M. David Hornbuckle

Author: mdavidhornbuckle

  • Zen, Mississippi is Available for Pre-Sale on Lulu.com

    You can buy Zen, Mississippi right now on lulu.com and have a copy in a week or so.

    Buy it here: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/zen-mississippi/8076267

    I’m calling this a “pre-sale” because it will be another 6-8 weeks before it will be available for general distribution. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll find it on the shelf in your local bookstore, though I’ll do what I can. What it DOES mean is that you will be able to go in your local bookstore and ask them to order it, and they should be able to easily get it for you. It will also be listed on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com and possibly other websites where books are sold.

    Even then, I make a couple of dollars more if you buy it directly from lulu.com, but I’m not concerned about how much money I make. I’m concerned about the easiest way to get this book in peoples’ hands, and if ordering it from Amazon is what’s easiest for you, then that is just fine with me.

  • Save the Date: Book Release Party May 13 at Lolita Bar

    I’m planning to have a book release party at Lolita Bar (266 Broome Street) on May 13 at 7pm.

    I will read a little from the book, play a little music, and have some friends play a little music. Of course, copies of my book(s) will be available for sale and signing. But mostly I just want to have a party and hang out.

    Lolita Bar has happy hour specials until 8, so get there early. I’ll post more information about this event as the date gets closer.

  • The Cover

    The cover of Zen, Mississippi, as well as all the interior design, was done by the multi-talented Marie Mundaca. She also designed my first book, as well as some books by famous people like David Foster Wallace.

  • New Book Will Be Out Soon

    My new book, a novel titled Zen, Mississippi, should be on sale on or around May 15. Mark your calendars, if you’re the sort of person who marks a calendar when a book comes out. You will be able to pre-order copies from lulu.com even sooner than that, probably within a week or two from now. I’ll keep you posted, of course.

    This is my first full-length novel, one that I’ve been working on for, oh, about 20 years now, off and on. I hope that you will buy it, read it, and enjoy it.

    Summary:

    Patrick Alexander thinks he’s going crazy. At age 30, he’s frustrated with his life in the small Mississippi town where he grew up, stifled by his unhappy marriage and his soul-crushing pizza-delivery job. But when he drinks, his world becomes populated with the hallucinatory characters he invented as a child, including a Martian and a talking monkey. In the midst of an existential crisis, Patrick leaves his wife and the only home he’s ever known to embark on a spiritual quest where he will find new loves, face his long-missing father, and confront the demigods of his personal mythology.

  • Globular Cluster

    I went to see the noise band Globular Cluster this past weekend, and they unexpectedly invited me onstage to read one of my stories, “The Year of Myself.”

    Here is audio of the performance.

  • Tea Party Security Administration

    So I flew down to Birmingham yesterday for a visit and to play a gig (Marty’s on Friday at midnight–be there!). And the planes that make the direct flights from New York-LaGuardia to Birmingham are tiny. These are the ones where they often make people move from the front to the back to redistribute weight during take-off. And on these planes, there is very little room for carry-ons–much less room even than on larger passenger planes where everyone is increasingly bringing everything they own on board to avoid bag checking fees, causing fistfights in the aisles on almost every flight I take. Anyway…

    I had to check my guitar anyway, so I went ahead and also checked my small suitcase. And just to make things even easier on myself, I packed my work laptop inside the suitcase instead of bringing it on board with me. I know… For some reason, everybody thinks I’m crazy for checking a laptop, but just shut up about that and focus. Focus. Okay, are you with me?

    So I get to Birmingham, and I take the laptop out of my suitcase to do some work, and this is what I find.

    If you can’t read the note, it says:

    Youtube
    “Fall of the Republic”
    “End Game”
    “Obama Deception”

    Google
    “Money Masters”

    So what this tells me is that some TSA employee at LaGuardia, or perhaps a Delta baggage handler, wants me to watch these youtube videos for some reason. And I did watch a little bit of each one, but it’s not the sort of thing that generally interests me. They are perpetuating right-wing conspiracy theories about Obama and banks. It seems to be the same old illuminati stuff that people have trotted out every few years since the 18th century, but dressed up in the most recent issues.

    So what do I make of this? I suppose it’s disturbing that someone at TSA is taking advantage of their job to furtively distribute anti-government propaganda (and I wouldn’t think it any less disturbing if it was pro-government propaganda). But I’m more amused by it than disturbed, though I guess whoever did this out to get called out for it. It does seem really creepy when I think about it.

    UPDATE

    When I originally posted, I had not yet opened my guitar case. When I did take out my guitar later in the day, I found ANOTHER NOTE. Basically the same as the first note, but with an additional message on the back saying, “Just check it out!”

