I know I am taking on too many projects but I keep wondering about doing some sort of crowd sourced novel. Or at least a public novel. Writing for the crowd, in front of the crowd, sort of thing. I don’t have time for this, of course. I know I don’t.

So of course I really want to do it.

That’s the thing about writing. You do it in private. I’ve seen artists draw in public, and people watch them, fascinated. I’ve watched painters hold entire rooms enraptured for hours at a time. Dancers, singers, musicians all do it on a regular basis. Artists do. They interact, live, if they choose, with their audience. It is, frankly, quite awesome.

Writers – not so much. Ever watched someone write? Yeah, fascinating stuff, that.

Watch the amazing hunched over pose!

See fingers type!

Listen to muttered curses!

Tangible excitement, I tell you. For seriously. And so performing in front of a crowd is an exciting idea, to me. The closest I get is writing “live,” doing a serial novel online with feedback.

Of course, there never is feedback and doing it for random donations ends up with no money. That’s not bitching, just stating the facts. You can make it work if you have a wide audience and get linked to by half of creation. And if you do? That’s fucking awesome. That ain’t me. So it would be a waste of time, resources, energy and a lesson in ever-increasing disappointment.

And yet.

I’m tempted.

At least 80% of this article was written live and on the scene at the Hunter S. Thompson signing in NYC on Weds Feb 7, 2003^th using a Handspring Visor and an attachable keyboard. As such, any factual mistakes are mine and mine only.

So here we are … hella long line sitting on the damn floor of the B&N while we wait for this shindig to start the fuck up …

It’s 5:25 now, HST gets here at 7 or so. They just told us the are already almost out of wrist bands. Yeah it’s a fucking rave here alright … you need a bright green wristband to get something signed. We were smart though. One item signed per person and I had my copy of the book and got one for Unrepentant at the Strand (Laszlo got his book there too) so the book itself was cheaper. which is fairly spiffy – the B&N folk looked like the might care if only they weren’t swamped by fuckers waiting for the good Doctor to show up.

Next to us is a very very nice guy – clocking in at about 6 foot goddamn with a damn cool beard. He went and pissed and came back with coffee and a cookie and decided to offer it around. I love this town I tell you, people are fucking well friendly. The line keeps breaking up, there goes a woman (who let us know she will be out of town March 5th till the19th – by accident, she was on her phone) and she is off to the bathroom too.

Behind me someone asked a friend “I wonder if he’ll sign this” followed by a chuckle. I hope no trou were dropped.
Read the rest of this entry »

The easy way to put it is: “If you want to be a writer, write.” But the easy way leaves out all sorts of little moments. It’s still true, and at the core that’s the secret above all others, but it doesn’t say nearly everything. How could it?

I won’t get into a discussion about professional vs. hobbyist writers and how much money makes you a pro and “I’m a writer because I say I am and I like to write” vs “I’m a writer because I do it for a living” or any of that. I don’t care about those lines just this second. They have nothing to do with this.

No, instead, if you want to be a writer, for whatever value you are going to assign to it, you need to write. Constantly. As much as possible. My “as much as possible” will be different from yours, sure, but that doesn’t matter as much as just doing the work does. If you want to be a writer and you talk about it and go through the motions and know everything but don’t actually do any writing? You ain’t one.

But I mentioned it missed the little moments, right? What are those, then. Well they’re probably exactly what you think they are. So you write, and that’s that. Sure. But keep in mind that if you write a lot… well…

* You’ll never be satisfied with anything you do. Oh, you’ll learn to let things go but nothing will ever be perfect, and even if it gets close, when you look back at it in a year or so it will seem worse and worse. This will never end or ease up.

* You’ll learn the horrible, nightmarish answer to “Where do your ideas come from.” No, really. People ask that all the time and everyone who creates anything kind of rolls their eyes and passes it off but we all know. Ideas come from everything, everywhere. It’s a muscle, your idea generator, and once you build it up enough you learn that ideas are cheap, because they’re endless and they will never stop. Everything is fodder. They won’t shut up. Ever. Might sound like a pot of gold to you now but it is a constant screaming insistence in your brain after a while. Hooray.

