I Killed My Book

I killed my book D-E-D.

I killed the website. I deleted the e-book from Amazon. While the print is still available, I’m hoping that HR doesn’t get their hands on it. Although, I could pull that, too, but I’m keeping that on a respirator for some stupid reason. Sentimentality, I guess.

I erased my electronic tracks — I killed the blog I began under my real name that hasn’t been updated since I went underground in April 2010. I killed the other blog which was the serialized version of the book. I deleted my original personas on the various blogs I post on, though admittedly there still may be a couple still out there. If they didn’t come up on the first four pages of Google, I didn’t focus on them.

I have tried to erase anything in my online identity that may lead an HR department to feel offended. I am awaiting a job offer and learned they launched the background check last week. In a panic, I went on this deletion spree hoping to fend off any of the employer panic. (Why can’t those “official” work-related articles I published in trade rags come up in search engine results ahead of my book stuff, dammit?)

You probably thought I did this all last April when that new job threatened to fire me if I didn’t unpublish the book and quit blogging and tweeting. But the online presence of that book has taken on a life of its own, selling nearly 5000 copies and free downloading another few thousand. So to erase those tracks are undoubtedly harder to accomplish.

I will know for sure that if I don’t get the offer for this job that my book killed it, whether they use that excuse or not.

I’m not sure if it’s better or worse to know that this drama is all my own fault. I like to blame others for general tumult in the world, but this one is all on me. WHY THE FUCK DID I PUBLISH THAT THING UNDER MY OWN NAME? Really, what a stupid ass thing to do. Did I think I could write the terms of my own destiny? Who do I think I am? I can write an irreverent, offensive and heavily opinionated book, publish and market it and think that I will have no consequences other than some bad reviews and a few extra bucks in my pocket?

Stupid, stupid girl.

Oh sure, in a perfect world (the pretend one where I do write the terms of my own destiny) I could spew all that crap, call it my own, and be proud of it. But I haven’t allowed myself the freedom. This job feeds my kids and puts a house over my family. I have no safety net. I don’t need to spend a moment’s thought on what is more important, my stupid integrity or my kids’ education and shelter?

I can’t believe this is all coming up again, and it’s interesting to watch this series of events just as volatile and impactful as they were a year ago (see the reason why, here).

It’s not the end of the world. I will continue writing and being an irreverent dick sometimes, pissing people off and offending others. But I just won’t do it under my name ever, ever, ever again.

Review: A Life Transparent, by Todd Keisling

First, go visit the site and read the synopsis for A Life Transparent.

Second, keep in mind that I suck at writing book reviews. But here goes.

Creepy, bizarre, dark, and yet uncannily familiar, A Life Transparent indelibly links the reader with an experience we have all felt at one time or another: that our lives are stuck in mediocrity, we are ignored, and no one is listening. Author Todd Keisling lays out a story about a man who feels he is disappearing, quite literally. Packed with a sicko twist and wonderful double-ententre character names, the writing is detailed and deliberate and easy to read. After Donovan Candle, our main character, begins to slip into an alternate universe run by a powerful, Kafka-esque manipulator, his wife is kidnapped and he snaps out of his grindingly dull routine.

Running through the streets at night escaping terrifying goblins that he isn’t sure are figments of his imagination, Donovan encounters aspects of his own personality that he didn’t even know existed.  Keisling uses wonderful descriptors (grey sludge, flickering, monochrome) and fabulous character names (Yawnings, Dullington, Guffin, Candle) to create what we don’t even know is a dream or science fiction in a story whose tone is both terrifying and compelling.

Rarely do I find myself re-living parts, scenes, or senses from a book as often as I did in the days I was reading ALT. It stuck with me. Somehow the language bullied its way through my skin, so that I was uncomfortably living with the characters–good and bad and ambiguous. Speaking of ambiguity, we as readers may find that we are not quite trusting the characters that we are led to believe we should be trusting. This is a theme that undergirds the novel.

It’s hard to not crack up at some of the funky scifi stuff out there today, as a non-scifi loyalist. Hey, I like my superheros and Avatar-like stuff just as much as the next guy. But sometimes it takes itself too seriously. I did not expect ALT to creep up on me like it did with its dark creativity, solid writing, compelling characters, and salient themes carried throughout the story.

Rocking.

The Time Is Now

Independent writers have the opportunity of a lifetime. We are on the cusp of a revolution in breaking open the audience for our work this holiday season. The day after tomorrow will be Independent Publishing 2.0. Millions of e-readers will be opened under the tree, and all of us writers are standing on the sidelines watching and hoping and wringing our hands that our work will be chosen to be downloaded.

