Advice to Someone Considering Taking Mind-Altering Drugs

Here's an interesting note I received, followed by my reply:

I'm interested in your new book due to a personal situation. It's the memoir Mormon Punk: From LSD to LDS. I'm willing to donate to help get your book published if you help me.

I read the sample chapter about when you were on LSD at a concert, and felt like your thoughts could be a trap, and i am intrigued. I want to know about what caused you to flip 180 degrees, about your experience "meeting the devil" and your thoughts on psychedelics.

I am strongly considering taking a mild dose of psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic purposes. I've done them a couple times several years back and only had positive experiences. This is paralleled by recent experiments done with them at top medical centers around the country (i.e. UCLA) and their long history of use by native tribes, along with peyote and ayahuasca.

Back My Kickstarter Project?

So, I've long been fascinated by Kickstarter, the website that helps people find financial backers for their creative projects. Now that I'm currently freelancing for a living, I thought it was a good time to give Kickstarter a try. So read about my memoir project here, and consider becoming a backer by essentially purchasing a copy of my book in advance. Oh, and please help spread the word!

My Thoughts on Two Recent Mormon Memoirs

Emily Pearson’s Dancing with Crazy and Joanna Brooks’s The Book of Mormon Girl

I first heard of Emily Pearson in June 2007, while I was riding in a nearly deserted Manhattan subway car. Only two other people were on board with me: my wife, Ann; and well-known Mormon writer and gay activist Carol Lynn Pearson, the mother of Emily.

            I was visiting New York on the dime—er, shilling—of a British publisher who wanted me to join him at a book convention. Ann decided to come along for a long weekend of theatergoing. We both enjoyed Vanessa Redgrave’s one-woman dramatization of Joan Didion’s perhaps slightly overrated memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, although the play was so quiet that you could hear the traffic outside, and at one point a cell phone shattered the spell for what seemed like several minutes. I loved Spring Awakening, but Ann found it too raw and sexual. We also saw the tourist-friendly 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Agent Rejection and Starting Over

More than a year ago, I started writing a new memoir titled Mormon Punk: From LSD to LDS. I have read conflicting opinions on whether one can sell a memoir on proposal with sample chapters and a synopsis or whether the whole thing needs to be written first, as with a novel. I decided to try selling on proposal because I already have a track record with seven books published, and I felt that the topic of Mormonism was (and still is) timely, for obvious reasons.

My Latest Author Bio

Here's an author bio I wrote for an upcoming humor book I'm involved in:

Born and raised in an ancient Nephite sorcerer's underground lair in an undisclosed location in the Great Salt Lake Desert, Christopher Kimball Bigelow considers himself a modern-day Gadianton robber of the written word. After working for seven years at the Ensign magazine, he began to fear he would be translated, so he quit and helped start a secret combination called The Sugar Beet. His publishing projects have also included cofounding Irreantum, a Mormon literary magazine whose name no one ever mispronounces; coauthoring Mormonism For Dummies, which the LDS Church has selected as the priesthood and Relief Society curriculum manual for 2014; a novel titled Kindred Spirits that recently hit triple digits in sales; and four or five boring nonfiction LDS reference books that funded several fun vacations. Forthcoming works include an exhibitionistic memoir titled Mormon Punk: From LSD to LDS and a post-apocalyptic, likely prophetic Mormon horror novel titled Master Mahan Avenged, which includes the gays taking over the LDS Church's City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City. Bigelow has a wife, five kids, a dog, and a cat who all want nothing more in life than to support his writing by providing him with unlimited, uninterrupted quiet time at his laptop. 

Upon Hearing of an Old Roommate's Gay Marriage

Yesterday, a long-ago roommate's name popped up as a recommended connection on a social network, and I invited him to connect. He accepted but wrote back to warn me that he's now gay-married and that maybe I will want to delete him for political/personal reasons. So here's how I explained my stance:

One Decade, One House

Occasionally I like to indulge myself in longish personal journal entries, like this one.

In June, we hit the 10-year mark in our current home in Provo, Utah. This is the longest, by far, that I have ever lived in one house continuously. My parents have lived in their current Bountiful house for 33 years now, but I lived there for only six years continuously with them, although if you count my pre-mission (1986), post-mission (1988), post-Boston (1992), and post-divorce (1997-98) times with them, the total is closer to eight years.