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Monday, August 26, 2013

Book Blurbs

Right about now is when I should be getting blurbs for Badge. You know what blurbs are: those quotes from various writers on the backs of novels telling you how great the novel is. Getting blurbs involves going out into the world and asking writers to read and blurb your novel. I got a few for Ghost Notes. They're an industry standard. If you want to do everything you can to sell your novel, you get book blurbs.

But I'm not getting blurbs for Badge.

Why Not? Three reasons.

1) I don't want to waste favors with my writer friends on blurbs.

Writers never have enough time to do what they want to do--which is write--and I don't want to exhaust these folks with my requests. I'd rather ask them to help promote Badge in other ways, should they be inclined, by reviewing it, or by doing a reading with me when I'm in their town.

2) Many argue blurbs don't help sell novels.

Hey, if you know Stephen King and can get him to blurb your book, go for it. I know many writers more successful than me who could probably be cajoled into blurbing Badge, but I don't know if their seals of approval will generate enough sales to merit bugging them in the first place.

3) There's something about blurb culture that's tired.

Maybe it's me, but whenever I see a writer's blurb on a novel, all I can think of is this poor writer having to drum up enthusiasm for this work out of loyalty or guilt or because she doesn't know how to say no, and not because she's genuinely interested in the work. That might be my projection, but it also might contain some truth. I've never blurbed someone else's book--self-published writers typically aren't sought after for their opinions--but should I have to do it someday, I can't help but imagine it as a kind of task. I tend to read slowly, so maybe that's part of the reason why it seems cumbersome. The temptation to read just the first chapter and scare up a quick sentence or two must be pretty strong.

Anyway, deciding to forgo blurbs is another great argument for self-publishing. If Badge were being traditionally published, I don't think I'd have a choice.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.



Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $10.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

Monday, August 19, 2013

New Website

I just redesigned my website, which makes updating much easier, but I could use your help troubleshooting, especially if you're viewing on an iPhone. So, if you're inclined, head on over and tell me how to make it better.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.



Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

Monday, August 12, 2013

My New Essay on Public Readings up at the Weeklings!!!

Wherein I manage to slag everything I'll be adopting in six months to promote Badge.

Speaking of Badge, I finished the final draft of it this past week (seven years in the making), and it's currently in the hands of its proofreader. I expect a proofread copy back in a week. Then I have to format it, Kel and I have to finish the cover, and it's off to the printer. I should have a copy in my greedy little hands by October, which means I'll be taunting you with it via the Internet during the last quarter of the year. Yes, torture is why I do this.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.



Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.

Monday, August 5, 2013

My Review of Rock Novel WISE YOUNG FOOL by Sean Beaudoin

As a teenager, I wasn’t much of a reader. Sure, I read the sports page, the occasional rock biography, but reading novels meant an assignment leveled at me by a teacher. Homework. These required books—A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind—offered nothing to appeal to my adolescent fantasies, which revolved around wanting to be awesome musician, play in a band, put out records and be chased by groupies. I wanted to be a rock star. Sorry, Madame Defarge, but Gene Simmons wins every time.

In the 1980s, the vast divide between books and rock music couldn’t have been wider. I suspect pop culture was seen as a threat to the vaunted world of books, the barbarians at the gate of The Important Stuff. David Lee Roth had a thousand times more influence on the kids of my era than Holden Caulfield, much less Natty Bumpo, and this no doubt pissed off some people with elbow patches on their suit coats. I of course loved that it pissed them off.

Still, when I turned eighteen and took my first lit class in college, I fell in love with A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five. These seemed more rock and roll to me than rock and roll, so much so I regretted not having started my fiction life earlier. Had Sean Beaudoin’s Wise Young Fool existed back then, it might have meant an entirely different launching point for my book life.

