tshirts

i cleaned out my tshirt drawer to make room for sweaters and socks that were in a different drawer to make room for towels in the former sock drawer (we don't have a linen closet). it made me think about tshirts. writing about tshirts helped me remember more about tshirts. this is a blog post about my personal relationship to/with tshirts throughout my life. i've enjoyed seeing this post get bigger, as i write it.

Age 0-10
i only wore tshirts that my parents or family bought for me, or which were free from sports events, or something. i remember wearing shirts of every color, including white. i think, in the 1990s, it was more common/stylish for tshirts to have large logos on the back, and small logos on the front, as opposed to today, where i feel like most 'stylish' shirts only have logos on the front. i remember having a large (on my body) green shirt with some large logo on the back and a small logo on the front. in photographs of me as a child, my tshirts look really baggy, i think because i wore many 'free' tshirts from events, like soccer tournaments, which came in limited sizes. i do not remember having a favorite tshirt.

Late Elementary/Middle School

i first started caring about tshirts around, i think, the age of 11, when i got into skateboarding, thanks to the popularity of the tony hawks' pro skater videogame. this level of interest in tshirt was based on trying to look like a skateboarder and buying shirts that had interesting designs or logos from brands that i (arbitrarily) aligned myself with based on looking at the CCS catalog probably every day for a long period of time. i remember liking Zero, Birdhouse, and Spitfire brands. i think I also owned Osiris shoes. i was thin and i mostly wore baggy tshirts of various dark colors with logos. sometimes i wore long-sleeved tshirts underneath. i did actually skateboard, but i was never good. i was probably the worst out of all my friends.

around the age of 12, i started getting fat, and i learned about how black tshirts were better at hiding the shape of my torso than other colors. i pivoted to mostly wearing black skateboard tshirts. my favorite was a Zero branded shirt, which i liked because of its association with the smashing pumpkins. i wore it to a physical with my doctor at some point and was asked very delicate questions about my mental health, whether i 'often felt like a zero,' etc. my parents tell this story fondly, in a 'such a rascal' way, and recalling how they told the doctor, on my behalf, 'no, it's just a skateboard company logo,'  like to insinuate that the doctor was an idiot. but, what i have since come to accept, and maybe they haven't, is that i did actually feel bad most of the time, and the Zero iconography did, i felt, represent my outlook on life, to some degree.

Jr High School

i remember my mom getting frustrated that i only owned black tshirts around the time i was 13 and offered to let me pick out and buy several tshirts from the internet. i was less into skateboarding by this point and become interested more in bands. i remember buying a bright yellow tshirt for the band LIARS which i wore exactly once. i remember, still, how it felt, seeing myself look really bad in such a bright yellow tshirt. i remember feeling frustrated that i hadn't thought about what it would look like to wear a bright colored shirt over my torso. it was printed on an american apparel tshirt and had a kite-based design. i remember my mom expressing frustration with me about my tshirts with some amount of frequency, i think, in retrospect, because i would wear black tshirts in the summer, and the summer is usually when we'd visit extended family, and my mom is very sensitive to being 'judged' as a parent by our extended family, i think. around this time i started wearing long-sleeved shirts (button downs, hoodies, and track jackets) almost all the time, including in the summer. i remember at some summer camp it becoming a 'thing' that i wore a track jacket so much, which i justified because i was doing the 'movie making' track of the camp, and spent most of the week indoors, where it was air conditioned.

High School

in early high school, i remember wearing black tshirts of various sizes. i remember having a black tshirt from the high school drama department, for some reason, that was too tight, but i wore it all the time. i had a bright eyes tshirt from their digital ash tour (glow in the dark ink on black) i also had a brown tshirt with a cartoon on it from toothpaste for dinner. at some later point in high school Threadless became popular and i spent my own money on $10 tshirts, including some that were dark blue or dark green. i still mostly wore black tshirts, at some point wearing a generic skateboarding tshirt (possible tony hawk brand) from Kohl's, but inside out. most of my clothing during my sophomore to senior year, i think, was tight fitting, including the tshirts, which on retrospect was counterproductive re: wearing black to hide my body shape. i remember wearing tight pants often and overhearing my friend comment to another friend that my pants were too tight, at some point, because he had to sit next to me in class. i also owned a pair of tight pink khakis i bought from a goodwill, because i liked The Unicorns at the time, but i'm pretty sure my mom threw them out (my siblings and i each have one story of our mom throwing out an article of clothing she deemed unacceptable - mine were the pink pants, i assume because of an appeal to gender/sexuality norms).

by my senior year of high school i had lost weight and had grown a beard and so felt more confident in my appearance. i remember it was around this time that i became more aware of american apparel and how it was the default shirt for band merchandise. i was in a band and had a lot of band shirts from bands we'd play with, or from concerts i would go to, or which sometimes i would order online. i remember wearing a baby blue modest mouse tshirt and a size small, black, modest mouse cotton track jacket a lot, for example, and i remember a dark blue tshirt for a band called The Nobility, who we played with once, and a brown Toads and Mice shirt. i remember giving my size-large tshirts that didn't fit me anymore to my bandmate josh, who later died i think ~5 years after the band broke up. i remember, at the time, being surprised that he wanted to wear my old shirts, because i remember him otherwise being very aggressive/dismissive toward/about me in a general sense.

around/after this time i found out about etsy and other websites where people sold screenprinted tshirts. one was a website called reckon.ws, which sold shirts with pictures of musicians and authors on american apparel tshirts. from them i purchased a black shirt with Nico printed on it, and some others, but the Nico shirt fit the best and was my favorite. i also purchased shirts from an etsy shop called "blackflag317", i think, which had anticapitalist and anti-imperial slogans/images on them, including "resist, don't enlist" (on olive green), "ningún ser humano es ilegal" (on slate), and "capitalism kills" (on red).  i felt good about my body and wore tshirts without longersleeved shirts over top during this period.

i find it interesting that 'high school' is the longest section in this post.

College
my friends and i considered getting into screenprinting our own shirts, inspired by these other stores, which was mostly a failure, but in the process we found a website that let you 'bulk order' american apparel tshirts for bulk prices, but for any number of shirts. this meant i was able to buy orders of 2-3 american apparel tshirts for ~$6 each before shipping. for most of my first year of college, i wore these $6 american apparel tshirts and the above shirts from etsy. i mostly had blank black, grey (slate), green (forest), and blue vnecks (blue was my least favorite). my friend james, in my head, from this time period, exclusively wore pastel american apparel (deep) vneck tshirts and nice pants. there was an american apparel store near where i went to college but i don't remember ever buying anything from there, refusing to pay the price the charged, after having purchased so many $6 shirts on the most-likely illegal website.

at some point i moved away from blank tshirts and wore other shirts from etsy with art/slogans on them again, or shirts i'd buy secondhand, including a black REM tour shirt (i do not listen to REM) and a forest green gilden shirt from etsy that was printed with some kind of bold futurist slogan about nature, which i wore ironically. i think this coincided with american apparel becoming less fashionable. i remember people using 'alternative apparel' for a while, for band tshirts, and then most moved to making shirts on the shitty thick gilden tshirts. i regret not buying more shirts from before this change to gilden (however, i have put on weight, and would not fit in any of the shirts i used to own, i think, anyway).

Grad School
i started buying blank vneck tshirts from old navy, which you could/can get for ~$6. i also attempted to 'dress nicer' for a while, wearing button-ups, and sometimes a sweater vest. during this period, most of my tshirts were from old navy or were free shirts from the annual career fair. i would go to the career fair simply to get free tshirts and other free, 'useful' things, sunglasses. most of the tshirts were for technology companies or had some kind of computer programming references on them that i didn't understand/care about. people in public would try to talk to me about the references and i'd say i got the shirt for free from the career fair and didn't understand the references. i also owned a pair of yellow snapchat branded sunglasses which i wore sometimes, a some other, less colorful sunglasses.

eventually i stopped giving a shit about my appearance/self and stopped dressing nicer, and started wearing just tshirts or tshirts with flannel shirts. i believe this coincided with me becoming more depressed/accepting my depression. i also started wearing/buying more black band tshirts that usually came with record preorders, i think, or which were gifts from my friend brent, who lived in seattle and would go to concerts i recommended to him, and he'd buy me merch to mail me. i remember having a Whirr tshirt and 2-3 Nothing tshirts, and blank old navy vnecks. i remember the bold, dark band shirts felt like the reflected my inner turmoil or outlook on life, in a juvenile, but therapeutic, maybe, way.

i do not have any of the technology company tshirts from this time period anymore, or any of the (black) band tshirts i did splurge on, or get as gifts, mostly because i have since gained weight, or lost the shirts.

