Turban Tan's 2 Year Anniversary Thoughts

Today marks the 2^nd anniversary of the release of my novella Turban Tan. Books deserve birthdays. Below is the main character, The Drippy Man celebrating.

Two Years Later, Some Thoughts.

Turban Tan began as a piece of spontaneous prose, thrown up here on this blog in fact. I developed it some more for one of the Seeding Meat releases, written almost as a play, with dueling philosophies on the parts of The Drippy Man and The Dry Advisor. As the economy continued to hover in a recession throughout 2009, I became quite interested in economics, the complicated facets of it, of derivatives, CDOs, mergers. I wanted to play around with an economic “drama” of sorts and The Drippy Man character continued to surface in my mind.

I became interested in dystopian literature as a sort of economic ghost story.

I liked the idea of starting not from his race to escape a fucked up world, but of exploring his tendency to go back to it after being offered a sanctuary. In a lot of ways I think people are masochistic. We make things harder on ourselves than need be.

Below is a video of me being really excited about this book. 

This is 2 years ago. I look pretty much the same. In fact I am still quite excited about this piece. I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t a perfect piece of literature. But I hold fast to the fact that it is a wild, unique crack at dystopia, at a fucked up spy novella, at a novella in general. Though flawed, I am confident in its fascinating trek from Maine to Dubai. The writing came together fairly quickly when I set out to expand it into a novella. I had a lot of shit floating around my head from reading the news more actively than I ever had before. Turban Tan is a bit raw, simple, ambiguous, and I appreciate aspects of that. The novel manuscript I’m currently working on, I’ve been working for two years now. I’m in a bit of perfectionist mode, chopping, refining each sentence structure. I’m less reckless as a writer now since Turban Tan, for good or ill. I suppose every writer goes through phases of development, after all, I’m working on strengthening my craft. Yet something I learned from my high school athletic days, sometimes you get worse before you get better, while the muscles rip and grow and ache.

Enough of my thoughts. Turban Tan is swell. It has an orange cover and a strange story told from a strange, coded point of view. You should buy a copy! I really think you should! For your back pocket and for your Occupier’s stockings. You should also eat cake today and read a book for at least a little bit.

I’ll be getting drunk tonight. I hope you do as well and offer a little toast to The Drippy Man.

Buy a copy and read it too!