I gave my first public reading last night from World Leader Pretend at Powell's Books on Hawthorne Street. Like half the world's population, I have a strong fear of public speaking.

What is interesting to me about stage fright is how it manifests itself in different people in completely different ways. It also often doesn't have any noticable effect on performance, or at least to the outside observer, who can't get into the performer's head to know what they would have liked to have said, had they not been so flabbergasted.

In my case, my stage fright brings me to an effective mental paralysis, where first I think about what I want to say, and then, before I can bring it into words, I think about the fact that I haven't said anything yet, and that all these people are waiting to hear something from me. Then comes the paralysis: I know that I can't talk about the fact that I haven't said anything yet, and my brain gets fixated on it, and then I'm stuck--I just sort of stand there with that thought in my head and I can't let it go.

Fortunately, at a book reading, one has book material to read. So I do what musicians do: I say into the microphone something completely inane, like here's a song about my mother, and then I start reading. The reading tends to go well, and the people in the audience quickly forget about that awkward opening.

Afterwards, I get patted on the back, and told how good the reading went, while all I can think about was the frightful opening, and how badly I biffed the introduction to my book, where I was going to explain in brilliant detail why people should be interested in it.

Labels: Tour Dates, World Leader Pretend

Back when I lived in San Francisco, Black Oak Books was my local bookstore--it was a nice walk across Golden Gate Park to the shopping district on Irving St. There is a table there, at the front of the store, that always has the latest greatest literary fiction. A friend sent me this photo from Black Oak today. How exciting! I made the table!

As any astute Neutral Milk Hotel or R.E.M. fan will immediately recognize, World Leader Pretend is a novel with a sound track. Unfortunately, due to the snail's pace of the modern publishing world, the sound track to World Leader Pretend is a bit dated, which is why I haven't made more of a to do about it. Way back when I was pitching the novel to agents, I would include a CD of the songs referenced in it. I lost that soundtrack some time in 2004, the year my wife and I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast and then back again. Recently, though, I got in touch with my ex-agent who had a copy of it laying around. I share it with you:

Two Headed Boy by Neutral Milk Hotel
World Leader Pretend by R.E.M.
Driver 8 by R.E.M.
Electricity by Spiritualized
A Life of Arctic Sounds by Modest Mouse
Bankrupt on Selling by Modest Mouse
Plateau by Nirvana (a Meat Puppets cover)
Motorollon Scalatron by Stereolab
The King of Carrot Flowers by Neutral Milk Hotel
Mookid by Aphex Twin
Cuyahuga by R.E.M.
Never Ending Math Equation by Modest Mouse
A Spoonful Weighs a Ton by The Flaming Lips
Two Headed Boy by Neutral Milk Hotel (remixed by Yars Revenge)

If you want to get really nutty with my novel, listening to the tunes as they're mentioned in the novel is an entertaining experience. Many of the lyrics in the songs have direct relationships with happenings in it. Everything on this list except the Yars Revenge remix should be pretty easy to obtain...

Labels: World Leader Pretend

One of the cooler things that's happened to me in the last few days was Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona offering me 300 words in their newsletter to answer the essay: Why You Should Buy My Book and Come to My Event at Changing Hands.

The main reason I thought it was cool was the unnecessarily lengthy essay title. I have a particular affinity towards unnecessarily lengthy titles (the original title of World Leader Pretend was The Strangely Peaceful Citadel of Blue Orcs...), so I was immediately attracted to the writing of the essay.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to savor the writing of it, I planned on waiting until this weekend to write it. Well, to make a long story short, the calendar editor at the bookstore had gotten the deadline dates wrong and told me yesterday that he needed it done by this morning. I hadn't started.

So this morning, a little jagged from my book release party last night, I wrote this:
(I'm worried that I'm still a bit tipsy...)