And we need our shit to be good. Really fucking good. Like so good, that grandma may actually break her 40-year streak in reading crime novels and read your anthology of shorts. We have this opportunity to kill the conventional publishing machine (no, it’s not dead yet, don’t get so comfortable). It belongs to us. This revolution was made for us. Now. What are you doing about it?

We  can take convention and turn it on its ass. But only if we know entirely what we’re doing.

I’m all for breaking down the walls. But until we are experts in our writing abilities, we should not experiment too broadly.

(*I’m not making an empirical judgment though: there are a few writers who are so brilliant from the start that they can make and break the conventions all they want.)

(** And I am also not talking about the mode of publishing their work, either. This essay strictly addresses the style of experimental writing rather than the approach to marketing and publishing the work.)

If a writer is not flexible or creative enough to be able to learn the craft expertly before he begins to experiment, he may likely run into trouble. I did that a few times. I thought I was so stylie and I go back and read that stuff from back when, and it was not good. I was all into doing things differently, but I had no anchor. And I am not as intrinsically talented as some other writers who can do the most innovative things a compelling piece of art.

I don’t think that the independent writing community can afford to fall into line with conventional, mainstream publishing, however. There is a cultural need for innovation and creativity and we need to feed that. But we need to feed it with quality work, not off-the-cuff weird shit that just doesn’t have any compelling reason to exist because it just isn’t good.

Then this begs the question of what experimental work is good…and I’m not looking for a debate down that road. When I say something isn’t good, it generally isn’t original, or it isn’t compelling. But worst, an experimental work that isn’t good is generally contrived.

• Writing with funky fonts and calling yourself a non-linear writer is just incongruent.
• Writing a Twitter novel has been done, and so it is no longer necessarily unconventional.
• Jumping on a bandwagon genre trend is not experimental.

There are so many brilliant and interesting ways of breaking the rules and creating compelling work. But I contend that unconventional work is compelling in its integrity. And excellent writers have the breadth of experience to approach experimentation seamlessly–rookies should stick to learning the craft of writing first.

We cannot afford to have independent authorship appear to be too disjointed, with inconsistent quality. I welcome work that comes from out of left field–but the body of work we produce is now out of the shadows and under much more public scrutiny. If all those folks who receive e-readers from the xmas stork encounter download after download of shitty work or dubious quality, we are all–as a community–wasting an opportunity to introduce independent publishing to millions of new readers.

The time is NOW. Let’s get our shit together. Let’s be more careful about what we put out there. I count myself in that group as well–I’ve been guilty of putting shit quality short stories out there and I am going to stop doing that. I only want the absolute best of the best of freaky, bizarre, or even conventional storytelling with my name on it floating around the interwebz.

Annus Horribilis: What I Learned in 2010

Most of you already know what a shitty year it’s been for me. For many. For others, it’s been a beautiful year: they’ve had babies, new jobs, good news, lost weight, and had plenty of visits from bunnies and unicorns. Instead of rounding out the year with a post summarizing all the shit that’s gone on to make me miserable, I thought I’d turn it around and contemplate what I’ve learned. (You didn’t think I’d get all mushy on you and give some optimistic shit about turning lemons into lemonade, did you?)

1. ON THE BIGGEST THING I DID THIS YEAR: Writing a totally excellent novel and publishing it myself was cool, but apparently not important enough to register on anyone else’s radar. Meh.

2. ON HYGIENE: Certain very expensive skin care products do actually work. And straight hair IS better.

3. ON SPORTS: Eli Manning is not a good quarterback.

4. ON HOT IRISH ACTORS: They are short.

5. ON LATE NIGHT COMEDY: While Conan O’Brien may have fought the establishment and come out alive, he is still not funny. (But neither are any of the other network late-nighters if that is any consolation.)

5. ON INDIE PUBLISHING: Despite all the advances of the past 2-3 years, we are likely still in Independent Publishing 1.0. My guess is that after the xmas 2010 delivery of e-reading devices by the xmas stork to millions of readers, we may see an actual market demand for a more reliable search methodology (or technology) so that the unqualified work is filtered out.

6. ON UNQUALIFIED WORK: Unfortunately for the experimental writers out there, we may not have much of a chance in 2011 to make much of a splash (though we are grateful now and forever for the e-medium to showcase our work). We didn’t create a strong enough force in 2010 to become an influence and in that time, the major publishers, the transmedia people, the private-equity backed tech startups, and Apple, among others, have all caught up so in Independent Publishing 2.0 we will likely be outweighed by the majors’ great power. The good news is that it generally takes a year for shitty writers to realize they aren’t getting any traction, so they’ll leave the platform to more qualified works. Or they’ll find another hobby. (Oh what a mean thing to say. I don’t exclude myself from that category, necessarily.)

