Gratz Industries HQ: Let the Roofing Begin

So today I was merrily typing away at some fascinating email for work when I suddenly heard a deep rumbling sound from outside. It wasn't thunder - it was the sound of a big panel of metal roofing being hoisted up three stories of scaffolding. The workers were starting the roofing!
And they got about a fourth of it done.
Sorry the pictures are so bad. It's very hard to take a picture of the roof. Unless you're a giant, I guess. Have I mentioned that we REALLY love this roof? One of these pictures is called Roof 083. 83! And that's not even counting the batch called More Roof. Sheesh. But here's one more picture to remind you how beautiful it is from the inside. . .

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A Fond Farewell

Jo and I cleaned out her closet a few weeks ago and I've been working through the pile of outgrown clothes deciding what to keep, what to donate, and what to cut apart and reuse. I came to one of my favorite things I've ever made for Jo.

I loved the icy blue paired with the black and white polka-dot skirt, and the penguin button was just perfect.

It was really easy to make so I'm going to share a mini-tutorial here. I made this a couple of years ago and didn't take pictures, but I really don't think you'll need them. It's that easy.

Start with a store-bought shirt. This was a summer dress so I used a tank top, but you could easily use a long-sleeved T-shirt for winter.

Measure around the bottom of the shirt. Double that length and add 1 inch for seam allowance. That will be the length of your rectangle.

Measure from the bottom of the shirt to the length you want the finished dress. Add whatever you like to use for the hem allowance. I like to use 1 1/2 inches. I turn it up 1/2 inch and then 1 inch for the hem.

Sew the short sides of the rectangle together to make a big circle. Gather around the top until it's the same size as the bottom of the shirt. Sew it to the bottom of the shirt.

Hem the bottom. Add a button if you want - to decorate the shirt and pull in the colors from the skirt. You're done.

I've made a several of these for Jo and there is one tricky thing to look for. Some T-shirts and tanks tend to twist off grain, so wash the shirt first and make sure it looks like it's not going to be a twisty one. You can wear a twisty, off-grain shirt, but if you attach a skirt to it, it makes the whole thing hang funny.

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Gratz Industries HQ: The Windows Are All In!

The windows are in and it's starting to look like a real house!
I love this wall of windows looking down from the top porch into my office/studio.
And here you can see the same windows from the master bedroom.

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Sweet Home Alabama

Hi kids - your roving reporter Alan checking in from the road, where I'm on day two of a week-long library tour through the Alabaman sub-continent. Today's exotic locale: Montgomery! The tour has actually been going very well, and I have a great story I want to share with you about it--just not yet. I have photo evidence that goes with this story, and I can't bear to post about it until I can include the photo.

I have photo evidence also of tonight's top story, which I may upload next week if I can finally figure out how to get pictures off my phone. I'm not a technotard, I swear--it's just that I have somehow found a thousand better things to do with my time than to actually ever sit down and try to send a picture to myself off my phone. Or download a unique ringtone. Ah, to be sixteen again with time to burn . . .

Anyhow, before I wax too nostalgic about my acne-ridden days of yore, I must share this gem, found in the bathroom of my Holiday Inn Express hotel room. (That sounds like this is going to be worse than it is. Bear with me.)

In the corner on the counter, I found a small plastic sign. At first, I thought this was the "Forgot something? Call us and we'll send it right up." kind of thing you often see. Upon closer inspection, it was a slyly-worded warning that if you steal items from the room you will be billed for them:

Dear Guest,

Due to the popularity of our guest room Amenities (sic), our Housekeeping Department now offers these items for sale:

Irons - $40.00
Ironing Boards - $30.00
Blow Dryer - $30.00
Bath Sheets - $20.00
Bath Towels - $15.00
Hand Towels - $10.00
Face Cloths - $5.00

Each Guest Room attendant is responsible for maintaining the guest room items. Should you decide to take these articles from your room, instead of obtaining them from the Executive Housekeeper, we will assume you approve a corresponding charge to your account.

Thank You

I love this. "Due to the popularity of our guest room Amenities . . ." Har-har! In other words, "Since you idiots keep inexplicably stealing the crappy sheets, towels, and appliances, you're gonna pay for them." I love that the cheapass hair dryer in the bathroom--which is attached to the wall, I might add--will set you back thirty bucks if you manage to dislodge it. And how about that "Should you decide to take these articles from your room, instead of obtaining them from the Executive Housekeeper" bit. Does anyone seriously buy this stuff? "Oh my goodness, the texture of this face cloth is like a cheese grater. I must own a set!" And I'm assuming they meant "Bed Sheets" not "Bath Sheets," unless they are referring to the wonderful one-ply toilet paper which is, in fact, one long, continuous sheet of paper.

Needless to say, I won't be taking home any of that loot. The mini-fridge isn't listed though, so I'm assuming that's free . . .

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Gratz Industries HQ: Windows!

Lots more progress on the roof today - but it's a side of the roof that's impossible to photograph so instead I'm posting pictures of. . .

All the windows that were delivered.

Lots and lots of windows!