You should buy World Leader Pretend because it's weird. Good weird. It’s about a two-headed boy, a man who pretends to be a girl, a girl who pretends to be a man, a coyote, a century plant, a saguaro that says "Good," mountain biking, an electric baby, a poetry slam gone awry, an Antarctic welder who does stupid penguin tricks, and the untimely demise of a dragon. Who writes books about those things? Nobody.

You should also buy my book because it's important. It's about how the Internet has altered human society: how it has made us friends with people continents away and strangers to the people next door. It's also about a young man who is a little like Caesar, a young man who would rather be first in command in a small village in Gaul then second in command in Rome--a young man who feels a bit stifled in 21st century America, where all important decisions are made by some distant talking head on TV. It's about how this young man turns to an online game where he can be a king.

So that's why you should buy my book. You should come to my reading for completely different reasons. You should come to my reading because I am terrified of public speaking and it will be a cliffhanger as to whether I get through the reading at all. It'll be live human drama.

Also, you should come because you can be a Cover Artist Pretend. There will be a table with Sharpies on it, and stickers with my alternative cover art, and you can color your own cover for the book. After you’ve designed it, I will sign your book and officially approve the cover, and then you can go home and add Book Cover Artist to your resume. How cool is that!

Labels: World Leader Pretend

The novel hits the stores tomorrow and I still don't have my talking point down: that very simple two-line answer that every writer who has ever written a book is supposed to have when asked what their book is about.

The reason for that is this: for seven years I have been trying to figure out how to reword my response so that people's brains don't instantly shut off.

My Answer: World Leader Pretend follows the lives of an international cast of characters involved in playing an online fantasy game.

Your Brain: Fantasy game. Ick. I hate those things. I don't want to read that. Boring. Ick.

Very rarely do people listen beyond my first sentence because they assume that a book about online gaming can't also be about the things that they read books for. So I wish people would ask me better questions, because then I would have better answers.

Is there sex in it? Yes, lots of sex.

Do you discuss politics? Yes.

Will the book make me see the world in a different light? Absolutely.

Is it a thoughtful book or a mass-market page-turner? It's thoughtful. And it's a page-turner.

Forget the plot, what's it really about? It's about how the Internet has changed our lives.

Is the book different from every other book out there? Totally.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

What I would do is go out on a particularly rainy night on a bike, wearing mostly black with a few reflective devices so I didn't get killed, put a bunch of queued up stickers underneath my jacket, and ride around to all the bookstores in town, pasting stickers on bike racks and newspaper stands and the backs of stop signs.

I didn't actually do this, of course. The glove doesn't fit.

Labels: Portlandia, World Leader Pretend

OMFG, I really wish I'd taken a video camera to this. The child gets up on her tip toes, releves, and then falls over. She attempts the arabesque, and falls over. She pirouttes, and falls over. At no time is she self-conscious about falling over. In fact, the whole time she is falling over, she is still watching her teacher with awe-struck, undivided attention. She gets up and returns to her particularly bow-legged attempt at a plie. She smiles back at me after several of these falls as if she is the most graceful swan on the lake.

I sat there, rapt, for 25 minutes. I had spent the day fretting over a single mistake.

Labels: Lessons taught by 4 year-olds

That vibrating guitar in the background of How Soon Is Now? has been haunting me for the last few days. You see, I decided to go public with my sticker idea, and now of course the press are doing their jobs and hounding me for the juicy details about why I'm putting a sticker on my own book.

I'm trying to reroll my tongue back into my mouth, but as these things go, I've already said too much. The sticker is a humorous graphical representation of what you can expect to find in the pages of World Leader Pretend. It's funny. There is a Two-Headed Boy on it. There's an Electric Baby. I wanted to make people laugh. Really, that's it. Honestly.

So please go read World Leader Pretend. And no, my publisher isn't evil.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

The Willamette Week ran a nice little article about my sticker cover. I appreciated that they worded it so it wasn't disparaging towards my publisher. Now if I could only get someone in the press to actually read the book and review it...

