Rumored to Exist: Annotated
The Beginning
I don’t know exactly what day I started writing Rumored to Exist, and I can’t pin down when the title got stuck in my head, but I remember vaguely when it all started, and it’s a story I tell often. It was the end of November in 1996, the days between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, and I was on a business trip to Boston. This was back in what is now called the “dot-com” era, when tech companies wouldn’t think twice about paying twenty grand a head on last-second plane tickets, expensive hotel reservations, and three-digit per diems to send a dozen people to a trade show to stand around and hand out mousepads printed with the company’s logo. Even though I went to Boston for another trade show a month before, they told me to go back and talk to strangers about our product, Internet in a Box.
I moved to Seattle a few months before this, after a six year drag through college back in Indiana. I spent most of my spare time writing a book called Summer Rain, a very straightforward look at a summer of my Midwestern college experience. It had first book written all over it, but it bided my time, especially since my tiny studio apartment didn’t have a TV or VCR and I had no idea how to go out and meet women. That fall, I finished a very fragile first draft of the novel that weighed in at about 600-some pages, and I intended to spend the trip carving away at the writing. My pal and coworker Bill Perry loaned me a Dell laptop running Linux that he stole from the IT department, and I hauled it with me on the plane so I could edit away at 30,000 feet.
We stayed in a boring hotel downtown somewhere in Boston, and since I didn’t feel like dressing up for hundred-dollar seafood dinners with the marketing folks, I usually found a booth in the hotel bar where I could fire up the laptop and order a burger while I edited. I quickly got sick of working on the Indiana book, and spent a lot of time doodling, writing paragraphs here and there as exercise, without trying to connect them. It felt like basically making a literary version of the comic The Far Side, and beat sitting around with the business development yo-yos at Legal Seafood or whatever.
One night, as I was toying with this, a woman walked up to my booth, obviously sloshed. She was wearing the typical business uniform of a fashionable pantsuit sort of thing, and looked about a decade older than me, but not too bad. She had a drink in one hand, and looked at me quizzically as I typed. Then, she asked, “Is that a computer?” The question seemed so basic yet bizarre, that it practically bookended this collection of weird scribbles and disconnected thoughts. With that, I decided I needed to somehow gather together these chunks of writing and really punch them up, make them work together in some larger sense. And that’s how it all got started.
A Framework
On the way back to Seattle, I came up with an idea for the book. I’ve always been fascinated with the way memory works, if there is any parallel between how the memory bank of a computer works and how the thoughts in our brain are stored. I had this idea for a book that was made from a few hundred random pieces or scenes from a brain, things that could be memories, dreams, fantasies, or interpretations of reality.
All I would have to do is write 256 (later 200) of these bits, throw them together, and voila - a book. Here’s the original start of the book when I felt a great explanation of this method would be in order:
Our existence is our brain. Okay, maybe that’s a statement the religious right won’t agree with. We can’t prove that there’s a soul connected by a cord to the center of our head, and nobody’s come back from a life after death with definite proof of the other side, despite what the Weekly World News tells us. But we do know that we transcribe our own histories in the gray stuff inside our skull. And although we don’t understand how it works, that big clump of neurons keeps a record of our personal existence, or at least the events that happened during it. But our brains aren’t like floppy discs or CD-ROMs, storing everything in a predictable, linear path. Our memories consist of strange, random snip- pets, with no obvious order or persistence. You can’t remember the name of your kindergarten teacher, but you remember when you threw up after eating rancid hot dogs in the school lunchroom. You remember all of the words to Stairway to Heaven but you can’t remember your girlfriend’s birthday, even though she’s reminded you several times in the last month. The timeline of our life consists of interesting snapshots inserted in a photo album, with some missing, some faded, and some with vivid colors that will always seem alive. Another interesting problem: the human mind can’t tell fantasy from fact. If you could browse the contents of a person’s gray matter, it would overflow with past, wish, desire, lie, distortion, forgetfulness and old epi- sodes of Charlie’s Angels. These intense droplets of information contained would have no source label, each frame, essence and moment would look the same in the big spaghetti pot of neural garbage. So, this disorganized photo albums would have some photos marked with dates, some marked with a faded name in light pencil, and some with no information whatsoever. With that in mind, how is new information, like a piece of fiction, assimilated and included in this photo album of the brain? In the past, fiction has been a linear journey, a long strip of film, a single scroll of writing, a large blast of prose, or