7. ON CELLPHONES: AT&T 3G is awful and my iPhone works much better using the older Edge network.

8. ON TUITION: Spending one-third of my income on tuition for independent schooling for my kids is worth it. I have learned though, that there isn’t much point in making this investment now if I can’t afford to send them to Ivy League colleges, which I most definitely can’t afford in 12 years. Now I don’t know what to do.

9. ON RELIGION: I’ve become even more adamantly against the dogma of organized religion as much as I am adamantly in favor of free thinking. So I’m alright with my decision to stiff-arm the priest at a family baby’s christening to save my 4 year old from potentially having his worldview influenced by my godfearing mother-in-law.

I fucking hate top ten lists, so I’ll stop at 9. That is all I can come up with while it is past my bedtime. The thing I’ve learned that terrifies me most is that my parents are getting old; and I fear even just the potential that they may face what my grandmother succumbed to: the soul-eating mindlessness of elderhood. The most important thing I’ve learned is that my kids are the most beautiful, independent, confident little boys in the world and they make me and everyone around them happiest.

Clogged

I’ve been thinking long and hard why I haven’t been able to write creatively (or editorially) for the past several months. I refuse to use the term “writer’s block;” it is just not a term. For the time that I’m not writing, I can’t call myself a writer, so “writer’s block” doesn’t apply.

I keep saying that when I get another job, one that doesn’t suck the life out of me, that I’ll be in a better position to free up that part of my brain that enables me to write creatively. But I don’t know if that is true, so I can’t set my expectations there or else I’m headed for disappointment. And I need that like I need an addiction to crack.

At least for the time being, it’s hard to concentrate on a fictional narrative, given this all-encompassing “holiday spirit” we are all supposed to be engaged in this time of year. Why is it that in a time of giving we are so obsessed with what we don’t have?

What I do have is what will enable me to clear my head and write, because that is what gives me the fulfillment I crave as a writer. I don’t know that the old adage of poor, hungry, alcoholic, tormented artists empirically applies. Good narrative writing requires a lot of things and discontentment isn’t necessarily one of them (or else every depressed person would have an equal shot at being the next great author).

What a good writer does need is confidence and gratification in her writing. We can’t write with the objective of getting external validation, in which all too often we get wrapped up. Independent publishing is more than just doing it on your own — it’s about making all of the details of a writing career your own, answering to no one, and making the right judgments in how to go forward. Or not.

My inspiration for writing fiction comes from having the bandwidth to notice small details and insights in the course of my days–a ladybug crawling up the curtains, the dust on a ceiling fan, a veiled comment. It’s when I don’t have that bandwidth devoted to noticing and cataloging those details that I can’t seem to write. I’m not Agatha Christie so my stories don’t involve complex twists in plots. The stories I am most successful writing involve complex characters with specific traits, involved in compelling yet often mundane situations.

So I need to free up my bandwidth to enable those insights. I am clogged up with resentment (for my boss who lied about my compensation package), commuting details (like leaving at a specific time to allow delays in the downtown 4 Express subway), kid details (oh shit I have to bake cookies for my kid’s school xmas party on Thursday), grownup details (Chase bank is a lying, cheating, manipulative bank that holds my first and second mortgage and if I don’t call them out with a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency they won’t issue a new escrow statement with a cancelled gap flood insurance policy). And more shit like that.

I have to somehow find a better way of dealing with all of those shit details, compartmentalize them, in such a way that I can still write. I’m letting them clog up my life. It’s like what practicing Kundalini Yoga is like, when the instructors teach you to unblock all the blockages, whatever the hell that means.

Somehow I have to do that. Somehow.

 

Thanks for reading. It’s good to be back.

1000 Words A Day

I’m back on it, folks.

Today will be my first 1000 word day in months. Too many months.

This next book will be beautiful and painful.

If I slip, it’s to the detriment of the characters and prospective readers…but I don’t want to let myself down again.

I need to find a better way of serializing. Posting chapters as I write on this blog may not be as successful as, say, publishing segments on Feedbooks, but then it will be hard to publish the book in its entirety.

Oh wait, there is no need to meet any word or size or format quota anymore, so fuck it!

Unless someone tells me otherwise, I am going to serialize Maggie & May and I would love to have your recommendations on other ways of doing it besides on my own widely read blog. (That was me making a sarcastic, self-deprecating dig.)

