WHY FACEBOOK?

I closed my original Facebook account years ago but opened a new one recently  thinkong it might prove useful as a meanse of spreading the word about the book. I trawled for friends and friends of friends and for people I might know or should know and their relatives and acquaintences, building an imaginary fan club.

Now I've  learned that  I violated some of the basic rules of Social Media Publicity. 1) Don't open a new account for the sole reason of hawking  your book, 2) Make friends with your friends first before shoving  book-for-sale spam in their faces, 3) Don't promote your book on a social medoa site you don't necesarrily like.

To my  surprise and wonderment, My Life As a Cadaver has not gone viral yet. I never could figure out how to use Facebook and it's gotten worse. I just don't undersand how it works. It turns me in knots when I  try to manipulate photos.  All my legions of  friends make it look so easy.

I learned my lesson the hard way. Twitter and Tumblr and all the rest are on the sidelines in my publiciy strategy until I know what I'm doing. My next step is to start the post card mailing campaign. What's your address?

THE REVISED EDITION IS AVAILABLE NOW

The New and Improved novel has been published in a second edition. Don't ask me what was wrong with the first edition because I'd get upset. Suffice to say I think the time and effort to fix it was worthwhile. The book is ready for prime time. Soon literary agents will competing for the privialege to represent, book reviewers will step forward to praise the ingenious novel, and mainstream publisher will be pounding on my door It'll a NYT best seller, go viral on the internet, and receive several offers from Hollywood produce to option the story. All it's going to take is blind optimism, savvy marketing techniques and dumb luck.

I urge everyone who bought the book to dump their old copies in the recycling bin and order the new edition. Now is the time for skeptics and the uninitiated to grab a copy of the newer, better book. It's available on Create Space and Amazon. The electronic Kindle version will be out in a few days. Tell your friends, families, acquaintences and therapists about it.

THE GRAPEVINE

One of my favorite scenes in the book is the "Grapevine," which props up  the schizophrenic narrative and connects to it's destination. I made sure I avoided the word phantasmagoria in the book because it's trite, but it's a good blog word and I'll use it now.  Only a reader can judge.  Leo steals Barlow's Green Subaru and flies down Interstate 5 to Los Angeles, weaving up and over  the gapevine on his way. Crucial detais omitted here, but if you read the book you'd know what I mean.

I imagined that dark passage  listening to one of my favorite Pat Metheny tunes.  Are You Going With Me?  Over and over again. The images in the video below don't match the landscape in the book but they do justice to the tune. You have to listen to the end to truly scale the Grapevine. I think you'll understand when you get there.

You can read the Grapevine section of book at the RAW FICTION website. It's an AUDIO EXCERPT, meaning you're supposed to listen to this very same tune as you read, like a sound track.  It's a different version, featuriing the haunting voice of Anna Marie Jopek, a Polish singer.

WHAT YOU SEE IS WWHAT IT IS

It wasn't easy but the RAW FICTION website v. 1.1 is more or less up and running. I'm seriously disappointed in the shortcomings of the WordPress website builder platform we used.  It's user-friendly but also user-stupid. It won't allow me to change the size of the text nor choose a font, which is ridiculous. Even compared to the humble Blog-Spot the formatting is primitive. That's ironic because WordPress started out in life as a kind of Super Blog and enhaned its reputation  as it moved up into website building. Something seems to have gone wrong along the way. But I'll have to do with what we got, which could be worse.

I really like the grainy textured design at the top of the page that my web-designer guy put together. I think it capures the essence of what I mean by raw fiction, Rough and unfished. That's me. Those who have read it know my writing is hardly polished. Let's not talk about typos again. The term of art is "dirty prose."  Dirty fiction has another connotation altogether. I'm sticking to raw.

I envisioned the website as a place to germinate fiction.  But now I'm told  my idea of airing  short-story drafts can  be construed as publishing them -- and thereby jeopardizing their chance of being picked up by real publishers. My scheme is in ruins. The platform must be "repurposed." I speak a little tech.  

In the worst case scenario it's still a place to help promate My Life as a Cadaver and redirect the novel on its path to obscurity.  The idea of rekindling interest in my human rights book Levi's Children is pure fantasy. 

Linking the site to a moribund gallery of long-expired news articles in the Morgue secton is a vestage of my old website. Irrelevent nostalgia.

I'm ready to start counting "hits."

RAW FICTION

My new website, RAW FICTION, is starting to take shape. You may have noticed an earlier post in which I described my severe case of computer burn caused by the effort to update my old website with a dysfunctional do-it-yourself web builder program. My sanity has been restored by a talented web doctor named Lawrence McKendell.  He designed a wabi home page and other content pages under my logo Raw Fiction. (I'll explain what that means in due course.)

The rest is technical. We need to build out the architecture of the inner pages with the short stories and articles I want to show off.

Unfortunately, my concept of posting short stories in-progress on the site has been compromised. I'm told that once you publish a piece on a website it's disqualified from being considered for publication  by a traditional  print publisher or an online magazine. They want to have first crack at it and run original work before it's widely available on the internet. Oh well.

SOME BOOK

 I think I made a serious error in putting exerpts from fictional reviews on the back cover of the book . When I started building the book cover I thought they were hilarious but intended them as place-holders until I could think of something better to fill the page. I got attached to them, however. It seemed to me at the time that the book's title and its morbid content  could benefit from a bit of humor.  But evidently the joke went flat.

Confidentially I was appalled that so many readers didn't get the allusion to E. B White's classic  children's  book Charlotte's Web. Maybe people don't have children anymore, or they were negligent in reading their kids to sleep at night.

In the first mock review the excerpt is "Some Book." Get it? Hah hah hah.

I regret making the assumption that  this would be  an clear reference to the immortal words Charlotte  the Spider spun in her web:

 "Some Pig"

Her spelling skills made Wilber the  Pig famous and spared him from being made into bacon. My reviewer is named Charlotte Weber, which is either too cute or really stupid,

Hopefully the novel won't be slaughtered into pork chops.

I STAND NAKED

I just returned a family event celebrating Easter and my brother's birthday  and suddenly feel very self-conscious about all the things everybody thinks they knows about me. It seems all my brother's in-laws (my inlaws-in-law?) read the damn book and now I fear they will never look at me the same way again. I have no idea whether this is good or bad. Suddenly I'm painfully aware that my friends and colleagues -- should they actually read the quirky and  indulgent novel -- may  readjust  their perception of me in a way that isn't necessarily flattering. I've given every one a picture window to see what an ass I can be.

This is what memoirs are all about, I suppose. You take the risk of ruining your reputation with candor. But in my case I've butchered the integrity of a serious memoir with flagrant lies and distortions of reality, all in the name of pulp fiction.  There's far too much fantasy and subterfuge in there to even call it auto-biographical.

I know who I am. But the reader has choices.  I can be a clown, a cognitive cripple or a delusional Hemingway wanna-be. That's what I get for writing at home wearing  my pajamas all day.