Self-Publishing Part II: Mike Heppner's Novella Series (First Installment)

This past December Mike Heppner, author of The Egg Code and Pike’s Folly, released his novella, Man, the second in a four-part series. But you can’t purchase Man in bookstores or read it online; it has to be found. In a stunt he describes as “guerrilla publicity,” Heppner sent copies to friends across the country to distribute and leave in coffee shops, museums, libraries, and other high-traffic locations. Man has surfaced at a gym and on an airplane, and the tactic seems to be working: it has gotten a lot of blogger buzz and was mentioned in The New Yorker.

Releasing his work this way is “a public way of calling attention to the problems [in publishing]” that Heppner says can happen to anyone in the business; you don’t get long-term support and you have to make your own way. With large presses, he explains, writers are dependent on other people doing work for them. Those people are overworked and haven’t read your piece, and they put a project to bed a week after it comes out.

In response to his blurb in The New Yorker, Heppner says the key was leaking out word about the novellas to enough blogs. The Man Talking Project has been mentioned in Maud Newton, HTMLGiant, Conversational Reading, AdFreak, Media Bistro, The 26th Story and The Millions.


In my next installment, I’ll discuss Heppner’s publishing history and how the Man Talking Project came to be.

Spread the Word(s)

While fishing around Craigslist for writing gigs, free coffee tables, and volunteer work, I stumbled across a program called Chicago Books to Women in Prison. By donating any (paperback) books to the program, incarcerated women in prisons nationwide will be given the chance to read. Their site states that they "hear over and over that rehabilitation is not a priority, and prison libraries tend to be dismal, if they exist at all."

So, as much as you love your books, (believe me ... the whole trying-to-start-a-library project is all too familiar) why not browse your bookshelves and donate to women in need? Chances are, someone who hasn't read "The Catcher in the Rye" will appreciate it more than you will the third time around. Besides, Amazon always has great deals if you can't live without it.

Here's your chance! Loosen your grip on that history book from freshman year of college and use that rainy day to see a movie instead. Come on ... who do you think you're kidding anyway?


Their blog reads:

We are still (as always) in need of:

PAPERBACK ONLY!

1. Dictionaries
2. Composition books
3. Daily Meditations
4. GED prep books, especially math
5. Urban fiction
6. Books on drug or alcohol recovery
7. Yoga or exercise books
8. Health books for HIV positive people
9. Books on Wicca
10. Books on racism and/or mass imprisonment
11. Blank journals

Contact Information:
Chicago Books to Women in Prison
c/o Beyondmedia Education
4001 N. Ravenswood Ave #204C
Chicago, IL 60613

chicagobwp@hotmail.com

Happy Donating!

Living Overseas and Maid Wages

A good friend of mine used to joke that "only boring women keep clean houses," and being anything but boring myself, I have always vowed to pay someone to do my cleaning if I could ever afford to do so. But I got a rude awakening when I triumphantly posted in my Livejournal that I'm paying my new maid 500 ringgit a month for eight hours a week of labor. To see my actual cost, divide that by 3.5. When I posted that blog, I did so with the idea that my American friends would be jealous, a rare occasion because having a maid is one of the few perks of living in Malaysia. Instead, my friends informed that this 40-yr old woman will be make $4.46 an hour, making me a sweat shop slave driver. The money I am giving her is what she asked to be paid for the amount of work that she proposed to do, though, so what that amount meant hadn't entered my mind. And I have the air conditioning on with NPR's All Things Considered in the background. Surely she could do worse.

My conscience was unsettled, though, so I decided to check up on whether she's getting a good part-time wage for Malaysia. Actually, it appears that house maids are doing pretty well according to this salary guide. There currently is no minimum wage in Malaysia, but look at this article which proposes a minimum wage of 1,200 ringgits. My maid earns almost half of that for eight hours a week. If she has two other houses, she's doing better than that, and if she works 40 hours a week, she's making almost double what authorities here think is a living wage. Despite what you might think, by paying maids so highly, we are empowering these women in a market where their unskilled labor would earn far less in other sectors.

But if all of this is true, then why do I feel like I am doing something wrong? I boycotted Nike shoes and Taco Bell tomatoes back in the day because of labor abuses. Of course, my house cleaning is hardly a matter of out-sourcing U.S. jobs or paying illegal immigrants less than locals. In fact, I am paying her more because it's possible to get Indonesian girls to work for you full-time for 500 ringgits. But do I only make myself feel better by saying "Oh, but someone else is worse!" Or am I legitimately doing what any overseas employer does, which is to pay the local going rate? Methinks I doth protest too much.

Shakespeare's Monkey Revue Volume 2

Hands down, my favorite gift this Christmas was my very own copy of this winter's Shakespeare's Monkey Revue. This issue's theme is Food, and I literally savored every page. The journal does a bang-up job of mixing humor with seriousness, and whenever a piece hits a sad tone, you can find a reason to laugh on the next page.

Brent A. Fisk's Yellow Banks, Indiana, October 1978 brings the smells and sounds of a campground vividly to mind:

The thick clank of cast iron skillets, scent of coffee
sausage and eggs. The lemon of hickory leaves.
I dragged myself from wool blankets,
flannel sheets to find an idle lap.