I want to hear from you!

The Unintentional Experiment

My experiment is over. The world does go on without me. I wasn’t sure, but now I am. The world most certainly does go on, seamlessly, without my active participation and youthful exuberance.

This was not me being coy or savvy. Just out of tune, slightly depressed, bogged down with day job, and yes, that anticlimactic “I-released-a-book-and-am-feeling-like-it’s-no-big-deal-but-it-really-is” feeling.

But today I’m getting back into it.  I must. Maggie & May must be written; Harvey Keitel must receive a copy of Back(stabbed) at his Goatsingers production studio; and a new job for yours truly must be sought.

Finally the summer heat and drought is over so I have no more excuses to be depressed over the weather. My kid #2 is nearly diaperless. I bought new headphones, so I no longer have to fight the anatomical fight of poorly fitted earplugs with shitty sound. It’s a new day, goddammit, and I’m going to shit all over it on my own terms rather than feel shit on myself.

I have Gupter! mags to distribute. I have stories on Year Zero to comment on. I have book signings, reviews, and promo copies to guerilla drop of Back(stabbed). I have a cake I must bake and apple sauce to make.

There are past months issues of The Atlantic and Harper’s to read. There are McSweeney’s posts to catch up on. There are tons of commentary to make on the ridiculous, silly know-it-all blogs of publishing industry folks to bug. There is more postulating on the end of the publishing industry to make.

There are leaves to rake. There are stupid fucking halloween costumes to deal with (I hate halloween). There are pumpkins to carve and later on, to hose off the stoop since they will undoubtedly rot in the ugliest way.

The unintentional experiment is over and my ass must get moving.

Big Fucking Deal

It occurred to me at 3am last night when I was awake wondering where the rain was. I’ve been obsessed with the rain–or more accurately, the lack of rain. It’s been a distraction all summer. In our little corner of the shore, we’ve had exactly 3 days of rain since May. It’s depressing to me. Every beautiful, shiny day there is no rain to interrupt the tedium of shining beauty. I am suspicious of the beauty. It shouldn’t be. No one deserves this much perfect weather. So instead, I focus on the drying, wilting aspect of a rainless summer: the high water bills for keeping our little garden intact and the sunburns.

And that’s what occurred to me last night as I lay awake: I’ve displaced my expectations for a texturally interesting and climactically diverse summer with the feelings of melancholy for releasing my book with no fanfare.

None, whatsoever.

So I wrote the book, with all the effort that any author–independent or otherwise–writes and releases a book. And it’s out. And that’s it. Sure I’m promoting it, but not so much. I mean really, one can only beg reviewers to review it so much. And one can tout it only so much on Twitter without people getting sick of seeing your same 140 character description and link. And the blog, well, what else can you do on your own blog to promote your book but keep a sticky post with the info?

I grew weary of calling and visiting every indie bookstore in a 50 mile radius to carry the book on consignment, only for them to look at me like I have ten heads. I grew weary of begging cafes and bookstores to let me do a reading, because I got sick of getting the brushoff. No one really gives a shit, problematically, so fighting against the tide just isn’t in the cards for me right now.

I’m not hanging around Amazon, so forget that. I wrote to Bonnie Bernstein at ICM, Harvey Keitel’s agent, in the random hopes she’d pick up the email and call me back about the book. But my overnight energy to get the book made into a film was dashed when even my two friends in the film industry didn’t email me back.

Meh.

So I wrote and released a couple of books. Big fucking deal.

Now when’s it going to rain?

Commodity or Magnum Opus?

Some people blow through a book in a day or two, while others take a couple of weeks or more. Many people just inhale them like a sweet breeze, one after the other, without stopping in between. I’m worse than that — I just forget the endings of books I enjoy. (Truth is, I don’t even finish books I don’t love.) To most avid readers, books are not only an unquestionable right, but they are taken for granted as a vital component of life.

It’s like when the tourists cruise through the Sistine Chapel, look up and say, “Look honey, Michelangelo’s painting, now let’s go get some spaghetti.”

But to a writer who may spend a year or more writing the damned thing, think about how we feel when we see a pile of books stacked up 5 feet high against the wall of a summer cabin and the proud readers saying, “We read all of these books this summer!” It’s an intractable dilemma. It’s not easy to write a book, and for some it’s extraordinarily difficult and a compelling feat. So when a reader zooms through it and moves on casually to the next one, how are we to reconcile this disparity?

