my first novel, blue, on kindle and iphone

After looking into and starting the process a while ago, and then looking again and seeing that Kindle was now a reader available for Iphone and ipod Touch, I gave it a try again and was able to get a new cover, pricing, and text of my first novel, Blue, loaded on the Amazon website without too much trouble. I'm excited for people to be able to read my first novel at a lower price and in a way that is convenient for them. It's easy to upload text and I may try to put a book of poetry on their as well.

Here is the Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/d6cp6b

Working on the novel

I recently talked to my friend Lou, a poet who has written several novels, and others, and my Creativity Coach, Wickie of Monstre Sacre, about my novel in progress and they both agreed that I need to focus more on the forest and look at the 2nd half of the book, the one I really haven't revised much or even read since I first wrote it.

I have revised the first part, really the first third, many times, since I was going to publish it as a novella, and then changed my mind. Reading the rest of what I've got makes sense.

So far I am surprised and somewhat dismayed at how personal and autobiographical it is. How much will the reader be interested in my life? As if they would know it was my life...but anyway...how interesting is this material? I took a class this weekend from one of my favorite writers, living, dead, or undead, Stephen Elliott, on writing literary fiction or non-fiction using your personal life. It was a good class and is making me think about who my ideal reader is, and how similar they are to me. My friend Anne is probably my ideal reader, currently, as far as I can tell. My friend Simon used to be but my work is not dark or horrific enough for him anymore.

My ideal reader probably likes the following books and authors etc.: Infinite Jest, Ulysses, William S. Burroughs, (my friend Brian comes to mind...), Franz Kafka, The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch, maybe Kundera, Rules of Attraction, Nadja by Andre Breton, Paul Bowles, Samuel Beckett, Bukowski, maybe Natalie Sarraute and other new wave novelists, also maybe Middlemarch and Saffron-Foer. An eclectic mix, for sure.

Even though my style is not that similar, I feel closest to Kafka in some ways, in the sense of saying "yes, everything is fucked up, but so? it can, and will get much worse..." I think this is the world I write about, with characters more cynical or depairing than myself. Writing about hope is not as interesting to me as how people deal with the lack of it.