some shorter ones interweaved or deconstructed into a magic vision which we all insert into our brains and enjoy (and turn into more brief clip art for our own mental salads). As the events in a film or book hap- pen, our brains choose to file some items as incredible, unforgettable experiences, while some are tucked away for later distant use in a conversation or dream. And others are simply dropped. But each person uses their own con- version algorithm to process what happens, and where things go. But could it happen the other way around? A literary piece can be pre- sented in the post-parsed raw format our brain uses for dissemination, show- ing a simulation of the mental process. Instead of the postmodern method of deconstructing an experience and transforming it to literature, it would be more like deconstructing a series of experiences into a non-linear transcrip- tion of the experience. Instead of taking a story based on an author’s experience, you’d see a potpourri of experiences based on a fictional brain. It would be an intact structure from within, a complete miniature version of the several billion data structures currently swimming in our skulls. So, here it is. The scalpel has carefully trimmed away 256 separate, ster- ile episodes and presented them as a model existence. Fact, fiction, and static, yours to believe or wonder…
The Balancing Act
That explanation and a bunch of wild ideas got me started. By that Christmas, I had about 100 pieces, and that partial draft circulated around to some friends, who all loved it. Because some of the numbered sections were only a paragraph long, some people started calling them “paragraphs”, or “that thing with all of the para- graphs”. I later dreaded and could not shake this, especially when each of the segments were much longer than just a paragraph, and that label made it sound like paragraphs were the whole concept of the book. I finished the first draft on May 14, 1996, with 256 sections and 60,902 words. A lot of the writing in this draft was directly based on life experiences, and doesn’t have the surreal quality that developed in later versions. Truthfully, I was probably a bit homesick for Bloomington, and a lot of the writing was culled from memories of there. So after making notes and annotations on the first draft, I went back to Summer Rain, to try to get the college experience out of my system. Having two major projects open at the same time sounds like a nightmare, but it actually worked well for me. I’d chip away at the straight, linear novel based on my past for a few weeks, and then when I got bored of the long hours needed to write prose like that consistently, I’d switch back to the more experimental stuff. I’d try to craft stuff that would explode within the first ten words, and then brightly explode for thirty lines, and then cut away without a proper ending. It was like filming a long drama, then cranking down to do a thirty second commercial. And then when I got bored, or got too nostalgic for Bloomington, I’d get back on the long novel.
The Zines
Around the time I got close to the end of the first draft, I was spending a lot of time at the office after hours. Like I said, I didn’t have a TV, plus I had a better com- puter and a faster internet connection there. And in the beginning days of the dot-com culture, a lot of other people were pretty much living in their offices. Hell, my own office probably had more square feet than my studio apartment, and I didn’t have a 25- cent Coke machine at home. Anyway, it was around then that I found the most perfect fringe benefit: a huge Panasonic photocopier, with all-auto everything: stapling, sort- ing, double-siding, and even some super-RoboCop photo mode that worked better than the twenty grand machine down the street at Kinko’s. Best of all, this copier had no sort of governor, counter, security code, or any other limiter on it. I used to PAY some- one to make copies for my old zine, and this beast sat unused most of the day. So one Sunday night at the end of February, I decided to fire up FrameMaker and create a new zine, called Air in the Paragraph Line. I wanted to have something I could mail to people as I finished my two books, so I could get a good list going and get people ready to check out my stuff. Since I had free photocopying, I decided to make this a simple monthly mailing, a three-fold newsletter that I could send to people for less than a stamp. The only price would be that the customer would have to send back a trade, a book suggestion, a cool letter, a weird postcard, the name of a friend who also wanted a copy, or anything else interesting. This started the tradition of excerpting Rumored to Exist for other zines. I actually didn’t put the first excerpt in until the second issue of Air in the Paragraph Line, but a chunk of writing was also republished in issue 8. Both of these excerpts, which can be found at rumored.com, feature writing that was almost completely edited from the final draft. It’s an interesting way to look back and see how the book progressed over time. Overall, there were eight excerpts published in seven zines: Air in the Para- graph Line (twice), Metal Curse, Wine With Thieves, Perezvon Plays Dead, Drunken- scrawl (online), Assorted Realities (online), and Extent. Most of these were friends’ zines, with two of them being music zines, and the rest being lit-oriented or general zines. The excerpts, taken from drafts in 1996-1999, were all met with positive feed- back, which kept me on the trail toward developing a better version of the book.