Think of the planning, outlining, and writing. And writing. And writing. Then the editing, proofing, and rewriting. And rewriting. And editing some more. And then the synopsis. And for some who choose to submit their work for mainstream publishing, the sterilizing and demoralizing query process. Then the rejections. More queries. More rejections. Finally the agent, then the selling to the publisher. The reworking of some parts. The publisher meetings. The marketing meetings. The marketing. For the DIY writers, the layout–the horrible horrible layout process, then the pre-marketing, the blogging, the begging for interviews and reviews, the vetting of e-book/free-book websites, the setting up your website and trying to figure out the e-commerce plugins and CSS and HTML, the tweeting and more tweeting, the artwork, the printer or POD joint, the price gouging, the amazon threads that will make you gouge your eyes out, the paltry and late checks from your method of distribution.

And some asshole reads the thing in a weekend?

There it is, that’s the truth. We are at odds with the very mode of entertainment we choose to pursue. We can’t possibly ask or expect the reader to study and appreciate every word and page as we did; we don’t want them to know how we made the sausages, after all.

This supports my argument that short fiction, novellas, and experimental-length and format fiction should not only have more of a platform, especially with e-books, but that more authors ought to put out more of this type of work. ESPECIALLY with more e-books, because readers will devour even more of our work with this enhanced format, right? RIGHT? So all the better to fill up our tanks not with the predictably dull 80,000 word novels, but with interesting work that we can package with other media to deliver in the increasingly sophisticated (but still clunky) devices for reading.

Fear of Success?

Dude, what the fuck does that mean?

That’s what I keep thinking when I hear people drop that line. “Oh, so and so is just scared of success, so they self-jeopardize, yadda yadda.”

I don’t understand what that means.

Or at least I didn’t think I understood what that meant until a few minutes ago.

The Yankee game is on a rain delay so I thought I would sketch out a plan of action to tackle the various projects I have jumbling around in my head. Prioritize, make a timeline, create an outline, do some research, that kind of thing. And then I realized that I have a novel I am about to release any minute now.

What am I doing working on other projects — juggling several of them, in fact — when I have a life-sucking day job, two toddlers, a commute from hell, and Back(stabbed) In Brooklyn to release? Since my last book’s promotion was brought to a screeching halt due to circumstances beyond my control, I owe it to myself to push Back(stabbed). So then I thought, am I that scattered, or am I really just trying to escape what could be a disappointing, anticlimactic release? Or is it the other thing — that fear of success thing?

For those of you who know what my last book was about (the young me), you’ll recall that it was a series of goals that I set which I met, and became disoriented after having met the goal. It’s kind of disappointing when you set out to reach what you tell yourself is a lofty expectation, and then you get there and it’s not so fabulous.

So perhaps it’s not a fear of “success,” in its immeasurable form, but a fear of continued disillusionment. Or, worse, (and this is where you say, babes, go see a shrink), an inability to feel satisfied not just with my own work but with its acceptance in the world.

So what does this all have to do with writing? Because it is a tremendous emotional and personal investment in our work and while we rely on external validation to a certain extent, much of how we feel about our work is measured on an internal scale. I write because I like to tell stories. I feel personal satisfaction once I’ve read the story I’ve written. I am proud of a lot of the stories I’ve written. But I cannot help but to put my work on a larger scale with the hopes that I’ll find gold at the end of the rainbow. Part of that desperation is due to the fact that the gold is simply unattainable.  It is like asking to live in bliss, to be able to support my family and writing.

Well, girlie, this life doesn’t work that way (for me, at least). My fear of success isn’t the problem so much as my expectations to win over fans and readers, adulation, demand, and my overwhelming desire to have the freedom to start any project I want. In order to really hit the next level as I want, I have to take some serious risks and just focus. I realize that I probably am not willing to risk what I have now (lame) in order to pursue what I really want. I did that. 29 times. And failed.

Projects I would like to get off the ground:

• Sports Blog – http://TheIntentionalWalk.wordpress.com (this is live, but sucks a little bit. need graphics.)
• Freelance articles and interviews with sports figures
• Maggie & May full length novel (4 chapters done)
• Jean-Baptiste Foulon is a Brilliant Liar full length novel (3 chapters done)
• Screenplay for Back(stabbed) In Brooklyn and set up some major meetings to get it produced
• Find an excellent food photographer and publish Intuitive Cooking cookbook (manuscript is complete)
• Biography of Jay-Z (alternatively, a story or novella about a fictional character attempting to write a biography of Jay-Z.) Not started yet.
• Launch Back(stabbed) In Brooklyn with more readings and appearances (1 appearance scheduled, here on August 22 for Katelan Foisy’s book release party)

Can I do it all? Check back to measure my progress. Nudge me, will ya? Thanks.