Back to work

Launch party update here – with a link to some pics.  There are no pictures of the after party, where I camped out in a corner with Lonnie Martin and his wife Cindy, my landlady, a drunken co-worker from my day job, and a certain strawberry blonde.

I probably should have wandered around gladhanding folks but…well, it was drinkin’ time!  And when it’s drinkin’ time, I don’t socialize.  Being out in the sun was bad enough.  Usually, during drinkin’ time, I’m naked and sitting in a dark apartment.  Or…endlessly watching classic episodes of Doctor Who on DVD.

Though, with summer coming, drinkin’ time will move out to the balcony where I’ll sit in my tattered bathrobe and stare down the small number of white people who live in my apartment complex.

Anyway, now back at work.  The book is out so I no longer have a million things I have to do.  I’m down to about 873,492 things that I have to do.  Which means I have spare time to write for GS again!  Except I’ve become obsessed with the Sunday Archives and my still-not-ready Friday project where I’m going to serialize my sad, hopeless, unmarketable novel.

The current Sunday Archives feature old fiction from the Dirtyfreaks era, as well as the first incarnation of Greatsociety in 2002.  And, as an added bonus, we’ll be moving into stuff I wrote in college… Because that’s going to be awesome and it’s my goal to drive you to drug abuse.

A big moment for me will be reprinting  In This Darkness in June.  A short story written in 1995.  I paraded it around during the “Purple Publications” phase of my life, where I put together chapbooks using a Xerox machine and a stapler.  Sadly, I made more money then than I do at my current publishing venture.  Maybe that’s the lesson?  I should fully embrace GS and publish the Boble and all the current and archived weird rants, using some local printer at the cheapest rates, and then sell them via mail-order.

In This Darkness actually got me laid, so, like the Boble, it has stayed on my hard drive.  Then, later, the person who married the girl who slept with me because of the story confronted me in a bar.  I didn’t know who he was at the time, and had long since broken up with the girl.  Twisted on Cape Cods (because I’m effete), I just assumed that I had made a new friend.  This was 1996 and I was a week away from graduation so, like every other week, I had attached myself to a mobile drunken party that went from bar to bar and, when things got late, retired to the dorms.  Namely, the APO Service Fraternity rooms, because those goofballs always had tons of booze and drugs that they gave away.

My new friend joined the group, and about 17 of us were drunkenly lurching through small town streets, up hills, and through forests to get to the dorms where, as I stole and began to guzzle a plastic bottle of vodka, he began quoting In This Darkness.  Like, word one, line one, begin!  And he stood there, reciting the story by memory.

It took me about three minutes to recognize the story, at which point I stopped him with a healthy WTF and he told me who he was, and how that story has also influenced him, and how he and my ex talk about it often.

That’s a warm slice of fucked up crazy right there.

So hopefully printing In This Darkness won’t fucking make the loons come out of the woodwork and rip out my throat.

Working with my lousy novel is far more emotional, though.  My first problem is figuring out where to cut it for serialization.  I’ll probably just randomly cut it off at 2000 words each work… But, then, as I read through it, I find myself consumed with the need to go back and rip its guts out, then rewrite everything.  Which should excite me but, instead, feels kind of defeating and sad.

I think, secretly, I hate writing.  Just thinking about writing a novel makes me enter the drinkin’ time.