Votary Nerves - released!

My latest novel, Votary Nerves, is now available. The soft launch has rolled forth. You can order it in paperback and for the Kindle. I might be biased here, but you should totally buy a copy. It's nutty, it's strange, it's personal. And it would mean a lot to me if you read it, maybe dog eared a page or two.

From Votary Nerves:

My dreams that night did not condone rest. Ever see a man with translucent skin? I did. I have dreamt of him many times before. Bright images ticked and shined through his epidermis. And he was loud. Static danced and burned my eyes and I wanted nothing to do with him. He was the terrorist I liked to call Televisor. He was apt to pin people down and force them to watch his heartbeat the images of Nagasaki in repeat. He desired to do this until everyone resigned to go live in a world built from television scraps that grew from the Earth by copper vines. I blamed the dreams on my dad for thinking it necessary to collect televisions that bulged our retinas.

I've Got Some Nerve

Some news.

The novel manuscript I've been tinkering with for 3 years now has come to completion. Votary Nerves is coming around the corner.

In 2009, while I was revising Turban Tan and prepping it for publication, I decided to do the NanoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that November. So I set a little chunk of time each night to pound away at something a tad stream of conscious. I started to pre-plot and outline an idea but threw it out in favor of surprising myself.  And I feel I successfully surprised myself. The only notion I had in mind to explore was "high school" for better or worse. I had at the time realized I never wrote a story revolving around a high school aged character. Even while I was in high school, I was writing about adult characters, because I thought them more interesting. At the time I had just watched Freaks and Geeks on DVD and re-watched Twin Peaks. There was a sort of fresh recklessness I found myself drawn towards through watching high school characters get themselves into trouble. In remembering my high school days, despite the lack of actual stakes in the grand scheme of things, at that time in my life, everyday was fucking vivid. And so my interest was piqued in that sort of naivety, and a perspective infused with curiosity and a tendency towards hysteria. 

So I started writing, and soon a story emerged involving the death of the narrator's father. I myself lost my dad to cancer the summer after I graduated high school. I didn't necessarily set out to write about that, but things spewed, and a different exploration dug itself into my story. A fantasy evolved. After my dad passed away, I experienced little waves of inexplicable anxiety. But I felt I handled that period of my life with some semblance of grace and even temperament. So I thought while writing, what if I handled that anxiety with extreme resignation to my quaking nerves? Out of all of my fiction so far, this one is the most personal. It's certainly fiction, but there are autobiographical nuggets peppered in throughout, and that makes it actually pretty scary, for me, to release. But I decided it was time. The proverbial "they" say to do thing that scare you. Well, here we go.

The first draft was raw and all over the place. It took some time to reshape and fine-tune into something readable. It morphed into some other variations. I played with a section of it to perhaps try as a solo performance piece, and even played with a screenplay version. Both were helpful in developing the voice and action of the piece, but ultimately I brought it back to prose form, because I felt it was the more appropriate medium for experiencing the story from the narrator's head, especially with some of the cerebral, hallucinatory aspects I wanted to keep.

I recently wrapped edits, artwork, and formatting for this bad boy. The release is imminent. 

Notes on the release. There will be a soft launch and an official launch. The soft launch will be very, very soon. Soft meaning, you can order it in paperback and Kindle editions via the internet. The official launch will be in early 2013 and will involve distribution to independent bookshops and a big launch party followed by a little book tour here in Chicago. If that goes well, maybe I'll run around with it in different corners of America.

Stay tuned for my baby, Votary Nerves.

The Biznix of Books

I had perused the site of the small press Two Dollar Radio and came across the mention of a book called The Business of Books by Andre Schiffrin. I'm glad I learned of it, and I'm glad I eventually read it. The book details the swallowing of publishing houses by a handful of corporations. Disney, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, to name a few of the few that own all of the major presses, and books are chosen not by the excitement of an editor towards a new work, but by committees, and accountants. This probably isn't news. We've all felt it. Publishing is in a weird state, with such an oligarchy, and digitizing of books, that the best option for a younger writer certainly seems to be the path of pursuing a small independent press with a supportive community, or DIY self publishing. 


In the big houses risks are not being taken, if a book won't sell more than 20,000 copies in it's first month, then the idea of that book is not taken on, not given a chance. The accountants are creating the mass market reading lists. 


The following passage did strike me, as quoted from the German publisher Klaus Wagenbach:


Let's make this as explicit as possible: If books with small print runs disappear, the future will die. Kafka's first book was published with a printing of 800 copies. Brecht's first work merited 600. What would happen if someone decided that was not worth it? 


Whereas some bemoan the ease in which self publishing has made it to where anyone can put a book out there, and yes, there's some bad content that makes it out there, but I'm personally for a plethora of material, and sifting through some "garbage" to find quality, than having a trend towards lack of new material. And because self publishing caught a bad reputation for awhile because of this lack of editorial quality, I think we'll see that turned around, particularly by the DIY writers that want to be taken seriously. And those that pumped out a book as to have a commodity on the market place, because they were impatient, I think we'll see them drop off. We're keeping each other in check.


I'd recommend this book for anyone involved in creative production. Even though the book was written in 2000 and 12 years later the DIY and small independently owned companies have begun to create thriving communities, it's still an important reflection, because the big publishing industry hasn't changed, nor has the make up of industrial corporate structure changed. The Republicans all fight for hands off on business for the sake of "liberty" but the momentum of business growth and mergers, the swallowing and mushing of business into bigger, stickier balls of clay continues, so that we reach a point where censorship doesn't come from the government, but from accountant's suggestions to the big boss. But then again Republicans in some parts of the country are okay with censorship, so they should probably stop co-opting the term liberty. We're certainly not doomed, because arguments are happening. And I'm not by any means against profit. I'd just like to see less of the banks profiting from tricky financial risks, and actual risks being taken on creative stories getting some ounce of profit so they these ventures can sustain themselves.