* Everyone will assume you’re not doing anything. Doesn’t matter. If you write people will think you’re sitting idle. Or not doing anything important. Thinking is a large part of the job. Kinda crucial. But if you’re sitting and staring at a wall most people don’t get that, for fuck’s sake, you’re working!

* You’ll get to spend endless amounts of time producing things that take a few minutes or hours to read. Yeah. I spent about a year on a novel, from writing to proofing and so on. Took people a day to read. You’ll want it to take as long to read as it did to write and that doesn’t work. Hey, how long does it take to write, record and produce a song? More than the 3 minutes it took me to listen to it. Argh.

Yeah it’s a ball of laughs, I tell you. Of course you also get to play with something so base-level human it predates fire. Telling stories is how we learn, it’s how we remember and share information. It is the root of all tool use and learning. There is nothing more primal than the ability to tell stories.

So for all the crap, still pretty nifty, no?

I have issues with identity sometimes. Not gender, sexual, political, sports-fan, or Clark Kent – those I got down. I’m good. We settled those years ago, each one in its own time. No, I’m talking professionally.

I don’t make my living writing. I do make some money at it, however. I have three books out. I still sometimes have problems calling myself a writer. That’s just me. I’ll call someone else a writer for having done far less. Not that other people are less than me, but I hold myself to some sort of stupid level that doesn’t make any sense.

So sometimes when I’m asked what I do I’ll say I’m a writer, but I always feel like I am lying. As if somehow I’ll be found out and people will point and laugh and explain, in carefully chosen words, exactly why I am not a writer. And I’ll have to agree with them. Because I don’t feel like a writer. I’m just a guy who writes a lot.

I know how stupid that sounds. What else is a writer but a person who writes a lot? I don’t know. There’s some indefinable thing that eludes me to allow me to fully 100% consider myself a writer.

It gets even stranger when you start breaking down what I do. Though I may not call myself a writer often, if I’m being honest with myself, I find that I bristle when other people refer to me as a blogger. Well what the fuck, Batman?

I write webcomics, I write multiple online columns, prose books, and, yes Virginia it’s true, I blog. A lot. So what’s wrong with the term “blogger”? I know plenty of bloggers. I love many of them. Some of them I want to touch in inappropriate ways. And then maybe blog about it. But I bristled the other night when someone called me a blogger.

Not because I somehow felt I was better than that you need to understand, but because it is, in my mind, such a small, disposable piece of what I write. And truth be told I do consider the blogging disposable. It’s stuff that isn’t enough to turn into a column, or put in a comic or novel. It’s little slices of life that I talk to about with my friends and funny things I find on the Internet and in my, obviously diseased, brainmeats I consider it to be the least that I do.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t important or that I don’t care about it. I do care. I take care with every entry and consider it an important way to talk with people I wouldn’t talk with otherwise. And yet? Disposable. I can’t explain it. I don’t look down on it, I just don’t elevate it to the same level as my other writing. Which isn’t fair, I suppose, but it’s honest.

And while I feel like I am somehow insulting everyone I know who does blog and does consider themselves a blogger, I don’t mean it that way. I truly don’t. I just, for myself and only myself, consider everything else I write less important than my prose fiction. I probably write it the least, the least output of everything I do, but that’s also because it is the most work and takes the longest.

So now let’s add those two together. I won’t call myself a writer but if you call me a subset of writer I get annoyed. Yeah, that ends anywhere but good, doesn’t it? I dunno. I’m trying to unpack this all myself. I’ve spent the last decade writing to get to where I am and some days it feels like I’m only a step along a road. Which, actually, is fantastic and I love it and I love all the stuff I get to do. But I’m not where I want to be, yet, and I know I may never get there.

That won’t stop me but it does mean that sometimes stupid semantics will trip me up, simply because I ain’t that bright, you know? I’m some guy, from New York, who happens to like mouthing off and has a few platforms to do it with.

