Letter

The guy who runs Newcity sent out a call-for-entries about the Printers Row Lit Fest. I wrote back that I could put something together about the time I was a featured writer along with Gillian Flynn and some others. He bit. Then I tried to write the thing and it was so bitter and shitty that it wasn’t even worth printing in his rag.

Good thing I have a newsletter…

In 2012, the Union League Club held a kick-off event ahead of that year’s book fair. The Trib was still running the show and selected a few promising young-ish and/or debut authors to showcase their forthcoming or recently published books. The University of Chicago Press had published Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab the previous fall, and this was an opportunity to get the book in front of a few more eyeballs.

I’d never been inside the Union League Club before. Hell, I doubt I’d ever been inside any private club before and few since. A large room held about a dozen hightop tables, each featuring a single book, its author nervously or enthusiastically hovering nearby to answer guest questions and plug their product. I don’t remember what I said or to whom I said it; I do remember drinking a bunch of free wine, waiting for the thing to be over.

Gillian Flynn, who would publish Gone Girl that year, was at one of the other hightops. I didn’t talk to her or any of the other featured writers. Their career fates likely mirrored mine. Though Hack was optioned shortly before publication, fourteen years later no movie or show has been greenlit. I’ve published eight or nine more books, most of which were enjoyed by the few who read them, but not a one has caused the smallest ripple.

Flynn hasn’t published any novels since Gone Girl but she hasn’t needed to. Movies, TV shows, comic books, and untold other media have kept her off the street. 

Do schmooze-fests do writers any good? Did Flynn say something or meet someone at the Union League Club that helped launch her career? I couldn’t tell you. In the years since, I’ve participated in the lit fest several times to sell my books. I’ve never been part of any talks, readings, or get-togethers organized by the fest.

This year I’m part of two off-site readings. Might not be Sharp Objects or Dark Places but it’s not nothing. I’ll take what I can get.

This Sunday, like a dress-rehearsal for Printers Row, I’ll be at Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence, Kansas. Pop by if you’re spending the dregs of summer in the vicinity.

I made pages for the art from three forthcoming books: The Suicide’s Grave, The World is Not Empty Without Reason, and The Sound and the Fury. Not sure yet when the latter two will appear but you can look at pictures while you wait.

I wrote about the bookstore again. I’d pitched a compilation of my zines but that was deemed “too artistic”. Don’t know what that meant. I waited a couple months and pitched this new thing having seen they like to profile bookstores.

I think the zines are a lot closer to what I want to be doing than this new thing but writing in a mode that splits the difference between journalism and personal essay is muscle memory by now. Low stakes. It’s the thing I’ve been trying to quit but sometimes still dip back into. A lot of the reason is Zona Motel, which has an audience I otherwise don’t have access to because of my social-media policies.

Contributing to Zona is a compromise. It gives me a nominal presence on a platform I quit a couple years ago and doesn’t require me to do any of the things I can no longer stomach, like performing some kind of online identity. They’re nice and even pay a little.

Another thing I thought I quit was the horror movie podcast. But I’ve been dipping my toe back in. A lot of the reason is that Mallory is more or less becoming my publisher—having put out Moby Dick and promising to put out others.

Monday morning we recorded a talk about Daughters of Darkness (1971), starring incomparable ice queen Delphine Seyrig and a guy who would go on to play the angry, frustrated husband of one of the cops on Cagney & Lacey on 80s TV. It’s a cold, stylish riff on vampire lore with allusions to Nazism and general European post-WWII malaise, but what’s most refreshing about it is that it doesn’t spoonfeed or over-explain much of anything. It’s a mood, as the kids used to say.

My show continues at the bar. People seem to dig it. A few pieces sold. Here’s what’s left.

My brother asked for a print of my Marvel Universe painting. You can get one too.

Krystle now sells her amazing zines direct, cutting out Etsy or any other middlemen, so go get yourself some already!

When I started on my public domain book design project last November I didn’t expect it to snowball into what it’s become. I figured I’d put out a book through Amazon or Ingram and that would be that.

Instead, the first one was immediately snapped up by a small press and, a few months later, I had a deal with a New York publisher for two books, with the very real possibility of many more to come. I’d self-published the first of those two and they wanted a new cover. I worked and reworked and reworked it until everyone was happy. There was no additional payment but I figured the extra labor might grease the wheels for a continuing financial commitment.

Everything was humming along apace until an email arrived stating that the publisher’s designers couldn’t use the print-ready files I’d sent and instead needed me to generate a text manuscript with instructions on where to place the images. Such a document did not exist. I assembled these books piece by piece, marrying text to image. I was taken aback by the request but sat down and made the thing they asked for.

A month passed and another email arrived. It had a sample of what the designers came up with. They changed typeface in places, changed the margins, and printed the author and book names at the top of every page. It was horrible and had little in common with what I’d made.

I didn’t write these books so my contribution is the art and the design. If you take apart those elements and reassemble them your own way it is no longer my work. I told this to the editor in my reply. He wanted to get on the phone and fix things. To see what he could do to make me happy. But there’s nothing to be done. I signed a contract and I’ll honor it. But these are no longer my books.

This morning I got an email from the designer requesting a link to the files. I wrote back that the editor had them. He requested I resend them, then wrote back that he couldn’t open the links. He wanted me to transfer them to another cloud storage site. That’s when I lost it. Told him to figure it out and not to contact me again.

Had a lovely talk in a park with June Skinner Sawyers.

Updated my events page.