Just a quick post to let folks know that my novel, The Last Good Halloween, is now up for sale on Amazon.
For the first several hours I was fascinated by the fact that it has an Amazon best seller's ranking that seems to fluctuate pretty wildly from hour to hour. It peaked somewhere around the 14,000s. Now today it seems to have settled into the 25,000s. All of which means very little, I think, but it allows the mind to spin and spin, perhaps a bit too much. My publisher's advice was pretty much spot on when I started emailing him frequent updates on the rankings: "At the end of the day, though, what feels best is working on something new! If we start a new project, everything else will sort itself out." Funny how these words seemed to calm me down. The fact is, I've been in a bit of a writing rut since the publication schedule has ramped up. There's always been something else that needed tending to before I could crack my notebook and start writing. Perhaps now that the book is finally out, I'll be able to find the mental headspace to get back to what got me here. That's the plan, anyway.
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The official launch party for The Last Good Halloween is now set for Saturday November 9th, at 7:00 PM. The location will be Uncharted Books, in Logan Square.
Since this is my first launch party, I'm a little unfamiliar with what exactly is supposed to happen at one, but my operating assumption is that there'll be a reading (by me, I guess, unless we can book James Earl Jones) followed by a book signing and a general breeze-shooting. Maybe some wine and vittles will be consumed on site. If not, we'll certainly book a bar nearby in order to do that shortly thereafter. Anyone and everyone are invited to attend, as my understanding is that there'll be plenty of space and it would certainly gladden me to see some friendly faces in the room. The address for Uncharted Books is: 2630 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL. I hope to see as many of you as can make it! A gigantic package arrived this week, and the world's most amazing birthday gift has made its debut on the Southside of Chicago. No matter how well I try to photograph this thing, the images will never quite do it justice. Still, I wanted to try to share it with the rest of the world because keeping it on a wall in here seems like it would somehow be an injustice. The painting was done by Minnesota artist Scott West. He painted it after reading the manuscript for my forthcoming novel, The Last Good Halloween. For me, hearing about the inspiration for a piece of art is almost as important as the art itself, so I was curious to hear what he had to say about this piece. Here's the note he sent me: "This painting was very different for me... usually my compositions are cluttered and busy and overbearing with color. The void was important. Knowing Izzy through your writing I felt an absence in her character, almost a separation from her surroundings because she knew she would one day leave. She became a metaphor for the connection we all have with loved ones that all too often leave our immediate life. They gift us life lessons for our future relationships and the strength to understand reasons why they leave. This is why I chose to paint just Izzy. She was the underlying current of the story for me. Thanks again for the opportunity and for sharing your wonderful work." Obviously, I was touched and moved by his thought and sensitivity in the way he treated my characters. It's strange, I was pretty nervous to see what he'd come up with because it felt like some kind of judgment on these characters I'd come to know and love. In the end, I couldn't be happier with the result. As the publication date for my novel approaches, things are starting to snap into fast-motion, where once they seemed to mosey along without a care in the world. The biggest item thus far has been settling on a cover. We've gone through many iterations and had some great suggestions, but I think we're finally zeroing in on a coherent idea. There are still a few changes that'll need to happen, but here is the prototype: From here on out, the rest of the work will center around launching and promotion. Stay tuned for an announcement regarding the launch party and for upcoming interviews/reviews. For now, I can tell you that I've already recorded an interview with the good folks at WordPlaySound. They'll be coming out with a special episode close to our publication date which will also include a recording of me reading an excerpt of The Last Good Halloween.
That's all for now. Surely more to come soon. The Bygone Bureau rounded up a series of reactions to the release of the fourth season of Arrested Development. And I was happy to be asked for my thoughts. It just went up today. My piece is somewhere in the mix there. Click here to check it out!