Present Day

today, my tshirt collection is, again, mostly black. i briefly experimented with wearing lighter-colored vnecks from old navy, such as a blue striped one and a cream/grey one, but when looking at pictures of myself wearing them, i feel grossed out/ashamed. they are now worn by my wife as pajama shirts.

i do own and wear one cream-colored shirt, because it was a gift and i like the design - it is from Chop Suey Books in Richmond, VA (and it is a vneck - i have few vnecks anymore, since old navy changed their tshirt sizing some years ago), but i try not to look at myself in the mirror when i wear it. i have also moved back to wearing hoodies/over shirts, specifically, now, flannel shirts, when the weather permits, which is maybe 8 months of the year. most of my tshirts are band tshirts on bad quality material (gilden) and/or bad cuts (tight crew necks), but i also still wear a tyrant books shirt (nicer quality) and hobart buffalo skulls shirt (good quality, kind of formfitting) with regularity. i own 3 horse jumper of love tshirts but only wear one regularly. i also have an orange Snowing shirt and a light blue/acidwash(?) Kindling shirt with a blue logo on it that my toddler likes to point at and say "blue". i wear maybe 5-6 shirts on a consistent rotation, the others feeling too thick and uncomfortable to wear frequently, including the bootleg tyrant books shirt from steve anwyll (canadian tshirt crewneck neck holes are noticeably tighter than american tshirt crewneck neck holes, in my experience, based on buying ~3 shirts from canada, including my 'no future' tshirt from choplogik, which this blog is named after). i think maybe the majority of my tshirts i own have dogs on them, maybe ~4 dog tshirts, 2 cat shirts, one buffalo shirt, and one lemur shirt. the hjol shirt i like also has a mouse on it i think.

most of my tshirts have holes near the front bottom hem due to my belt buckle, i think, which has a sharp square corner. most of my shirts are also faded and in some cases 'lobsided'.  i am currently wearing my tyrant books tshirt. i just looked at myself in the mirror and i look like total shit.

i briefly googled 'what happened to american apparel' and learned that they went into bankruptcy twice, and there were a lot of issues/accusations about their founder/ceo/?? being a misogynist republican. i don't know anyone who wears or talks about american apparel. i don't have any american apparel shirts left. i held onto my Nico shirt for sentimental reasons, but it has a pretty bad hole in the armpit, and is two sizes too small.

i just wondered if tao lin's Joy Williams tshirt was from reckon.ws. that seems likely. this is the shirt:

Tao Lin's Joy Williams Shirt. I think this is 'eggplant' color from american apparel

the blackflag317 etsy shop no longer exists. i saw someone make a joke(?) about threadless on twitter recently, but haven't looked at their shirts in ~10 years, which i think was maybe the joke.

i have also spent some unknown amount of time uselessly looking for nice quality band tshirts printed on vnecks. if you have any recommendations on cool tshirts printed on black vnecks, please contact me. thank you.

how to make a book

in the process of making and selling books for back patio press, i have learned some things about printing and selling small press/independent books. i feel like a lot of people don't know some of these things. i will keep this very short and concise. there are a lot of other blog posts about making books. i recommend this interview with spencer madsen for example.

digital printing

most/all indie/small press books use digital printing. digitally-printed books are printed one at a time and are glued together by a machine. you can print any number of books at a time, for cheap. the printer we use for back patio does a 5"x8" ~130 page book for less than $3 per copy and you can order just a single copy if you want. colored ink inside the book or nicer paper will make the book more expensive.

'real' paperback books put out by eg. penguin books use offset printing. offset printing has a minimum run count of somewhere in the thousands, but the paper can be very high quality and thin, the ink is nicer, and the margins look better, because they use real stitching instead of glue. digitally printed indie books will always look and feel shittier, and the margins will look worse, so add more to your gutter margins to compensate. you cannot have a 'real'-feeling paperback book if you use digital printing.

i have had a hard time finding digital printers in the UK who operate as cheaply as printers in the US. all UK-based printers, from my research, have a $120 startup fee, or something, regardless of the number of books printed. however, snowfall press (based in pennsylvania) lets you create an account and print a ~400 page book shipped to your house for ~$9.50. i did this recently, independent of back patio stuff, and felt empowered/impressed.

amazon print on demand and ingram spark print on demand use digital printing. amazon books have a print date and location on the last page. i enjoy looking at amazon kdp books and seeing when they were printed.

i do not recommend investing in an offset print run for your indie book unless you're confident you can sell over 1,000 books. i have seen a few small presses complaining on twitter about having to donate/give away 970 books because the did an offset print run without realizing they'd only sell ~15 books. i recommend assuming you will sell between 0 and 15 books for any book you make. for this reason, digital printing is better.

typesetting/cover art

this means making your word document into a pdf that looks nice. it's actually pretty easy, in my experience, aside from dealing with page numbers, if you use microsoft word. many people use indesign for book layout, but i don't think it's necessary, however, indesign supports ligatures better, which is the term fro when certain letters merge together in an aesthetically pleasing way. you pick a font, add the sections and page numbers, and add a gutter margin to make the inside margin of each page wider. you can change the page size in microsoft word. back patio makes books that are 5"x8". the printer we use has a nice responsive preview tool so you can verify the book will look good before printing.

for whatever reason, a lot of small presses forget to include page numbers, even if they have a table of contents that lists which page a story is on. i think it's funny. but don't do this.

making the cover is more complicated because it requires knowing how big the book will be, so you can make the spine the right width. our printer has a calculator to make this easier. you need to add 'bleed' to your image, which means adding ~.25" to each side that will get cut off. you will also want the front, spine, and back to be one single large image - imagine ripping out all the pages of a book and laying the remainder flat. so if you are making a 200 page 5x8" book, make a cover that is something like 11"x8.5" (5.25[front cover]+5.25[back cover]+.5[spine] x 8.5).

ISBNs

in order for your book to be sold through a distributor (see below) or book store, your book needs an ISBN, which is a unique number and includes metadata in the ISBN database about the publisher and category of your book, for example. ISBNs must be paid for and the pricing is insane/terrible/anti-small business. you can buy one for $100. you can buy 10 for $300. you can buy 100 for ~$600, etc. It gets cheaper the more you buy in bulk. Major presses have unlimited, cheap ISBNs, basically, while most small presses require a startup/annual fee of $300-600 just for the ISBNs. amazon print on demand gives you one for free and ingram spark gives you one for cheaper. you can buy secondhand ISBNs but 1) you will get ripped off and 2) they will not actually list you as the publisher, since that is listed when the number is purchased. Bowker, which sells ISBNs, is a non-governmental monopoly and i hate them, and you should too.

[update]: amazon kdp likes to automatically insist that the listing title for the book match the cover text, and also the title registered with the Bowker ISBN, which also has automated filtering for various things like punctuation. this morning, in trying to set up Neil Clark's Time. Wow. on amazon for international shipping, we learned that Bowker truncated the final period (.) from the title, which means that the ISBN is registered as Time. Wow while amazon is expecting the title to be Time. Wow. (based on the cover). this means we cannot currently register the book on amazon and, i guess, i need to try to contact someone at bowker over the phone?

distribution / bookstores

to get your book on amazon or any real book store or library, for the most part, you need to work with a distributor. this is a warehouse/website combo which will hold onto copies of your book and put your book in a database or catalog for stores to order from. small press distro is a company that does this for most small presses and there is a minimum annual fee of something like ~$300 to use them at all. they take a cut of the sale price when a book store buys a copy to sell to a customer. the distributor also handles returns (most bookstores will return unsold books after some period of time for a full refund). just having your book listed with a distributor does not mean that bookstores will carry it, because there are probably over a billion books to choose from. major presses pay money for their books to get preference in the catalogs. you will not get your book picked up by any bookstores through small press distro unless you land some really big reviews/press.

some cool small stores will let you work directly with them, as the publisher. you will need a returns contract, but you can send them a package of books that they will stock for you (or you can drop them off in person). this requires a personal relationship with a bookstore. some bookstores allow authors to do this, but many (in my experience) will just ignore you. amazon, in this way, is like a normal bookstore - you can sign up to sen them copies of your book to keep in a warehouse, if you are not using their print on demand service.

amazon, ingram, and small press distro all take something like ~34-50% of the sale price, or something. there are calculators for each online. for example, if you sell a 200 page book for $16 on amazon through amazon kdp, you will get ~$6.50. thus if you are an author with a 50/50 split with a press that uses amazon kdp, you will get ~$3.75 per book. this is more or less standard across all distributors, as the publisher, the distributor, and the store all want to make money off the final sale price. most major presses offer something very small, like 2-5% royalties, while print-on-demand presses will be more generous with 30-50% royalty splits. however, some small presses will not give you royalties, or will only pay you in contributor copies, for example. if money is important to you, you should consider this before signing a contract.

libraries

libraries, from a publisher standpoint, are basically the same as bookstores. you need an ISBN, distribution, etc. to get books into a library. they also use catalogs which major presses spend money to get priority placement in. libraries spend a lot of money on crazy ebook contracts with major presses. you will most likely never see your book in a library.

