My books at Lulu dot Com are 30% off until January 31.
Good to know.
I hope their marketing team is calling this “30 through 30.”
Everything at Lulu is 30% off until January 31, if you use code SHELFSTOCK305. The link above goes to my Lulu store, where you can get most of my independently published works.
Tsk, tsk. Didn’t you know you could have gotten this made in China for a fraction of the cost, had 2,000 printed, and sold them for a profit? WHAT KIND OF AMERICAN ARE YOU, anyway? The folly of man indeed.
MOBY DICK TYPED ON TOILET PAPER
MY FRIEND AND I ONCE JOKED THAT TOILET PAPER SHOULD HAVE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED ON THEM FOR CERTAIN PEOPLE
ONE DAY, THE CONVERSATION GREW FROM THERE AND TURNED INTO A WAGER THAT I COULDN’T (OR WOULDN’T) BE ABLE TO TYPE OUT A NOVEL ON TOILET PAPER.
YES, WE DID HAVE SOME TIME ON OUR HANDS BUT, AS YOU CAN SEE BY THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS, I WON THE BET.
THERE ARE FOUR FULL ROLLS, ONE ROLL (EPILOGUE) IS ABOUT 1/5 OF A ROLL AND ONE HALF-ROLL
ALL OF THE ROLLS OF TP CAME OUT OF A BRAND NEW — CLEAN — PACKAGE OF 2-PLY COTTONELLE
THEY’VE BEEN HANDLED VERY GINGERLY AND INFREQUENTLY
AS YOU’LL SEE IN THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS, ONE OR TWO ROLLS HAVE A TEAR AT THE BEGINNING
THIS IS WHERE I WAS TRYING TO PULL THE PAPER THROUGH THE TYPEWRITER
I’VE KEPT THIS MOD ODDITY IN A BOX IN A COOL, DRY PLACE FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS
AND HAVE ONLY BROKEN IT OUT TO PROVE TO DOUBTERS THAT I ACTUALLY DID IT
CONSIDERING WHAT IT’S BEEN THROUGH, IT’S IN AMAZING CONDITION
(via eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices)via @powermobydick
THERE IS NO FOLLY OF THE BEASTS OF EARTH WHICH IS NOT INFINITELY OUTDONE BY THE MADNESS OF MEN.
Scooped up yr cat turds, m’lady. Hope you won’t be needing the colander.
Via someecards
![I’ve reached a turning point on this novel I’ve been working on for about seven !#$% years. I realized that all of the difficult scenes are written save one, and that one isn’t necessarily necessary. I’ve sent out a call for first readers and have sent the first eight chapters out into the world to be criticized by some of my brightest, meanest friends. Working on the same project for so long, and rarely was the 100th blank page any easier than the first one. But now when I look at the things that need to be done, it feels like I’ve climed the stairs to the top of a big yellow slide and now I can finally throw my potato sack down for the long, easy glide to the end.I had no idea I was so close because for the last year and a half I’ve been ten-or twenty scenes away from finishing. Just as soon as I would finish one scene I’d realize there was something missing, and my To-Do list would grow. I expect it still will, but none of it feels heavy now, or insurmountable.
2012 is going to be an exciting year for me! If the whole world doesn’t end I’m going to finish this damned novel!
[Image via 2headedsnake: Selena Kimball - From collage novel “The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz”, 2004 (collaboration with Agnieszka Taborska).]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxrbo6u7kp1qbcporo1_500.jpg)
I’ve reached a turning point on this novel I’ve been working on for about seven !#$% years. I realized that all of the difficult scenes are written save one, and that one isn’t necessarily necessary. I’ve sent out a call for first readers and have sent the first eight chapters out into the world to be criticized by some of my brightest, meanest friends. Working on the same project for so long, and rarely was the 100th blank page any easier than the first one. But now when I look at the things that need to be done, it feels like I’ve climed the stairs to the top of a big yellow slide and now I can finally throw my potato sack down for the long, easy glide to the end.I had no idea I was so close because for the last year and a half I’ve been ten-or twenty scenes away from finishing. Just as soon as I would finish one scene I’d realize there was something missing, and my To-Do list would grow. I expect it still will, but none of it feels heavy now, or insurmountable.
