So I’ve returned from a trip of leisure to Miami Beach, where I visited my step dad Tom and we had ourselves a rip roaring time. Instead of writing a regular post about it I thought I’d just list some impressions I had and post some pics.

Miami Beach is an island all its own, located east of Miami across a causeway and accessed by a bridge that goes by a major shipping pier with some of the largest cranes in the world.

Tom and I spent nearly every sunset drinking at the Miami Beach VFW, which is filled with characters and has a view of downtown Miami. We also hit up Mac’s Club Deuce a few times, which is a 1920’s era dive bar and exactly as cool as you’d think (the pic of Mac’s is not mine but I did see the cool dude with the eye patch sitting exactly in that spot at the bar).

Miami Beach is a top-notch white sand beach and attracts tourists from around the world, which makes for a crazy multilingual speedo infested scene. I noted a lot of French, Italian, and Russian tourists. Everybody acts like they’re hot shit on Miami Beach-Patton Oswalt has a bit in his new special about everyone on Miami Beach being an alpha personality. The restaurants and hotels along Ocean Drive (located by the beach) are all fancy and expensive and feature stuff like $50 pitchers of mojitos.

Tom took me on a basement to roof tour of Marlin’s Park, where he works as the guy who maintains the retractable roof. Very cool work if you can get it!

We toured Little Havana, which is in Miami near the stadium. Highlights included an awesome Cuban breakfast at a local counter, drinking my first Cafe Cubano, and watching tobacco leaves get hand rolled into cigars. If you never want to sleep again I recommend two cafe cubanos and one cigar.

On my last full day in town we drove down to Key Largo and ate our weight in delicious seafood and checked out the swampy everglades.  The main highway back to Miami was fenced in on both sides to protect speeding traffic from being devoured by alligators.

Finally Tom drove me back to the airport and dropped me right into one last apocalyptic Florida sunset. Good times! It’s taken me three days to recover.

So I’ve been with my agent Jonathan for over ten years now (the fall of 2005 to be semi-exact) and over the years I’ve become familiar with the variety of slow burns that come with trying to push a book through the publication process. One particular burn occurs between the period of submitting your brand new book to your agent for the first time and waiting for him to read it, process it, and get back to you with his thoughts (like if you’re brilliant or terrible and if he thinks he can sell this particular book). Even if your agent isn’t your first reader (and right now Jonathan is my first reader) this can be about as nerve wracking as it gets.

Jonathan usually takes somewhere between 2-6 weeks to get back to me (though once two months passed, I email chided him, and he admitted he’d forgotten about whatever book that was, though give the man a break he’s read something like eleven Oppegaard novels at this point and does get back to me very quickly via email, for which I am eternally grateful. I’m serious-my NYC agent returns my emails faster than almost every friend I have, though he gets hundreds a day). During this waiting period it would probably be wise for me to move on to the next project but usually I can only muster up a couple pages of short fiction, if that, and generally use the time to catch up on reading and generally fuck around (like this new rebooted website!). Also, I’ll admit, after this past book my mind has been cleared out and I only have a vague notion of where I should go next.

So during this restless time, which generally makes or breaks a year or more of very isolated work for me (and low grade shitty apartment living) I return again and again to the book in my mind and reassess it in a sharp Jonathan-type way, which I can still only guess at, and hope I brought the literary thunder loud enough and that he’ll see the book my way, which is inevitably with rose colored glasses.

And then I drink, for the publishing pit waits, and the digestion is slowwwwwwwwwwwwwww…

The maw of time has swallowed me whole. From its dusty belly, I have now updated my author website and moved it here to WordPress, an asylum for the lunatic damned if ever there was one. I have also ended the mighty Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard blog (alive and kicking since 2005, with over 1,000 posts) and now shall blog only here, on my shiny new author website. I hope you can take it. I hope we all can take it.

All hail the bloody march of Time!

The oceans are dying.