Please Buy My Book! (Does This Headline Make Me Look Desperate?)

For nigh on a thousand years, I have been working on and talking about my just-released road-trip memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli (see May 5, 2016, "Here's An Excerpt from My Road-Trip Memoir").

I hit the road with three friends in February 1988, traveling in a converted handyman's van. From Connecticut we traveled down the eastern seaboard, and then on through Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, before entering the southwest. We ended up in New Mexico, where we lived for a few months. In 2008, I wrote about this journey on a predecessor blog; in 2011, I began expanding my story into a book. That book has now been published.

Why did it take me 10 years to finish the book? That's par for the course for me. My first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity, also spent a decade in development. I'm not the most disciplined writer, that's for sure. But, as I discovered part-way through the process of writing my new memoir, I have ADD (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List"). That means I struggle to stay on task and organize my thoughts on paper, and I can get easily frustrated when I find things to be difficult.

Great/Dismal underwent a lot of changes from the initial draft all those years ago, to the one I hope you'll consider buying today. Because of my ADD (and executive function issues), I also procrastinate like a true professional. So it's not like I spent 10 straight years working on this book. I would leave it alone for weeks, sometimes even months. And even when I worked on it, sometimes progress was painfully slow. Also, I took my hands off it for a while, sending it to friends and family, seeking their input (see May 15, 2013, "Out of My Hands...for Now").

"What's the book about?" you might ask. It's equal parts Jack Kerouac's On the Road, detailing the adventures my three friends and I had while running amok in America (and also the boring parts), and Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, with its nod to classic-era disco as well as new millennium club music.

Wait, that last part's not quite right.

It's a mash-up of Kerouac's famous book; John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley; the Rough Guide series of travelogues; the very tamest of Charles Bukowski; and a mid-life journey to self-discovery. I write not only about the four-month odyssey I took with my friends, but also about the various inspirations for the trip (National Lampoon magazine, the aforementioned Kerouac, a few free-form trips I took at the end of my college years, etc.). Additionally, I flash back to college and spend a chapter analyzing why I struggled to let my hair down during my adventure.

It's the most intimate thing I've ever written, which is another reason that I took so long to publish it. I don't like to talk about myself and my struggles, so this is a big step for me. I hope that if you buy it (and actually read it) you will connect with some part of it, whether the stupid stuff my friends and I did on our journey, or the struggles I had during the trip. And please let me know what you think, whether by posting a comment here, sending me a text or email or a Facebook message, or writing a review on Amazon, where the book is also available (along with other online retailers. You can also order one via your favorite indie bookseller).

Thanks!

Heavy Reading

I've been in a great reading groove for quite some time now. I'm on my 13th book since the beginning of the year, and it's one I've been anticipating for a long while.

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns has been on my radar since it came out three years ago. In this massive undertaking, Wilkerson, who in 1994 became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize while working as the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, tells the story of the emigration of African Americans from the South to the North and West that took place from World War I until the early '70s.

During that half century, approximately six million people fled the brutally repressive conditions in the Jim Crow south for cities ranging from Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and New York, to Los Angeles, Oakland and Houston. They didn't know what they would find upon their arrival, and often times they surely discovered that conditions weren't much better than what they'd known back home.

I've just barely cracked this book, so this isn't a review. I just wanted to get across how excited I am to be reading this book. I'll admit that I knew next to nothing about this amazing chapter in America's history. I was aware that black Southerners headed north seeking work, and that countless Delta guitarists turned Chicago into the capital of the blues.

But I had no idea of the scope of the exodus, and never thought about the incredible bravery involved in taking part. Entire families left everything behind because they were so sick of being harassed, beaten, threatened and humiliated by white folks. Sometimes just the men left in search of work; at times it was just women. All of them went seeking something better, a place where they could spread their wings a bit, have a chance at moving upward.

Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people while researching and writing this book. She uses the riveting information from their stories to build the base of the 500-plus page book, while focusing on three individuals whose stories she tells in rich, rich detail.

Here she explains her process:

I may post more about this book as I read it, and most likely something when I'm all done. I can say this, though. I recommend it already and I'm only 35 pages in.

"On the Road," again

James A. Reeves has written the road trip memoir I wish I could write.

Bastard....

Reeves recently published The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir, which is a "photo memoir of one man’s journey through America that is as sprawling and chaotic as the country itself. Contains 55,000 miles and 416 colorful pages with a map and an index," according to the book's back cover.

I can't wait to read, and look at, this book.

According to the publisher's description: "While working at a design studio and teaching, whenever he could find a few days he would buy a ticket to anywhere cheap, rent a car, and drive in the direction of whatever towns struck his fancy — Truth & Consequences, Delta, Dinosaur — racing blindly through the back roads of the country."

Reeves took his trips between 2004 and 2009, taking tons of pictures along the way.

Here's a promotional video:

Some have compared Reeves' book to Jack Kerouac's seminal novel On the Road. As I've mentioned here a few times (May 25, 2012, "Inspiration," and October 2, 2012, "The Struggle"), I'm working on a memoir about a road trip I took with three friends in 1988. I compare our trip and the dynamic of the four personalities to the ramblings of Kerouac and his buddy, Neal Cassady.

Obviously, my book is very different from The Road to Somewhere. I took my trip 16 years before Reeve, and the photos that I took didn't come out because I was using a crappy camera and didn't know what I was doing even with a crappy camera.

But like him, I learned a lot about this country -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- during the four months I traveled from Connecticut to New Mexico and back. I also learned about myself, although many of those lessons didn't come until I'd started working on the book nearly eight months ago.

I continue to make progress on my book. I have begun filling in holes in the timeline thanks to email and phone correspondence with friends and family. And I've recently begun hammering all of it together into what I believe is the right format and order. Of course, I've had those thoughts before and ended up making changes, but that's just part of the process.

Review: The Slap

The Slap is another paperback I picked up for free at Newtonville Books after buying a full-price hardcover (see July 24, 2012, "Review: That Old Ace In the Hole").

I'd never heard of the book or its author, Christos Tsiolkas, but I liked the premise: a man slaps somebody else's child at a backyard barbecue, and as a result, a group of friends, acquaintances and family members question their parenting abilities, their cultural differences, their ideals and their relationships to each other.

Plus, it's an Australian tale and who doesn't love the Aussies?

As with the last book I read, Annie Proulx's "That Old Ace In the Hole," I feel that this book could've used a heavier edit. What's wrong with a novel that's under, say, 400 pages?

As someone who self-published a book ((C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity) that needed better editorial oversight, I know of what I speak. I had spent so much time getting the book ready for publication (10 years, give or take) that I couldn't stomach the idea of someone telling me where to make changes, or questioning the ideas in my book.

But if you're working with an actual editor and publisher, your book should be tighter than Tsiolkas's book. Still, I enjoyed his story and his method for presenting the multitude of difficult and intricately woven issues.

There are eight chapters, each one told from the perspective of a different character. I was impressed at Tsiolkas's ability to see life from so many different angles, both male and female, young (18) and old (69), and make each one seem true to life.

I thought he did an especially good job with the internal monologues of each of the characters. As someone who does a lot of self-talking (what probably appears to the outside world as crazy talk), I can relate to the world of inner thoughts, and how different that realm is to the persona we put forward.

And the view into the various cultures of Australia -- many of the characters are Greek immigrants and their children and grandchildren -- was fascinating. How do the Greeks deal with each other, and the aboriginal natives, and those of English descent? And what are the conflicts among friends who are Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist? Good stuff all around.

I know this isn't the most thorough review, but I started this a while back and just want to finish it up, so in conclusion I'll just say that I recommend the book.

G'day!