Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to read from World Leader Pretend at my alma mater, the University of San Francisco. Given the fact that MFA's in Creative Writing are degrees that don't always pay off, this was something of a victory lap for me. (Although, even with the book published, the degree still hasn't paid for itself...)

It's nice being introduced by people who know you. Kate Brady called my writing sly and mischievous, which made me chuckle, as those are not words that are often used to describe writing, and yet in my case are undoubtfully true.

The reading went well, people bought books, I signed them, and then I went out with a bunch of old friends and drank sake cocktails. All in all a good night.

Labels: Tour Dates

At my reading at Book Passage on Tuesday I ran into a number of words in my own book that I had no idea how to pronounce. I suspect that at the time I wrote them I knew how to pronounce these words, but as time passed between the writing of the book and the publishing of it, I think my gray matter replaced the pronunciation of these words with other more pressing concerns. (Like, for example, how to change a diaper.)

I slipped up on "chic," "reson d'etre" and "schlemeil, schlemazel, hassenpfeffer incorporated." (Not slips of the tongue, when I came to the words, I literally didn't know how to pronounce them.)

By the end of the reading I was prompting the audience for help. Anyway, the audience seemed to think it was kind of funny. I guess if I didn't impress them with my intelligence, at least I made them laugh.

Labels: Tour Dates, World Leader Pretend

The Willamette Week ran a Q&A with me last week, and while it was positive and made the book sound interesting, I was disappointed that it wasn't actually a review.

I've found the lack of public discourse over my book to be disheartening. At least for me, the entire purpose of writing a book is to enter into the cultural conversation, to see what people have to say about the moving hand that has written. You're prepared for, even eager in some ways, to have your guts ripped out my someone who doesn't see the world the way you do.

But silence and apathy--it's a hard pill to swallow.

We'll see, though, the book's only been out for 3 weeks. It's not dead yet.

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

Train operator: "Ferry Terminal"
A gay man to his partner: "And there's no cure."

Fellow Portlander Joe Sacco has an incredible comic spread in this month's Harper's on how the Marines are training (or rather, terrifying) the Iraqi National Guard. And one wonders how we lose wars...

Labels: Book Lovers, Portlandia

As could only happen in Portland, Oregon, my book reading tomorrow happens to coincide with another book reading half a block away. If I had to choose between the two readings (and unfortunately, I don't get to choose), I would, no doubt, attend William Vollman's.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the Portland Mercury is going to say the same thing tomorrow in its weekly shrine to snark. Oh well, at least they're paying me some attention.)

This isn't self-deprecation either; this is cold fact. William Vollman is the king of experiential writing. This is a man who travelled with the muhjadeen in Afghanistan (this was way back when the muhjadeen were "good," as they were fighting off the Soviets), who has ridden box cars with hobos up and down the West Coast, who has passed around a crack pipe with prostitutes in the Tenderloin, and who has just published a book in which he has traveled to the far corners of the earth on a mission to interview the poorest people he could, and ask them the question "Why do you think you're poor?"

What to me makes this more noble, is that he has done this solely out of an overdeveloped spirit of inquiry. Vollman is no Keruoac. This isn't some adventurous Dharma mission he's on that ropes in the chicks. There is very little sense that he does these things out of fun. Vollman himself is not the dashing, thrill-seeking sort--he is short, stubby, and wears very thick glasses. Like all great writers, Vollman has a desperate need to answer the question "why?," and in his quest to do so he puts himself in precarious and dangerous situations, far beyond what I would ever be willing to do for a story.

Now lest the syrup get too thick, I find Vollman's writing to be overly philosophical, and I've never been able to finish an entire one of his books. (This may say more about me than about him...) I love the essays that appear from time to time in Harper's, and he's a sharp cultural critic, but his novels tend to lack plot and I have too short an attention span for his sort of writing.

I'd love to sit down with him over a beer one night, though, and ask him just how he does it. I can subject myself to the guilty pleasure and nasty addiction of online gaming to write a novel, but gun-toting religious nuts and crack-whores? I don't know... they're harder to escape.

Labels: Portlandia, Tour Dates

For a week, I've been given the reins of the blog of Book Passage, an independent bookstore in the Bay Area. I'll be cross-posting entries.