Adding Confusion
After a few rounds of editing, deleting, and expanding the drafts, I got into this horrible catch-22. Sticking to the initial “framework” about pieces of a brain didn’t really allow the book to “work”. I couldn’t define “work”, but the general problem was that there was no linear story to pull you through the pages. I knew I wasn’t writing an Oprah book or anything, but I started reading other experimental and non- linear books (William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch; Mark Leyner: Et Tu Babe; Raymond Federman: Take it or Leave it) and I saw that even if they weren’t constructed of a story that went from beginning to end, they somehow still managed to have an under- current, a background propulsion that kept you from putting the book down. I liked that my individual segments were punchy, and could be read by them- selves. I figured that with an attention deficit disorder nation, it might be a benefit to write a book that could be opened at any random page. But it was also so fucking hard to be writing a book in which the simple question “So what’s it about?” And almost every night, I’d call up Ray Miller back in Indiana, long after midnight, and bitch about this whole situation. And every time, he’d tell me stuff like “just tell people something different each time they ask what it’s about”, and “you don’t really need a story.” And every time he told me those two things, I would convince myself he was a fucking liar, and I really did need to think of some different angle for this book, or possibly just delete my entire hard drive and burn every printout and start over. In the spring of 1998, I walked out of probably the most stable relationship of my life, with a woman that put up with all of my shit and who never, ever got in a fight with me, after almost two years together. I had everything with her and I’m sure I’ll kick myself in the ass about doing that for a long time, except for the fact that I never really felt free enough to finish this damn book. So I stopped spending my weekends going to Pottery Barn and Ikea and eating at sit-down restaurants and watching movies from Blockbuster, and instead went into a total seclusion, eating nothing but hot dogs from 7-Eleven and low-grade speed while I stayed up every night and hacked this book until it was total fucking warfare on a global scale and hit people like a ceramic tub dropped out of the back of a truck going 90 on the interstate.
My first big idea was to take this recurring dream of mine and make it into a second plot. I’d put that plot on the “A” reel, and then cut up the good stuff from the book and rearrange it to fit in the spaces between that story. And just for shits, that main story from my dream, it would also be nonlinear, because it was about time travel, so the order of that would also be all fucked up. The story, the dream, was about me forty or so years in the future, coming back in time and telling the current me to get the hell out of dodge to avoid some super-weirdo enemies from the future. And the me from the present gets a time machine in the form of a Nintendo GameBoy and a credit card that works infinitely anywhere, and goes back in time to 1992, to essen- tially hang out with the characters of my first book, which was still unfinished. Sounds like a great plan so far, right? It wasn’t. I spent the whole summer spinning my wheels on this time travel bullshit, editing up my original drafts to make changes for the story, and then by fall I decided to edit back out all of the stuff, because the story was too damn confusing. Actually, I didn’t even understand the story, and there was no story - I really just liked the idea of a GameBoy with a time machine in it. I lost a lot of time editing in then out that shit, but it made the other bits and pieces that much more crazy. Add to that the fact that my buddy Larry Falli, who was in law school in Chi- cago, kept sending me totally insane shit in the