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Open for Business

I have an Etsy shop now and it's open for business. I actually set up the shop over six months ago and took these pictures of my dolls before we left Atlanta, but I'm only just now getting around to listing them on the site. How lame is that?
I only have a few of my dolls posted so far but over this week and next I'll get the rest of my dolls and all of my quilts up there too.

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Gratz Industries HQ: Raise the Roof!

Ta-da!

Holy cow--cathedral ceilings!

Originally the roof was going to have insulation in between those rafters, with some kind of ceiling underneath that like drywall. But Wendi and I loved the look of those rafters so much we asked Marvin and his crew if we could put the insulation on the outside, and then put the metal roof on top of that. It's doable, and they're doing it.

That means our roof will always look like this. Too bad the walls won't! I love the way that looks.

These shots are on the third floor, of course. This is the master bedroom/Alan's office. The two rooms will be separated of course, but we're arranging that. For now, it's one big open room, and it's really neat to be up there.

Superstar!

Up top, the house got a little crown. (A topknot, perhaps?) I didn't know what that was for, until today:

It was the beginning of the secondary rafters on the exterior of the roof. The insulation will go between those, and will be capped by the green metal roof. It has created a double-tall board on the overhang, which is interesting. Our house may look like a large mushroom. We were going to call this The House that Books Built, but perhaps we'll have to call it the Smurf House.

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What is it with the sasquatch?

Is it just me, or has there been a preponderance of sasquatch references on television lately?

First there was a stupid ice cream commercial where Bigfoot has to decide whether to brave a hunter, a sasquatch enthusiast, and a Brazilian bikini-waxer to get to a scoop of Strawberry Blonde.

Next there was a series of commercials called "Messin' with Sasquatch," in which a bunch of foolish hikers and campers play pranks on Bigfoot, only to get slapped around.

And now tonight I have Monday Night Football on while I'm working at the computer, and I look up and a fan has one of those acronym signs using the letters ESPN to try and get on television. It says:

Even
Sasquatch
suPports the
RedskiNs

Um, what?

Seriously, why has the sasquatch myth reared its hairy head in popular culture all of a sudden? You can certainly argue that Bigfoot hasn't ever gone away, but why the resurgence?

The article on Wikipedia suggests that "Bigfoot is a worldwide phenomenon." In the "Bigfoot in Popular Culture" article, it's argued that "The meanings of the words 'Bigfoot' or 'Sasquatch' are quickly understood by most people (at least in North America)," which might be behind their use in commercials. In advertising, you have to use concepts that are immediately recognizable to most of your audience. If everybody knows what Bigfoot is, you can jump right to the comedy. (And, presumably, some kind of useful product placement.)

Then too there is the caveman/Geico commercial phenomenon. Did you know those cavemen are getting their own sitcom? I kid you not.

I bring them up not because they're sasquatches of course, but because I can just imagine the conversation in some meeting between a business owner and his advertising agency: "Say, those Geico cavemen are funny. Can you give me something like that?"

And the answer, of course, has to be sasquatches.

I had a similar proposition put to me when I was writing radio commercials in Knoxville. The local Hooters franchise wanted me to come up with two animals talking, like the Budweiser lizards. My genius idea? Two misguided owls who thought "Hooters" meant it was a restaurant for them.

They didn't buy it.

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Gratz Industries HQ: Walk the Plank

Time to walk the (aluminum) plank, me hearties!

The sheathing on the roof has begun.

The first layer got put up today on two of the four sides of the roof.

Here you can see the edging on the rafters.

And a bit further out, where you can see they've already added the house wrap to the sheathing up there.

Then late this afternoon two new things got delivered: the roof insulation . . .

. . . and the green metal roofing . . .

. . . in various sizes. It all looks great, although . . .

. . . I'm not really sure what this is, or what it means. Is it a Blair Witch thing?

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Samurai Shorstop: Compare and Contrast

I just got done with a lot of nitpicky little web site updates to www.alangratz.com--changes that most repeat visitors wouldn't even notice--but one change I made that is noticeable is the addition of an audio player link to the first chapter of Listening Library's version of Samurai Shortstop, as read by Arthur Morey. If you haven't heard it, it's really fabulous. I listened to the whole thing absolutely spellbound once on a long car trip. (Not because I didn't know what was going to happen of course, but because I couldn't believe how fabulous the reading was!)

So until now the only clip of Samurai I had available on my web site was Chapter Seven--a strange choice for a clip, but the one Listening Library chose for promotion. Then recently the Books on Tape folks--which, if I have this right, are a different division of Random House with their own separate packaging and distribution but exact same product--posted a new clip from Samurai: Chapter One.

I added the new clip to the Media page on my web site, but then Wendi had the bright idea to include it also on the Samurai Shortstop Chapter One excerpt page. It was an easy add, and now you can either listen to Chapter One, read it yourself, or read along as Arthur Morey reads it to you.

Only, it's not the same chapter.

Go there and listen to the clip and read along, and you'll soon start to hear subtle differences. "Koji" in the text is now referred to as "Uncle Koji." And Toyo's father--Sotaro--gets named much sooner.