shipping

if you forgo normal distro channels and ship books yourself, you can use Media Mail via the USPS (usa only). Media Mail is a subsidized rate based on weight and is cheap. It can only be used to books/cds/records/stuff like that. you can mail a book across the country for like $3. You might get busted for including pins or tshirts in these packages. The USPS also tends to lose these packages most frequently. Back Patio has had something like 8 books shipped via media mail lost in transit, which feels high.

shipping internationally is really expensive. it costs something like $15 to ship a single book across the atlantic. there is no media mail for international shipping. 15 copies of 50 Barn Blurbs shipped directly from the printer (usa) to the UK cost us something like $70 to ship.

you can have the customer pay for shipping. this is normal and offsets shipping costs. some small publishers will offer free shipping as a sales tactic. this tactic works on me. i recommend using a print on demand service like ingram or amazon kdp for international orders.

reviews/galleys

this is another big area where small presses struggle. the key to being taken 'seriously', getting reviews, drumming up press, and getting your book stocked in book stores depends on this step.

most major presses, in anticipation of a book release, will send out hundreds or thousands of free 'advance' copies of the book, sometimes up to a year in advance of the book release. they send these books to review websites, magazines/newspapers, critics, and, maybe most importantly, librarians and librarian organizations. they also give them away at conferences, like AWP.

note that these are separate from 'free' copies for normal people through eg Goodreads giveaways. most small presses will have tighter timelines and lack the funds to spend ~$6 x 500 = $3,500 on giving away free books for reviews to promote a book 6-12 months before release. most small presses instead rely on people organically purchasing and reviewing a book, which makes the 'hype' cycle short and stuttery. most small presses struggle with successfully getting reviews from advance reader copies, as most venues that publish reviews use a submission system just like they do for unsolicited fiction or poetry, which is a lot of work to ask from a potential reviewer. i recommend forging a good personal relationship with reviewers/venues to help get reviews out there.

some reviewer organizations, like kirkus, ask for multiple copies of the book, for some reason, as well. most reviewers will ignore you, even if they say that they promise that will review the book in personal correspondence. you should expect to get 0-2 reviews for every 25 books you send out, maybe.

most 'legit' reviewers ignore digitally printed books sort of on principle. small presses are basically no different from self-published books and no one takes small press/self-published books seriously in the 'real world' outside your indie scene.

digital reviewer systems are similarly expensive. for example, sending out ebook copies to reviewers through NetGalley costs something like $600 per book for 6 months, or something. these ebooks are given to people who sign up for books based on some rough metadata like topic/style of book and in my experience reading through netgalley reviews, indie/experimental literary fiction is very unpopular. you will get 1-star reviews by people who think all books should espouse positive christian morals, for example, or who think your story has no plot.

goodreads giveaways cost ~$200 dollars for a normal, non-promoted giveaway, and ~$600 for a promoted giveaway. plus the cost of the book and shipping, obviously.

awards

awards help promote a book or author via exposure. most award organizations will talk about the book/author in a press release, on the media, online, etc. An award also helps you convince potential readers that the book is good or worthwhile, and should help sales, i assume.

to be considered for almost any award, a publisher/author must send between 3-10 copies of the book to an award committee by some date. these copies are not returned. i have seen some awards that ask for only 1 or 2 copies. many awards have an entry fee of $75-$150 as well, although some are free to enter. i do not know whether, for most small presses, paying money/sending books to these arbitrary awards with names like American Book Award or National Literature Association Award, or whatever, is actually worth it, in terms of exposure or sales. i do not think indie books win awards. 

however, recently-ish, the publisher that put out Ducks, Newburyport was ripped off by some awards organization that required them printing something like 10k copies of the book as part of the process to promote the book because of the award, or something, but the award organization never paid, for some reason, and the publisher needed to run a GoFundMe for $50k, which is insane and embarassing. here is an article about it.

other fees / tax

selling anything on, eg. bigcartel or bandcamp, means you will pay a fee on each item sold, something like 3% plus $.30 per item. same for square (if you sell things with a square reader at a book fair or reading) and even paypal. so if you sell a book for $10 on bigcartel, you will only 'get' $9.60.

bigcartel also reports your sales as taxable income. many independent authors get fucked on taxes if they make more than like $1,000 per year because this income isn't taxed when you get it (unlike, for example, a paycheck from a restaurant, which takes out the tax before it pays you). independent income like this is taxed at something like 30%, which is very high and shitty. if you make $1,000 in selling books this year, you should keep $300 of that in your bank account for when you file your taxes. i think you also need to file your taxes 4x per year if your sole income, or the majority of your income, comes from this kind of payment, for some reason. if this applies to you, and you are somehow making all/most of your money through book/art royalties, you should save receipts for eg. office supplies, computers, art supplies, or even mileage (for travel for research) to use for tax deductions. you can look this up on your own time, if it applies to you.

you can risk not reporting this income and being fine or getting fucked by the IRS. you have higher odds of getting fucked by the IRS if your publisher is a real 'company' like an LLC, as opposed to a couple of idiots selling books out of cavin's apartment. getting fucked by the IRS means you have to pay what you owe and they'll send you threatening mail about garnishing your wages.

if you are a publisher, you should tell your authors about this tax stuff (especially before you file forms on their behalf). 

*

by now you should have a better appreciation for how expensive/impossible it is to 'compete' as a small publisher. if you start a book press, you will never 'compete' with a major press. you should have very low expectations, lower than you may already have. every step of the way is more expensive or impenetrable for you and you will not be taken 'seriously' by eg. reviewers if you do not do all of the expensive/impossible things. even if you do all the expensive things, you will still lose money, most likely, and not be taken seriously.

most 'success' stories about new/small presses published on publisher's weekly, for example, are actually about imprints created under one of the major 5 presses. these imprints basically have a million dollars to throw at creating/promoting a book and do all of the expensive things i listed above. they aren't actually indie presses.

ingram and amazon make some of the above steps easier for you, as a publisher, especially for international sales. which is why they are popular with small presses, but they have their own problems, for example, the layout/formatting interfaces are, from what i hear, difficult or confusing and limited in what you can do, eg. edge-to-edge printing on the inside, for example, for all-black pages.

if you are an author putting out a book on a small press, you should be aware of all of the above, as well. you will most likely be disappointed in your publisher for not getting you many/any reviews or interviews on your behalf. you will most likely be disappointed in how hard it is to get your book taken seriously by institutions like book stores or libraries, or even other small press authors or small websites/blogs that you like. you will not make money on your small press book. you most likely will make something like $300 on your small press book over 1-2 years, and $150 of that will be from your friends/family.

barn poem backgrounds

i've done 3 podcast interviews and two written interviews about my book 50 Barn Poems. interest in the book has since waned (which is fine) and back during the promotional cycle/interviewing i generally felt unfocused and uncomfortable about how to talk about the book, what other people might think about what i said about it, etc.

i realized that in some ways i censored myself unnecessarily in fear of what people might think about me or the book, that being honest about it in some way would make people like it, or me, less. so i've decided to write this blog post with some details about the creation/writing/publishing of the book.

1. prior to writing it i had written very little poetry, and almost no 'good' poems, and for a long time considered myself 'someone who wouldn't write poetry'

2. three or four of the barn poems were reworked versions of older poems/short stories/excerpts from other projects that i repurposed for 50 barn poems. i feel like it's obvious which ones they are, if you read it. everything else was written wholesale for the collection

3. it took roughly 7 days to go from settling on the idea for the book (based on a off-handed joke in a group DM) to submitting the final manuscript to clash books. i also submitted it to moloko house and bottlecap press. i had, somehow, forgotten to attach the file when i emailed moloko house, and they were nice in their short correspondence about that, and when i withdrew my submission to them.

4. clash responded within ~3 days, preceded by them following me on twitter. (something similar happened just before i had a story accepted in wigleaf. however, soft skull follows me, and as far as i know, they otherwise don't know/care about me, so this isn't a tried and true gauge of interest, but maybe usually means something). this puts the book at ~10 days to go from vague idea to publishing deal.

5. there was pretty extensive back and forth about the formatting of the text, margins, and fonts, due, i think primarily, to the software leza was using to typeset it and its various presets. this discussion exclusively took place over twitter DM. after a while i 'gave up' on suggesting changes which is why, for example, it does not use hanging indents, but this only impacts ~5-6 lines in the whole book, as most lines are very short. i think this was a bad experience for leza and i feel bad about that, but i think the inside overall looks really good compared to the original versions, and compared to other poetry books on clash.

6. stephin merritt's name was misspelled on both the inside and cover in the original printing. his name is still misspelled, but in a different way, on the back cover (but spelled correctly on the inside) in the second printing. other things are misspelled in the first printing, including daniel bailey's name. i think there's still a typo in one of the poems in both printings that i forgot about and don't really care about. i plan on mailing stephin merritt both copies and apologizing. i hope he thinks it's funny.

