A Story

FAMEPUNK is the story of a fictional Brooklyn-born girl tennis prodigy with a sad secretive past and a great kick serve. Her triumphs and misadventures fuel a sexy, funny multi-volume book about love and competition, children and parents, the natural world and the art world, the Cold War and its aftermath, money, globalism, technology, women's bodies in the marketplace, women's bodies in the home, addiction, secrecy, hypocrisy, truth-telling--and tennis. This is a fan's novel, grounded in my love for the sport of tennis and its real-life players.

The story so far...

Part 1 of FAMEPUNK follows the heroine out of obscurity along an upset-strewn path to the 1987 US Open women's singles final in Queens, New York. As a curious sports journalist digs unwisely into the strange network of Soviet émigré artistes and Brighton Beach gamblers who coached her to greatness, the new player's rivals react, reflect, and fall.

Part 2 takes the action out-of-town, introducing its champion to 1988 America's top clay courts, beaches, and deserts, where one rival steps out from the rest--with scandalous results. This is a big, long book full of madcap and misadventures in the tradition of Victorian novels; I've called it Middlemarch.

The short, stark Part 3 jumps ahead to the last months of 1991. As the Soviet Union crumbles, the heroine prepares an Epiphany gift for the world with the help of her newest fan, The Lutheran.

These three volumes are available in fine vibrant paperback editions from Amazon as well as for e-readers everywhere--especially Smashwords where they are occasionally on half-price sale.

This page tells more about how FAMEPUNK started.

To read about it as it happens on a blog click here.

 

September, 2015

Finished and For Sale (First Editions)

Middlemarch is done, it's here. I've got a copy here in my apartment, I've given some away. It's 800 pages. As soon as I started paging through, I started finding typos. Not that many, no major whoppers, but enough to make me start to jot them down. The door was open a crack and now other things, little buggy bothersome niggling things, started to claw at my notice. Within a week, I had quite a list.



Perfectionism wins again.

So. Maybe I overreacted, but the next thing I did was cut the price to the bone, just clearing Amazon's print-to-order minimum. Then I did the same thing to the first volume. Second editions of both will be coming in 2013...and meanwhile, they're both really good, really funny, and not really all so very full of typos and infelicities that they should detract from anyone's enjoyment but mine.

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

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

Middlemarch: The Cover!

As might have been predicted, writing mean things about Serena Williams destroyed me creatively for a number of days, then my computer stopped dead. Back on a new computer and prepared to be contrite, I just have to say, first, that I am who I am and it is what it is. There's the heat of the moment to consider, as well.

HOWEVER:

I am mainly posting so as to display the second and far superior iteration of the new cover! Files under review at CreateSpace, second proof back this week to me, new novel out  to THE WORLD next week!

LINK:  First excerpt

Honest

So, here I am writing this huge novel about professional women’s tennis and I can’t stand Serena Williams. She just won the US Open again, I don’t know for which time, I don’t care.

I took against Serena Williams when she was still a child, the first time I ever saw her on television. It must have been 1994, she hadn’t turned pro yet but her big sister Venus was making a splash somewhere and their “unique upbringing” was always a big part of the story. So one day they stuck little sister Serena in front of the cameras to show off the success of the family’s educational methods by having her recite the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth. She mangled it. She must have been about eleven or twelve, she could have done better—but no one mentioned this fact and no one corrected her. Macbeth is my favorite play and I felt offended on its behalf, she mangled it that badly, giggling all the while. Why no re-take? There was no re-take. Because she was being cute, because she had a wide toothy smile and a head full of beads and wasn’t shy about performing on camera, because she was maybe a future major tennis star if the father’s predictions were to be believed, the network ran what she gave them, as if it were just fine to get mostly all the words wrong in a filmed recitation of Shakespeare. When—in my opinion—it wasn’t. Isn't. When—as I continue to believe—she’d never memorized that speech at all, she just wanted to make a boast of it. I’ve always tended to like lively truth-challenged children but this one I didn’t. Just like that, like with a finger snap, I parted ways with Serena Williams. She might have been a charming American girl who claimed to have parts of Shakespeare by memory and really truly did; she’d have won me over in that case, I would have been her fan, probably forever. I’d have admired her had she cried out, “No, no, let me try again, I can do better, I really know this!” Instead she came off as a big mealy-mouthed child liar.

