{"id":355,"date":"2009-04-09T08:08:36","date_gmt":"2009-04-09T13:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=355"},"modified":"2018-10-31T08:43:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T12:43:40","slug":"back-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=355","title":{"rendered":"Back to work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Launch party update here<\/a> \u2013 with a link to some pics.\u00a0 There are no pictures of the after party, where I camped out in a corner with Lonnie Martin<\/a> and his wife Cindy<\/a>, my landlady, a drunken co-worker from my day job, and a certain strawberry blonde.<\/p>\n

I probably should have wandered around gladhanding folks but\u2026well, it was drinkin\u2019 time!\u00a0 And when it\u2019s drinkin\u2019 time, I don\u2019t socialize.\u00a0 Being out in the sun was bad enough.\u00a0 Usually, during drinkin\u2019 time, I\u2019m naked and sitting in a dark apartment.\u00a0 Or\u2026endlessly watching classic episodes of Doctor Who<\/em> on DVD.<\/p>\n


\nThough, with summer coming, drinkin\u2019 time will move out to the balcony where I\u2019ll sit in my tattered bathrobe and stare down the small number of white people who live in my apartment complex.<\/p>\n

Anyway, now back at work.\u00a0 The book is out so I no longer have a million things I have to do.\u00a0 I\u2019m down to about 873,492 things that I have to do.\u00a0 Which means I have spare time to write for GS again!\u00a0 Except I\u2019ve become obsessed with the Sunday Archives<\/a> and my still-not-ready Friday project<\/a> where I\u2019m going to serialize my sad, hopeless, unmarketable novel.<\/p>\n

The current Sunday Archives feature old fiction from the Dirtyfreaks era, as well as the first incarnation of Greatsociety in 2002.\u00a0 And, as an added bonus, we\u2019ll be moving into stuff I wrote in college\u2026 Because that\u2019s going to be awesome and it\u2019s my goal to drive you to drug abuse.<\/p>\n

A big moment for me will be reprinting\u00a0 In This Darkness<\/em> in June.\u00a0 A short story written in 1995.\u00a0 I paraded it around during the \u201cPurple Publications\u201d phase of my life, where I put together chapbooks using a Xerox machine and a stapler.\u00a0 Sadly, I made more money then than I do at my current publishing venture.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s the lesson?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In This Darkness<\/em> actually got me laid, so, like the Boble, it has stayed on my hard drive.\u00a0 Then, later, the person who married the girl who slept with me because of the story confronted me in a bar.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know who he was at the time, and had long since broken up with the girl.\u00a0 Twisted on Cape Cods (because I\u2019m effete), I just assumed that I had made a new friend.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Namely, the APO Service Fraternity rooms, because those goofballs always had tons of booze and drugs that they gave away.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>.\u00a0 Like, word one, line one, begin!\u00a0 And he stood there, reciting the story by memory.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a warm slice of fucked up crazy right there.<\/p>\n

So hopefully printing In This Darkness<\/em> won\u2019t fucking make the loons come out of the woodwork and rip out my throat.<\/p>\n

Working with my lousy novel is far more emotional, though.\u00a0 My first problem is figuring out where to cut it for serialization.\u00a0 I\u2019ll probably just randomly cut it off at 2000 words each work\u2026 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.\u00a0 Which should excite me but, instead, feels kind of defeating and sad.<\/p>\n

I think, secretly, I hate writing.\u00a0 Just thinking about writing a novel makes me enter the drinkin\u2019 time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Launch party update here \u2013 with a link to some pics.\u00a0 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 …<\/p>\n

Back to work<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[398,127],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gs-news","tag-gs-news","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":930,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions\/930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}