7. in terms of other poets on clash, i have no idea what Big Bruiser Dope Boy thinks about the book, or about me. i am intimidated by him and his poetry and i assume he thinks i suck/it sucks. however, BBDB friend requested me on facebook maybe two months ago (i am surprised by how many writers are 'active' on facebook...i don't remember the last time i friend requested someone or posted anything on facebook...i worry this comes off as 'rude', to the people who are active on facebook) so maybe he thinks i'm fine. sam pink said nice/supportive things about it in a twitter DM after i sent him a copy. i should send BBDB a copy i think - i think i didn't originally because of feeling intimidated/self-conscious. i submitted to clash because of sam and BBDB. they both have books on 11:11 now. i don't plan on sending a book to 11:11 but partially out of a desire to not make them think i'm just trying to 'act like i'm at their level and go where they go' which is a fear i have often when it comes to submitting/publishing/promoting, for example, when i had a short story i read on the zero point fiction podcast that was released immediately after bud smith and joey grantham had stories on that podcast, even though i didn't know either of them would have stories on it when i was working on recording my story to send in, which is a complicated thing to think/talk about and i think just me being paranoid/self-conscious.

8. i did not receive an advance, which is fine. the royalty split is good as per the contract, but i don't actually know how much i receive per book. i think i make either $2.49 or $4.98 per normally-priced print version sold, based on receiving a few royalty payments of $4.98/month. i think i've sold maybe 100 copies through clash and maybe 20 copies myself. i haven't done the math. i've given away ~15 copies through barn poem contests, blurber copies, and random people i like/talk to. i have several copies sitting on my bookshelf, but i am kind of afraid of going to the post office during the pandemic.

9. i never really knew, nor have i since learned, the proper/right way to try to get excerpts published in anticipation of/in support of a book release. different magazines seem to have different protocols and categories. i don't really know. i kind of gave up on it.

anyway, i've been continually surprised at the positive response from people and the kind things people say and think about it. i accept that it isn't something that appeals to everyone and i don't feel bad that some people dislike it.

i really appreciate everyone who has read the book, reached out to me about it, recommended it to others, interviewed me about it, reviewed it, or anything else in support of it. i've especially enjoyed talking to people about it inspiring them to try writing poetry or reading more poetry. it feels unreal and i've enjoyed what i've read coming from them. so that's been great. i feel good about it. thanks for reading my blog.

Pseudonym Rankings by Giacomo Pope

The world of writers is populated with scheming liars who live behind fake names. It is time to name names. Prepare for judgement.

- "Giacomo"

[note: this is a guest post by Giacomo Pope. he pitched the idea to me and i agreed to post it on his behalf. it went through several iterations over twitter DM and email.]

[second note: i sent a draft of this, with some edits and questions, to giacomo shortly after he lacerated his head on a street sign.]

Giacomo reviewing my edits after lacerating his head on a street sign

This is a blog post about pseudonyms written as a list with a very scientific and precise scoring system. It's like rotten tomatoes, except a high score means that I've judged the author to be using a pseudonym and I don't talk about films at all. Disclaimer: I am writing this introduction after cutting my head open and I'm not really paying attention to what I'm writing. But yeah, whatever. Here's an IMDB of named names. You have been judged. - "Giacomo"

Sam Pink
82%

Sam Pink was once at a party and someone asked Sam what his favourite colour was, and then Sam responded pink but regretted it and changed his mind and said blue, but everyone had already heard pink and everyone at the party was laughing at him and so he said, i said pink, but i only said pink because i say my name before answering any question, as you know. so what you heard, when you heard pink, was actually my name: Pink, and then you all heard my favourite colour, which is blue. and all his friends said "i thought your name was Boccaccio" and he said "no, it's Pink and my favourite colour is blue."



Chelsea Martin
0%

For "Chelsea Martin" to pick a pseudonym she would have to have a name that wasn't "Chelsea Martin". For "Chelsea Martin" who isn't "Chelsea Martin" to pick the pseudonym "Chelsea Martin", "Chelsea Martin" would first have to think of the name "Chelsea Martin". For "Chelsea Martin", who isn't "Chelsea Martin" to pick the name "Chelsea Martin" after thinking of the name "Chelsea Martin", "Chelsea Martin" would have to decide to use the name "Chelsea Martin", instead of the name "Chelsea Martin" had before becoming "Chelsea Martin" as a name to attach to "Chelsea Martin's" art. For "Chelsea Martin" to feel like "Chelsea Martin" was the name of the person who made the art that the person who wasn't called "Chelsea Martin" made, the person called "Chelsea Martin" would first have to make art as "Chelsea Martin". For there to be art made by "Chelsea Martin", the person who isn't "Chelsea Martin" would have to already be "Chelsea Martin", making art as "Chelsea Martin" for the person who isn't named "Chelsea Martin" to look at to decide if the art "Chelsea Martin" felt congruent to the art made by the person who isn't "Chelsea Martin" to be sold as art made by "Chelsea Martin". Therefore "Chelsea Martin" was making art as "Chelsea Martin" before the person called not called "Chelsea Martin" was making art. Therefore "Chelsea Martin" has always been "Chelsea Martin".



Bud Smith
91%

Feel overwhelmingly that "Bud Smith" was a name picked to subconsciously inspire friendship between "Bud Smith" and other members of the community. When I message "Bud Smith", i say "hey bud", which makes me feel calm and relaxed, like I'm messaging a good and kind friend. I am 90% certain is part of some evil plan. Potentially his name could also be a reference to "smoking the devils lettuce", or even the flowering of "opium buds". When I say "bud," am I really saying "foe"???


Mike Andrelczyk
23%

I find Andrelczyk very hard to spell, but I'm an idiot. Luckily I message Mike every day so I copy paste it from our Twitter DMs so I don't need to learn to spell it myself. Potentially problematic if Mike spells his own name wrong. Sometimes Mike says he wishes he had a pseudonym, which seems to suggest he doesn't... but Mike plays chess, so I wouldn't put it past him to be playing mind tricks with me. This move is known as the Poet's Gambit.



Noah Cicero
80%

"Noah" might be Noah's name, but "Cicero" seems too good to be true considering the political edge to a lot of Noah's writing. If Cicero is Noah's real name, then he's another case of people becoming their names. The first case of this I remember was being taught physics by a man named Mr. Newton. He was a strange man who told me to work harder after getting 100% in a physics exam. Feeling interested that I have made the speculation about Noah's name as an opportunity into sharing a fact about myself where I make myself seem intelligent. Going to keep it in, along with these sentences.


Big Bruiser Dope Boy
0%

No one would pick that as a pseudonym, must just have weird parents.



Joseph (Joey) Grantham 
50%

"Hi I'm Joseph, but my friends call me Joey" seems innocent on the surface, but under the kindness and the moustache lies the mysterious workings of indie lit's most gruesome sociopath. Over the course of the past few years, Joseph (Joey) Grantham has worked his way up through the independent literature scene, from a small indie press run with his sister, to being the editor of the lit mag associated to the worlds most important and likeable podcaster. Unsatisfied with the power over the nervous breakdown, Joseph (Joey) Grantham went after Brad Listi himself, killing Brad and hiding his body in the hollywood hills in the summer of 2019. We will never learn of the true identity of Joseph (Joey) Grantham until we see it on white letters, on a black board in a mugshot, with crocodile tears falling under the rims of his glasses.



Cavin (Bryce) Gonzalez
13%

Cavin is a friend, but how well do you really know anyone over the internet? His middle name comes and goes, and I've heard dark rumours of an early life as Mr. Sinatra. I suspect Cavin's real name is "Jethro" and the dog he posts photos of his just his way to allow the truth to air in a safe space.



Crispin Best
17% + 99%

I went to a church the other day and there was a hallway filled with stained glass pictures of various saints. One of the saints was "St. Cripsin". I took a photo and tweeted the photo of the stained glass picture of saint crispin to Crispin Best. Honestly thought up until the point "Crispin" was some punny name linked with "Crispin off your bacon" or something. Now I just feel like Crispin was named after a saint. Almost totally sure in display of domination, Crispin picked the last name "Best" to establish an intimidating presence on social media.



Elizabeth Ellen
5%

I'm instantly suspicious of alliterative names, but EE's whole shtick seems to be catastrophic honesty, so using a pseudonym would just be really weird. Going to just assume EE's mum liked the letter E.



Tao Lin
0%

Certain that Tao would use his real name. Would be very surprised if Tao did not use his real name. I can imagine Tao sitting there for a long time thinking about whether to use a pseudonym, but deciding that it would be better to not use a pseudonym.



Sam Pink (again)
73%

"Sam" appears to me as too American Italian to be called "Sam". If Sam was short for "Samuele", "Santo", "Santu" or "Sarbaturi" I am 96% certain "Sam" would just use his full name, as those are great names. Imagining "Sam" is actually named "Giovanni", or maybe "Ludovico", and picked "Sam" so it was easier to write in crayon.



