1. Thank you to my generous readers for allowing me to workshop my memoir on this site during the full course of this year. I quietly announced this project last December, and when I look back at my initial announcement I see how much my concept has evolved since then. For one thing, I originally conceived it as a 15-year memoir (1993 to 2008), but at about the halfway point I realized that the story would have a perfect arc if I ended it at 2003. The further adventures of my life (working for A&E Network/History Channel, hosting the LitKicks 24 Hour Poetry Party, turning LitKicks into a blog, joining the Litblog Co-op, working for Pearl Jam, jumping aboard the Twitter revolution, getting married) will have to wait for the sequel.
So, what’s next for the draft I’ve just completed? I’m very happy with the response I got from many of you, and I certainly think I’ve got a mandate to prepare a book proposal and seek a publisher. Some may ask, do I even need a publisher? Haven’t I published it already, and isn’t the book biz a total clusterfuck right now? Yes and yes, but even so I want to give this a try, and I wouldn’t mind working with an excellent editor to bring out the very best in this material. My search for a publisher may also prove entertaining in its own right: I wrote the book out here “in full view”, and I plan to handle the next steps the same way. Thanks again to everybody who posted comments, suggestions, feedback or advice, and you’ll be hearing more about this soon.
2. I’ve got some busy days ahead — as I work on this book proposal, I’m also hoping to relaunch Literary Kicks in Drupal. I’ve barely begun the work so I don’t know if it will fly or not. Stay tuned, I hope.
I’m also planning to shut the site down for the rest of the holidays, and will shortly be putting up an Action Poetry Random Poem Selector like we like to do every year around this time.
Okay, enough about LitKicks … here are a few more literary links you might like:
3. An informative look at the circumstances behind Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
4. PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah calls sentencing of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo a “mockery” and a “scandal”.
5. Beat-related videos by the excellent Laki Vazakas.
6. Was John Keats killed by a bad review?
7. Arthur Conan Doyle as Metafictionist.
8. Wizzywig, a hacker memoir by Ed Piskor.
9. Yay! Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is heading our way soon.
10. A word cloud representing Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories series.
12. Very nice: Pride and Prejudice in emoticons.
13. You know that Joseph Conrad classic. The N-Word of the Narcissus.
14. And, just to prove I have some Christmas spirit, here’s a Christmas memory from Henry David Thoreau (via @geoffwisner).
One Response
Good luck with everything in
Good luck with everything in the New Year. Look forward to the random selector and so on. I don’t have a clue, until I click on it, what Drupal is.