Fuck. I don’t know. I may have just insulted a large group of people, made myself come off like both an arrogant prick and a complete mental case (not that either of those are wrong mind you) and come to no real conclusion at the end of the day.

Hooray!

Look, I tell you what. I’m gonna shut the fuck up now. I should be working on a column or something, I’m sure, right about now, and day jobbing and … thinking of something good to post here later that isn’t just mindless prattle about “woe is me I am not considered to be…” You know what before I go let me rant for one more second.

You know what I’m not? I’m not an artist. I’m not. And I’m glad of it. I’m very much a craftsman. Writing is a job, it isn’t creating art. Not for me. You may be an artist. That’s fine, go with God. I ain’t. I build furniture, make cars, you know what I mean? I don’t believe in muses, waiting for inspiration, or that I am committing acts of art. Again, that’s just me. I just put words in specific orders to achieve specific effects. It’s a job. A job that doesn’t pay well, but hey.

Wandering again. Anyway. I should be doing other stuff that isn’t this. That is, in all likelihood, more interesting to everyone reading this. So I’m'a go do that.

You guys be good to each other, ya hear?

So I have this new column at MamaPop.com. But, you ask, what is it? Well they asked what I wanted to do and so I thought. I ran through all the options for what I could do for an ongoing column at a pop culture website that they didn’t already have other people doing (probably better than I could) and came up blank for a second. So I did what I always do in those situations – look back and see if there is something I did once upon a time that I would want to take out and adapt a bit and do again because I loved it and had to put it away last time.

And I found something. Details of the new/old thing are below the cut…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been writing stuff (columns and posting fiction and such) on the intardwebs for over a decade now. One thing has not changed – people don’t like to comment. It’s true. Now let me make a few quick exceptions to this: places like LiveJournal where a chunk of the point is commenting for many people see more comments. Obvious but true. Still, most people don’t comment. If you have 400 people read a blog entry you’ll get one, maybe two comments, sometimes.

I’m as guilty as everyone else. We tend to treat these things as disposable entertainment, and they mostly are! That’s fine. I can understand the reflex. When we’re cruising around, reading things and moving to the next thing we don’t stop and say anything. Part of that is due to a brain tick that treats this medium like TV or radio. Yup. Sure.

Except it isn’t. And as a writer let me tell you that a comment is a glorious thing. It lets the writer know that someone read their work and thought about it just long enough to say something back. Does it have to be a lengthy discourse on the nature of man as it relates to the 5th Crusade? No. Unless, of course the post was about… well you know.

The same holds true of book reviews on sites like Amazon. If you read a book by a smaller author and enjoy it, please consider reviewing it on the site you bought it from. More reviews tells people who just stumble on the book that folks are reading it. That actually makes a difference as people are more likely to buy a book that other people have read and enjoyed than one that there seems to be an air of silence about.

Talking back is important. Letting people know that you’re out there is important. Like I said, I am a perpetrator of this as well, often enough. Sometimes you read something and like it and can’t think of anything to say other than “I liked this” and who wants to do that? You want to leave something pithy and memorable. Don’t worry about it so much.

Around the time I started a column, a year or so ago, I was told by the site runner that I shouldn’t expect comments. I told him I was well versed in shouting into the darkness and didn’t expect any. And generally I don’t. That’s the way of it. But I wish it wasn’t. I can think of three entries around the internet right now that I want to comment on. And I’ll try to get to that soon. There’s always something else, though, if you don’t strike while the proverbial iron is proverbially hot. My proverbs always end up wrinkled that way.

So when you read something and enjoy it, stop and comment. It doesn’t have to be gushing praise – disagree, reason, have a meaningful discourse for a change. Or just tell the author you enjoyed it. It can make someone’s day and give them reason to try harder and write even better for the people reading.

And when you read a book and enjoy it leave a review. An honest one, no matter what you thought of the book, so the author knows people are reading it and other readers know it too. It helps sales, honestly. And that’s a great and simple gift to give. And yes if you’ve read Stays Crunchy in Milk, I happily ask you to review it on Amazon or where ever.