2012 is going to be an exciting year for me! If the whole world doesn’t end I’m going to finish this damned novel!
[Image via 2headedsnake: Selena Kimball - From collage novel “The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz”, 2004 (collaboration with Agnieszka Taborska).]
A Blowjob Anecdote as Described by HP Lovecraft
Last night on Glee, one of the male leads announced he was going to enlist. Glee is as campy as it is liberal, so it was expected that hunky but nosey teacher Will Shooster would try to stop Finn from becoming another dead hero, like his father. I was expecting the typical “don’t do it son; it’s not worth it” speech. The twist they threw down was much more honest.
In the scene, Finn’s mother reveals that his dad didn’t die in the war after all. In some fine acting from Romy Rosemont, she says, “I don’t know if he did something or saw something or just lost his way but…he broke.”
It was just a matter of time before the fiction of today began increasingly to deal with the plight of traumatized veterans and their impact on society. Post WWI we had Virginia Woolf’s shell shocked vets, while much of E.E. Cummings poetry centered around his own struggle with life during wartime and we saw a slew of post-Vietnam characters in 80s movies. The same theme is returning to our stories as more soldiers return from Iraq and Aphganistan. More writers will know vets who’ve lost their way, or will hear of their stories from others and want to write about them. Drug addiction amongst veterans is always higher than the general population—it’s a population that’s not scared of the dangers and often much in need of “better living through chemistry.” Moreover, often their position overseas gives them easy access to drugs.This scene in Glee where we find out Finn’s father died of a drug overdose could just as easily have been written about Vietnam. Yet because drug addiction amongst soldiers is seldom talked about it makes me wonder if the writer behind this scene knew a veteran in this situation.
Either way, we’re going to see more of this. In 2000, a show about bootleggers wouldn’t have focused on returing veterans. Today Boardwalk Empire is so interwined with the story of psychotic WWI vets that it states them as the cause of the bootlegging gangsterism the show covers. What other shows are there that deal with PTSD and drug use among returning veterans? I’d like to ponder this more. The plight of the returning soldier says “War is hell” better than any flag-waving or flag-burning speech ever does.
I wonder what this is from.
(Source: cine-)
It’s not the first Hunter S. Thompson “professional” letter I’ve shared here. I wonder how many there are floating about.
Hunter S. Thomson to Mike Peterson in response to a piece he submitted to the magazine in 1971. (via Dean Praetorious)
Every Day Fiction - The once a day flash fiction magazine.
This site features a new short story every day. They also have a similar site for poetry.
Nicholas Carr has an article in The Wall Street Journal about the malleability of e-books. Because a digital edition can be perpetually edited, it is never officially finished. He muses on how intrusive school boards and dictators will tinker in otherwise “published” e-books.
The section that interested me most (as I’ve pondered the article’s subject before) was this:
What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, publishers may soon be awash in market research. They’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book.
I can absolutely see publishers doing this. It could create a world where books are tailored to fit a majority, in the same way market testing has resulted in a bevy of cookie-cutter movies. On the other hand, one could argue that this isn’t so different from the modern writers’ workshop.
One issue the article doesn’t delve into is how editable e-books can encourage more collaborative reading. One could imagine people trading versions of the Bible annotated by Christopher Hitchens or popular novels with erotic fan-fic written in, or copies of The Da Vinci Code with embedded photos of the art mentioned in the story. You’d end up with a variety of specially named editions floating around.
This would all serve to add to the notion of the physical book as a collectors item. With e-books as ephemeral, the printed book may continue to exist as the authority on what the final, official draft is. In the future when print runs decrease dramatically, having a personal copy of the rare, unchanging, printed book will give its owner a certain authority on the text and having a personal library will again become a status symbol.
If you don’t know who this fellow is but you loved Blade Runner or Scanner Darkly, then you do know and you should check this out.
Open Culture rounded up 11 Philip K. Dick short stories that you can download for free - legally. It includes his first published story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” which is also the source for the illustration above.
Future is Fiction, Best of 2011
My BEST posts of 2011
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Happy New Year!