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

No value judgments. Just the facts.

Peter Rock: The Bewildered -- Finished, took a week and a half
James Tabor: Why Waco? -- Read two chapters, I'm done
Alex de Tocqueville: Democracy in America -- Read the intro, I'm done
David Oates: Walking Portland's Boundary -- Finished, took four weeks
Che Guevara: The Motorcycle Diaries -- Read 1/3rd, Will read more
Samantha Hunt: The Seas -- Finished, took three weeks
David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again -- Read 2/3rds of the stories, I'm done
Douglas Coupland: Life After God -- Read half, I'm done
Lewis Buzbee: After the Gold Rush -- Read one story, Will read more
Monica Drake: Clown Girl -- Finished, took two days

Labels: Book Lovers

While I can empathize with Stephen King and other celebrities who have stalkers, it's far worse when you're a nobody and you have one. I mean, I'm sure it's annoying and unnerving, but at least celebs can hire body guards. Not to mention that having stalkers inevitably means more dough.

But if you're just a regular Joe and Jane like the wife and I, there's really no upside to a stalker.

We have an ex-employee who has been creepily watching our every move for over a year now. If we have an event or get a mention in the local media, she writes nasty messages about us in the comments section. We have to vigilantly watch our blogs, our websites, and our MySpace pages to erase her lengthy, crazed rants. Lately, she's taken to writing bogus reviews of my book on all the online sites. (The book isn't even frickin' out yet...)

Until tonight, the stalking was limited to these situations, but tonight her boyfriend showed up at my wife's event at Black Wagon and proceeded to chew her out in front of the store in front of my daughter.

I have to say, I'm glad I wasn't there. I have a very long fuse, but when I've reached its length I tend to snap.

Anyway, the wife drove immediately to her lawyer's house. And knowing the wife she will take care of matters. But man, what a waste of time and effort--when your finances are already hanging by a thread, it's really awful having to shield yourself from a nut job.

Labels: stalkers

Today, when I arrived home from a long and trying day, I found a padded manila envelope tucked behind the ratty green couch on my front porch. The envelope came to me unheralded, and I wondered what was inside. I opened it, and inside I found two copies of World Leader Pretend. Not proofs or review copies, but the actual finished product.

I remember running through Golden Gate Park seven years ago, mad at myself because I had spent the day playing a worthless online game, rather than doing my homework for gradutate school. An idea caught me, while I was running, that maybe I should write a book about the addiction. My hair stood on end. Yes, that's it, I thought. And I started, and seven years later...

It is finished.

I don't think I'll read the copies. Whatever value my book might have, it is now up to readers and critics to decide upon. I will read at a few book stores, send out press releases, paste on stickers, but I will not write any more. There are flaws--some self-generated and some generated by the publishing process--but those flaws are now a part of it. There is nothing left for me to fix or to fight for. It is finished. And for a brief moment, on a rainy night in Portland, Oregon, I'm going to sit at my desk alone, sip a glass of wine, and relish this.

Labels: World Leader Pretend, Writing Process

Here's a fast late-night post--please forgive any spelling errors...

I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing but publicity: finalizing the sticker cover, working on the book supplement, setting up readings, editing press releases, making sure review copies get to the right people. The release is in two weeks. I can't wait! Unfortunately, there hasn't been much time for quality blogging.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

The wife and I went to Monica Drake's book release party last night at Mississippi Pizza. Man, that is one popular writer. The place was packed.

Unfortunately, the wife, being five months pregnant and all, had a wave of nausea run through her, and not wanting to ruin the reading with a jet of vomit, we exited stage left. We did stay long enough to hear Monica tell a comedic story about arriving in a hospital in a clown suit, and being subsequently carted off to the Psych Ward. This fits into the Things Authors Write About That You Really Want to Know If It Really Happened category.

Labels: Book Lovers, Portlandia