We like to talk about community, on the intardwebs. About how we’re all here for one another, and how we care and support each other. So let’s try and show that a bit more often in the simplest of ways. It’s a major part of how you build an actual community – communication with one another.

I write a lot of stuff. Among that stuff is generally a column or two. Been doing that for ten years now, it’s habit. I feel like I need a column, now, or I get lost. Recently (as in this weekend) I agreed to start a new column on MamaPop.com real soon now. More on that column in a day or so.

Let me adjust that a bit. When I say “agreed” I mean “would have possibly begged.” Is it because they’re a great site? Well, yes. Is it because they do the sort of thing I enjoy and I wanted to get a piece of that? Yup. But it was more than that.

I had heard about MamaPop from Maria who helped open a door to their agreeing to do a review of Crunchy. So, like anywhere I expect a bit of judgment from, I checked them out. I got the feeling, instantly, that good or bad the review would be fair and honest. That goes a long way with me. It goes further when I get to know the people behind the words. I was lucky enough to strike up a bit of friendship with Aiden over there and we had a blast emailing back and forth.

Eventually he asked me to be a part of Polite fictions, a round-robin fiction experiment. I readily agreed, enjoying the work they’d done. Fine, whatever. But see a funny thing happened on the way to the forum – I met a set of amazing people. All of them. Each and every person who worked with Polite Fictions was a person I would happily buy a drink and spend endless hours laughing and talking with. They didn’t even blink before they made me feel welcome and threw me into the mix as if I had known them for years.

And that’s what it felt like.

So now I will be working for both sites (which share some staff) and the folks at MamaPop that I didn’t know treated me the same as the PF folks did and … Christ do you know how rare this is?

A lot has been going on this week in my email (Hey, Aaron) and over other channels about being paid for what you love, and that is important and key and special. One day I hope to get paid enough for my writing to do only that with my time. But even then I’d work for these two sites for free.

The people make it worth my time. They make me want to make them proud of my work. I’ve driven a few of them nuts by being nervous about a blob of fiction or an idea – because I want to be worth their time, to be as good and open and friendly and smart as they each are.

That’s so rare. So rare it hurts. I mean, let me quote a few bits from a blog entry by Sweetney, the woman who runs MamaPop (read the whole entry here):

“When I speak of the site, and in particular of the people who write for it, I often tear up like a sap, because I feel so incredibly lucky to be working with these brilliant and hugely talented people, and I am ridiculously proud of what we’ve made together, of what we make every day together. I feel an almost maternal affection for and protectiveness over the writers. They are, as I said, family. And yes, I mean that in the most Tony Soprano way possible.”

“At BlogHer this past weekend, MamaPop threw an amazing party. And here’s a secret I’ll share with you: I didn’t put all of that together to impress and entertain the general BlogHer population — though I’m incredibly glad people had a great time, and that the online community we’re a part of embraced The Joy of Unicorns. The whole time I was planning the party, making arrangements and purchases, I was thinking about the MamaPop writers. That party was for them, and if there’s anyone I wanted to ‘impress,’ it was them. Right before the party Friday night, all of the writers met up at the Chi Bar in the Sheraton, and I handed out some small gifts, and teared up saying a few flailing words about how awesome they are, and about how thankful I am to have each of them in my work-life and in my life-life. And at some point I told them that the whole thing, the party, all of it, was for them, about them, and that I’d just invited 450 of our closest friends to enjoy it with us. That’s how I felt. That, for me, was the truth of it. That was my motivation.”

I remember when I ran TwoHeadedCat all those years ago, my first website/magazine writing thing, that’s how I felt. It’s the best feeling in the world. How could I not align myself with these caring, kind, insane, goat-molesting, hysterical, intelligent people? It isn’t about money. I don’t write for money, I want the money to allow me to write more, not to retire, I write out of love for communicating, for telling stories and for finding other lights in the darkness by flicking a flashlight on and off in quiet desperation.

