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.

Giving Up Soda

So, I've now been off soda for about a month.

I'm not sure when I developed a daily Coke habit, but by the time I was working at the Ensign magazine in the mid-to-late 1990s, I was getting a 32-ounce Coke every morning and then another one at lunch on some days, plus a refill of that one. By the time I was working at Unicity in the early 2000s, I was drinking as many as 100 ounces of Coke a day. Well, subtract for the space taken up by the ice, which I usually filled to the halfway mark of the cup, partly because I love extremely cold drinks and I love chewing ice, and partly because I told myself that putting more ice in was healthier because it meant I was drinking less soda, which I suppose is true. (I can also drink Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and at one point Dr. Pepper, but Coke was my main drink.)

Updating My Reading Shelf

For several months (or years?), my shelf in our bedroom where I keep the books I want to read next has been mostly full of LDS last-days stuff, which I intended to read as research for a novel project. Tonight, I decided to put all those books down in my basement and bring up a fresh crop of books, which I'd like to think I could read my way through within the next year.

Status Report on Zarahemla Books

Someone asked me for some thoughts on Zarahemla Books and Mormon publishing, and I ended up typing more details and personal thoughts than he probably needed, so I'm posting it here as a personal blog/journal entry.

My little Mormon-themed publishing company Zarahemla Books published three titles in 2010. Angela Hallstrom's story anthology Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction has sold nearly 300 copies, Stephen Carter's personal-essay collection What of the Night about 50, and Darin Cozzens's story collection Light of the New Day about 60 copies. I knew none of these titles were particularly commercial, especially the latter two, and they have performed exactly how I expected.

15 Songs on Shuffle

A little sampling of 15 songs my iTunes just randomly played from my 8,000-song library, with some commentary:

"The Bike Song (feat. Kyle Falconer with Spankrock)," Mark Ronson & The Business: I have no idea what this song is and don't even remember listening to it.

"The Trooper," Iron Maiden: I have deleted most Iron Maiden from my iTunes because the singer is often quite bad and out of tune.

Thoughts Provoked by a Gay-Mormon Play

This essay will hopefully finish off my latest spate of posting (mostly on Facebook) about the gay issue. This issue pushes so many buttons for me that I tend to get sucked into too much writing about it, when I have lots of other things I need to be doing. I'm sure something will trigger me to write about it again in the near future, but I'd like to take a few months off.

I spent a recent weekend seeing a one-man play called Becoming Norman at a little nonprofit theater in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles. This intimate, honest, heartfelt, engaging play is the dramatized memoir of a guy who grew up Mormon in Orem, Utah, served a mission and attended BYU, but ultimately chose to leave Mormonism and pursue a gay lifestyle and gay romantic/sexual relationships. It was written and performed by my wife's cousin and good friend Norman Dixon, who I too enjoy and value as a person.

Letter to President Packer

Here is my letter in response to the following invitation: "Please support President Packer in standing for truth and righteousness, sounding a clear and much-needed warning voice, and exercising his constitutionally protected freedoms despite intense intimidation. You can send an email to the Church’s Public Affairs office at owentl@ldschurch.org (we are told your email will be forwarded to Pres. Packer) or send a note or postcard to President Boyd K. Packer, 50 East North Temple, Salt Lake City, UT, 84150."

Dear President Packer:

I felt so relieved to hear your talk on homosexuality and gay marriage (although I don't think you even mentioned those two terms). I'm online a lot, and I get so frustrated by the high level of confusion and worldliness AMONG LATTER-DAY SAINTS on this issue. I've even sometimes wondered if the LDS Church was starting to soften and go politically correct, such as when Church PR announced support for Salt Lake City's gay anti-discrimination ordinance or when Elder Marlin K. Jensen seemed to apologize for the Church's involvement in Prop 8 recently in California, or at least made it sound as if we're not already bending over backwards to be as compassionate as we can without changing our doctrine and surrending our standards.

Thoughts on "The Passage"

The Passage is one of those books that I just had to read. Not only is it a post-apocalyptic novel with lots in common with the novel I'm occasionally working on, but several trusted people recommended it to me, and I couldn't resist all the buzz.

So I just finished reading it. It's nearly 800 pages, so it took me about a month. There were many sentences that I really liked. There were several stretches of pages that I really liked. Overall, however, it was only a second-base hit for me.

Trying to Listen to "The Exorcist"

Recently, I've been listening to "The Exorcist" as an audiobook. The main reason I got it was because I'm working on a novel that has demon possession in it, and I wanted to see how this mother of all demon-possession stories plays out.

