I’ve been editing a book, or maybe a chunk of a book, that’s mostly composed of blog posts from earlier this year, and one of the harder parts of this (aside from all of the typos) has been retitling the posts when they are reincarnated in short story format. As both a goof and a desperate trick for SEO, I originally titled all of these as if they were crappy content poured into an autoblogged site, like “10 Reasons Zombies Will Steal Your iPad”. And the sad thing is, that actually seemed to work.

I thought of this today, because I went to look at Lifehacker for some dumb reason. I used to love that site, because I’m a lazy bastard, and if anyone presented me with a tip that would shave ten seconds off of my week, I’d probably love it. But now you go there, and it’s nothing but these listicles of the obvious. And go to StumbleUpon, which is a neat site, but now it seems like nine out of ten articles are these collations of brief tips or factoids.

Why are they so popular? I guess part of it is, it’s easier to consume. You could write a long-form article about the failing financial system, or you could throw ten bullet points at the wall and call it a day. It’s sort of the PowerPointing of the world. I worked at a place where every damn thing HAD to be a PowerPoint deck, from idea pitches to weekly status reports, and it seemed like the higher up the management food chain, the more the person could only digest items in slide format. I’m sure there’s a rabbit hole of reading I could fall into about usability and eye tracking studies, but I’ll leave that to someone else.

Another theory would be that it’s easier to write posts like that. I think it’s a push; it probably takes me just as long to write a 20-item list as it does to bang out a thousand words of prose without an outline. Maybe if I started with a quick list and used that as an outline for prose, that would take longer. But it’s one of those false economies of scale, like that if a person could build a whole house from scratch in a year, they should be able to build a fully-functional HO scale house in 4.19 days.

The thing that interests me is if this is because stripping away the supporting structure of a prose story and presenting it as a list makes it easier or more effective for people to parse. I don’t mean in a “we all have ADD/fuck Twitter” sort of way, but I mean if there’s some reason for this, like how a root/fifth/fourth song sounds so much better to us than some Yoko Ono experimental noise shit where she’s raping a lawnmower engine with a pizza oven.

And that makes me wonder about structure of non-blog post/article pieces, like short stories or books. One of the things I tried to do with Rumored to Exist was present a novel-sized work in small pieces, with an almost total disregard for traditional form. And I did that, but I felt like it would have been more readable if it did have a standard novel’s plot arc, and the “randomness” had a certain amount of non-randomness, partly out of pure chance, and partly because I kept rearranging the pieces until it felt right.

I keep writing these bursts of fiction that have no home, and end up in a big Scrivener document when they happen to be written near a computer, or find their way into a bunch of different moleskine notebooks when I’m not at the Mac. And the number one thing I bitch about to people is how I don’t have a form to put these on. I don’t know how I lucked into the one I had for Rumored, and I don’t know if it can be re-used, or if there’s something else I need to do.

I wonder if there’s anything to be gleaned from the way web articles have gone. I guess one could write a book that’s nothing but fake articles like this. There are already a whole slew of books written as email exchanges, which is something I was talking about back in 94 or 95. I thought about setting up a fake email on my linux machine, and then emailing it a page or two a day, to slowly concoct a longer work. I now know that would have just become an editing nightmare, but it’s still a fun idea.

I hate the term “Indie Writer”.  Hate it.  Hate all of the variations: indie writer, indie writing, indie books.  It’s one of those terms, like “sammies.”  Any time I am in a restaurant that has the term “sammies” on the menu, I want to burn the fucking place to the ground.

Over on Self Publishing Review, there was an interesting article about this (here.)  In recent years, I’ve had a certain unease with the sudden popularity of self-publishing, and I could never really explain this effectively. But then I read this article, and it was like I’d spent the last X months staring at the splotchy acid-trip picture at the mall and something shifted and I could magically see the 3-D unicorn.

Back in the day, I was tangentially involved in the underground death metal scene; I published a zine, wrote for another, and spent a lot of time trading tapes and writing obscure bands around the world.  This was independent music at its most fundamental: people recorded albums in their own garage, dubbed them onto Maxell C-90s with a jambox or tape deck, then photocopied j-cards and mailed them off to zines for review, or sold copies through the mail.  (“Enclose carefully hidden cash!”)  Some bands “sold out” and signed to major labels, and you could have arguments forever with people over whether or not Nuclear Blast America was a “major” label, but I’m sure their most popular band sold about as many albums total as Sony gave away during promotion of a new Mariah Carey album.

