READING AND BOOK SIGNING @ BARNES & NIZZELOBLES
I STILL AM GETTING TO BED CLOSER TO 3 AM THAN MIDNIGHT, 
but I am relaxing a little, now.
Despite plumbing projects. 
More on that later.
My first catch-up blog is about my Barnes & Noble reading on June 7. 
The event started with a writing club mini-reunion. 
Taylor, Jack, Brandon, & Li-Mae and I had lunch and I read bits from my work in progress, CONTACT HIGH, and they helped me choose one to read that day.
The reading was super fun. I brought my new portable turntable and started with Cassie’s fav form Zeppelin I, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” Then I read from OR NOT as well as a tiny bit of CONTACT HIGH.
I had great questions, including one about who had inspired Cassie and have I actually ever had someone that amazing as a student. No one in particular and lots of people. Some of my former students in the room are easily as amazing, gifted, insightful as my beloved Cass.
As I signed books, I played my Nirvana, LIVE IN NEW YORK record, and knew I was doing the right thing when management asked me to turn it down.
Overall, I love, love, love the energy I get from these things and am so thankful to have people who will come out and support me. Always a little sad when it’s over, because I’d like to spend more time with people than I get to. 
But, you know me–I love being the center of attention, and I love you people who come to see me. Lot of love in this paragraph! Sorry for gushing, but that’s how I feel, and I’m grateful and want to express it.
Here’s a few pics taken by Liberty Grad, writer, and all around awesome-woman, Marty:
Also in attendance were:Lee, Andy, Niles, Brandy, Kyle, Anna, Caltera, Chy and her two cool friends in the picture where V. is hiding, Kelsey, Kaley, Brittany Lana, Emily, Mary, Becky, Leah, Michaela, two old CC people and their wonderful daughter, Druzzie Dru and friend and sister, Dennis, and that lady just outside the cafe who was working on legal pads and laptop who kept scowling at me for having a reading in what she seemed to think of as her own private Idaho–love you, too, lady!
finally done with latest revisions and ready to blog about old stuff like my barnes and noble reading :)
I STILL AM GETTING TO BED CLOSER TO 3 AM THAN MIDNIGHT, but I am relaxing a little, now.
Despite plumbing projects. More on that later.
My first catch-up blog is about my Barnes & Noble reading on June 7.
The event started with a writing club mini-reunion. Taylor, Jack, Brandon, & Li-Mae and I had lunch and I read bits from my work in progress, CONTACT HIGH, and they helped me choose one to read that day.
The reading was super fun. I brought my new portable turntable and started with Cassie’s fav form Zeppelin I, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” Then I read from OR NOT as well as a tiny bit of CONTACT HIGH.
I had great questions, including one about who had inspired Cassie and have I actually ever had someone that amazing as a student. No one in particular and lots of people. Some of my former students in the room are easily as amazing, gifted, insightful as my beloved Cass.
As I signed books, I played my Nirvana, LIVE IN NEW YORK record, and knew I was doing the right thing when management asked me to turn it down.
Overall, I love, love, love the energy I get from these things and am so thankful to have people who will come out and support me. Always a little sad when it’s over, because I’d like to spend more time with people than I get to. But, you know me–I love being the center of attention, and I love you people who come to see me. Lot of love in this paragraph! Sorry for gushing, but that’s how I feel, and I’m grateful and want to express it.
Here’s a few pics taken by Liberty Grad, writer, and all around awesome-woman, Marty:
Also in attendance were:
Lee, Andy, Niles, Brandy, Kyle, Anna, Caltera, Chy and her two cool friends in the picture where V. is hiding, Kelsey, Kaley, Brittany Lana, Emily, Mary, Becky, Leah, Michaela, two old CC people and their wonderful daughter, Druzzie Dru and friend and sister, Dennis, and that lady just outside the cafe who was working on legal pads and laptop who kept scowling at me for having a reading in what she seemed to think of as her own private Idaho–love you, too, lady!
A video trailer for OR NOT
My dear family friend, high school senior and all around superteen, Meredith, made this video for me ages ago, but I only just figured out how to upload it. 
Mandabach’s OR NOT: a book trailer
Who says there’s no significant content on myspace?
Who indeed?!?!?!? 
Check out Melissa’s blog for an interview–
with MEEEEEEE!
Okay, I’m not significant. 
Click here to go right to Melissa’s blog interview with me!
Author of the Month :D Embracing the Child . . .
Here’s another link that I’m excited about–this one to a website that has named me its AUTHOR OF THE MONTH!! 
The site is called Embracing the Child and the main feature of this honor is an interview.
Here’s an excerpt:
ETC: The voice of Cassie, the main character, rings so true, especially her thoughts and emotions as she makes entries into her journal. How were you able to achieve that authenticity, writing in the voice of a teenage girl?
Mandabach: One of my old friends who just finished the book emailed me saying, “Are you sure you’re NOT a 14-year-old girl?”