The U.S. Open Women's Singles Trophy (r)

Eighteen years later, she’s got no eyebrows except those she inks on, and sideburns—otherwise she hasn’t changed at all.

Fact 1: What I think about Serena Williams doesn’t matter. Fact 2: Serena Williams has always been just as sloppy and greedy and narcissistic and disrespectful of Shakespeare as she’s been allowed to be—just as dishonest, too. To blame her for being successfully rotten misses the point. The plain truth is that if she didn’t play such an error-strewn game I’d have grown fond of her by now, but she just slaps so many wide, so many long, as if it didn’t matter—and then it doesn’t matter, she still wins because she hits so hard.

Pro Women’s Tennis (and Animals)

An explanation: Yesterday morning I finished reading JM Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, the first book of his I’ve read. It’s extremely impressive and highly polemical. So last night in the spirit and somewhat under the spell of that book I ended up writing a polemic—I wrote “a brief polemic” first but maybe it didn’t seem that brief. I should add that I have no evidence for the part about the early absconders and their role in the latest crash and recession, only a strong feeling that it’s true.

I’m back to the What is Famepunk blog after a month of line by line revisions to the manuscript of the second part, Middlemarch. This week I should be sending out the files to CreateSpace over at Amazon and start the first proof copy going, for late September print publication. The Kindle version will be available sooner. I have a lot of work to do at the computer on all this file preparation but I’m very busy, instead, becoming a vegetarian and watching the US Open live streaming. This whole week, it’s been exactly like Wimbledon wasn’t: six courts simultaneously on-line, viewer’s choice, and free. At home my buffering isn’t the quickest but that’s not the end of the world, not when I can watch defending champion Samantha Stosur play a tough match on Armstrong while CBS showed men’s tennis, only, from noon to 5:50pm, at which point they showed one game from Stosur’s second set, cut to commercial, then showed part of another game but cut away in the middle to broadcast live shots of the grounds and some wrap-up commentary by a guy with a cartoon hairstyle.

C2

This close to football season on the Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, the networks are competing for the male gaze, obviously—it is also true (see above) that men don’t want their women to see Samantha Stosur’s body because it might cause lesbianism.

For dinner which was finished very late because I then watched my favorite player Petra Kvitova lose in three to the amazing Marion Bartoli of France, who was on fire tonight—en flammes!—I cooked a Turkish eggplant dish called Imam Bayidli (The Imam Swooned) and Bulghur Pilav, I’ve never made either dish before, both recipes from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook; highly recommended.

Samantha Stosur (August 2012)

Am I really becoming a vegetarian? And why now? I’m not sure but I return to what I’ve been reading this week. The title character of JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is a famous novelist who receives invitations to give talks all over the world. At some opportunities, she speaks against raising animals to kill and eat. Other characters in the book disagree with her and they strongly object to her comparison of the meat industry with the Nazi death camps. I have a friend who says, if they weren’t going to be eaten they wouldn’t have been born in the first place; she tries to buy only the best kinds of meat, from real butchers who stock heirloom breeds fed organically and raised humanely; she doesn’t hold with having meat every day, either. I really agree with her, on all of that. Then I think to myself, does meat matter so much to me that I’m willing to spend two or more hours each week away from my work on Famepunk making trips to artisanal butchers in Brooklyn’s most annoying neighborhoods? In other words, can I spare the same amount of time for meat each week that I’ll give to watching women’s tennis on a weekend once or twice a year? Unlike my friend, I have a full-time office job—I’d end up someday buying pre-formed beef patties at Whole Foods, I just know this, and I won’t do it. I refuse that future. I made quinoa for the first time two weeks ago, tonight I’ve tried bulgur, also delicious. Onward and upward.

LINK: This role model