Characterize This - Brad Parks

There are those who say that, if you were to cut Brad Parks’ chest open, you would find not a heart and lungs and all that strange ticky-tacky stuff that constitutes the average person … you would find a finely optimized open source operation system churning out the next generation of world domination webware.

Bullshit.

Brad has a big heart. He’s the guy who hosts biffmitchell.com, who wakes up in the middle of the night when biffmitchell calls and says, “Holy shit! Biffmitchel.com is down! All my fans in the Western Desert and the strip joints in Bangkok are cut off from my never-changing and totally irrelevant content. What? Turn my computer on? The On button? Oh yeah … it’s coming on. And there’s my website. ‘Night!”

Here's what Brad looks like. See? He's definitely not a machine. He's actually some kinda mystical three-headed creature. But aren't we all just a little three-headed and mystical?

Brad is infinitely patient and infinitely assertive … even though his ultimate goal is world domination, but then, isn’t that everybody’s goal?

Besides hosting biffmitchell.com, Brad has been nagging me to get back to finishing Murder by Burger ever since I took a break from it to write short fiction and other shit two years ago. Brad hates mysteries. In fact, once a month, he participates in mystery book burning rituals in Zeeland, home of the hunt and snag. But he liked the first 60 pages of Burger and wants to know how it ends to the extent that he regularly sends me threatening emails and verbal lashings to the effect: Finish it or die. What he fondly refers to as motivational messaging.

But it worked. I’m back on the book and progress is furious with completion looking like mid to late May. Thanks, Brad, for the kick in the pants.

Coming soon to Characterize This: an old flame, a cruel muse, a murder victim, and more.