mail. Every few weeks, I’d get a giant envelope filled with clippings from free newspapers about Satanists, necrophiliacs, crooked politicians, chicks who fucked dogs, and who knows what else. I pored over the photocopies of photocopies, and each one made me hit the search engines (then AltaVista.com) and find even more weird shit. I’d sit in my office reading web pages on astrology cults and synthetic hallucinogens and take notes on a legal pad next to my computer; my coworkers probably thought I was researching some software testing bullshit. These notes got typed and jumbled and edited and shuffled and fleshed out until I got some really bizarre science going in the drafts. Another thing kept the writing weird that summer. The nation-long strip of Interstate 90 terminated right outside the window of my Seattle apartment. That sum- mer, they started a multimillion dollar project to strip the pavement down and slap on new coats of asphalt. Because it was such a high-traffic area, this was about as compli- cated as building an international space station the size of Los Angeles, and they had to work 24 hours a day. I was already a bit on edge because, after about nine months of being caffeine-free, I was drinking about a two-liter a night, plus what I had in the office that day, and popping mini-thins like they were candy sprinkles. My apartment, on the top floor and with no air conditioner, usually ran about 10 to 20 degrees hotter than the temp on the street level. And the road project either filled my apartment with noxious asphalt fumes or kept the jackhammers and heavy machinery going well into the morning. The only way I could sleep and get to work in the morning was to crack open a case of beer at about midnight and keep drinking until I passed out. By August, I had such a strong alcohol tolerance, I could have drank a twelve-pack on an empty stomach and then flown a helicopter. And of course, I kept writing through all of this. I forced myself to write 30 lines a night, and then try to clean up my “slush file” of notes. And I think the writing got better and better.
Leaving Here
Another thing happened that summer: I met another woman. The good news was that she was into postmodern fiction, and she really believed in the writing, which made me work even harder to perfect it. The bad news was that she lived in New York. But after she visited Seattle and I visited New York, I knew it was time for a big change. By the end of 1998, I decided to quit my day job and move to Manhattan to work full-time on getting my writing career started. I spent most of the spring of 1999 getting ready for the move. Every day, I scoured the apartment for things to throw out or load in the car and drag to the Salvation Army. I shipped boxes of books to New York, and sold my TV. And when I wasn’t cleaning or packing, I wrote. Most of my time was spent working on Summer Rain, because every spring, I’d get hit by a horrible spring fever that made me wish I was back at the beginning of that book, back at the very beginning of the summer of 1992. I even bought a beat-up VW Rabbit that looked exactly like my old one so I could remember what it was like to drive around in a tiny shoebox with a German four- banger under the hood. I didn’t think I could publish Summer Rain, but I knew I’d have to finish it to get back to Rumored. At the end of March, everything in the apartment had been UPSed across the country, dragged down to the dumpster, or packed in the one-way rental car I secured for the trip. Even though I backed up my writing before I left, my work essentially rode on my PC, sitting behind the driver’s seat on the floor. I spent two weeks cross- ing the country, seeing strange things and stopping to visit every person who had a couch for me to sleep on. Then I got to Washington Heights, unpacked the rest of my shit, returned the rental car with 4897 extra miles on the odometer and $1,052.68 on my bill, and set up shop in my new home.
