Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

Copyright © 2009 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.

Friday, October 23

I went to Key West so I could
feel like a writer. I had quit my job
at IBM, given myself an evil genius
grant, I was working as the houseperson
in the home. I had taken out a line-of-credit
home-equity loan on the house I inherited from
my grandparents to live on. I had written and published
Evil Genius, a book about Growing Up, like Russell Baker's,
and like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek/The Writing Life, like
Annie Dillard's. I was writing Open Book, about what happened
to Evil Genius. The rest of the story. I had the feeling it would sink.
I was apprehensive about its prospects. It had the stigma of
self-publication on it. Vanity press. This was before
the online journal (OLJ) and the weblog (blog).
This was before social networking. Facebook and Twitter.
Was I already calling what I did daily typewriting?
That might have come later. But that is what
I was doing. Leaving a record. Documenting
my life as an underground writer. A small press
big shot. A mail art titan. An outsider.
Someone writing outside the mainstream.
Antinovel didn't mean against, it meant
instead of. In addition to.
Something new, under the sun.
Evil Genius and Open Book.
Forty. A correspondence novel, à la David Zack.
Immortality Centre, Tepoztlan, Mexico.