I remember seeing the movie as a kid, but I don't remember being that scared by it. Of course, I saw it before I became spiritually awake to the reality of the devil, so I guess it didn't have as much punch for me then. Or maybe I'm just not remembering my feelings. I remember I felt more scared about getting caught by my parents watching an R-rated movie than I did about the subject matter of the movie itself. (In fact, it may have been the first R-rated movie I ever watched, when video players had just come out and my neighbors across the street became movie fanatics.)

Lake Tahoe So Far

Good things so far:

• We left with things in good shape both at work and home, so no unfinished business is hanging over our heads, and we will be going home to a clean house and yard, unless some disaster hits while we're gone.
• No one has thrown up or otherwise gotten sick or injured, except Ann bit her lip when she hit herself with a paddle.
• The resort is very beautiful and clean and high class, with lots of amenities, plenty of handy stores around, and excellent concierge and valet service.

Mormon Cult Analysis

The word “cult” is quite loaded. I don’t think the Mormon church is really a cult anymore, although it certainly was in the beginning, just as Christianity itself began as a cult of Judaism. However, people still like to use the word “cult” to describe the Mormon church, and I think that’s because the church and its culture still display quite a few cult-like traits, not all of which are bad.

The following is a list of cult attributes that I picked up from somewhere, and I’ve responded to each one by analyzing how much I think Mormonism displays that trait and whether I personally feel that’s good or bad.

No Way Around It: Bad Guys Say F-Words

Here's a post I wrote for Dawning of a Brighter Day, the blog of the Association for Mormon Letters:

So, I'm working on a Mormon-themed novel with some bad guys in it, one bad guy in particular. I know this isn't a totally new discussion, but right now I'm in the thick of the issue of realistic language. I'm at the point where sometimes I delete the F-words and sometimes I add them back in or substitute "softer" crudities. But the bottom line is that my bad guys say F-words; they just do. And at least one of these guys is a very important point-of-view character who I just don't feel I can sanitize, and plus his use of profanity helps differentiate him from the other main POV character, who is of the same age, gender, and similar background.

Overstock Sale at Zarahemla Books

Would you like to help Zarahemla Books generate some cash flow to publish the next four books in our pipeline?

We’re overstocked on the following titles, so we're offering some deep discounts. Now would be a great time to stock up for your summer reading, future gift-giving occasions, book club, copies to donate to your local library, etc.

More Thoughts on Dutcher

I've been thinking more about the two recent Dutcher films I saw, "Falling" and "Evil Angel. (I mistakenly called it "Fallen" in earlier posts--sorry about that; I guess I was focused on the idea of Dutcher as a "fallen angel" from Mormonism.) Although I didn't get much online response to my earlier review and subsequent discussion, I did receive several private e-mails of support from people who, for some reason, did not want to speak out negatively or unsupportively about Dutcher. So I'd like to do a little more typing on this topic, with the acknowledgment that my expressions may not be 100% free of judgmentality, hypocrisy, and other flaws. WARNING: My following discussion has plot spoilers for both films.

My Wife Has Joined a Cult

So, my wife and I haven’t had any squabbles in several years. Seriously, we get along that well.

Unfortunately, we have now declared the fridge a battle zone. Yes, I said the fridge.

Why? Because my wife has joined this weird fruit-and-vegetable cult.

Debate on Dutcher

Here's an e-mail I sent out on the nearly defunct AML-List. The parts in angle brackets were responses to my original review by D. Michael Martindale, followed by my new responses:

> Dutcher's Mormonness or lack thereof is not an issue in critiquing the
> film. Many former Dutcher fans now retroactively criticize even
> Dutcher's Mormon films, films many of them once liked, because Dutcher
> "betrayed" them. As if it's any person's responsibility to subjugate his
> spiritual life to the desires of other people.

Review of Richard Dutcher's "Evil Angel"

Personally, I found Dutcher's newest movie difficult to process. Partly it's because I just recently saw "Fallen," which has so much more substance and nuance to it. Yes, I know, "Evil Angel" is a horror genre film, so it's not fair to compare... But I enjoyed "Fallen" much more than expected and "Evil Angel" much less.

Review of John Harmer’s "Ere His Floods of Anger Flow"

I admit that Harmer's apocalypse novel took hold of my mind and kept me reading. The story is about the near future, when pornography and drugs have become even more prevalent and powerful in the world. In the course of just a week or two, a perfect storm of problems arises to humble and punish the entire world, including a deadly e. coli plague, revelation of financial fraud and resultant economic collapse, acts of terrorism against the electricity supply, famine caused by genetically modified crops going bad, solar flares destroying satellites, deadly storms of hail, and I may have forgotten two or three.