New York
I essentially spent the rest of the summer trying to finish Summer Rain. And I know this is a Rumored to Exist introduction and not a Summer Rain introduction, but it’s important to note that things spent some time on the back burner while I got this first book out my system. Summer Rain got to the point where I considered it “mostly done” by the end of the summer, at about a quarter-million words. That’s almost four times bigger than drafts of Rumored, so it felt good to get that load off my chest so I could start really writing. I knew I had some real gems in the current draft, but I also had a lot of gar- bage. To sift this out, I renamed the current draft the “Seattle” draft, and started the “New York” draft as a blank file. Then I cut through the Seattle stuff, and moved only the good bits to the New York draft, rewriting things as they got moved. I tried to watch the general order as much as I could, to make sure contiguous sections didn’t have common threads. I tried to space things throughout the draft as much as I could, and get a good division of items as you went from cover to cover. It was a lot like making a good mix tape, except it was a lot longer. By the end of the summer, I had a bit of an aneurysm about money, and got worried about watching my bank account slowly drain away. Yes, I was doing dumb shit, like buying my first DVD player and tons of DVDs, and eating out lunch at McDonald’s or Subway every day instead of sticking to the starving and unemployed writer diet of baloney on Wonder bread. But I’d had a job pretty much constantly since I was 15, and even if I spent no money each day, it really freaked me out that I had about eight or ten grand in the bank, and I’d basically have to retire on that unless I published a book or got another job. Publishing a book didn’t seem like a feasible idea, especially considering I knew nobody in town, and I was writing a book about vomit and goat sex. Right around then, some dot-com recruiter was bugging me, so I decided to get back into it. After a lot of fairly scary interviews at companies that obviously had no financial models whatsoever, I ended up going to work at Juno, which was essentially like my first job at Compuserve, but I’d be the first writer hired, instead of the fourth, and their stuff needed a ton of work. I got a good salary and a great office right in the heart of Times Square. But I also got plunged back into the corporate lifestyle, with lots of people wearing dockers organizing priority lists of action items during lengthy meetings, with catering spreads bigger than most weddings. And at 28 years old, almost all of my bosses and coworkers were five years my junior. Even the CEO was younger than me. Like a diamond, fine writing is usually formed under high pressure. And this place would make for some intense pressure.
Big Fat Greek Neighborhood
At the end of 1999, things were not working out on the home front, and I moved into a shithole apartment in Astoria, Queens. That meant a few nights alone at my place with the book, and a few nights of riding the subway between Queens and Washington Heights, or Queens and work in Midtown, or Midtown to the Heights, and so on. I got a Palm Pilot to jot down my ideas, but they still accumulated on post-it notes, check stubs, margins of newspapers, and spiral-bound journals. I got a high- speed connection at home, and spent even more time reading pages about alien abduc- tions and serial killers and government conspiracies and anything else that might look neat in the book. By spring, the girlfriend thing ended, although I’m still good friends with her and she probably edited the whole draft of Rumored another two or three times after we broke up. Right when the spring fever kicked in, I found out about this new con- cept called Print on Demand, or POD. Basically, this company called iUniverse would take a draft of any book, design it into a real-looking product with an ISBN and bar code and color cover and everything, and then sell it through Ingram, the huge book distributor. Your book would be on Amazon.com and all of the other online stores (but not in real stores, unless someone special-ordered it), and then the company took a cut of the profits. It sounded like the deal of a lifetime, even if it would provide no mar- keting whatsoever. It also provided the perfect vehicle for me to get Summer Rain off of my back and out the all of the people who had been hearing my bullshit stories about it for the last five years. The spring and summer of 2000 went to getting the final draft of Summer Rain ready for print. I basically rewrote the last third of the book, because it was based on an ex-girlfriend that had just finished law school, and I was almost certain she was going to sue me over it. Editing a book of that size is no easy feat, and even after I cut down everything I could, I ended up with a 220,866 word draft. My original cover designer fell through, and I got Dave Gulbransen to run around campus with his digital camera so I could have a few photos to throw at one of iUniverse’s designers. They ended up doing a horrific job on the cover design. Also, the book, which was a sizable chunk of dead tree, came with a list price of thirty bucks. On top of all of this, UPS sent the first box of books to the wrong place, and it took an additional month until I finally saw the finished product. But it was done, signed, sealed, and delivered. I was published, I was on Amazon, and the curse of the first book was over. Now I could start working on something else.
