MADOREABLE

Right now I am hoping that writing this post will make me feel better about everything, because there is so much to write about and hopefully writing this post will help me organize my thoughts. Right now I am in the darkness of my Saturday morning room feeling legendary. Ten years ago I’d be watching cartoons, maybe, or shoveling the snow off the deck, maybe, or chilling in my treehouse with my best friend Josh Goodwin, maybe, or riding around my broken-down four-wheeler, maybe even. I’m feeling legendary, like I’m at the edge of being deep in the zone. So probably this post will help to get me there.

I’ve only got one major publishing-related hump to get over before the end of the next fourteen or so days. I have to reproduce the hardcover poetry book ash wilderness by John Sweet and get all of that set up.

I finished production of little white poetry journal VI and put it up for sale, finally. I finished producing my collection Here Lies An American Dreamer, and my piece Da Vinci Died Before Cigarettes was accepted by my beloved ml press. (!)

I received in the mail their latest offerings the other day. I’ve been too busy and weird to do anything about it. Now it is the following morning after I wrote those words, and I’m sort of weaving through the beginning of this post pruning and pricking, and I realize that today will be a day pretty much dedicated wholly to writing my novel. I think I will take breaks for the purpose of eating, perhaps even unto the purpose of reading, or also unto the purpose of finishing up a few loose ends on the web design side of town, but overall, I want to write this novel, I want it to be written, and so I have to pour myself fully into it. I think perhaps over the past couple days, with my debauchery and foolishness, I was just recharding batteries maybe. It doesn’t matter, because now I am going to write. First I will write this post. Then I will put things in my stomach, not to mention coffee. I think that even cigarettes are going to be on the take-with-caution side today.

I do, however, want this post to be full. I want this post to be perfect. I want this post to be everything it should be, because after I write it, I don’t think I’ll be back for a few more days. Because I’ve got loose ends to tie up in the other areas of my working life, life in progress as it were, and so those things must be done. I need like some serious introspection on site design, but that’s another story.

It’s not so much that I chickened out as I just wasn’t in the mood really. The past couple days have been really weird for me. I’ve been drinking quite a lot. I don’t mind drinking a lot, but it does leave me feeling a sense of timeless loss I can’t really explain. Putting together my collection has put things into perspective for me. I waded through hundreds of thousands of words in search of the gems which I felt would best give the reader a sense of where I came from and where I’m now headed. I ordered it like non-fiction, poetry, fiction, step, repeat. The page count limit I had in mind was 75 pages. I didn’t want it to be just a big compilation of blah blah blah. I could do that easy enough, if I could just ebook something like that if I really wanted to. No, that wasn’t the point of this print collection. I have such a produce-oriented mind, though, it’s pretty retarded how I’m already considering future possibilities for nonpress. For now I just want to finish the things I have decided I will finish, like my novel and the redesign of ash wilderness. Once those things are finished, I think I will breathe much easier.

One of the ideas I got, in the way of promotion for my book, was a reading of the piece from whence the title was born. The name of that piece is “Submission To An Internet Asshole.” I had completely forgotten about ever writing it, until the decision came down from the heavens that I would be putting together a collection as a Christmas gift. Once that decision was made, I had to do a lot of the legwork. It took a couple days of dedication to nothing else, but I pulled it off, and in good style. There is only one mistake in the whole book, that I can see, and I have no desire to correct it. Copies have already begun to sell. I would say that it would be great if everyone who reads this blog bought a copy, but I know that most of you are my friends and will be receiving a copy anyway. So after you read your copy, if feel like it would be a good gift for someone else or something, just go buy one, dude. $8.99 is the base price. That’s not bad. I’ve seen much bigger rip-offs. I guess I just feel a little fucked because I spent over $400 on copies of things yesterday. That pretty much spells commitment. I think the statements I made in the mourning silence introduction are definitely ringing true. Anyway, the reading. That I will post in good form on freemadore.info before too long. I was quite drunk when I recorded it, but I think that will add to the piece in good style. I think that will make things better, somehow.

It’s weird how the Itunes shuffle on my Mac is much more sensible and brilliant than the one on my PC. I can’t wait until I get back from Iraq and I have a brand-new Macbook. That will be sweet. Things I won’t have when I get back include debt or probably fear of death. I wish I could bring myself to use the fact that I’m a servicemember to encourage people to buy my book, or to buy any one of these projects. I don’t think that’s what will happen. I know it’s all on me. I know I have to really throw everything I have into the writing over the next couple years specifically, otherwise I really never will amount to anything but a bunch of half-starts and broken hearts from Georgia to Canada. I can’t have that. I have to really invest every ounce of soul I have into the next forty to eighty-five pieces of prose and poetry that I write. Beginning with this novel that I have been neglecting.

I have some pictures I want to post in this post, but I don’t want to take the time that it will take. So that will wait awhile. That will give me a reason to come back and make another post when life makes it more affordable to do that. I wish I could compromise. I don’t have any more of those left in me. I’m broken and tired and hungry and hungover and totally useless.

I think this puts me in better overall standing. I have a collection of prose, poetry, and non-fiction in print and a forthcoming beautiful chapbook from ml press. If I can get something together for the purpose of submitting to publishing genius, a project I really truly dig, then perhaps I will have enough buzz to last me for a year of silence. It’s a maddeningly strange world we have stepped into, as writers.

Thank you for reading. I am sorry but that is all for now. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

Love,

Paul