A PSEUDONYMOUS “Jane Austen Doe” has supplied Salon with a rather standard complaint about the trying times facing authors of non-bestseller books. It’s nothing I haven’t heard all my adult life; yet I’m re-entering the book biz this month.

Why? (Besides the whole quixotic bravery/foolishness of it all)?

Because I believe things don’t have do be as darned bleak as Doe says they are.

I believe in independent publishing. I believe in the success (within ups and downs) of Fantagraphics, McSweeney’s, Cometbus, and the like. So-called “midlist” books perhaps shouldn’t be marketed by conglomerate publishers, if the conglomerate publishers no longer know how to market them. They should be marketed by those who know how to nurture and build niche audiences for them.

The ebook version of The Myrtle of Venus is now available! The print version will be here in two weeks.

NOVEL NEWS #2: The fab book release party’s taking place on Friday, April 2 (the day after the old Roman feast day for Venus), 7-10 p.m., at the splendid Rendezvous Jewel Box on Second Avenue north of Bell Street. DJ Superjew will spin retro-pop tuneage for your exquisite enjoyment. Be there.

…modern fiction is “more punk rock than music will ever be again.”

I NOW HAVE an official publication date for my sprightly funny novel The Myrtle of Venus. It’ll be April 1. Not just because it’s April Fool’s Day but because it’s the historic date of Veneralia, the Roman festival of Venus.

On or before that date, the free HTML version of Myrtle will disappear from this site. You’ll then be able to buy the ebook version and preorder the ultra-limited first print edition.

There’s also gonna be a release party, Friday April 2 at the lovely Rendezvvous, with diverting entertainment provided by our ol’ pal DJ Superjew. More details later.

…in domestic mainstream media, has a cogent long review of the Paul O’Neill and Kevin Phillips anti-Bush books.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE ex-employers, Lake City’s own Fantagraphics, has announced what may just be its crowning achievement (at least in the repackaging department): The Complete Peanuts! All fifty years of Charles Schulz’s masterwork, in twenty-five deluxe volumes to be issued over the next twelve and a half years; including many early episodes never before anthologized. And yes, it’s already on my Amazon.com wish list.

Seattle Weekly’s had two strong cover stories in a row.

This week’s piece by Tim Appelo wondering why Ken Kesey ceased to be a great writer expressed (and, thankfully, didn’t try to fully answer) all the questions I had when Kesey died and all the obits ran paragraph after paragraph about his drugging and drinking and only a couple of sentences about his writing.

Appelo’s piece followed Philip Dawdy’s long, haunting pontification about last summer’s suicide by beloved KUOW personality Cynthia Doyon. We’re just a couple of months away from what will probably be a string of media hype pieces marking ten years since Kurt Cobain’s death. We seem not to have learned a damned thing since then about taking care of ourselves or one another.

Some readers have told me they’ve only read the first chapter of my online novel, because they couldn’t locate any links to the subsequent scenes. I’ve now redesigned the whole thing, so you should now have no trouble navigatin’ your whole way through. (This revision is also about 15 percent shorter, and hence tighter and funnier.)

So start readin’ it already!

ANYBODY WHO CARES about the American short story, and how to market same, should look at the (probably unauthorized) online scanning and posting of A Cotton Candy Autopsy. It was the first episode of Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman’s illustrated-story series, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.

Published between 1989 and 1992 by DC Comics’ short-lived Piranha Press division, Beautiful Stories wasn’t a comic book (not even a “grownup” comic book). Rather, Louapre wrote a different (usually darkly humorous) text story for each issue, to which Sweetman added large illustrations (in a different, appropriate style each time).

The various book and magazine incarnations of Beautiful Stories have all been out of print for years. I’ve no idea what Louapre or Sweetman have done since. But the series remains one of the last examples of a big media company packaging and selling an individual short story as a stand-alone, un-anthologized entity unto itself.

(via Josh Okrent):

“Hey Clark,”Thanks for the Kodak story. I was born and raised in Rochester and have a long and tangled history with the area’s #1 employer. Most of my parents’ friends worked for Kodak, and too many of their kids died young from cancers caused by Kodak’s shitty waste disposal practices.

“Allow me to recommend a great, and little read, novel about Kodak’s prescence in Rochester. It’s called The Lost Scrapbook, by Evan Dara, published in 1995 by FC2. It features a barely fictionalized Rochester called Springfield, but the strangenesses and horrors it discusses are all
too real. It made the rounds of all the literate-punk bookshelves in Rochester before being named by William Vollman as “winning manuscript” in the Normal, Illinois fiction contest. Anyhoo, look for it.”

I indeed have read The Lost Scrapbook, and heartily second Mr. Okrent’s recommendation.

SOMEONE NAMED ONLY ‘MICHAEL’ has a lot of profound things to say about the differences between “movie people” and book people.” I read books, and even write them, but I’ve never considered myself comfortable among the proponents of what I’ve called “the writerly lifestyle.” This essay tells me why, at long last.

BRITAIN’S BOOK PUBLISHERS are reportedly slashing the number of new books they’ll put out, so they can concentrate on (1) established bestseller names and (2) “‘good-looking’ first-time novelists who are more marketable.”

I’m immediately reminded of the bleak Brit movie Morvern Callar. Its heroine, a sexy young party babe stuck in a small town, wakes up to find her struggling-author boyfriend has deliberately OD’d. She sells his novel manuscript, under her byline, for big bucks. The movie never directly says, but clearly implies, the boyfriend’s book would never have sold if publishers didn’t get the chance to stick Ms. Morvern’s cute face on the back cover.

IT’S TRUE: Books can be dangerous.

AS YOU MIGHT TELL from the top left side of this page, we now have a fancy intro page to our hilarious new novel The Myrtle of Venus. It tells you all you need to know before you read the online first draft.

So now you’ve no excuse not to start reading it already!

FIFTY-ONE DAYS since I began, I’m truly, fully, completely done with the first draft of my humorous modern novel The Myrtle of Venus. An epilog chapter to the story is now online, having been completed at exactly 10 p.m. Sunday night.

As usual, the whole thing starts at this link.