u like youtube better? a book trailer for Mandabach’s OR NOT
I love my myspace, but here’s Meredith’s OR NOT preview on youtube. Share if you like. 
OR NOT Sells Out Again! Book Launch Party; Charlotte, NC; Borders
It’s been tough keeping up on postings–just too busy.
I haven’t even told about my book launch party at Hillside Gardens, where we ran out of books.
Then I went to Charlotte, NC for visit to Myers Park HS–amazing students–and a fab party at the Trennings with Park Road Bookstore.
And today, when I did my thing at Borders at the the Chapel Hills Mall in Colorado Springs, they ran plumb out of Or Not!
I guess without the amazing Frazer Dobson of Park Road Books around, I’m a sell-out!
Details later–my friend and I have some papers to grade!
Creative Writing Questions from Barrington High School Seniors
ON THE 4th OF OCTOBER, I visited with six creative writing classes at Barrington High School, about 40 miles NW of Chicago. I hadn’t darkened the doors of BHS since I’d graduated in June of 1980, and coming back was a little weird.
It’s always strange returning to Barrington, where I spent the first 18 years of my life in a big house my father built by Bakers Lake. Despite all the changes in the neighborhood, I seem to breathe memories in from the humid air, and the shape of the land (though much of it has been built over) and the sky that sits over it (the same way it always has) strikes me with strange familiarity.
Inside, the school was so different as to have little of this effect. But I knew it was the same place. And there were moments, such as looking out the window of Ms. Sultan’s classroom and realizing it was my old typing room, when I could remember sitting there buzzed on coffee from The Breadbasket restaurant, making mistakes and borrowing Jena’s typing eraser.
THIS IS THE FIRST of a series of blogs in which I respond to questions from BHS students:
How do you come up with a concept for your writing?
For the novel that I’m currently avoiding revising, I started with an image: a canoe lodged in tall cattails at the shore of Bakers Lake, and someone–me, I suppose–lying down in the bottom of the canoe. The tall, thin blades of the cattails exude coolness and green, but from the warm water the scent of decay rises: ripe with algae and the biology of fresh water, millions of organisms living in the water and the mud. The green of the cattails and the algae breathe out the fresh oxygen, converting the sun into energy, while microorganisms eat and decompose and die and are decomposed themselves.
In the canoe, the character–the more I think about him the further he goes from being me–is aware of everything around him. He knows the ecology, the relationships between the living and non-living things around him, and his imagination brings it all into his consciousness. He is himself alone in this place, but he is thinking about his friend, and something has happened. Maybe his friend has died. And a song they used to listen to comes to his mind, haunts him, ” . . .story of her boyfriend, of teenage stone death games, handsome lad, dead in a car . . .” And he thinks of his best friend’s girlfriend because of the “story of her boyfriend” line.
So my concepts come from memory, and changing memory by drifting deep into the scenes brought to my mind from memory and letting the possibilities of those scenes shift.
Aidan Chambers uses a repeating line, placed throughout his amazing novel, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn: “All writing is memory.” Some of the shifting is very deliberate–I take a memory of my best friend, and I say, “He can’t be blonde, his hair is dark.” Or I’m thinking about his girlfriend, (only it’s the character’s girlfriend now) and I’m doing the dishes and she’s not coming to me, and I’m getting frustrated. Then I think her name might be Sophia,* and the image of a Sophia I once knew comes to me. Suddenly I realize that her name isn’t Sophia, but that she looks like Sophia, and from that memory of Sophia’s physical presence–not just her hair and her eyes and her body, but the way she carries herself, her gestures, the movement of her eyes–the character suddenly takes shape.
To BHS Seniors: Hope this answers your questions better than my random presentation!
*name changed to protect the innocent. 
Mandabach’s OR NOT T-shirt Banned! Is the book next?!?!?
Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful, hate her because she has the shirt, and you don’t! lol
I thought it would be fun to get some t-shirts made up, so I worked on a design based on the last paragraph of Journal One (link here to it) of OR NOT.
To wit:
Now if I were mad, I would think there were mental viruses hidden between the bits in digital samples. There could even be microchips in our brains that are triggered by digital media to produce thoughts like: “Drink Sexy Cola and be Powerful!” “You must buy things to truly exist!” “The virtual and the actual are ONE!” “Security is Freedom is Marketing is Art is Power is America is Right is Peace is Security is Strength is Truth is Might is Liberty is Lifestyle is Property is Happiness is Automobile is Independence is Globalism is Diversity is Oneness is Jesus is the Almighty Clean of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Castile Soap–Dilute! Dilute! Dilute! Dilute! Dilute!”
But I’m not mad. So I don’t think that.
