2012-11-18

A Long Self-Blurbed Book

I’ve written this massively long book in complete isolation and I have no one to blurb it. Which is ridiculous, really: while I was extremely busy writing Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch, I’ve also had over a year since publishing the first part to gather comments and support and plant excitement and harvest something in the way of a blurb. I also had the desk time—which I wasted surfing the internet at my day job, instead.

So maybe I should re-phrase: I’m a feckless isolated internet-addicted loser writing a massively long book. It’s such an excellent book, though, I can’t seem to feel like a loser even when the evidence is right there confronting me. It’s like I live in a dream world—but I don’t. I’m awake, I understand the modern age. Indeed, I wrote promotional copy as part of my living for years, as in fifteen or twenty years. There I sit, at my job, day after day, there I sit on my skills, checking in and out of videogum and dlisted where, yes, the writing is excellent. But in the mornings, among other publications where good prose is not exactly a watchword, I read The New York Daily News and The Root. Seriously, it’s absurd the quantity of time I’ve fapped away like Octomom (credit and thank you, Michael K) that I could have spent on self-marketing; it’s a real failure of mine, to have let my isolation feed upon itself and grow this way
 
For here I am, as a result, shopping another product that’s entirely missing “The Best Book by Any American!—Zadie Smith” on any portion of its surface. I’ve got another self-written blurb on my book cover which is not exactly “A magical realm—primeval powers battle—in this page-turning delight—an instant classic” either. Even if all this were more or less true (it is) I cannot, as my own publisher, make that sort of claim on the book cover. It would look too shabby, or shady—too L. Ron Hubbard-y—too desperate and crazy. Too sad, pretending to have a publisher’s enthusiasm behind me when all I’ve really got is talent, pluck and an internet connection.


TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE:
Tom Hardy for mass marketing and Fairness Doctrine purposes

2012-11-11

A Victory Over Perfectionism

Even though the cover is slightly askew on the print version which also has a few typos I've discovered this week while sitting at home with the first copy out of the box, Middlemarch can't be denied any longer--it is done!



KVITOVA! Prague Nov 2012