Aside from generally “trying to create a revolution during my lifetime,” on the writing front, I just finished an article about “Guys’ Night at the San Francisco Opera” for San Francisco Magazine that’s a shameless promotional piece.

Mostly, I’m working on my second novel, Jackson Stone, which is about personal hypocrisy, gambling, coffee jocks, and the search for love here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s a blend between a Philip Roth unreliable narrator’s rant (God, I wish I wrote The Human Stain) and a Charles Willeford noir. It’s supposed to be fast-paced, dark, funny, taking place in the North Beach and Tenderloin neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Somehow, constructing the minor characters in this novel, I’m working through my love for Joseph Mitchell. I’m also taking notes for another novel, a sort of updated Great Gatsby, set in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I’m certain a Larry Ellison–type guy will be a major character, and somehow I’ll make him sympathetic.

And I’m almost done with my first play, The Death of Teddy Ballgame, which is where I pour all my 9/11 and daily New York Times headline angst that doesn’t belong in Jackson Stone. Unabashedly stealing from O’Neil, Mamet, Sartre, and Beckett, I’ve got a group of men gathered in a coffee shop a couple of days after the apocalypse, wondering if it’s safe to drink the coffee, discussing how they intend to survive nuclear fallout, radiation, small pox, anthrax, SARS II, roaming bands of marauders, no movies or ESPN, and other horrors, and whether or not it’s even worth surviving. It’s a comedy. And lastly, I’m working on a screenplay with my cousin Zack called Pig Hunt that takes place in the hills outside of a small town like Boonville. It’s a creepy cross between The Blair Witch Project and Deliverance, with a little Jaws thrown in. The tag line is “Think BIG, think PIG!” You get the picture.