stupid stunts I’ve pulled in my time—i.e. ramming a snow sled into a moving vehicle, getting my head stuck in a fence—I wholeheartedly support this, before I do something else that warrants the title. Regardless, it’s fun to see people get into it.

Here’s the original pdf, downloadable off the mothership:

So that’s it, then. The final Dollar Store was Friday night, or at least the final one until maybe the spring. It’s no longer on its regular first-Friday schedule, and if we do it again, it’ll happen in May, maybe June. It’s for the best, I was getting tired of booking a show every month. Now we’ll be able to put together killer shows when we’re itching to, and ensure that it jibes with Abraham’s schedule. That guy has become an integral part of the show—a great source of spontaneous creativity interwoven into the more plotted stories. I’ll put some audio and visual up as soon as I get my hands on them.

I feel gloomy about it today. I hadn’t, really, until some well-wishes the night-of, and the final post-show handshake with Abe. I read an old story on Friday, “Containers,” which has a funny back story that had me fighting off some serious nostalgia about halfway through the reading. I wrote that story the night before the May 2006 Dollar Store, on a dare from Maria, the lovely girl who is now my girlfriend, but whom I was trying hard to convince to be my girlfriend back then. I was bankrupt of ideas, and she challenged me to write a “Paul Austerish” noir story, and at the time, I had no idea what that meant (though Auster now, is one of my favorites). I went home and knocked out a weird little noir and hoped it would work. So that goes down as the only time I wrote a story explicitly to impress a girl, which I’m not too proud of. But at least both the story and the meta-story have happy endings.