Then Nirvana showed up, and the metal scene completely died.  And all of a sudden, all of these “indie” bands appeared.  And we were constantly told that a band like Smashing Pumpkins was “indie rock,” even though they shared a label with the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson.  And this must have been a major pain in the ass for alternative or punk bands who were still pressing their CDs in batches of 1000 and dragging their own orders to the post office.  But it was even worse for the metal bands who saw a recently functional ecosystem completely dry up, replaced with a bunch of guys in flannel.  The only valid solutions for metal bands were to a) cut out all of the satan references and play mopy college rock; b) get a job at a gas station; and/or c) wait it out until all of the alternative bands had kids and got old and metal once again ruled. Meanwhile, MTV and the mainstream press beat this “indie” label to death until it had no meaning.

There are two different axes to graph this stuff on.  One is “indie” as meaning independent of a massive corporation for your publisher.  The other is “indie” as a term describing rebellion against common conventions in literature.  And I think many of the people who write genre fiction and self-publish it take up the “indie” moniker to show that they are somehow bad-asses raging against the machine, although they’re still writing vampire romances and murder mysteries.  And most self-publishing forums and groups I encounter have little to nothing to do with pushing boundaries, and are mostly about how to make a product that looks like and competes with the same exact things released by the Big Six.  And anyone calling themselves an “indie” would be the last to admit any of this, and respond with “but MY book isn’t just like Tom Clancy - it’s like Tom Clancy with zombies!”

Self-publishing suddenly became “indie publishing” because people wanted self publishing to sound legit, and shed the baggage of being associated with people who paid vanity presses a few thousand bucks for a box of a thousand books, 974 of which would sit in a box in their attic forever.  And some people may be staging a revolution against the Big Six by doing it themselves, while others may have tried to get an agent and get a deal and failed.  And maybe they failed because the industry is failing (nobody reads, economic downturn, the damn 1%, choose one or more), or maybe they just didn’t make the cut, because their stuff was no good.

And I know you’re probably just thinking, “He’s just jealous his piece of shit books didn’t sell as much as Twilight.”  That’s not the point.  That isn’t my world.  I’m not Pavement complaining about Smashing Pumpkins.  I’m Captain Beefheart for the sake of that comparison; I’m doing something that’s not meant to be appreciated by anyone but a small number of people.  I’m fine with that.

The problem is, I self-publish.  I’m an “indie” in the sense that Random House is not handling my output.  And for whatever stupid reason, that automatically lumps me in with every Stephenie fucking Meyer wannabe that’s self-publishing for profit.  I don’t self-publish to make money.  I self-publish because I don’t happen to have an offset press in my living room.  And I write because it’s a way of channeling my subconscious and my thoughts on finding a meaning to life into a format that can then be consumed and possibly felt as emotion by other people.  And the way that happens isn’t about a perfectly carved out plot arc or a nicely packaged consumer product or a compliant genre-specific thriller novel.  Jackson Pollock did not paint crying clowns and landscapes.  Albert Camus did not pen murder mysteries for the YA market.  I don’t have to adhere to the bullshit rules people keep spouting off, any more than G.G. Allin had to dress like the members of Pearl Jam, even though they both released albums in the same era.

It’s irrelevant.  And it should be for you, too.  Write what you want.  If someone tells you to develop a marketing plan, tell them to go fuck themselves.  This is Art, not Amway.  I am not an “indie” writer.  Underground?  Maybe.  Cult?  I probably need more cult members first.  But “indie”?  Ugh.  Someone’s mom is an indie writer.  I’m anything but.

I think when I sit down to write, I now spend more time trying to figure out what I want to listen to than I do actually writing, and that’s a problem.  My mind bounces between two solutions: one is to spend some inordinate amount of time and money finding all new music that moves me.  The other is to declare iTunes bankruptcy, and either delete every song in my iTunes library, or rate every single one at zero stars, then put it on shuffle and re-rate everything until the 11,000-some tracks more accurately describe what I like, instead of the current rating situation.  I think I “finished” rating all of my music, aside from new additions, in about 2007, and I would like to think I have evolved since then, but who knows.