I have been clinically insane for the last six days. I'm being serious. According to the DSM IV (that's The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States) I am suffering from caffeine withdrawal. Symptoms include headache, fatigue, decreased energy-activeness, decreased alertness, drowsiness, decreased contentedness, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, irritability, feeling foggy or not clearheaded. These symptoms can last anywhere from two to nine days.

I'm now on on Day 6 of attempting to kick the coffee habit, and I've finally returned to the land of the living (as well as the land of the blogging). While I experienced all of the above listed symptoms to some degree, the overarching manifestation of the mental disorder for me was complete and utter lethargy.

Which is to say that for 6 days I turned into a slug. All housework ceased. All marketing efforts for my novel came to an abrupt halt. My dog went stir-crazy from a lack of walks. I couldn't read: it was too difficult to concentrate on the words. I just lay on the couch and let my daughter run circles around me--even the thought of saving myself from this misery and going to the coffeeshop seemed like too much effort.

This was not quite as awful as it sounds. The irritability inherent to the disorder only came about when I was forced to do something. I felt completely serene, almost Buddhist. Unfortunately, when my wife asked me to take my daughter to the park so that she could get some work done, and I, unable to coax my daughter into a coat, simply gave up and returned to the couch, this caused some irritability, as my wife was angry at me and started clashing dishes together in the sink, increasing my headache but not to the point where I could get off the couch and go outside to escape the noise.

So it's now Day 6 and I think I've come out on the other side. I still feel a little dull, especially in my attempts to write, but I did leave the house this morning. In addition, I feel unusually calm and grounded, have an increased appetite and sex drive, and this morning, for the first time in living memory, I woke up not wanting to die (a wanting to die which could be alleviated by coffee, but which was always there until I'd had a cup).

I'll keep you updated as to how this goes. My writing has been fueled by caffeine for seven years, and I'm not sure what will happen to it should I stay clean...

A Willamette Week reporter interviewed me yesterday about my book. I was, somewhat unuually for me, not at all nervous in the interview. I was, in fact, very atypically myself--flinging my arms about, making self-desparaging comments, going off on wild and unprompted tangents. I'm terrified of how this will turn out. What if someone actually writes about what I'm really like?

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel

Sweet!

A magazine from Japan contacted me yesterday saying they wanted to do a story about me, my book and my blog. What was strange about this request, was that they didn't want to interview me, they just wanted a hi-resolution picture.

If this had been an American magazine, I would have been highly suspicious of such a request, especially if it was a magazine I had never heard of. But because it was Japanese, I immediately shipped off a photo. You see, I don't care what they say about me, I'm just excited that someone is going to write something about me in those cool Japanese characters...

While the brave American media imposed a blackout on Paris Hilton news for, like, a whole three days (OMG! What ballsy journalism!), I've been imposing my own moratorium on speaking about the sticker cover of my book. I did this largely because I didn't want the entire focus of my book to be about what it was wearing, rather than what it was like on the inside.

This morning, though, I came to the realization that I'm doing my readers a disservice. After all, we live in America--it's all about what people are wearing!

The sticker cover for World Leader Pretend has garnered a not insignificant amount of press. Portland's alt weekly, the Willamette Week, first covered it. And the online publishing gossip blog Galley Cat followed up. The Willamette Week interviewed me for their piece, and as is typical of any guilt-ridden ex-Catholic, I pretty much just apologized for creating the sticker in the first place, rather than defending the sentiments behind it or my reasons for doing it.

The Galley Cat article about the World Leader Pretend sticker was juicier. The editor there poked through my old blog entries, and found the August entry where I first addressed the issue of the sticker cover. I was, well, angry at the time, and the blog entry reflected that. Basically, I talked about the "take-it-or-leave-it" ultimatum my editor gave me with the cover, and how totally off and wrong I felt the cover art was. As the Galley Cat article quoted, "Why give a sci-fi cover to a book that isn't sci-fi?"

The Galley Cat article got the wheels turning--a number of the more popular lit-blogs commented on it, and attaboys starting appearing in my email box. Yesterday, Print Magazine wrote me with a request for an interview--we'll see whether they follow up.