The shirt just starts with “Drink Sexy Cola and be Powerful!” and ends with “Dilute . . . ”
On the back it says
. . . OR NOT
a novel for audacious teens and other young adults
by
Brian Mandabach
I think it looks cool, and I like that it starts catchy and I imagine people looking at it and being embarrassed about staring at your shirt and then looking away and wanting to look more and maybe looking at your back as you walk away. Or people you know will make you stop so they can read the whole thing. So, I think it’s fun. And also, I like the irony of the ranting.
I gave one to my daughter, and guess what? After lunch a teacher noticed it and asked another teacher, and they agreed that it was INAPPROPRIATE, and they made her turn it inside out.
I have to guess that it was the word SEXY *gasp!* omg! But come on! It’s not as if she had on some sweats that said, SEXY or JUICY right across the butt! This is a statement of protest against the absurdist imagery of advertising, multimediocrity, and Johnny Jingo public “discourse”.
Or maybe that’s what they objected to, but that might be expecting too much.
Anyway, I got kind of a kick that the shirt that I sent her to school in, that I designed using an excerpt from MY book, had to be turned inside-out.
If you’ve got one of the shirts, send me a picture. And if not, come see me at one of my events and pick one up with your copy of OR NOT.
Hope to see you soon.
peace, love, & vinyl,
M
events listed on my myspace profile as “shows” and at www.mandabach.com
Oh, and I’m going to write “censored” on a piece of duct tape, and she’s going to wear it again! 
John Nichols on Or Not
Dear Journal Friends–
WRITING is a magic journey, but waiting for the book to come out is a nerve-wracking time. Like other writers I know, I’m pretty good at convincing myself that my work sucks and that it won’t find its way into more than a few stores let alone anyone’s backback, bedside table, or desk.
But sometimes, it just feels good to have a book on the way, and sometimes even my limitless need for reassurance abates.
When I sent OR NOT to a big hero of mine, John Nichols, who is an amazing novelist and a champion of beauty and truth in both the human and natural worlds, I didn’t really expect him to read it. Not only is he a busy man with a lot of demands on his time, but he almost never blurbs. He’d much rather be hiking down into the Rio Grande Gorge, with or without a fly rod, than reading some hack’s first novel.
So I was pretty much floored to get a note from him only two weeks later–filled with good wishes and praise about my book. Including this:
“Cassie Sullivan is a lovely kid, aware of the earth and how to save it, but nobody’s listening. Cassie’s voice is funny, angry, sad, sarcastic, and perplexed as she struggles to find her own identity. And to find hope for the future despite all the yahoos surrounding her. You will laugh, you will weep, and you’ll really enjoy this delightful and poignant novel about a kooky idealist who refuses to give up as she grows up.”
My editor doesn’t think Cass would like being called “a lovely kid,” but take it from me: though Cassie hasn’t read Nichols yet, she’d glow in his words. Nichols’ uncompromising integrity shines as a light of inspiration to me. Without him, OR NOT would not exist. That he read it, and approved of it, is not only a personal thrill, but it helps reassure me that I’m on the right road. 
Peace,
B
New Characterization of Cassie
by the fabulous Roq’cze:
Cassie by ~LoZoreh on deviantART
Cover
Here’s the cover for OR NOT coming October 2007~~~~~
Brian Mandabach & OR NOT
There’s an Edward Abbey book, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto), that I’m thinking of as I post my first blog here. It’s a little collection of pithy Abbeyisms, such as “A word is worth a thousand pictures, if it’s the right word.” It’s a good Abbey title, though his was really more of a voice crying from the wilderness, a voice that echoes still in the coffee-scented aisles of Barnes & Nobles and Borders stores across this great land.
My editor, Andrew Karre of FLUX, said that on my myspace blog, I’m “not a voice in the wilderness,” but I really am. I love myspace, but it’s not a place where people read much. I had to do a lot of pleading with my friends–mostly former students–to get them to look at the postings of my as yet unpublished novel, OR NOT. Once they did look at it, I was very pleased with the response, even by some of those that I thought might not relate or might even be offended.
But I’m still vox clamantis in deserto, and I remember a night when I left the party next door to my apartment in the old Colorado College student dive that we called the Wahsatch Hotel, retiring to the tuberculosis-cure porch that was my bedroom at the time. As I sang and played my guitar–some traditional song that I knew from the Grateful Dead, I’m sure–philosophy snob Allen Hill passed by and called out, “Are we having an audience yet?”
Aparently, yes. Not very appreciative, to be sure, but yes. And as Gandalf the Grey said (though he was, in fact, Gandalf the White at this point in the tale), it was customary of old to address the wisest person present, which allowed one to avoid the annoyance of tedious explanations. So, in Gandalf’s case, he was–as Strider suggested–speaking to himself.
Vox clamantis in deserto, then! I’ve always been able to amuse myself by talking and singing to myself. If somebody happens to listen in, then s/he’s welcome to lend an ear. And if thine ear offends thee, or mine mouth, pray don’t pluck it out–just move along until you’re out of earshot.
Brian Mandabach is a writer and teacher who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. OR NOT is his first novel.