( A few more facts.  Total tracks: 11,397.  Added in 2011: 426. In 2010: 504. Added since the beginning of 2007, which was my last big iTunes crash/rebuild: 5334.  Number of tracks that are “from” 2011: 122.  Number from 1989-1995, when I was in college: 2114.)

I think when I’m at the height of my collector snobdom, my worst fear is that I will become one of those people that lock into a certain artist or time period and never acknowledge that there is any music outside of that sphere of influence, ever.  I dated a girl in college who was like this with Billy Joel, and it (plus the fact that she was bat-shit insane, but there’s a cart/horse situation here) were the reason I walked away from that relationship like an unemployed person walks away from a $500,000-underwater mortgage.

But keeping up with new music is work.  I briefly tried to do this when I was reviewing new music for a now-dead web site, and it seems like the easier it is to get music, the harder it is to find music.  I can turn on iTunes genius and fire up Pandora or Spotify and point my web browser at a million different news sites and fan sites and get up-to-the-second email blasts from my favorite artists, but it seems like I find about 4% of what I used to find by wasting half my Saturday going from A to Z at a half-dozen different local record stores.  And it seems like the more I buy or download, the less potent the music is.  When I was in high school and could only afford to buy a tape a week, almost every one of those tapes was gold.  Now. I can add a hundred tracks at a clip to my library, and I still can’t name an album I bought in the last year that can stand up to repeat plays.

Albums are always time machines for me, but I’m finding the harder it is to find an album, the higher the chance of it being powerful to me.  An example: I accidentally found out about Gary Moore in 1988, while on a record buying spree in Canada.  A guy working at a store in Stratford told me I should really check him out, and I did, and I loved it.  A couple of those albums were indelibly marked on my past, and of course those tapes got lost or fell apart, and I went for years wishing I could hear them again.  And in the 90s, finding those things was next to impossible; they were out of print, or were “imports” and I never could track them down, and doing a web search on Gary Moore (Alta Vista back then, I think) would turn up maybe four hits, none helpful.  When I eventually found those albums, they were absolutely efficacious, and transported me through time like I suddenly had a Delorean with attached flux capacitor.  I think if I would have been able to just type two words and a credit card number into a browser and instantly hear those songs, it would have been nowhere near as powerful as spending months scouring every non-chain record store in Seattle.

But now I worry about listening to those tracks so much that they won’t work anymore, just like how I worry about drinking my twelfth diet coke of the day and still feeling lethargic.  I wonder if I should set aside that discography and find something new, and hope it will someday be my bridge back to 2011.  I hope that someone else out there is making something as mind-altering as the music I cherished 20 years ago.  And I wonder how I will find it, especially when I mention this to people and they say, “Oh, you need to listen to Arcade Fire.  They have like ten members or something.”

OK, now take this entire article and replace music with books.  Same thing.

Whenever I get writer’s block, I hit wikipedia.  It’s arguable if it’s better or worse to fall down an internet k-hole by reading every single serial killer article you can find on wikipedia, but my hope is that I’ll eventually mine all of this for a good reference to throw in a story.

Here’s a short list of wikipedia articles that I’ve read recently that are truly bizarre:

1. Banana equivalent dose - The amount of radiation you absorb by eating one banana.  (Yes, you absorb radiation from eating bananas.  Helicopter parents: let’s ban them!)
2. Berners Street Hoax - Two men had a bet that one of them could turn a random address the most talked-about address in London in a week; antics ensue.
3. Ota Benga - The Bronx zoo had a human as an exhibit.  In the 20th century.  This is a truly fucked up and sad story.
4. FedEx Express Flight 705 - Want to read about one of the most demented hijacking schemes ever?  Here you go.
5. Self-surgery - If you ever read alt.tasteless, you already know where I’m going with this one.
6. Dyatlov Pass incident - When hikers wander off for no reason barefoot in heavy snow in the Ural mountains and are later found with fractured skulls, missing tongues, and no signs of struggle, a serious WTF situation occurs.
7. Human Interference Task Force - How do you tell people for the next 10,000 years not to screw around with a buried crypt of radioactive waste?  The US government formed a task force of scientists, anthropologists, and science fiction writers to brainstorm this.  One linguist proposed creating a religion based on radioactive waste, that would create myths and legends surrounding the spent fuel rods, which would be handed down from generation to generation and eventually produce some asshole that would take people’s money to build a water park.
8. New Swabia - Did you know Nazi Germany still has a territorial claim on Antarctica? You do now.
9. Phineas Gage - My favorite story of a railroad worker having a metal spike drilled through his skull by an explosion and surviving.
10. List of unusual deaths - This one is the god damned mother lode.  You could kill an entire day reading this.