Labels: sticker cover, World Leader Pretend

So in the flurry of blogosphere hype about the sticker, I get an email from the cover artist of the book, a person who I had not previously had any contact with.

The cover artist was refreshingly candid in his email about how the cover design decisions about my book went down. What struck me, immediately, was how exactingly it confirmed every suspicion I had about how things work in the graphic design departments of big publishing houses.

Basically, the graphic designer gets a paragraph about the book from the book's editor. (not the manuscript of the book, or an excerpt from the book, or even a personal phone call or visit by the editor, but a paragraph of text written by the editor) The graphic designer then comes up with a few rough designs for the book without any other direction.

These designs are then taken to "the publisher." "The publisher" hasn't read the book either.

Now this notion of "the publisher" is laughably mythic in the publishing world, and every single person I have ever spoken to--agents, editors, graphic designers, even authors--is guilty of perpetuating it. "The publisher" is never given a name--it isn't even clear whether "the publisher" is one person or some sort of board of directors. "The publisher's" only concern is money, and the job of all other parties is to circumnavigate whether or not the book is important and explain to "the publisher" why the book will make money. Finally, "the publisher's" decisions are final, and not, under any circumstances, to be questioned.

So "the publisher" chose one of the covers that the cover artist designed. The artist was not particularly pleased with his work, and the author was screaming bloody murder about it, but the publisher had spoken. The reasons for the publisher's choice had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with money. A sci-fi/fantasy buyer at the biggest national chain bookstore had shown some interest in the book, and he/she was more likely to order a large quantity of the books if it had a sci-fi looking cover. (At least this was the perception, heaven knows whether the sci-fi buyer really cared.)

Labels: sticker cover, World Leader Pretend

Having a book released is like your Prom, or Bar Mitzvah, or your Wedding Day, or any other Coming of Age-type of event. What you are wearing on those days is very important to you. And if your mother or father orders a dress for you, and if your mother or father doesn't bother to tell the designer what your height, weight, or bust size is, and if the dress comes back and it's not at all right for you--it's a carnation pink and makes you look as flat as a pancake--then you are not really going to want to go to your Prom: you are going to want to go back to room and hide.

But then suddenly you have an idea. What if you screw your parents? What if you act prim and proper, agreeing to go to the Prom in that bad fitting dress, and then when your date shows up, you cart along a paper bag, and you ask your date to pull over at a gas station, and in the gas station bathroom you take out a halter top, a short black skirt and some fuck-me boots from the paper bag, and you put these on, and then off you are to your Prom...

Labels: sticker cover, World Leader Pretend

Everything that happened with the cover art for World Leader Pretend was a very simple communication problem. I am relatively certain that if all these levels of fear and secrecy and top-to-bottom management didn't exist, I could have worked directly with the cover artist and come up with a book cover that sold books, suited my book, and even pleased "the publisher." I've seen this artist's work, and when he is given a deeper understanding of the work he is representing he produces fine designs. And I don't think working this way would be less efficient or cost "the publisher" more money--the author's time is free to the publisher, and the artist is less likely to have to start from scratch when the first designs are so terribly off.

In an interesting development, I have been working with the publishing house's Internet marketing coordinator on a MySpace page to represent World Leader Pretend. For whatever reason, this department seems less centralized. The MySpace page that we created was a collaborative effort--both the coordinator and myself had equal access to the MySpace administration functions. He did some stuff; I did some stuff. He did some stuff and I changed some of his stuff. I did some stuff that he changed. Neither one of us had to get approval from an amorphous higher power. We just respected each other's opinions and abilities and got things done.

And the MySpace page is very good...

Labels: sticker cover, World Leader Pretend

My lovely wife pointed out recently how cool it is that the act of putting a sticker cover on my book mirrors the book itself. All the characters in the novel are trying to escape a real life in which they feel that their creative spirit is overly controlled, so they enter a virtual life where they have more creative freedoms. This split-personality is reflected by the novel: a cover was forced on the book that it didn't like, so it escaped to an alternative one...

Labels: sticker cover, World Leader Pretend

I'm aware that the sticker cover fits into the huge international culture jam phenomenon, where people are taking corporate media advertizing and subverting it to make social commentary. It wasn't unintentional on my part.

Labels: sticker cover, World Leader Pretend