By the time I managed to locate Bert Leonard, all that was left of him fit into a small unit in a self-storage facility in Los Angeles that was hemmed in by concertina wire and a row of spindly palm trees.
– Susan Orlean
All that was left of him was not a storage unit. That wasn’t all that was left of his life. He had all of his children around him, and he got to understand that he was leaving us behind. He didn’t die alone.
In the course of my so-called career, I’ve found that new writers always lead off any conversation with the same two questions:
Even I get tired of talking about myself, so let’s move on to the agent thing for now, okay?
And now, due to popular demand, the second of the “Zeitgeist Boom”/”Drunken Monkey” columns from wherever the hell it is I first published them (It’s fiction, dammit! Don’t forget – it’s fiction!):
I’m in the Airstream, on the not-so-foamy pad that passes for a bed, playing a sweet shuffle beat on a little gal I met at the Chimacum feed store across the highway, when my cell phone rings.
Well, it doesn’t ring, actually, it starts thumping out the opening of “L.A. Woman.” Which, if you’re old enough to remember that song, you’ll know is totally out of sync with my fucking, or anybody’s, for that matter.
It’s not TV, but we think this info is muy importanto:
The massive scale of the self-publishing world can easily overwhelm readers, writers and publishing professionals.
To help GalleyCat readers discover self-published authors, we have compiled lists of the top eBooks in three major marketplaces for self-published digital books: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. We will update these lists every week, tracking how writers perform inside these booming marketplaces.
Gerald Sanford returns with a VIQ – Very Important Quickie:
Write to TELL a story…not SELL a story.