Past The Wall
It took some time to get back into Rumored. I had this weird post-natal depression about Summer Rain, and it kept me from doing anything creative, aside from maybe playing Rogue Squadron on the Nintendo 64. I also got into a somewhat dicey relationship with a girl that went to Cornell, and that didn’t last very long. I did end up going to Ithaca and editing the entire book on the train ride there and back. I spent a week in a hotel room, red-penning a draft and then wandering around some remote part of the city near a bunch of used car lots each day, eating at a Wendy’s that had Mr. Pibb soda. Most of 2001 was spent tearing apart the book and putting it back together repeatedly, except for a brief period in which I thought it might be fun to actually write The Device, until I remembered that I had no plot or characters, just a time machine. So I kept at Rumored, and the good got better, and I started to wonder when I would ever get done, or what would happen to the book if I did. I remember one night that fall, it rained all day, and after work, I stopped and took some pictures near the new office of my new job just north of SoHo. I went to Kiev for dinner, and marked up about a hundred pages of a draft of the book with a felt-tip marker. On my way out, I bumped into a friend of mine from Juno, and he dragged me to a play he was reviewing for some stage magazine. It suddenly poured rain like a fucking chapter of the Old Testament, and we got completely soaked, to the point where my shoes were filled with water as if I put them in a tub. We got to the theater, and my draft of the book and all of my edits were basically a lump of paper pulp and pink-red marker. I went home, pissed off that I lost so much work. The next morning, the World Trade Center blew up, which made me think much less about my draft. I was in the train my my way to the office when it happened. Four people from my company were killed, when they just happened to be in the towers for a trade show. I coinciden- tally blew a fuse in my apartment that night, a single fuse that powered all of my lights and appliances, and my ghetto landlord was in Italy, so I couldn’t get into the cellar to change it, and I went without power for a week. And those pictures I took the night before? One of them would end up on the cover of Rumored. The closer I got to the end of writing Rumored, the more I started to shit blood over the prospect of writing thousands of query letters to publishers, trying to describe a book that describes random violence and bloodshed while mentioning drugs, necro- philia, sex with barnyard animals, devil worship, and all the while not having a good plot. I knew if I could get the damn thing onto paper and into people’s hands, they would love it. But that’s the problem with anything, really.
12
I had this friend who was really into writing, and also into the beats. He seemed very enthusiastic about the book, but as the drafts got further along, he would read them and say, “No, I liked the other thing better.” And I’d ask him what other thing, and he’d change the subject, or say, “I don’t know.” I’d send Ray a draft, and it would take him about 15 months to read it, and then he would say, “It’s cool.” The only constructive criticism I could get, other than basic punctuation problems, was “it’s good, but just change it a little or something.” This made me go insane, and I could never get any editing done. I simply could not take a big step back and think about making any changes to the book. I’d talk to this aforementioned friend, who is one of these open source, everything-is-free nuts, and he’d tell me to give the whole thing away to the world, and play my bongos and post it all as an HTML file and be done with it. Then I’d think of printing up a few books, and he’d tell me that if there was any interest in anyone buying it, that I should start sending letters to publishers to get them to pay for it. Meanwhile, this was in the post-9/11 economy, when every small publisher was jumping off of a building, and even the big ones were starting to ratchet back their author welfare programs. I had almost a complete book, but didn’t know where to take it. So I decided this friend was terminally insane, and said fuck it to him and to everyone else, and decided to publish this god damned thing on iUniverse and get it over with. As a side note, he’s the rea- son Rumored did not have a thanks list - I did not want to thank him and then have him think he was instrumental to the success of the book, so I didn’t thank anybody. Sorry about that.
