by john | Jul 20, 2009 | Writing
You might be wondering why, after publishing 39 installments of a novel on this little website, I would decide to start off my self-publishing life by publishing a collection of short stories and poetry, and not hold off until the novel happens. Well, some days so am I, but here’s how my thinking ran. Having never published anything on lulu.com before, or on any other self-publishing format (and the word publishing is extremely hard to type this morning for some reason) I decided to publish the collection of randomness first to see how it all looks. I wanted to see how easy the ISBN process is, to see what it was going to look like in a final product, and to see what the turnaround time on orders is.
And I’m not finished editing the novel yet. Plus, there are a couple of events coming up in Charlotte that I wanted to participate in, and it would be handy to have published examples of my work for those events. I’ll tell you more about them as they develop. So I went ahead and dusted off the small collection and went to press. I’m not done with Choices, but hopefully I will be in the next few weeks, and then I can have it printed and ready to go early fall. And if enough of you buy the current book, I won’t even have to go too deep into hock to pay for it :). Actually, the lulu.com stuff is really affordable, and the royalty setup is much better than traditional publishing (although you obviously expect to sell fewer copies). So it’s an experiment, let’s see if we can make anything blow up!
So buy my book. You can use your debit card on PayPal if you like.
by john | Jul 18, 2009 | Writing
So if you’re paying waaaayyyyy too much attention to the layout of this here blog, you’ve noticed a new button over on the sidebar, which says that my collection of poetry and short stories is now available for purchase!
I know, I’ve been working on Choices so much that I almost forgot I had poems and short stories, too. But I do, and the first collection is now available from Lulu.com (or it will be in a couple of weeks – I’m dealing with ISBN numbers and stuff like that right now). But you can order it in hard copy right now for $12 plus shipping, or for download for $5.
Or, if you’d like to have a signed and numbered limited edition, you can order that here. I’m going to do a limited run of 100 copies that I’ll sign and number, and the $15 will cover shipping to you via US Mail as well. So please tell all your friends, and don’t forget – books make great gifts, too! Given that shipping off Lulu is kinda spendy if you’re only buying one book, and that I gt a publisher’s discount plus a quantity discount for buying a big box of books, it’ll actually be cheaper for you to go with the pre-order and help me defray the costs of publishing.
I know, I’m a dirty pirate whore. Get over it.
by john | May 28, 2009 | Writing
I realized upon looking through my poetry that I’ve written a lot of poems about getting dumped. Now it’s been a long time since I’ve been dumped. Suzy and I have been married for almost 14 years now, and we’ve been together for about 15, but some of those old memories come flooding back when it comes time to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be). And besides, right now for me it’s about the exercise of writing, the discipline of writing something every day (I do give myself weekends off) that leads me to dredge up old memories and spew them onto paper.
I’ve written a ton in the past couple of years, almost 400 articles for PokerNews, at an average of 600-700 words per article, but most of that stuff all followed a formula. This guy bet, this guy raised, all the money went in and the cards looked like this. This guy scooped a huge pot whie this guy got his dreams shattered. That kind of thing. The exercise of writing poetry and/or fiction every day is something I haven’t done in a long time, so even though I’m dredging up a bunch of old stuff, and even though a fair chunk of what I’m turning out is pure crap, it’s important enough for me to continue with the exercise. So that’s what you’re getting, random spewage from my writing exercises. Some of it hasn’t been bad. Unpolished, but not awful. Some of it has been crap. You’ll have that. I’m trying to get the muscles working again more than anything, so welcome, I hope you enjoy the ride.