I’m a big fan of Beaudoin’s work at the websites like The Weeklings, and his first foray into the rock novel seemed the perfect time to jump into his longer efforts. Much of Beaudoin’s verbal talent is in full force in this novel. Here, the author renders the hottest girl in protagonist Ritchie Sudden’s high school class, Ravenna Woods:

So why does she make every dude in the school apoplectic? 

Why does she walk around lobbing a toaster into the collective bath tub?

Hey, let’s not pretend.

It’s her body.

There is simply no ignoring its heft and criminal perk. It’s a monument of taut Austrian hydraulics. If she were flat or fat she’d still be pretty, but no linebackers would be cutting practice trying to get to know her better. Without the badonkadonk and sheik-money strut, guys would hardly be killing themselves to score her fake digits anymore.

You’ve got to figure that level of constant objectification and wheedling hypocrisy would make a girl bitter.

And you’d be right.

Ravenna’s caught two hundred meters below the reef, unwanted sexual pressure crushing her lungs, sharks below and the bends above, nowhere to go but farther inside herself.

Any reader of Wise Young Fool will have no trouble finding such acrobatics, the next tumble of tropes never far from the last, creating a distinctly Beaudoinian joy ride.

The plight of Ritchie Sudden from discontented high schooler to rock hero to juvenile detention attendee is the raison d’etre of WYF, and Ritchie’s frustration is palpable throughout—his unresolved feelings over his sister’s death; his too-busy, too-lesbian mother; his absent father; his disgust with the folks in his class. Most effective are the times Beaudoin touches on the very human teenager behind the wise ass, like when a high school student almost chokes to death in front of Ritchie in the cafeteria.

“Call the nurse,” Lacy says.

“Yeah,” Meb says.

“Right,” I say, but for some reason don’t move. I don’t take charge. I don’t leap to action. I don’t leap at all.

I just sit.

Scared.

Such trepidation is the yang to Ritchie’s sardonic edge, and Beaudoin plies his budding guitarist’s frank observations for all they’re worth. At the detention center Progressive Progress, Ritchie lists his classes: “Art Therapy, How to Do a Job Interview, How to Not Be High All the Time.” Ritchie’s mom’s girlfriend’s boss, a businessman and pool cleaning entrepreneur named Rude, is always worth a few chuckles when seen from Ritchie’s vantage. “There’s always enough dirty pools, leaves, and dead mice and bugs, and kids squeezing out a Baby Ruth in the shallow end to keep [him] busy.”

Answering the call for a literature that says something to young rockers about their lives, Beaudoin includes plenty of teenage rock fantasy moments, like when Ritchie dons his Les Paul in front of his bedroom mirror.

I do the Keith Richards slouch, the Billy Zoom grin, the Chuck Berry duckwalk, the My Chemical Romance dickwalk, the Eddie Van Halen finger-slam, the Hendrix teeth-pluck, the Joe Strummer low-slung, the Jimmy Page smack-daze .... Then I stop screwing around and just straight-out pentatonic air-wail like my man Joe Walsh.

Anyone who owned a guitar as a teenager can relate—or so I’ve heard.

Beaudoin skillfully bounces back and forth in time between Ritchie’s time in juvie and the events that lead to it, but the detention side of Ritchie’s experiences runs thin compared to the drama of his band, his love life, and the moment he commits his crime. Still, Beaudoin seamlessly brings it all together in the end, like the disparate members of a rock band coming down hard on the last note of the night, right before the singer shouts “thank you” and they scurry off.

Teenagers and angst go together like Les Pauls and Marshall Stacks. Luckily, rock is there for those who need a potent release from this mortal coil. If our literature doesn’t show that struggle, it’s the lesser for it. Wise Young Fool offers up a fun, fast-paced and ultimately satisfying road map for the young rocker in search of the way home.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Check out the Trailer for Stuck Outside of Phoenix the Movie, which premiered in Tempe in May 2013.



Or try Stuck Outside of Phoenix in print form for just $5.

Or try Stuck for your Kindle for just $2.99.