NightBallet Press: Debut of Prayerbook Bouquet by Zachary Fishel!

NightBallet Press: Debut of Prayerbook Bouquet by Zachary Fishel!

What a pleasure it was to read about the initiative that my FB friend and colleague Dianne Borsenick has taken to establish this new press! I certainly plan on submitting my chapbook to them, and I encourage you all to surf over there.

Bird in the Hand...

The proverb goes, "Better to have a bird in the hand than two in the bush." Of course, if you love birds, the literal wisdom of the proverb is debatable, but the meaning is clear. If you have something now, take it, and leave the future to take care of the future. But is this good advice for novelists?

As you know, I have been "selling" 3 Through History as an ebook for a few months now, and have the following rollicking results: 8 sales, 4 that weren't free for reviewers, and one review (bless your heart, it was a five-star). I have been a little slack about my platform - most of you were wondering when my next literary fiction review was going to go up - but I have been more aggressive about finding reviewers. Still, not very good results. But last Friday, I got an email from a boutique publisher with almost no budget that wants to add my novel to their literary offerings. Rejoice! Party! Beer for everyone!

Then I opened my email yesterday, and got the big surprise that an agency that represents a lot of literary fiction and gets such novels published by the Big Six New York Publishers, wanted my manuscript! So at this moment, I sit and puzzle, wondering whether to sign the contract that the boutique house is going to send me, or roll the dice. Very large dice, but dice nevertheless.

Dear reader, what would you do? Have you ever been in a Bird-In-The-Hand situation (or live in Bird-In-Hand, PA) and made your choice? How did it turn out?

Franzen's Freedom, a Review in Verse

Franzen Freedom in Free Verse

Patty, you pirouetted freely on the floor

Of a baller gym trying to escape the still-hot embers

Of free love freely robbed from you

Honeybee rapes the flower,

Robs the honeysuckle of that which

Heaven gave, and though depraved

Men who claim your fealty, family

Fails to carry swords for girls

Carries water for criminals

With bigger dicks and wallets

Walter, frozen like a shallow pond

In Iron Ranging winter raging

Through your backwoods blood, the

Booze and smokes of the Bemidji men

Who tie the women down with drink and

Servitude. The weight of constant winter

Silent spring traps you in a world of must

Until you find a free spirit free love freely

Given in sattvic smiles saturated with

Sex and satisfaction. Shiva sweeps in

Swollen roadbeds slippery tar and loosened

Gravel thrown from truckbeds full to

Breaking broken coal soot whiskey

Fly Lalitha, fly love free for though

You came to this overpopulated

Planet poised to choke on smoke

City soaked with human sorrow

You found freedom, love to borrow

Wresting Walter from his chains

Of filial obligation now you’re gone

Children live, triangulated

Joey individuated

Wrapped in teen lust, still a boy

Coupled free of Mom and Dad

Grab that prize! Trash her later

Make connection, take that contract

Find a way to cop free stash and

Money by the hundred thousand

Find the stench of rotting blood

Turns you back, pay ill with good

Rock star Richard

Fluid rake

Will you take

Her mistake

Thrown like waste

In the face

Of the chick

Who would stick

To the pick

Your guitar

Travels far

From the heart

Of your Walt

Though you love him

You betray him

With your radar cock

you slay him

Sets him free

To love and lose

And grieve

Yet another, a girl who might redeem

Brokenness, the wretched weight of empty

Space between the fibers raveling.

Free from guttering smoky flame

Of family’s woven wick, Jessica,

Your mother’s calling,

Calling

Calling

You are my mirror. Cast the light

Where I fail, hebete presence, to shine.

Hurl spears for me. Then salve

The wounds I caused. Put the pieces of Patty

Back together. Walter’s birds, however fragile,

Can not rise or sing with their savior

Limned on a cross with

Anger

Pain

Loss

Betrayal

Richard

Lalitha

Patty

Free to be who we aren’t

Freedom’s never free

For the cost is the loss

Of who we are

Alpha Male Diner: Guest Cook Joleene Naylor + giveaway | I Smell Sheep

Curious as to the person responsible for the bold cover art on 3 Through History (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/239509)? Here she is, the diva of PNR, Miss Joleene Naylor...

Alpha Male Diner: Guest Cook Joleene Naylor + giveaway | I Smell Sheep

The Pursuit of Cool, a Review

Ever need to revisit a time in your life that lives just out of the edge of imagination, in the haze of half-recalled images, song lyrics with ellipses at each end, and fragrances that blend together like the Tempera paint of out-of-control kindergarteners? You know the one – you are trying to tell the story to yourself and remember that it was more than the classes you cut, or job you lost, or the girl who dumped you? Several strategies come to mind, and fortunately for me, as a novelist and a book reviewer, most of them involve story-telling.

The Pursuit of Cool, a new novel by Robb Skidmore(TMIK Press, 2012), could be counted as a coming-of-age story about three kids who bond as suite mates as freshmen in college. By the same logic, you would call The Grapes of Wrath a travel journal. The place of the novel is AnyPrepTown, USA, but the time? It is SO ‘80’s, SO Reagan, SO age of greed, and SO tinged with the dissatisfaction that living a life dictated by what your image should be rather than who you are that it just might define the decade.

You remember the ‘80’s, right? Remember those big-hair rock-pop bands that MTV sold us? I thought so. But do you remember all the alt-music that came from bands with names like Siouxsie and the Banshees or the lyrical but almost painfully dark Bauhaus? No, I thought you might have forgotten them. I began the novel riding on memory lane, in that happy storytelling mode of “Oh, yeah, I remember where I was when I heard that.” At first, I  found myself hating but envying the beach-bum gorgeous Ian Lacoss, identifying with the brilliant but socially maladroit Charles Boyd, and riding the narrative wave with the inner monologue of lead protagonist Lance Rally as they make their way through their first years of collegiate liberation from parental control. Soon, however, I was buried under the cultural references. I found that it was easier to read The Pursuit of Cool with my computer open, Goodsearch.com on one tab and Youtube on another, in order to do quick lookups. In fact, the book owns “cool:” defining it, bringing it into your eyes, ears, and even your nose, and piercing you with it if you allow.

The narrator hovers over Lance like a thought translator who has a point-of view only slightly more in-the-know than Lance himself. I am reminded of the role of Nick Calloway from The Great Gatsby. Nick’s “truth” about Gatsby changes – he assets that Gatsby is a landed scion one moment and a self-made man in another – based on Calloway’s own evolving sense of reality. Lance asserts, through his narrator, an evolving sense of reality that shows a young man totally unprepared to confront a life that offers him his own independent choices.  Through the first two-plus years of his college career, every interaction is about what his image is. This obsession with looking suave, sexy, caring, sympathetic, resilient – in a word, “cool” – is Lance’s way of confronting girls, friends, classes, alcohol, everything. Since his family gave him only one option of how to be in college – high GPA, Honors/Awards, Internships and all those other prerequisites to the Top 10 MBA, it is not surprising that Lance is left to his own devices when his path veers off the Gordon Gekko indenture.

Weighing in at 410 pages, The Pursuit of Cool did get slow for me by around page 300, because this is not a plot-driven novel. In fact, by following the three boys becoming men and reacting to growing up with all things Reagan, the book is a long essay on the nature of “cool,” and whether such a thing is really attainable after all. For me, the essay was too long. I would have preferred to part with some of the exhaustive, encyclopedic cultural references in order to get to the point: how do the three characters deal with the disillusionment of trying to live someone else’s life? That having been said, Skidmore does a commendable job at underscoring the existential question of an important period of American history through the prism of the coming-of-age novel.