Zac Smith
99.999%

Surely no one would write 50 poems about barns and put their real name on the front? Zac has a proper job, with proper friends. Family, people who love him. Can't believe it for a second that he'd let that barn open its doors for the world to look into. He also mentioned his name rhyming with "Larry" at some point, when we were shit talking poems that rhyme, which seems suspicious, in retrospect.


Blake butler
1%

Alliteration means this was obviously once a pseudonym - however I’m almost totally certain that after the first few books Blake published, "Blake" legally changed his name to become Blake. I suspect that this was to help him stop feeling weird when random people on the internet sent him emails referring to him as “Blake”.



Juliet Escoria
100% 

I read Scott Mclanahan’s book and listened to a podcast with Scott Mclanahan in which he refers to Juliet as Julia. I do not think Juliet's last name is Mclanahan, but I also don’t think it’s Escoria.


Daniel Bailey
42%

There's something elegant in how many letters are shared between "Daniel" and "Bailey" which makes me think that this was done on purpose. Decided to write "Dn By", as a minimal name, as though I can cancel letters on both sides. Buying a poetry book by Dn By. Being taught poems by dn by. bydnby as a signature on a book contract. Doubt re: pseudonym in the form of knowledge that "Daniel" named his blog "Horse Juice", and with ideas like that, I feel like if Daniel was picking a pseudonym, it would probably be something as earth shattering as "Horse Juice" and that "Daniel" is indeed just "Daniel".


Scott McClanahan
??%

Every time I think Scott's name I sing a little song which goes "Scott McClanahahanahanahaahahan" and giggle and lose focus. No idea. Great name though.



Steve Anwyll
3%

Feel almost completely certain it is important for Steve to attach his real name to his writing. Feel this on the level of his dedication to authenticity. Steve feels like an authentic man. Feel like I can imagine an interviewer asking Steve whether he uses a pen name and Steve telling the podcaster only a coward would use a pen name.



Raymond Carver
100%

I see you Gordon.



Megan Boyle
1%

After writing Liveblog, I'm not sure there'd be much of a point in writing under a pseudonym. Potentially picked a pseudonym before deciding to write the accountability blog, but feel that if this was the case, "Megan" would have included thoughts within Liveblog such as "Asked mom about how good my pseudonym was, like on a scale of 10 while watching homeland, but didn't listen to her response. Opened the bathroom door and flushed the toilet".



Troy James Weaver
68%

Feel Like Troy's name is Troy, but that either "James" or "Weaver" has been added to make sure Troy would be considered with other three-named authors such as David Foster Wallace, William Carlos Williams, Karl One Knausgaard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Earl Craig, Edgar Allen Poe, R L Stein, Joseph (Joey) Grantham and Philip Seymour Hoffman.



Brian Allen Carr / Brian Alan Ellis
50%

One of these guys is real, one of them is an alter ego. I refuse to believe that this tiny bubble of indie lit has two separate people with such confusingly similar names. I've talked with Brian Alan Ellis, which makes me think he exists, but he could also exist as a pseudonym online, living day-to-day as Allen Carr. Laughing about how both of these people have three word names but that I forgot to add them into Troy's investigation. Decided not to edit them back in as some form of authenticity to the investigation. Potentially both are the pen names for Bret Easten Ellis for when he want to stop writing about being white and instead focus on the higher arts such as wrestling, or Alf.



Brad Phillips
13%

I first became aware of Brad while he was lying to people with funny fake business cards. Feel strongly that Brad is good at making art about lying, but that his name came before the lies and is probably real. Feel like it's important for Brad to be Brad while doing Brad things, like lying. Maybe he has won me over, and I am just another mark in a lifetime of art-cons.

Top Ten Writers on Twitter

i originally wrote this in a bout of mania inspired by the old vice shit that people would write and apparently get paid hundreds of dollars to publish. i think there's a lack of navel-gazing and community-promotion in different venues these days - twitter feels very locked into twitter. instead of pitching this stupid thing anywhere, i'm putting it here. on rereading it, i'm working on changing how it's written, so it can feel more earnest, i think.

--

As a writer - and for writers - Twitter is a fun medium. Are we past peak writer Twitter? Absolutely - with alt-lit's drug-fueled livetweets and overly-personal confessions long gone, Twitter is turning, slowly but surely, into Facebook Lite, a place where millennials post personality quiz results and complain about their neighbors.

But it's also, for many writers, one of many generic dumping grounds for hashtags and new book announcements, thanks in part to the hundreds of identical articles full of tips for promoting your shitty new eBook, thanks in another part to the writers who are on Twitter begrudgingly, just to engage their loyal fans with non-committal retweets for upcoming book tours and interviews. I think it's just, maybe, like everything else, but still, in that way, bad.

So far, if you base your opinion on what I've written, Twitter is mostly bad.

But Twitter can still be a force for creative good for writers, and I don't just mean in terms of vaguely viral #AmWriting tweets about working on a novel draft. And I'm not talkign about it as a place to make friends and connections, which happens, and which I've done and benefited from, in a person-to-person way. I mean there are still writers - people who write - using the medium to exercise their creativity and voice in the act of tweeting. This writing on, and for, the medium, is a conscious distancing from self-promotion, networking, SEO-optimization, and whatever marketing bullshit people usually associate with being a writer on twitter. I'm talking about "Pure Tweets", the tweet for the tweet's sake, the injection of literary goodness into a never-ending feed. Something something hellworld, doomscrolling, blah blah.

This is a list I've compiled to celebrate - and encourage - this kind of writerly tweeting, and hopefully inspire more people to tweet this. There are many writers on Twitter I love, and even for their tweets, but I'm also narrowing down the field in terms of: consistency, frequency, original content to retweet ratios, and 'all that jazz'. It was a lot of work, so you better enjoy this: a list of some of my favorite writer, or writer-adjacent, tweeters in 2020.
 

10. @weeatherhead

Andrew Weatherhead

@weeatherhead · Apr 23

Feel like my cats are extracting a cat person out of me, like a zip file

Andrew Weatherhead is a poet. You should buy, and read, his jangly, fragmented "book-length poem" $50,000. While for a while I wouldn't have recommended Andrew's tweets due to his emphasis on cataloguing his work out routines, I've since come around to enjoying his tweeting. I think his book coming out got him back into the swing of things. Andrew's tweet strengths lies in his provocative introspection. His tweets are a medium for him to peer into his own mind...

Andrew Weatherhead

@weeatherhead · Apr 6

Keep thinking “Dave ‘Easter’ Eggers”

...and find the inexplicable...

Andrew Weatherhead

@weeatherhead · Apr 22

I keep hoping that Girl Talk will come back and remix my life somehow -- all my poems, my art, make me better or something, beatmatch my bullshit, cure me

...but also, ultimately, sometimes, his tweets deliver a deft punch to the deflating writerly spirit in all of us:

Andrew Weatherhead

@weeatherhead · Apr 21

Reinvigorating my novel by changing the title to “Who Cares”

Follow Andrew and you will see good writer tweets. I think he's consciously tapped into what I'm tapped into, re:good tweets, a kindred spirit in the hunt for, and desire to manufacture, good tweets.

9. @timothysanders

TWS

@timothysanders · Apr 16

ordered a bidet for my ass

Timothy Willis Sanders was around a few years ago in indie lit, with small press (and out of print) books from 2010 and 2014, but he's still around and he's still tweeting and he's still tweeting with a panache for the written word. Like his evocative fiction, often disjointed and strange, TWS's tweets engage me with their turn of phrase and irreverent nature. From observational comedy...

TWS

@timothysanders · Mar 29

my bank emailed me to say that in these tough times they are still committed to me. thank you bank.

To dark, humorous confession...

TWS

@timothysanders · Mar 13

rude of my emotions to make me cry again

To self-aware digs at "being in the writing scene"...

TWS

@timothysanders · Mar 4

so far i’ve met 6,00,000 people at awp & they’re all in the same mfa program

...TWS offers a solid repertoire of writerly tweets. Follow him for a good mix of the personal and the cutting, the sweet and the strange, and read his books for more of the same (sorry for rhyming).

8. @sighpilot

momo @SighPilot · Apr 25

some words/phrases i have repeated in recent personal emails: fuck bubble, modified calvinism, collective sheltering inertia, crisis=opportunity, telegraphed intention, cosmic equations, folly, ranches, psychobabble, collapsed anus, yeah, looping, cardinal, extrapolate, slowdown

Momo doesn't have a book, and he barely has anything in any online lit mags (but what he does have, well *chef's kiss*, as they say). But he's a writer through and through, treating your twitter timeline like his Kerouacquian scroll of paper. And with under 500 followers, he's yet to let his art decay into an ego-feeding engagement frenzy. You should follow him, though, to see if we can make him go insane.