The Publishing
I can’t say much more about the process, except I tore through the last bits of editing by taking trips to Pittsburgh and DC for long weekends, to work on the road and in hotels. By the beginning of June, I talked Ray into making me a cover, with the photo I mentioned of a dark and rainy street in New York. Then I pored over the last draft, with a hundred-some flags marking changes and corrections. The number went down to 70-some, then 40-some, then two dozen, and finally about seven. Finally, I’d read the entire draft so many damn times that it didn’t make sense anymore. On June 11, I uploaded the draft to iUniverse, and hoped for the best. There’s a delay period when their production staff goes over your work, designs the back cover, and dicks around for a while. The process takes a while because all of their graphic designers are convicted felons working from prison. (Just kidding.) Once you get your proofs, there’s a longer delay until the book shows up on their site. And then you get hit with another delay while you wait for the first order of books to be sent to you. And you wait some more for the book to go live on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, so people will actually buy it. After things left my hands, I went into a heavy depression. I went out to Las Vegas for a week at the beginning of July, which is pretty stupid when you consider that a Vegas July is hot enough to melt lead. Then I rented a car from a place off the strip and drove about 14 hours to my 40 acres of land in Colorado. I took a piss on my property, then turned around and went back to Vegas, where I crashed in the Stratosphere and made a 40 minute phone call to Bill Perry that cost me 87 bucks. I was on the strip, in the blinding cold A/C, and the book would be out soon. But for that moment, I wanted to think of anything but books.
When I got back, the book went live on barnesandnoble.com, and through a freak statistical error, it entered the race at number 1200 or so on their best books list. I ordered two copies, and an hour later, the number was 900. Someone else in the office bought one, and it went to the low 600s. Someone back home bought one, and I was in the top 500 of all books for all time at one of the biggest booksellers in the world. The next day, I was at 9000, and a day later, I hovered around two million. But it was a cool ride while it lasted, and I got screenshots. The friend that kept throwing me off about the book and publishing, I sent him a copy to review. He said it was pornographic and too violent and that I needed to go to a therapist. He suggested some insane Wilhelm Reich-trained, crystal wearing, orgone box-building guy into holistic orgone treatment involving the prophecies of Buckminster Fuller or something. I never talked to him again. There’s not much to say about sales, but everyone who bought one found it very interesting. A lot of people told other people to check it out, and I’m glad. I did one reading in Boston in August of 2003 at the urging of my pal John Sheppard (author of Small Town Punk, go to amazon and buy one.) It took about 4 or 5 beers to get me in front of a small crowd, and I read too fast, but it was fun and I managed to get two people to get up and leave in disgust, so I guess I did good. So this is the annotated version, and I’ve added enough footnotes to explain all of my goofy references. I’ve thrown this book together myself without iUniverse, so there may be some messy layout problems, but I’ve tried to make the book as cheap as possible. Please do email me with any other questions, praise, complaints, or issues - it’s jkonrath@rumored.com. And I’ll include a thanks list this time, since I left it out before. Enjoy,
Jon
Born to Lose, Live to Win
Metropolis: Ray Miller - High general, army of Satan; unofficial editor, critic, chauf- feur, lodgekeeper; reason it all happened (sorry there weren’t more Godzilla refer- ences.)
(We are) the road crew: Andrea Donderi, Todd Duffin, Bill and Jen Perry, Ryan Grant, Steve Simms, Tom Sample, Marie Mundaca, Virgina Lore, John Fail, Derek Raugh, Robert W. “The Loser” Howington, and other readers of early drafts that convinced me that they didn’t suck.
(I Won’t) Pay Your Price: Metal Curse zine, Wine with Thieves zine, Air in the Para- graph Line zine, Assorted Realities. Partial credit: Extent zine.
Leaving Here: Bill Perry - frequent answerer of stupid emacs and linux questions, and the loaning of a stolen laptop during the trip to Boston that started this whole thing.
14
Stay Clean: Tara Culbertson, R.K. Overton, Scott Boggan, Chris “Sven” Blanc, Keiko “Thor” Shiotoni, Roger Eppich, Larry Falli, Sonya Gamargo, Suzanne Strick, Danielle Baehler, Julius Cooper, Murray Sperber, Steve Simms, Jim Manges, Jim Ludwig, Jia Myers, John Sheppard, and Chuck Stringer.
Remember Me, I’m Gone: Thank you to the woman from Minnesota who tried to hit on me while I was editing my first book in a fit of depression in the bar of the Boston convention center Sheraton. Whoever you are, your “hey, is that a computer?” line unknowingly sparked the writing binge which eventually caused me to ditch the other book and start this.
Go to Hell: No thanks to Evergreen Ford of Issaquah.