Between March 18, 2000 and September
23, 2007 I wrote 137 books and published them on the worldwide web, daily, as I wrote
them. I self-published 103 pamphlets, chapbooks, fliers, and four-page sheets and
sold them or gave them away to my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.
I had two books published by small presses, Bukowski Never Did This: A Year
in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family and Postcards From Pottersville,
Vol. 3, Adventures in the Underground. I attended book-signings, poetry readings,
street fairs and crafts shows, zine fests, writers conferences, book fairs, and a
Florida noir festival. I was a headliner at the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA)
Legends of the Underground readings and I attended the ULA protest of the 50th anniversary
of the publication of Howl at Columbia University. In 2007 I completed my
300th book, without selling a word to New York or Hollywood, and won the Noir Novel
Writing Contest held by Pottersville Press. Not very impressive as a writing title
but it meant a lot to me.
During this time I worked as a senior information
development specialist at Lucent Technologies, was laid off, went on sabbatical,
worked as a technical writer and as a grant writer, cashed in the annuity I had rolled
my retirement over into to drive around the Redneck Riviera promoting Bukowski
Never Did This, worked as a custodian, at a community behavioral health care
center, updating Edward Sapir's essay, "Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls in
the Business of Getting a Living," cashed in some money my mother left me to
promote Adventures in the Underground, and now work as a handyman at the L.
A. (Lower Alabama) Folk Life Center. My job is eating me alive.
Andrew Keen
wrote an article for the Weekly Standard attacking anti-establishment writing
reminiscent of Norman Podhoretz's "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" attacking
beat writers 50 years before. He expanded it into a book. The Cult of the Amateur:
How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. I think the Internet is keeping
the culture alive. The establishment is killing it.
My book is in part an
answer to his. I subtitle it CULT WRITER: I WRITE AN IMMOBILIZED
HERO NOVEL IN REAL TIME, OR, SAVING LITERATURE ON THE INTERNET.
I won't
save literature if the book isn't published. But my publishing history is part of
my qualifications to write the book. Indeed, it's the crux of them.
And,
while writing 300 books without selling one to New York might look like a negative,
to New York, to me, it's a selling point. How can such a thing happen? Is it me?
Or New York?
I am serializing the book, online, daily, at The Daily Bulletin.
This puts my day job in jeopardy.
My last book was called Fired for Blogging;
Book Rejected: Writing the Black Novel After 9-11.
I'm not writing a
black novel I'm writing an immobilized hero novel. In real time.
The difference
between a black novel and an immobilized hero novel is an immobilized hero novel
is funny. In a black humor kind of way.