I truly hope each and every one of you is as lucky as I am in finding a piece of your tribe that you didn’t know what missing. And to each and every person who works at PF and MamaPop … I only hope I do you guys proud every moment I can.

Adam P. Knave and D.J. Kirkbride are proud to introduce SHAZUM!

Yeah, you may all know of Captain Marvel, who says the magic word Shazam and turns into a great hero but have you met SHAZUM? I don’t think that you have. While Captain Marvel is powered by the wizard Shazam he gets the following powers that make up his name:

Solomon – wisdom
Hercules – strength
Atlas – stamina
Zeus – power
Achilles – courage
Mercury – speed

Well SHAZUM is a bit different. Let’s take a look at the world’s greatest hero of all time, shall we?

SHAZUM (pronounced Shaz-um) is normally mild-manned Bo Jesse Luke Bobby Steven Hosanna Williams Jr., lumberjack enthusiast and spunky reporter for the Little Creek Daily Woodland Report and Fishing Guide. One day, while exploring a cave that smelled of rotting bear, Bo found himself in a magical tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a fisherman. He was, in fact a ghost fisherman, the last vestiges of an ancient spirit come to Earth to protect us. He found Bo worthy, because, duh, he can catch a really big trout more often than not, and decided that the Earth had found its new protector. Instructing Bo in saying his magic word and name the Ghost Fisherman vanished, leaving to fish the shores of the dead no more. Partly because Bo scared off the fish what with his human foot clomping and all. But that isn’t important!

No!

For with the mighty slow drawl of SHAZUM! Bo summons his power from the ether! The sky darkens, clouds swirl and the unmistakable sound of a beer can fizzing open rips through the air!

KKT-SHHHHHHHHTTK!

There stands SHAZUM! There stands your hero! But what powers, you ask, does SHAZUM have and where does he get them? We’ll tell you!

Schlitz – drunken ability to withstand pain
Habanero – flame throwing
Alabama – tractor pulling skills
Zima – sometimes you run out of Schlitz, son
Unicorn – magic
Monkeys – agility

He stands at the ready! Vigilant, wise, caring and properly versed in classical languages. He is SHAZUM! And he is here to protect you. So we say to you, panic-ridden populace, fear not for SHAZUM will protect you with his agile, magic flame throwing abilities. And his denim cape.

SHAZUM!

Say it with me now!

SHAZUM!

One of the things I worry about, as a writer, is that I am doing it all wrong. Not the writing. That I have a grip on. Far from the greatest, far from the worst, I’m doing all right and I work on getting better all the time. No I have the basic concern that there is a right way to build a career and I’m not doing anything close to that.

See, in any writing field (well, outside film and kinda outside comics) you build an audience by sticking to one type of thing. That isn’t to say that everything you do is the same, far from it. Still you find a genre, a type, a tone and you tend to stick pretty close to it in order to build a fan base. Which is fair and fine. Because people listening like [a thing] and they want to purchase [a thing] from you.

Look, 99% of the people who listen to U2 expect an album that sounds like what they consider U2 to be. This is a lot of why Pop and Zooropa were not well received. They’re actually decent albums. But they “aren’t U2.” And so people walk away from them without giving them a fair chance. Of course, new people who aren’t generally fans of “normal U2″ don’t buy them because they don’t like “normal U2″ so why should this be different?

So many writers (prose or song etc) find a mode of story telling that they are good at and then work in that area. Sometimes they do it because that truly is what they love the best and the mode they want to work in the most and sometimes it is because, having established the start of something in that mode they now use it to keep consistency.

And this is fine and right and makes a lot of sense. Never think I am putting it down. I just don’t work that way. Partly by choice and partly by nature. Let me poke at both of those and explain.

See, part of it is by choice, I admit. I like a lot of different things. I like horror and SF and fantasy and mystery and … I want to work on all of them. I want to delve deeply into each mode and not ever have to make something fit into an established structure frame if I’m not in the mood. It is willful and not always, in the strictest sense, smart.