From the classic introspective monologuing:

momo @SighPilot · Apr 15

just thought ‘gimme all the deets’ in shithead brunch voice apropos of nothing immediately discernible while brushing my teeth

to the stupid depressed dad jokes (he's expecting, so it's ok):

momo @SighPilot · Apr 11

a tisket

a tasket

a custom crocodile leather casket

to the punchy short-story-in-a-tweets:

momo @SighPilot · Apr 6

an ongoing, open zoom meeting where participants come to shave their heads in silence

Momo's a welcome addition to anyone looking for good, writerly, tweeterly content. I endorse his tweets.

7. @wownicebuttdude

ava wolf

@wownicebuttdude · Apr 28

roommate said that yesterday her boss overheard me marching up and down the stairs with the cat in my arms yelling "BIG BOY STINKY BOY BIG BOY STINKY BOY"

Ava Wolf doesn't have any books either, because fuck you, we have the internet (unless you count a digital-only 18-page microchap as a book, which you probably should, because it was released by the indelible Ghost City Press). But, speaking of internet, she's a solid tweeter who specializes in self-deprecating introspection about food, clothes, and, hey, even books. The versatility of her subdued humor rips and grips, from dry one-liners...

ava wolf

@wownicebuttdude · Apr 27

some tweets are good. some tweets are bad.  that’s life baby

to her stylish exercises in autofiction...

ava wolf

@wownicebuttdude · Apr 24

very exciting plans this weekend. for instance, i will be wearing a bathrobe, laying down, getting back up, taking a sip of water, laying down, computer, getting back up, wiping something (body? counter?), laying down, opening book, closing book, computer, etc.

to, somehow, actually good content about cats (rare in 2020)...

ava wolf

@wownicebuttdude · Apr 24

people ask how i can tell my cats apart. "both of your cats look the same," they say. ha! fools... one is a beautiful and elegant creature with silken fur, while the other is simply a bunch of ketchup in a ziplock bag with googly eyes

Bold and contemporary, Ava's tweets are that rare type of good tweet written by someone with an unpretentious ability to write well - truly a writer who tweets, not simply a tweeter who writes, or a writer who tweets to promote writing. This is the sunshine quadrant, the intersection of intent and execution that all good writers-on-twitter should target.

6. @miragonz

Mira Gonzalez

@miragonz · Apr 22

the last thought i have before i die is definitely gonna be something insanely stupid

Mira Gonzalez is not a best-kept secret. She's an OG alt-lit tweeter (even though she hates the label, like all good alt-lit writers do) with an out-of-print poetry book on Sorry House, ~30k followers and even 50% of a book of tweets (Selected Tweets, co-authored with Tao Lin, on Tyrant Books). While she's a strong meta-tweeter - consistently dunking with observational commentary with her finger on the timeline's pulse - I recommend following her for the sheer variety of topics she tackles with her self-assured, confident style. Check our her range, from weed thoughts...

Mira Gonzalez

@miragonz · Apr 27

seems like the whole point of golf is to play as little actual golf as possible?

to political commentary...

Mira Gonzalez

@miragonz · Apr 10

oh your candidate is a rapist who can't form a coherent sentence after 3pm? idk, that sounds like a You problem

to provocative fun facts...

Mira Gonzalez

@miragonz · Apr 23

just learned that one-third of all divorce filings in the US include the word "facebook"

...Mira is a must-follow writer who brings a good breadth and engaging relevancy to the feed. You can also mine her accounts (yes, plural) for some classic, hey-day twitter shit, including an account dedicated to her aborted attempt at reading Infinite Jest.

5. @oneloveasshole

one love asshole

@oneloveasshole · Apr 26

was gonna post a pic of my unpublished manuscript printed out but remembered i’m not that kind of asshole.

Steve Anwyll is a Canadian author. His novel, Welfare (Tyrant Books) was one of the best books I read in 2019. While his novel is heartbreaking and raw, and in interviews he's enthusiastic and honest, on Twitter, Steve is a depressed, angry asshole. His lowercase, staccato, and bleak tweets are grounding and refreshingly meditative. From his self-deprecating self-empowerment...

one love asshole

@oneloveasshole · Apr 18

everything i believe in is bullshit and that’s ok.

to his unexpected philosophical treatises...

one love asshole

@oneloveasshole · Apr 22

you frisbee toss an expired pita out the window. it explodes in a cloud of dust on the sidewalk. and that's all there is to this life.

to his ability to 'connect the dots'...

one love asshole @oneloveasshole · Mar 5

looking at a pile of dust i swept up and thinking pretty good haul.

...Including Steve in your timeline is a good, often hilarious way to keep yourself off your high horse. He truly wrenches the most out of the short form that Twitter affords us, as any good writer should.

4. @asdkfjasdlfjd

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d

@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 21

With the sensation of making a historical insight, caught self depressed at desk job beginning to conceptualize my sadness as rats scurrying around in my brain, like the ratatouille movie where they steer and control you, guided by sad rats

Nathan Duggan has some stories and poems on some places on the internet. He lives in Maine and has been using his twitter to curate a very strong, inventive, and engaging series of vignettes about work, self-worth, and crustaceans/slugs/insects. From our personal correspondence and from reading his writing, both published and non-published on the internet, i think the crustacean/slug/insect thing goes deep and may be one of the best/unique themes in writing I've encountered lately. Because of his consistently good tweets about crabs and muck...

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d

@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 11

Going to go to the beach today maybe, where there are, among other things, crabs and muck

...that good office depression life...

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d

@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 9

Thursday at work we get a little giddy. We talk maybe too loudly in the cells of our cubicles, we cackle and sneer. 'Another day another dollar,' rolling our eyes so hard they go into the backs of our heads. Outside it is raining -- perhaps it's been raining our whole lives

...and droll observational humor...

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d

@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 3

There is not a single law against it, but for some reason swimming in the marshes of my town has always seemed 'forbidden' to me

... I told him recently to repurpose several of his recent tweets into a short-chapter, kafkaesque, vignette-style book about working a shitty office job. I think it would be a good book.

3.  @bartlebytaco

sebastian castillo @bartlebytaco · 18h

yes i am 32... the age jesus christ infamously went “beast mode”

Sebastian Castillo is, in my mind, a principal player in making jokes about writing on twitter. With a chapbook of single-sentence "novels" on Bottlecap press and a hybrid prose/poetry collection forthcoming from Word West, Sebastian is unassuming, unpretentiously pretentious, and consistently hilarious. I think his experience as an adjunct writing professor in NYC has helped him hone is droll absurdism, his self-aware silliness. From his ongoing dream journals...

sebastian castillo

@bartlebytaco · Apr 2

dreamt that diet coke cost $40 a can. no way am i going to pay that! in the next dream, i was a field mouse running away from a big, ugly ogre who was trying to cook me up in his soup. no thanks!

to his seamless, stupid pop culture punchlines...

sebastian castillo

@bartlebytaco · Mar 14

just wrote this play called king lear. it’s about this huge dumbass old guy

to his revelatory, Bernhardian confessions...

sebastian castillo

@bartlebytaco · Apr 19

my mother said when i was a child the funniest thing in the world to me was frosty the snowman. to me, nothing was funnier than frosty the snowman

...Sebastian is probably indie lit's best-kept secrets, at least in terms of tweets. In a world of viral inanity, his tweets will remind you that, yes, writers can use their knowledge and power to be interesting, actually.

2. @a_neutral_space

Neutral Spaces - Intern

@a_neutral_space · Apr 22

me, reading submission guidelines for some wix site lit mag with ads and 206 twitter followers: "damn my BEST huh? you want my BEST? damn alright i guess you deserve it"

Filling the void, I think, left behind by the likes of @muumuuinterns and other strange, anonymous, shitposty literature community accounts, the Neutral Spaces Intern - who is definitely not Dave Eggers - has captured my heart with his consistent mix of @dril-style dumbness to prescient commentary-on-the-commentary...

Neutral Spaces - Intern

@a_neutral_space · Mar 19

poetry? more like DICKSUCKETRY

And poop jokes...

Neutral Spaces - Intern

@a_neutral_space · Mar 17

my poems about shitting into a teacup have been nominated for the national book award. finally

Dav- I mean, The Intern - is a daily lit community supplement, the guy in the corner making the jerkoff motion and drinking from a forty while the rest of the party argues about Lorrie Moore or whatever. I'm also partial to the quick snatches of the Intern's personal narrative arc, when we get to see them; whether drunk on his fixie or punching in at the k-mart distribution center, the Intern's story is odd, beautiful, and oddly beautiful.