And the casual, friendly tone of David Hirt's Douglas of Avonlea leaves a smile on my lips:

"Dear Mademoiselly, ur,
Can't help but notice yer
Fashion sense lacking or
Breast and warm buns."

Boston chef Matt Barre added a set of recipes to the journal with kooky names that had me giggling from the start. From "Edward Skillet Hands" to "Forrest Gumbo," Barre's recipes are prefaced with a little line from the chef to set the stage, and each is accessible enough to imagine executing with a few key ingredients and some time (all except for "The Yolk's on You," that is).

When publisher Stephan Anstey handed me the Revue, he couldn't have known it was just what I needed to read. It's journals like his that remind me of how much fun life can be, of how lovely it is to hold a fresh journal in your hands and discover writers previously unknown to you, and of how amazing it is to laugh.

Skip your boring doppio macchiato and spend the five bucks on one of these instead. Follow the "Gone in 60 Spoonfuls" recipe, and have yourself a grand time.

Teh Internetz: Ignoring Online Distractions

Most of my writing friends decry the internet as a huge time-waster when they should be focusing on their writing. But Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing recently wrote a column about how one can write in the age of internet distraction. (By the way, if you have taken my advice and set up a feed reader, you should add BoingBoing, as it is the repository of all that is right and wrong online.)

Here's a little snippet from the column:

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.

But the Internet has been very good to me. It's informed my creativity and aesthetics, it's benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I'd no sooner give it up than I'd give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.

It's followed by some pretty decent advice on how to get your writing done by following some simple rules. My personal Achilles heel while writing on my laptop? The bullet point about eschewing research while in the middle of writing. I get distracted so easily by Wikipediaing a fact or looking up a Google Map of a city I'm not terribly familiar with. I think it's my intense, perverted love of hard facts that tempts me so easily from fiction; I am tricked into thinking that the injection of a real fact will somehow help my fiction writing and make it more realistic. In some cases, I wish I had Wikied something before submitting my piece (who knew that India was actually ABOVE the equator?) but the bulk of my experience has been that cleaving to facts has only hampered the creative process.

At any rate, it's not the fault of the internet for distracting you any more than it's MacDonald's fault that you're fat. Just don't eat too many online Big Macs at inappropriate times, and you should be fine.

The Hoops

If you're a writer or editor who's ever applied for a job, you know about The Hoops. The hoops you have to jump through in order to obtain a full-time gig. As you listen to your friends' simple stories of success—the one and only interview that landed them the job at the consulting firm or engineering lab—you know that this will never be you.

"So, what are they making you do?" one of my friends asked when I explained that before I could come back in for a third interview, I'd have to conceptualize and write the text for an advertising campaign.

In all of my combined months of unemployment, I've probably written or edited my way through the equivalent of one year of work for employers who chose not to hire me. I've edited scholarly articles and doctored stories, written text for travel guides and marketing materials, and laid out pages using desktop publishing software, among countless other projects. And this was usually after I had already submitted 2-4 writing samples.

I understand that competition in my line of work is fierce. Companies have to be sure they're getting what they pay for (even if what they're willing to pay is criminal). But it seems to me that, more often than not, they're getting the milk for free. And often.

Perhaps one day, I'll lead a writers' revolt. In the meantime, I should really get back to that advertising campaign.

The Ravishing Nonsense of Poetry

A few weeks ago, I spoke of T.S. Eliot in fairly high regard, commenting on his essentially Anglican poems and his idea of writing to a "sense of the cosmos," as contemporary philosopher Jacob Needleman might say. This attitude is closely aligned with another poet contemporary to Eliot: the English poet A.E. Housman, who has an uncanny ability to write essays that are at once charming and stern.

Yet here is where similarities end. Whereas Eliot looked both forward and backward, Housman settled into a fine nostalgia for the 18th century poets like, say, Pope. On top of that, Eliot was decidedly intellectual, but Housman was the opposite. Speaking of the 1700's Housman says, "the human faculty which dominated the eighteenth century and informed its literature was the intelligence...Man had ceased to live from the depths of his nature."

A "thought" to John Donne, Eliot says in his essay The Metaphysical Poets, was an experience, and the Metaphysicals "feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose". Housman, on the other hand, says in his essay The Name and Nature of Poetry that such "wit" in writing is "no more poetical than anagrams".

So I found myself in Powells Books in Portland, Oregon reading the entirety of one of the recent National Poetry Series winners, thinking the whole time that it simply dripped with that Metaphysical wit but at the same time appeared, on the surface, to be "nonsense". This, of course, is the ghost of Housman, largely forgotten in any semblance of contemporary literature. Point is, is he right?

Troubled by my understanding of books like this, I found the Great American Pinup, a far more extraordinary site for real in-depth reviews of books such as these. I've heard it said that Ron Silliman seperates contemporary poetry into two sides: the post-avant and the School of Quietude (SoQ!). He looks backward and apparently tries to fit 20th century poets into the schema as well.

If you go farther back, we can probably see where Eliot may fall, not to mention Housman. Or is it this easy? As we see in both of these writers, divisions are often shifty.