    And to the people that have a problem with me calling these videos “right-wing,” — really, that is beside the point. I could make arguments to defend that characterization, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. What is happening here is that a government employee is taking advantage of his/her job to furtively distribute anti-government propaganda, and that’s an interesting story to me. And even if you are one of those people that believes or agrees with the videos this person is promoting, that has no bearing on the fact that these messages came to me in a very strange and inappropriate manner. The content of the videos is really not important. I still find this whole thing more amusing than alarming, although the second note makes it all a bit creepier.

  • The Internet Kills Idle Wonder

    Remember before we all carried the Internets around in our pockets, we would just hang out and talk? And often the thing that would fuel conversation would be a question that had just occurred to someone for no reason. For example, someone will say: Do dogs have shoulders? I mean they don’t have arms. They just have legs. So do they have two sets of hips? People would theorize about this come up with reasons for their opinions, and this could easily take a half hour before organically moving on to another topic.

    But now, a question like this comes up, and someone takes out an iPhone or Blackberry and wham! There’s the answer (dogs do have shoulders, or scapila if you want to use the medical term). So now what are we supposed to talk about? Did we really even want the answer, or is it more fun to make up our own?

    I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I could riff here on making conversation more efficient, etc, but I think we can do better than that. These highly informed times simply challenge us to come up with better questions, things that aren’t so easy to just look up. And maybe we wonder more about things that, when we look up the answer, it spurs another question.

    So here’s the question for discussion: Does easy access to the Internet kill idle wonder?

  • Blog Name Change Explained

    Last week, I decided to change the name of this blog from “There Will Be Blog” to “Zen, Mississippi” in anticipation of my forthcoming second book, which is now in production and due to be published later this year by my own imprint Tritone Media. I also incorporated my other blog, which was dedicated to promoting my first book, into this one. So now all your M. David Hornbuckle news can be found in one location.

    The new book, of course, will be titled Zen, Mississippi, and it’s a novel about a man on a spiritual quest, led on by three fantastical characters that he invented as a child and have recently come back to life for him. He isn’t sure what he is looking for at first, but he comes to understand that it is about realizing the ways in which is both similar to and different from his father, who abandoned him when he was ten.

    It’s a serious book, but also a humorous book. And I’ll be talking about it much more in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

  • Never Fall Out of Love

    I recorded some new music this past weekend with my old bandmate from the Exes Angela DiPaolo. Our friend Crystal Dawn Baker helped with the engineering and some backup vocals. We aren’t 100% sure what we are doing with this project yet, but I’m excited to be writing and recording songs with Angela again. Here are some samples:

    Banana Fever

    Cold Day

    Fall Out of Love

    Drunken Poetry

  • Becoming a Fan

    I know I am often far too persnickety about how I think Facebook and other social media sites should/shouldn’t be used. I sent someone a scathing email the other day because they sent me a friend request for their business. “That’s what fan pages are for!” I said. I also don’t care for people leaving personal notes on my wall when a private message would be be more appropriate. But I understand that not everybody has such rigid feelings about these things, and I try to let it go most of the time.

    But about Fan pages… I would like to think that when you become a fan of something, you are actually committing to it in some way. You are saying, “yes, I want to see updates about this thing in my newsfeed, I want to interact with other fans of this thing, and I want to publicly declare that I am a fan of this thing, and you too should become a fan of this thing.” To me, it is not just a matter of clicking a button, giggling, and moving on. But I know I take all this too seriously. As my friend Angie says, “The internets, they are silly.”

    Still I am perplexed that 26 of my Facebook friends have become “fans” of a dill pickle purely for the purposes of delivering a wry dis to the band Nickleback. Sure, I agree that Nickleback sucks. But they are so not even on my radar, I can’t really get worked up about them sucking.  If this pickle does indeed achieve its goal of getting more fans than Nickleback, will that be newsworthy? Will anyone tell Nickleback that this has happened?

    This just in: apparently such things are newsworthy, as this Mashable article reports. According to this, an onion ring was able to get more fans than Justin Bieber (whom I’ve never even heard of, but I am fairly isolated from much of pop culture). And this meme, “Can this (random  object) Get More Fans than (some famous person)” has become pervasive. I can’t say that I’m really bothered by all this. I’m not that much a curmudgeon. I just wonder if there is a deeper meaning or lesson about human nature in it, and I suspect, disappointingly, that there is not.

    But if you like being fans of things, here are three pages I recommend:

    M. David Hornbuckle (where I try to do the bulk of my self-promotion)

    PopCanon (my longest lasting and probably most beloved former band–and I didn’t start this page myself, though I’m an admin)

    Southside Fiction Writing Workshop (more on this another post soon)