Author: Otis West

I wrote Stories on a Macintosh 512K

I bought a Macintosh 512K during my freshman year of college. It was my first real computer. As kids we’d had an Atari 400 but had mostly used it for games. I did all my high school papers on a typewriter.

When the 512k was first introduced in 1984 it retailed for $3,195. I think it had been discounted significantly by 1986 when I bought it, and then I got a further student discount, so I think I paid closer to $1,500. Still, adjusted for inflation, that is around $4,500 today!

I had this Mac til my mid-twenties–through the mid-1990s–and wrote most of the short stories in Stories on this computer. Then it disappeared. Or so I thought.

Then last year my brother was clearing some of his junk out of my parents’ garage and it appeared. It still has a Tracker sticker on the mouse (I actually hated Tracker trucks–have always used Independent Trucks, but I thought it was a cool and appropriate sticker for the mouse).

The stories in the collection are about adolescents and young adults. I was still very close to those experiences when I wrote those stories and I’m glad I got them down on the page when I did.

Camper Van Beethoven and the Sound of Mountain View

If I can think of any music to sum up the vibe of lazy San Francisco Bay Area summer days in the late 80s it’s Camper Van Beethoven. Formed in Redlands and Santa Cruz, they released their first three albums between 1985 and 1987. I bought these records as they came out and saw them play once or twice at the Fillmore in San Francisco. This music is part of the fabric of Mountain View.

Skating the Cobblestones of Florence: The Story Behind Firenze

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Italy both as a kid and an adult, and I studied in Florence for seven months during the late 80s. My younger brother was a pretty big skater and always used to bring his skateboard to Italy and try to skate cobblestones, etc. which I always thought hilarious. All of this went into creating Kevin, the narrator of my novel Firenze, who brings his skateboard to Florence.

I asked Sean Jackson to create this scene of hitting the cobbles on a skateboard and he did an awesome job.

Seattle in the Late 90s and Early 2000s: The World of Kato

I started visiting Seattle in the early 90s and then moved there in 2000. The city changed a lot over the years, and not for the better IMO. I moved away in 2021, though I still visit often. The version of Seattle depicted in Kato (set in the late 90s/early 2000s) no longer exists as far as I can tell.

Photo taken at Gas Works Park in Seattle on a rare sunny day!

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Writing Mountain View in 1990s San Francisco: The N Judah Years

I wrote Mountain View in the late 90s while living in San Francisco. I recently came across some old photos in a box, taken from the window of the room where I used to write.

I left SF in 2000. All my friends were moving away (mostly to the East Bay or Brooklyn) and the place was really starting to change.

I really do miss 80s/90s SF sometimes! What an incredible time and place.

Miss the N Judah!

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The Eight Books That Made Me a Writer: From Vonnegut to Raymond Carver

Recently I was thinking about what I read as a kid, and how I eventually decided to try writing myself.

Looking back there seems to be four phases, each represented by two authors.

The first phase was reading on my own in elementary school in the mid-70s. I first became obsessed with Robert Arthur’s Three Investigators books and then with the John Christopher trilogy.

After that I stopped reading for several years. I don’t remember much of a “YA” category to bridge the gap. I read a little C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien, but fantasy was not my thing. I was more into BMX and sports.

In high school I didn’t pay a lot of attention to reading until around junior year in 1984 when an English teacher assigned 1984 and Brave New World. These books definitely got my attention. This was “real” adult writing to me.

The first writers that got me to read on my own again were Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. I was very into punk rock and these authors seemed to have a punk rock, anti-establishment attitude.

In college I decided to be an English major, and began reading all the classics. But then I found Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski. These were the first writers that made me think about writing myself. Something about their simple, clean lines and direct stripped-down storytelling gave me permission to try.

What were the books that got you into reading and maybe even into writing?

Thrasher Magazine in the 1980s: Skateboarding Culture and the Novel Firenze

In Firenze, our hero Kevin takes a latest issues of Thrasher with him to Florence. And since it was the 80s and there was no internet, he reads Thrasher over and over for much of the book.

I was bored. Normally I’d just watch TV or something. I didn’t really know what to do. I’d brought along the latest issues of Thrasher, which I’d already read twice on the plane. What the fuck, I’d read it again.

This issue had Tommy Guerrero on the cover. Looking through the article I got homesick. Tommy was from SF. He was my hero. I’d seen him skate once in Oakland and the dude had blown me away.

I flipped through and read all the ads. Then I read Skarfing Material, my favorite column by Chef-Boy-Am-I-Hungry. If you remember the scene in Rocky where he drinks all those raw eggs, that’d kind of like a Chef-Boy-Am-I-Hungry recipe, except he’d maybe add something to the eggs first, like hot sauce and peanut butter. Each recipe was preceded by an existentialist rambling of some kind. Chef-Boy-Am-I-Hungry had a recipe for a Squid Eyeball Sandwich and Vito’s Vittles. After the nasty dinner with Sr. Gasperi they both sounded pretty good.

Pic via ThrasherMagazine.com

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1988 California Soundtrack: The Mountain View Spotify Playlist

I had fun putting together this short playlist on Spotify for Mountain View. Welcome To The Jungle gets mentioned on the first page, and Gordie is later described as a King Crimson fan. Lunatic Fringe is heard playing in a car driven by Mercedes Steve. But the rest are all the sorts of songs Colin (or I) would have been listening to in 1988. I’ll drop a link in a story and it’s featured in the highlights above! Playlists for Kato and Firenze to follow.

Listen to the playlist on Spotify!

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Guinness Book of World Records

If you grew up in the 70s or 80s, you were guaranteed to have at least one copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, most likely ordered through Scholastic at school.

While QCing the Mountain View audiobook (coming soon!), I was reminded of this passage, when the narrator walks into his old friend’s room back home:

I checked under the bed. The stack of porno mags was gone. The bookshelf was filled with trophies, framed photos, and model cars. There was only one book: The Guinness Book of World Records.

I took it off the shelf and started thumbing through it. There were the fat twins riding motorcycles—with the plaid pants and cowboy hats. Then there was the guy who was so huge they had to bury him in a coffin the size of a piano case. 1,069 pounds. Why did they put the fat people up front? I flipped to the cool color photo section in the middle and saw the guy with the fingernails. They were each about three feet long and they were twisted and had these strange stripes. I had nightmares about that guy when I was a kid.

Did you have a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records? What do you most remember from it?

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