I didn't listen to the whole thing to hear all the differences, but I know what happened. I used the latest manuscript I had on the computer to post the text, but there is always one more copy-edit after that--the one actually done on the typeset pages! At that point we must have had the discussion about the names.

I had deliberately not introduced Sotaro's name until almost the very last line, because I didn't want readers to be confused by too many Japanese names. I was already throwing Toyo and Koji around, and didn't want to confuse the matter. Then we decided, late in the process, that calling Sotaro "Toyo's father" all the way through the chapter was confusing too. Why didn't he have a name? So we changed that. You can see other minor changes as well--like clarifying that Koji is "Uncle Koji" more often.

If you're interested to see the differences between the last manuscript I sent off and the last round of edits done directly on the typeset manuscript, get yourself over to my web site and have a listen/look. This is a limited time offer, because soon I'll have to fix it!

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Gratz Industries HQ: Here Comes the Rain Again

The tropical storm to the east brought a little rain our way, but not before the guys got some of the rafters installed.

These will be trimmed down, but it makes for a nice picture. I'm hanging out the window in the rain for this shot. I just want you to know what lengths I go to for you.

And here's where those boards start!

Cool, huh? These are the rafters above the master bedroom.

The next day we had blue skies, and the guys went to town.


Wendi laid down where the bed will be to see what the ceiling will look like. Jo laid on her tummy to see what the floor looked like.

A corner full of rafters.

And a peak of rafters.

One more quadrant to go - the hard one, over the two story hole.

And the long shot! Tune in tomorrow for more adventures in roofing.

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Rotten Review: Kirkus

The first official review of Something Rotten is in and it's . . . pretty good. Here's what Kirkus had to say:

Gratz is cornering the niche market of novels containing dissimilar topics. Here he combines Hamlet and hardboiled detective pulp. During a vacation from their academy, Horatio Wilkes accompanies his buddy Hamilton Prince to Denmark, Tenn. Just two months after his father passed away under suspicious circumstances, Hamilton's Uncle Claude has married Hamilton's mother. Claude now controls the Elsinore Paper Plant, a multibillion dollar company blatantly polluting the Copenhagen River. Horatio, with a knack for investigating, is determined to expose Claude's corruption while Hamilton, dismayed by what he believes is his mother's betrayal, drowns himself in alcohol. Ultimately, Horatio relies on environmentalist protester Olivia to reveal secrets about Elsinore. The many parallels to Hamlet are interesting, but Gratz wisely avoids producing a carbon copy of the tragedy. Horatio admirably plays the loyal friend but has a cocky voice that is too self-assured and as a teen rings unauthentic. However, this well-crafted mystery has appeal for readers familiar with both Raymond Chandler's novels and Shakespeare's masterpiece.

The reviewer is completely right to say that Horatio is too self-assured and has an unauthentic voice. It was never my intent to write a truly "authentic" teen voice in Something Rotten. My goal was to write a highly stylized voice to mirror the style and tone of 50s and 60s noir. Horatio talks and acts like I wished I had when I was a teen; just as Chandler's Philip Marlowe is the man every man wishes to be, Horatio is the boy every teenage boy wishes he could be.

Horatio always has the right snarky comeback at the right moment - not minutes or hours or days late like the rest of us. Horatio speaks the language of the teenager working on his lines alone in front of the mirror. It's aspirational fiction, in a way; Horatio's character is enjoyable (I hope) because we like to imagine ourselves ever being that cool, even though we know it's impossible. (Well, at least it is for me.) I feel the same way about Veronica Mars. Could any teen ever be that cool and smart and confident? We only wish.

And the idea that I could have cornered the market on anything after just two books reads like a compliment to me. :-)

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Sealed with a Skull

I jut got my new Something Rotten stamp back from the printer today. Pretty cool, eh? The skull image is ganked from the cover of the novel. (Well, it was too small to scan clearly for an inch and a quarter stamp, so I dropped it into Illustrator and redrew it one night.)

My hanko stamp has proven so popular at signings that I wanted something like it for the Horatio books. The best part - I can use this stamp for all of them, since that skull will be incorporated into every cover design!

And the stamp in action.

A touch of class. Macabre class, but class.

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Gratz Industries HQ: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Sorry. I've been waiting for weeks to use that headline. Give yourself extra points if you get that reference. (Without the click-thru to Wikipedia, of course.)
Monday was roof day! Well, partially.

Early in the day we could see that one of the roof beams was going up, so I poked my head out the front door of our temporary digs and snapped a couple of in-progress shots.

Then after we returned from a trip down to Asheville, we snuck out to get some close-ups:

It was another scaffolding day - this time to reach the peak of the house.

Where four of the long special-ordered boards meet and descend to the four corners of the house.

But the roof beams weren't the only thing the carpenters raised today. They also got around to putting up the wall of windows that looks down from the third floor porch into Wendi's studio. Very cool.

And they also built the little toilet room in the master bedroom. After many years of shaving, showering, and brushing our teeth next to the toilet, we wanted it more isolated from our ablutions. Now it gets its own water closet, while the double sinks will be out in the bedroom and the shower will be enclosed in the opposite corner.

More roof beams tomorrow, Seymour!

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