I’m pretty sure I’m not, but that’s the exciting thing about writing fiction–going deep into your imagination, bringing everything you know and feel, and living that alternate reality via language as you attempt to communicate it.
So how did I achieve authenticity in the voice of a teenage girl? (check out the whole interview at the link above to find out . . .
Peace, everybody, and talk to me!
<3
M
Great New Reviews of OR NOT!
I’m very thankful today for two new glowing reviews of Or Not!
As if I deserve more than an amazing wife, two healthy and fun kids, a cool (though run-down–hey I’m a writer, teacher, and dad) 110 year old house, and so much more!
Follow these links and comment the first one. (I think for the second one you have to be a jacketflap member.)
Teen Book Reviewer just gives me a heckuva rave, which I love.
And Lisa Chellman really “gets” the book and Cassie more than any other reviewer who’s done a review of this much detail.
Oh, and here’s a picture of my mom and me at the book signing in Alabama! I’m so thankful to have a mom who is a lover of poetry and books and who inspired me so much.
next question . . . from Barrington High School creative writing students
THIS IS ENTRY TWO in my series of questions and answers from senior creative writing students of my alma mater, Barrington High School.
I DON’T KNOW ANYBODY in Barrington anymore except for my high school girlfriend, Claire, and my favorite English teacher, Dale Griffith. So I spent the night in the Barrington Motel, and took a cab over to the high school. My cabbie dropped me off at the wrong entrance, by the gym and the senior lockers, but the garrulous security guard had the authority—after checking his computer—and the technology to scan my Colorado driver’s license and print me a visitor’s ID sticker. Then another security staffer escorted me to the main entrance, and a third called Dept. Chair Jack Bowyer, who collected me and led me up the stairs that hadn’t existed in my day.
Here’s the second question that teacher Maggie Olberg gave me from the class:
What influences you? (Style & content)
Everything I read influences me a lot—or everything I read that’s good and substantial, because the stuff that isn’t just passes through me without leaving an impression. When I read, the language echoes in my mind. So I have to be careful what I’m reading when I’m writing.
Right now I’m reading I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, and I can hear his voice, very lyrical. The good stuff becomes part of me, the characters are real people inside me, the worlds that are created become real places within me. I like writing that has a deep sense of place, urban or natural or both, and I like characters with a lot of love in them, or perhaps sympathy—with other people, with nature, with music and stories and all the arts. There will be alienation, disconnection, despair—but without what I’m calling love or sympathy, the alienation has no consequence.
Sometimes the language itself expresses love. I think Hemingway did that. One of my favorite stories, which is in a book that I borrowed from the BHS English resource center and never returned, is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” It amazes me that I was so attracted to that story at so young an age, and I believe that even very young people often sympathize with the loss and disappointment of the age. The sympathy of the waiter in that story, the old waiter, carries the story—and the reader despises the young, self-involved waiter because he has none. Though the old waiter is preoccupied with nothingness, with emptiness, his emptiness is not nihilistic because he still feels the emptiness and sympathizes with those who also feel it.
Was this supposed to be style OR content? I think they are of equal importance. There is no style without content, and since the content is expressed via language, it can’t be communicated without good writing (which is one way to define style) or without a voice that arises naturally from the subject and expresses the content.
And everything influences me. My best friend Sam, whom I met at BHS when I was a junior and he was a soph, influenced and continues to influence me. He’s now the editor of Willow Springs and the author of an excellent novel called Safe in Heaven Dead.
But “everything under the sun”, as it says in the finale of Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon, influences me. Growing up in Barrington, coming back, meeting new students . . . I could go on and on. (And usually do ☺)
It’s a REAL BOOK!
Yesterday, I got a package:
My novel is now a book.
Very excited, of course. I still can’t really believe there is a book with my name on it. I’m a writer, I suppose, and I should be able to describe it better. The dust jacket is glossy and covered with that girl who isn’t Cassie, but whom some of the guys in my 7th period class liked the look of enough to want to read about. The cover itself is black. I like it. The pages are smooth, but not too smooth, and very white. I like the design, the set-up of the journals, and the weight of it. It’s not a slim book–at 400 pages–but not too thick to seem intimidating, I think.
I’m NOT let down, but since I have been waiting so long and with such trepidation, maybe I am more relieved than ecstatic.
The thing that really energized me was how excited that 7th period class was when I told them about Or Not yesterday (just before I found out it had arrived!) Then when I passed it around today, it was simply very cool.
I warned them that it might be too mature for some of them, lol, and expressed my horror of the thought of them going home and telling their parents that their English teacher had written a book with lots of bad words in it, and they had to get it. (I told them how Robin Brande, in Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature will say something like, “he called him a male body part,” while I just write what people actually say. I do think Mom and Dad, as well as some kids, won’t appreciate me calling a dick a dick, so . . . I guess we’ll see soon enough what sort of a reaction I get. :/ :D)
Scary and fun.
Brian Mandabach is a writer and teacher who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. OR NOT is his first novel.