Neutral Spaces - Intern

@a_neutral_space · Oct 9, 2019

drumk on my fixie,and i have stolen twenty eight dollars worth of hanburgers from the enemy. timme for ooetry

1. @markleidner

mark leidner

@markleidner · Sep 6, 2018

each morning I put one uncooked ravioli in a thermos. i pour hot water over it, steeping it like tea, and then i drink it all day at work (i work at the white house) and at the end of the day, as i take the last sip of the tea, the soft ravioli slides into my mouth, and i eat it

Mark Leidner is great. He's an incredible artist. He has books of poetry on some small presses, a delightful collection of short stories on Tyrant Books, a few short film credits, and who knows what else in the works. He's a legit "creative" whose work is tight, focused, surreal, and meticulous - Only someone like Mark Leidner could write a 50 page love story/political thriller about ants and keep you gripped the entire way through, or a book of aphorisms that never runs dull. And his tweets are similarly powerful, strange and evocative. I highly encourage you to follow him, as his pure content to general self promotion ratio is incredible; he's almost a purely content-driven tweeter who scores 3-pointers with every shot. From his running X-Files bits...

mark leidner

@markleidner · May 19, 2015

mulder: in heaven will we finally be able to punish each other without causing each other to suffer?

scully: I don't know, mulder

to his aphoristic nanofictions...

mark leidner

@markleidner · Jun 24, 2012

unnecessary stop signs every ten feet on an endless highway with no intersections

to his running "unhinged guy at the podium" bits...

mark leidner

@markleidner · May 14, 2019

[pounding pulpit] we live on god’s ass

Mark is a top choice for anyone looking for good tweets by a good writer on a regular basis.

brief book reviews

this is an attempt to articulate my thoughts on some recently read books without pitching formal reviews to venues or deciding on some star-rating like on goodreads. i've spent a lot of time thinking about the role of reviews in 'the online writing community', the centralizing nature of avenues like goodreads, and the 'pointless frustration' of 'submitting' book reviews to places for publication. i want to write a blog post sometime about my feelings on how the internet has changed and what it means for things like promotional work, hype, engaging with readers, etc. but for now i'm just going to use this blog to write reviews, at least for the time being. i like feeling like i have the freedom to write my honest thoughts without feeling like negative or neutral ideas are inherently unwelcome because of the idea that the review should be about elevating/promoting a book/author. it also allows me, having written the stuff below already, to make connections between multiple books, and allows me to write reviews for older books as well as newer books in a way that's more satisfying than adding content to the goodreads database.

here are the 3 books i most recently read and my thoughts:

Faceless in Nippon by Dale Brett (Expat Press): I 'met' dale online through neutral spaces i think, or maybe just on twitter. we talked about shoegaze, which is a shared interest, and we talked about the idea of writing prose in a way that reads like how shoegaze sounds, which i haven't since thought too deeply about, but which is something dale says he's tried to do in a recently released chapbook/zine thing, which i haven't read. i bought Faceless based on kind of being friendly with dale online and some excerpts i read online (i think i only read one excerpt out of what seems like maybe 5-7 that exist online, which feels like a lot of excerpts). i like a lot of the book and read it pretty quickly. i read it during times when i don't normally read, which i've come to understand means i'm enjoying the book more than average, because of how structured my days are. the chapters are very short and there is a general narrative arc with some character-based subplots. i think it could have benefited from some editing (both copyediting and from a larger cutting/keeping/sequencing perspective) - the chapters vacillate between present and past tense, and there are some redundant passages (nearly identical ruminations on rejecting the mortgage/family/suburb life in the beginning and toward the end) and some passages that stifle the flow of the narrative. but that latter part is probably a personally negative thing, as i don't get much from dale's main aesthetic focus of cramming a weird adjective into every noun phrase to describe some setting, but people seem to respond to it online, so whatever. these are front-loaded in the book and I mostly skimmed them when they came about later on. related, there are experiences referenced in the book - going to punk clubs, seeing live music, etc etc. - which don't get any space in the narrative, which is a shame because i think they'd make for really great content with dale's voice/perspective. i think the biggest strengths of the book were the clear and open narratives revolving around the protagonist's love interest and other expat friend, but these sections are in the minority. i think the friend gets like 2 chapters and the girlfriend gets maybe 4. the scenes about riding bikes around and drinking beer, fucking around, feeling lonely but together - these appealed to me, and they really tied together, by the end, what i thought was great about it, which is that it's ultimately a novel about the experience of trying to be an expat - the romantic arc of living somewhere new and, eventually, getting over it. i think this is what makes the book unique, and it's something that i feel we can only really get in indie lit, as opposed to making it more specifically about the relationships between lovers and instead between a person and a place. i also liked the way that dale plays with his power, as an author/narrator, in making shit up. there's a chapter about a strange food/beverage that was really surreal, enticing, confounding, and interesting. the way that he wrote about it from an emotional point of view, and the ambiguous way he described it, made me google it after reading that chapter, but it doesn't exist, which impressed me. i thought this was a powerful move and could warrant a larger critical analysis of this chapter, and others that were similar. it was obvious that he had fun writing some parts of the book, and felt serious during others, which something something something range of styles and emotions from a literary perspective. so, overall, i think it could have been a great book, but as it exists it is a very good book. i could see dale's next book being a great book, especially if he gets more comfortable with cutting the fat. it feels like a debut indie album, where the melodic hooks and guitar sound outweigh the sprawling tracklist and weird production choices. stupid comparison but whatever. but it makes sense, since it's his debut indie book.

Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (Vintage Classics): Bought some books by Joy Williams based on a tweet by Tao Lin saying that she was one of his most-read authors (and pictures of him wearing a cool purple joy williams tshirt). I had no other expectation in going in, but i ended up thoroughly enjoying it. I can see where she would have influenced his kmart realist/alt lit style in some ways, but her style is in some ways more complex and vague than his earlier work, and in this one especially, i got a lot of, like, pynchon/robbins/general 80's-style 'kooky character'-based dialogue, which i didn't expect. i was most moved by the emphasis on strange details and evocative turns of phrase. i felt like characters were never really 'introduced' and they faded in and out, which, combined with the section-based jumps in time, made it very dreamlike, or like i had skipped a page at times. in this way though, it felt uniquely 'challenging' as a novel-reading experience similar to when i first read thomas bernhard. and speaking of which, i assume he was/is an influence, especially in the way that some 'insane' characters end up monologuing/dialoguing throughout the book, to sort of, just, explore, i think, their madness and communicate it in a provocative way. however, in a way that doesn't seem to exist anymore in indie/alt lit, there are, like, 'twists' and 'reveals' and 'life or death' stakes, especially toward the end. it also felt like there was a good deal of symbolism that could be analyzed if i felt compelled to, but i don't, so i won't. in this way i see it sort of as a bridge between 'typical' big press novels and 'atypical' indie novels. the cover of this edition is, in my opinion, atrocious. it looks like a shitty beach read book for a book club. i enjoyed thinking about its previous owner buying it for that purpose and thinking "what the fuck" maybe 3 chapters in. this is her 3rd novel. i'm excited to read the novels that came before and after this to get a sense of her arc as a writer, and to read 99 stories of God which mike andrelczyk recommended to me and i bought based on some pictures he sent.

Supremecist by David Shapiro (Tyrant Books): Read this really quickly. The pages are really thick, photo-glossy, because of the many photographs. and the chapters are short. i didn't know what to expect going in at all, but ended up really enjoying it. it's very narrative-driven with kind of cliche plot points and the dialogue is often incredibly artificial, like from gilmore girls or an Aaron Sorkin show/movie, which i think is intentional, and i think makes it feel more like a movie. this sounds bad on rereading but i thought it worked fine. like, i could see it being a good little movie. i liked the inclusion of the photographs and the design, an obvious (but good, still) commentary like in the book, on supreme, the brand. and i liked the topic, the 'purpose' of the book is good, concise, clear, unique. i liked the strong characterization of the characters, the narrator, the travel partner, the other people they talk to. it's mostly set in japan, which paired nicely wit Faceless, seeing similar but different articulations of the same kind of things, especially the junk food - i laughed at how much 7/11 beef on a stick the narrator eats. laughed at some other lines and dialogue, the absurdity that he leans into a lot. i felt like the ending was good. i remember telling jessica it was "sweet" how it ended, like, endearing in a way. the artificality of the dialogue is probably its only real 'problem,' and some of it feels shoehorned in, and isn't as good as the bleak little scenes, eg. narrator falling asleep in a running bath in a hotel and then doing express checkout.

ok

trying to think of what else i read recently, running out of energy to write more of these right now. might just start here and continue this in the future, not retroactively write about any other books i read in the recent past. future posts will be about the below books, maybe.

i'm currently reading:
War on X-Mas by Alan Good
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
Frowns Need Friends Too by Sam Pink
The Collected Works volume 1 by Scott McClanahan
Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek
The Sellout by Paul Beatty

i'm reading them all sort of randomly when out walking the dogs or before bed or sometimes in the afternoon. i also got some books on plant and insect identification, i wanna spend more time with those, too. another book i bought used, on flower identification, is falling apart, the binding has turned to yellow dust. i might cut out some of the nicer looking flowers and use them for an art project with my toddler.

