Book news

Flashback: Washington City Paper cover story “Stranger Among Us”

That time my article “Stranger Among Us” was the cover story for Washington City Paper, September 28, 2001. The full article is archived online here.

The story followed local electrician Napoleon Epps, who started making Atlantean One Meditation Helmets after a life-threatening work accident. The helmet, as well as other apparatus in his home and yard, were meant to help him maintain contact with some alien masters who guided his spiritual development. His work touched on outsider art, pseudoscience, and new age spirituality–and I was all over it.

Looks like the City Paper has improved its online archive of late, and plenty more of my reviews and articles can be found on their site from this page. You can find articles on psychosexual graphics magazine Malefact, outsider filmmaker Rock Savage, avant garde vocal group Comma, perennial candidate for DC Mayor Faith Dane, and poet Buck Downs and his postcard poetry project, among other documentation of local fringe creatives.

Four poems in In Between Hangovers

Just got word that poetry blog In Between Hangovers accepted four of my poems for publication. “Radio Free USA” went live today (12/23/16). The others will be published at roughly three week intervals: “Hard/Easy,” “Marketing Zero,” and “Zodiac of the Damned.” This journal seems to share my more playful sense of avant garde aesthetics, so I’m super happy to be included.

A note on submission persistence: the first batch I sent got sent back because of the heavy indenting; In Between Hangovers is another fine WordPress blog, and the platform does not reproduce indents. It’s a peculiar glitch to WordPress, which I’m not sure is present in other blogging platforms. Anyway, I immediately rounded up a batch of poems that did not rely on the implied sense of movement and performance that comes with line spacing. Never give up.

Xmas is coming! Kill Claus! available as an eBook

Kill Claus!

In case you’re really sick of Christmas already, you might be interested in my book Kill Claus! A surreal science fiction tale inspired by bizarro fiction, the novel follows a young man named Sesam on a journey through a far distant, post-apocalyptic future in which “the Claus” is a fearsome monster that regularly culls the “human” population. After Sesam’s village is destroyed, he is forced to cross a forbidding landscape to get revenge on “the Claus.” On the way he runs into zombie Christmas trees, a mutant reindeer, flying jellyfish, a tribe of living snowmen, and many more strange creatures before he gets to the North Pole, where he must confront the Claus. A friend of mine called it the “most disturbing book” he’d ever read. High praise, indeed.

Kill Claus! is available in paperback and kindle formats from Amazon. Just follow the links if you’re interested. It’s also available from Lulu as a discounted paperback, an eBook in ePub format, and an eBook in PDF.

Big Amazon Score: 100 copies of my own book for $1 each

It still amuses me to think of the time I bought 100 copies of my own book, Savage Night and Other Stories, for $1 each on Amazon. Looking back at my Amazon orders, this was on April 1, 2011.

I caught the sale at the right time. Amazon was listing my book for $3. I assume they had warehoused a few stock copies due to the success of my earlier book, Mondo DC. Now they had unsold copies to get rid of. On a whim, I placed an order for my own book, requesting 100 copies. I had to order the books in batches of 33, with one batch of a single copy. I figured they would cut me off based on the number they actually had in stock. But no.

They sent me 100 copies of Savage Night.

Savage Night and Other Stories

For me, this was a no-brainer. Kind of. My royalty rate on Xlibris, where I had self-published Savage Night, was $2 per copy. So eventually I got a check from them covering two thirds of the price I paid Amazon. My net cost was $1 a copy.

Of course I have roughly 98 copies of the book left in my house. If anyone wants one, let me know. I’m sure we can work out a fair price.

This actually happened a second time in May 2015 with the second book I published through Xlibris, Spells of Coming Day. Amazon listed the book for $4, and I tried to order 100 copies. However, the bookseller had learned their lesson. I was only able to buy 4 copies at the reduced price. Of course, I still have those sitting in my house.

Spells of Coming Day

Every now and then, I check the Amazon listings for my books. I haven’t seen any big sales lately. But it’s remarkable how many third party sellers are offering my titles, usually at prices far higher than either Amazon or Lulu list them. I’d like to know how that’s supposed to work. But in some way, it’s flattering to think that someone listed my book in their catalog, hoping to make a little bread. I’m sure it’s a win-win for them: if one sells, they just have to order it from Lulu (or Xlibris or AuthorHouse) and then send it out, reaping big profits.

Since I rarely see any royalties from my own books, I guess they aren’t selling too many copies. Somehow, it all seems like a commentary on today’s publishing industry.

 

 

Three poems in Otoliths 43

Otoliths 43, the Southern Spring issue for 2016, just went live on October 30. A great ezine based in Australia with lots of visual poetry, asemic poetry, and plenty interesting textual stuff. I’m particularly inspired by the visual work of John Bennett (and his collaborators), Jim Leftwich, Texas Fontanella, and differx.