This is the last of my updates on the essay I published last week on the strangely huge impact Arrested Development had on my life. If you haven't yet had a chance to check it out, I'd highly recommend you take yourself to The Bygone Bureau and give it a look-see ASAP. Yes, I know I'm biased, but the interwebs are basically a giant swirling mass of biases, so I'm just adding my drop to the ocean.
And since this was the spot where a few short months ago I renounced hope, only to relapse badly a couple weeks later, I figure this would be as good a spot as any to revisit that notion. Yes, I'm back in the hope business. But it's more a toughened-up, cube-steak hope than the wide-eyed, cotton candy variety. My hope is Sisyphus' hope as he stands with his hands on his hips at the bottom of the hill, knowing what's likely to happen, but always in the business of thinking something else might be possible. Just having a little fun here today. I've posted the first chapter of my novel The Last Good Halloween on my novel page. If you're curious to find out what it's all about, go the bottom of the page and click on the "Read Chapter One" link.
Well, it seems as if there might be something interesting in the works. Don't want to overstate it right now, but it involves one of the smarter websites I've come across in recent months, and an essay I wrote earlier this year.
And, yes, this means I did violate my year-long no-submission oath in order to make this happen. Basically, I made it about three weeks. I guess I'm just a hopeless addict. It's been a tough year, publishing-wise. It started out with high hopes and
a swirl of good news, only for it to slowly evaporate as the months dragged on. Dark times call for soul-searching. As I was wandering through the foggy corridors of the interior, I came eyeball-to-eyeball with a surprising (to me) fact: I have been submitting stories, essays and novels to literary journals and agents and contests on a consistent basis for almost twenty years. That means for nearly half my life I've been on tenterhooks, awaiting responses on submissions -- trapped in a perpetual state of hope. I'm starting to wonder if hope might not be an addictive substance, as damaging as the most seductive narcotic. Does that sound cynical? Perhaps. But bear with me as I examine some side effects of hope. I find myself constantly checking email, waiting for a response. Good news, when it comes, is inevitably buried under drifts of bad news. And even when there is good news, the high it produces is never as strong as I imagine it should be. Through it all, what does hope imbue me with most? Paralysis -- a sense of constantly waiting for things to change. I'm a hope-junky. So it's time to go cold turkey. My resolution, if that's what you want to call it, is to go for an entire year without submitting one piece of writing. No contests, no lit journals, no queries. There's still a backlog of submitted pieces, which should take a few months to work its way out of the submission process bloodstream -- so it probably won't be until this summer that hope will be officially purged from my system. Then I'll be able to experience life without hope. I'm calling this experiment a submission-fast. (My freelance work is exempt from this fast due to the fact that I'm not subjecting those pieces to judgment. They're already commissioned, so the people paying me for them don't really have a choice. And I don't have to hope that they'll get accepted.) What do I expect to accomplish from this? Aesceticism aside, the expectation is that by spending some time with absolutely no thoughts of submission, of purging the notion of hope from my psyche, I'll see if in fact it's better to live without it. Do I feel better day-to-day, not needing to check my email? Do I sleep better at night, not thinking if I should have put something else in a cover letter? Most importantly, will I be more productive with my time, not having to spend hour upon hour looking for submission sites and preparing the submissions? A positive side effect might also be to get back to writing for the sheer thrill of it. After all, if you don't expect anyone to ever see what you're writing, that can be liberating to write whatever the hell you want. That's why I'm doing this. I'll report back as the year unfolds. Not much to report around here, writing-wise. At least not much of tremendous interest at the moment. The freelance writing is really taking off. And it's keeping me quite busy lately, busier than I'd expected, though mostly in a good way. The most recent patches of work I've done are updates for the Encyclopedia of Multicultural America. Ask me anything about Dutch Americans, Indonesian Americans, Inuit, or Yupiat. Seriously, ask me.
I do have a few fictional pieces in the hopper, so stay tuned on what happens with those. Otherwise, I'm planning a bit of an intentional fallow or fasting period set to start at the beginning of March. I'll let you know what that entails as the date draws near. |