writing in progress

unsure if this is interesting to anyone but me but i felt emboldened by thinking about the transparency in publishing talk recently to write something like this. envisioning this as part one of two parts, one about work in-prep and my plans/goals/work done for them, and another about previously published stuff and insider details and thoughts on it, both in terms of mags and book presses. this is the first part, about what i'm working on or have worked on but have not published, might not ever publish, etc., which is dumb because i have only published one book, of barn poems, which was ~60 pages, whereas all of this stuff totals like ~400 pages maybe, or something.

the writing i am working on

1. i have roughly put together a collection of flash/short stories. my working title has been Today is Totally Fucked but in trying to pitch it i've moved to calling it Everything is Totally Fine. it is currently ~60 stories, ~24k words. some stories are only a sentence or two, some are as long as ~2k words. some of the stories have been on Hobart, X-Ray, and Maudlin House and the Neutral Spaces blog, although everything pulled from there has since been very reworked. the genesis for the project was, originally, a plan giacomo and i had about starting a bear parade-style website that would only do dual/collaborative ebook things. i wrote ~6 stories and he wrote ~8 poems, something like that, that complement each other well, and he coded it up so it'd look really nice. he's since repurposed those poems for Chainsaw Poems and Other Poems and i've rewritten my stories in some drastic ways for this collection.

a few weeks ago i emailed a pitch for the collection (and an excerpt) to yuka at soft skull via her catapult email, based on richard chiem doing the same thing, which he said in an interview on either other ppl or zero point fiction, for King of Joy. i feel like it will be ignored for three reasons: 1) i'm a nobody, 2) the stories aren't good, 3) soft skull has, as of march, stated they only accept agent-submitted pitches for fiction. i have also dm'd gian at tyrant books to 'shoot my shot' and see if he wanted to read it, and he responded favorably and asked me to email it to him, which i did, but haven't heard back yet (i don't know the typical timeframe for any of this), and i have low/zero expectations. i queried an agent i found listed on a blog who said he responds to all queries, saying that i simply needed help pitching to soft skull and/or melville house, and that otherwise didn't want/need any other agent-like help, but he responded (quickly) saying he doesn't represent fiction anymore. clash has expressed interest based on twitter interactions and me asking leza if they'd be interested in seeing it as well, although christoph edits the fiction for clash, and he may not like it.

i don't currently care about getting this book, which feels like my 'best' current project, on any other presses besides these 4. even though i like several presses, i don't feel a desire to move 'laterally' from clash to a similarly small press, which feels like something a lot of people do, but i don't see much purpose in it, personally. i have vague thoughts about liking it when an author stays on the same press for multiple books, in the way that bands do this on record labels, and to work toward a more clear aesthetic/expectation/working relationship between author and press - this could be another blog post i think. anyway, i feel 90% certain it will come out on clash in the next year or two, and i hope that they don't feel bad about me trying to pitch tyrant and soft skull, or for assuming they'd even want to publish it, but i feel like this is normal, writers trying to move onto bigger presses that invest more in galleys/reviews/etc. anyway. these stories are very much in the vein of bear parade stuff but i diverge in certain, and i think, important ways, although i have a fear that this influence will be too 'obvious' and people will view them as imitative and derivative of this style. similar to how i felt self-conscious about people thinking the barn poems were 'stupid', i feel like people will think these are similarly 'stupid', or maybe worse, both stupid and derivative.

2. some of the stories cut form the above collection i think, maybe, will be reserved and rewritten for another Untitled collection that will be tonally distinct from TiTF/EiTF and more internally consistent. i currently have 3-4 of these stories, and one, about a mattress, is about ~7k words and i feel like needs to keep growing. another one won an award hosted by mythic picnic, because it was published on wigleaf, and they sent me $150, which i donated to the Minneapolis Freedom Fund (this was, i think, maybe, the only time i've 'accepted' payment for writing, aside from a smaller version of this same prize...or something...for the same story). sam pink dm'd me to compliment a version of one of the sections i had posted on the neutral spaces blog, but i think he only read it because he logged on to post his own story or poem, but it was still nice to hear that he liked it. other people have complemented the 'no future' story on wigleaf in private correspondence. i haven't spent much time 'compiling' this collection, mostly on writing/fleshing out stories which i think will be a part of it, so far.

3. i have a document i am calling Normal Stories which consists of generally longer, sadder, more boringly literary fiction stories, most of which have been published on, for example, soft cartel. a few of the stories have not been published. i like them but am struggling with what they mean in terms of my voice/brand/whatever. i will most likely not do anything with this collection.

4. i sent jenn from x-ray a ~12k word story called Bobby DiGiorno will Fucking Die based on a sort of solicitation for a vague idea about starting a print or ebook-only (?) press for manuscripts about this length. this reads confusingly - i wrote it, then sent it, because of its length. jenn has put it into a google doc with suggested edits i haven't looked at in a few weeks but seemed fine/good/minimal when i first looked. it is about pizza brand-sponsored lifestyle icons acting as sort of like the face of/machinations behind the ruling class in the near future. it has a bunch of silly shit in it and i like it, i think it's a fun story. cavin has read a couple iterations of it. i just remembered that i sent it to ben devos at apocolypse party as well, who declined to pursue it, citing a stylistic shift in the press, which is reasonable. at the time, on sending it to him, and still now, i felt/feel conflicted about whether i want it to be a book at all, but i think it's maybe important to just make books instead of otherthinking this.

5. to celebrate/promote giacomo's book on ghost city press this year, i wrote Chainsaw Blurbs and Other Blurbs, as an homage, also, to his book of blurbs for my book. i like the idea of us writing books of blurbs for each other. i really like the longer pieces i wrote for it, or repurposed from other older writing, especially. it will be limited to 50 copies. we haven't announced it yet, though, so, haha. whatever. i think people will like it. it's 50 blurbs, about ~8k words.

6. i am collaborating with giacomo on a long-form poem. the google doc is currently titled POEM. it is a stylistically rigid, intentionally ambiguous stream of consciousness that loosely centers around being in heaven and thinking about celebrities. it is currently ~6,666 words. i think it is funny and insightful and we are both enthusiastic about it. we've had some pretty extensive discussions concerning the poem and how it relates to, comments on, or conveys sexual relationships, gender, and celebrities, in the process of writing and editing it. giacomo is very thoughtful and a good person. collaborating on it has been fun and invigorating. here are two lines from it: "Thinking about an octopus while rinsing Bill Gates’ underwear in the sink / Thinking about an octopus doing laundry in the sink because Alexis Bledel’s washing machine is broken"

7. i have been compiling and writing more small poems. i kind of want to do an old-school digital chap kind of thing with them, maybe get other people to make similar ones and make a site for them all. i also wrote something like 75 more barn poems as part of a fundraiser for bail funds a few weeks ago. it was very taxing but i feel good about maybe 50 of them, as barn poems. unsure what i'll do with any of them.

8. i have two abandoned/whatever novels called Yarn (~65k words) and Give Up (~50k words). Yarn was basically the first thing i wrote, before everything else here, and i'm not sure how to describe it. it is vaguely 'normal' in terms of literary fiction and 'higher stakes' ideas like death/birth/power. it is sort of 'mysterious' and uses lots of made up words and explores themes of cognition from a philosophical/linguistics perspective and how societies are, or could be, eventually, structured. it tracks different perspectives and i employ a lot of different voices/narrative conventions and i focused a lot on sort of complex, strange phrasing and avoiding/pre-empting idiomatic cliches. it was inspired by the snippet of out of the world that knausgaard included in book 5 of my struggle, the scene of firefighters looking at a burning building. cavin has read a draft of it and thinks it should can be easily finished and that it should be published but i'm less sure. in my head i feel like it has 'big debut novel energy.

excerpts from Give Up have been on sleazemag/derelict lit and the neutral spaces blog. it is about a grad school dropout / in-school suspension supervisor mostly feeling depressed and eating junk food, thinking existentially and thinking about existentialism, and dealing with a dead father/sense of home/place/purpose while living in the midwest. it was very much inspired by lars iyer's spurious novels. it was basically the second thing i wrote. i've sent versions of it to some people but i think only no glykon and nick farriella read/skimmed it. nick had good feedback using fancy mfa terms and no glykon complemented the internality of it, i think. i submitted an early version of it to a metatron contest and tried querying one agent about it. i feel a sense of regret/idiocy about both of those things, in retrospect. for a long time i felt optimistic about it, about publishing it, about being critically acclaimed, etc. but have since considered it more or less abandoned in a way that feels freeing. i briefly considered completely rewriting it into a long-form narrative sequel to 50 Barn Poems, which i would call 50 Barn Poems 2, but i don't have the energy for this, i don't think.