The other half is just that I don’t have [a thing]. I am not that lucky or fortunate or disciplined. Pick your reason. I have what I have and that’s it.

The offshoot is that right this second I have a book of mostly horror short stories, an action/adventure book and a pop culture parable out for purchase. And people who like one, well, the others might not be their thing at all. Which leaves me with no hook except “Fuck if even I know what you’ll get next,” and that isn’t the best of sales hooks.

It makes it hard for people to be fans, because they might be fans of [Thing 1] but not [Thing 2] and since most other experience is teaching them that people have [a thing] suddenly having shifts makes them leave. Making it hard for people to follow your work is kinda aggressively not the point. Wooops.

None of this makes me cool or special or better or worse or stupid. It just is. There are pros and cons to everything and this is just where I’m at. But it’s kinda of odd to realize that, in a certain light, I’m setting myself up to fail. And yet if I do this long enough I have a chance to grow a fan base that doesn’t want only [a thing] and is willing to explore with me. And that would be awesome. It’s just an incredibly hard, strange road without many people on it.

And sometimes it is frustrating. And I’ll see people who have it different (not better or worse) and who do happen to do [a thing] and flail and feel bad and generally ARGH! about it for a minute or two. Because there are days I want that instead of what I have.

But then I remember that I like what I do and I shut up and get back to work. Still. Makes me think.

Monday night I was at the bar. While there I hung out a bit with Pete. Pete’s an amazing guitarist who plays with the blues band Monday nights (as well as a few other nights). He isn’t the world’s best player, but he’s really damned good. I’ve heard him play everything from Hendrix to Tom Waits and make it work.

We were outside, it was far cooler out there, and hanging out, talking. We do that sometimes, since Pete shows up randomly between 8 and 9 and doesn’t go on until 10. Anyway. I was talking about how right now my life is slightly consumed by trying to sell copies of the new book and Pete looked at me and laughed. “Book sales don’t matter, not really, do they?” he asked and I thought about it.

I mean they matter because the more books I sell the better the book is doing and the more people who read it and hopefully enjoy it and then the next book can do better and so on. But that wasn’t what Pete meant.

He went on for a bit about how he does what he loves. He plays guitar. All day. Every day. Sometimes he teaches people to play, or has a small gig somewhere, or is just practicing. It doesn’t matter. Playing that guitar is what Pete loves above all else and so he does it all the time. “There were 30 years where no one tended to pay me. I still played. You still write,” and he smirked at me again. “If this book does horribly, will you write the next one?”

“Of course,” I said before I could think about it.

“That’s just it,” he told me. We both know it can be soul crushing constant work. You’ll work harder doing what you love than any other time in your life. But it’s the good kind of work that is worth doing. And when it squeezes you dry for a bit you get up and keep going. Because it’s simply what you do.

“I go to get a gig and they ask if they can see me play and they try to make me feel like they’re paying me to play,” he said. I didn’t get it. I mean of course they paid him to play, like they pay me to write. But no. “They couldn’t afford to pay me to play. I wouldn’t ask them to. I play anyway. They pay me for my time.”

They pay him for his time.

I thought about it and he’s right. I don’t get paid for my writing. You can’t afford me. You can pay me for my time, doing this isn’t instant, but that’s about it. Because you can’t pay for my joy. No one can afford that, and, as Pete said, I wouldn’t ask someone to. It’s mine and I do it because I do it. But I’ll happily let you give me money to do it over there as opposed to over here, ya dig?

“They think, what, the pain in my playing, the blue, that comes from needing money? They don’t get pain. Life creates pain. I play it.” Damn, Pete was on fire Monday night. And I admit, I felt kinda special. Here was a guy I respected for his talent and his character, taking me into his club. The people who work it, live it, and bleed it. That felt good. Because sure, I hope like hell the new book sells. It would make it easier to move forward. But at the end of the day if it doesn’t I’m still writing the next one and the one after that.

You can’t pay me to play.