I love reading this journal. So I feel very honored to have three poems appear in the e-pages of this issue: “Checklist for the Next Whatever,” “Seasons of Flight,” and “Springtime Effigies.” You can read them here.

Also, the print version of Otoliths 42, which contains two of my poems, just went live in two parts: a black and white half and a color half. They’re available here.

Savage Magic live on Lulu

Savage Magic

Today I approved the proof copy of Savage Magic, a collection of poems featuring my character Jean Savage. This was the second proof, as I found an error in the first one: a space was omitted between the title and text of one poem. In a month or so, this book should be live on Amazon. At the moment, it’s available on Lulu.

Here’s the back cover blurb I wrote for the book: “[Savage Magic] collects all seventeen poems featuring the philosophy, life hacks, and adventures of Jean Savage, the heroine of the author’s avant garde science fiction novel Savage Night, as well as several short stories which also explore the potential of this rhetorical anima. Violent, erotic, polemical, and mystical by turns, these texts define a poetics of self-actualization and anticapitalist defiance in a mass media ecosphere using images of magic, sexuality, nature, paganism, graffiti, and crime. Something of a cross between a song of self and a rant against the machine, these works offer an obsessive, personal, and rhythmic cleansing and revenge, constructing a hermitage and then defending it from society’s commercial, hierarchical, and fraudulent tendencies.”

I had published four of these poems in my earlier collection Spells of Coming Day. When I recently located a box of old manuscripts, I was surprised to find so many other poems also featuring Jean Savage. I also found three stories I’d forgotten I’d written using the same character. A collection of those stories is planned for release this year under the title, Savage Space.

I’m especially happy with the covers for these companion volumes. The image is the result of experiments with analog video run through a video effects box called the Opti-Glitch, made by a Jacksonville, FL, duo working as Tachyons +. I haven’t had much time to work with my growing collection of video synths and effects, but the images are amazing. Mostly I’ve used the movies as backdrops for live performances. The still photographs make such great cover images I’m planning to use this much more often, especially since a photograph is very easy to work with in creating a cover design in Photoshop.

More new eBooks now available: Dishwasher series, Toothpick Fairy

For those interested in checking out some of my books, eBooks are now available for my novels The Toothpick Fairy, and the entire Dishwasher series: Dishwasher on Uranus, Dishwasher on Mars, and Dishwasher on Venus. You can find these available for instant download on the Lulu website here. Eventually, these titles should propagate to multiple eBook formats and platforms, including Kindle, Nook, and Apple’s iBook. So if you prefer those formats/devices, then keep a look out for them. The list price is $3.99. I hope that’s not too high, but these other vendors take a huge cut, and I don’t seem to be able to set a lower price on Lulu, where my royalty rate is higher. In any case, this price is at least one third to one fourth the cost of the print copies.

I learned a few things about eBooks while I was formatting my titles. It surprised me that so little formatting is allowed: only three heading styles and a few fonts. Also, the text is not justified, an arrangement that forms a nice rectangular column in a print publication and which is much easier to read. Since I generally put much effort into the design and font selection for my print titles, it’s a little sad that the eBooks can’t reflect that. So if you want books with fonts and design, then hard copies is the way to go!

Manuscripts found in a box

I had the happy surprise last week of finding a bunch of my old manuscripts stored in a box. How old? Well, most of them are dot matrix prints, some even on that tractor feed paper. Among the files of old poems were several things I’d totally forgotten I’d written: a long poem, two incomplete novel manuscripts, and three short stories. Some of this material could work as new books: a poetry collection and a short story collection.

The long poem centers on my character Jean Savage, who features in my novel, Savage Night, and several stories published in that same collection. Jean is sort of an anti-establishment figure who uses magic, sex, and violence in her mission of self discovery and rebellion. I also wrote a few poems with her in them, four of which made it into my collection Spells of Coming Day. Looking through the sheaf of old poems in the box, I realized there were more Jean Savage poems than I remembered. Ideally, there are enough for a short book. The long poem, Jean Savage Magic, seems pretty good on first read, so I’m hopeful the others will hold up as well.

The discoveries set me off in search of more complete poetry print outs, and I eventually located the notebooks where I had put everything. Then I searched for the backup discs, so I wouldn’t have to retype all this stuff. I couldn’t find any CDR backups that included these items, so I started looking at old floppy discs. I still have a pile of 3.5″ and 5″ floppies, and an auxiliary reader for the smaller ones.

One of the 3.5″ discs had a bunch of old poetry files, so I’ve been able to copy the short Jean Savage poems. But the long one continues to elude me. Maybe it’s on one of the other discs. The search continues.

The stories are from a series I did around the theme of “sex in space,” which Ducky Doolittle was supposed to publish in the 1990’s. One of the stories made it into my collection, Savage Night and Other Stories, but the remaining ones didn’t make it because they were hidden away.

I’ve been trying to keep my manuscripts organized as I write and publish them, particularly as I’ve been going back and revising stuff for publication. Looks like I still have a ways to go before everything is in order.