That damned Joel

That damned Joel. He’s done it again. He beat me to reviewing J.D. Tuccille’s new novel High Desert Barbecue.

He has a habit of doing things like that.

Years ago, when The Mental Militia forums were still The Claire Files, I started noticing this person.

He went by the handle “John DeWitt” then (an obscure literary reference, I gather). And the thing I noticed about him was this: Every time I felt the urge to make some particularly incisive and witty response to somebody else on the forum, I would scan further down the thread and discover that this “DeWitt” person had already said exactly what I was going to say. Only better.

I knew I just had to meet this guy who had the seeming ability to extract thoughts from my brain and apply good editing skills to them. Eventually we did meet at a gathering in the desert. Turned out we had almost nothing in common. He had not a word to say when I was around. I got the impression he basically couldn’t stand me, and I considered him a cipher.

Eventually, that worked out and we became trailer-neighbors for a time in the high desert. Good neighbors. But we remain very different people. He’s a crotchety, socially maladept hermit who lives alone by choice with dogs and a cat and I’m … Oh. Yeah. Um. Well, I’m female.

Still, as writers, we tend to think alike. So go read Joel’s review of High Desert Barbecue. Because he says very much what I was about to say (good book, flawed but still one to buy and have fun with). And — as usual — he says it with the incisiveness and wit with which he has always had that annoying habit of pre-empting me.

I’ll have more on the book tomorrow or Wednesday. Because I really do have a few more thoughts on the subject that Joel hasn’t already sneakily extracted from my brain.