Happy reading, and let me know your favorites, too.

It’s almost Christmas!  Or it’s almost Hanukkah, and maybe it’s almost Kwanzaa (not sure), and it’s definitely almost the Firestorm, if you worship Satan.  But it’s definitely that time of year where you spend your hard earned money on carefully thought-out presents for all of your family, and maybe get a fruit basket in return.  And a week from today, the criminally insane will converge on local big box stores to beat the shit out of each other to get a crappy DVD player made by slave labor in China out of toxic plastic, that will work for roughly 37 minutes before exploding.

So, you looking for some gifts that aren’t made by children in sweatshops that might actually promote an artist and maybe make a person think?  How about some books?  Here’s my list of books I’ve read lately that aren’t big-6 published, written by people without a massive marketing budget:

• Small Town Punk by John Sheppard - This is probably one of the best self-published books I’ve ever read.  All of John’s stuff is awesome, and maybe I’m biased because I published Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Make sure to get the original 2002 edition, and not the 1997 abortion. (It’s not in print, but there are many copies floating around for $5, which is the best five bucks you could possibly spend.)
• Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes - I only know him as a friend-of-friend through Timothy Gager, which was enough for me to put down the cash.  This is 18 short stories of hard living in rural Appalachia, and each one is so precisely crafted, with absolutely no waste.  He’s got a way of really haunting you, getting something wedged very deep in your head in a thousand words.  Great stuff.
• Treating a Sick Animal by Timothy Gager - Speaking of, check out Gager’s latest collection of flash fiction.  It contains 40-some shorter pieces, each just as lethal as the last.  What’s even more amazing than the quality of his writing is the tremendous speed at which he turns out this precision work.  He’s probably written four stories better than anything I’ve ever done in the time it takes me to finish this post.
• How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace - Lovelace is a writer in Indiana (he teaches at my sister’s alma mater of Ball State) and he has a blog that almost entirely talks about nachos.  There’s two things I like about this chapbook, aside from the quality of the prose.  One is that Lovelace has a way of coming up with very unique forms, twisting and clever structures that make me think, “god DAMN why didn’t I do that?”  (Example: the titular piece is a list of how famous people like their eggs.)  The other thing I like is that this is a real damn chapbook: a carefully designed, really printed on quality paper chapbook.  It’s not just a POD 6x9 trade paperback, which is awesome.
• Johnny Astronaut by Rory Carmichael and I, An Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey by Jeffrey Dinsmore - These are both kindle reissues of the Awkward Press editor’s earlier novels.  He’s added bonus materials to both, and priced them at 99 cents each, so they’re well worth the look.
• Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore - This is truly awesome creative nonfiction, the telling of a person’s life in hilarious autobiographical sketches, knitted together in a way that tells more than the whole story, and then breaks to throw in some quiz questions or go off on a different tangent.  It’s like a mix of Vonnegut at his best, but replace the aliens with tripping acid at the top of the World Trade Center.
• Powering the Devil’s Circus, Redux by Jason Jordan - A collection from the editor of decomP, this is a dozen stories and a novella of experimental work, with plenty of mention of metal, which I of course like.
• Tomorrowland by Grant Bailie - The UPS guy literally showed up with this one as I was typing this post.  It’s a collection of interwoven stories, and looks promising.  I loved his books Cloud 8 and Mortarville, so this looks awesome.
• Fistful of Pizza by Jon Konrath - Most importantly, buy my damn book!  Nine twisted stories, and it’s only 99 cents on the kindle.  Break in that new Kindle Fire by reading about a parody of the Ben Hur chariot race, filmed with small breed dogs around a set designed like a 1970s Times Square filled with heroin addicts and pornographers.  Also available in print for you luddites.

I’m sure I forgot a few others, but check these out - thanks!