Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea trivia questions!

Hey...this is cool. I can make trivia questions about mine, or other people's, books! Now that's promotion I can get behind!

Try out the ones I made for Zeus! Never before have questions been so trivial! Can you get 100%? Can you get 5%?

Youch!

Wow, I never realized how good Goodreads is for stalking your fans! Too bad I found this out by getting my first Goodreads rating for Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea: 2 out of 5 stars! Ouch!

So I did some digging and see that this particular reader has set this book on the quality shelf among such peers as Wrestling Superstars II, I Was for Sale: Confessions of a Bondage Model and The Satanic Rituals: Companion to the "Satanic Bible". Zeus was rated lower, in this person's opinion, than Bomb Queen Volume 3: The Good, The Bad And The Lovely and Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection. Even poetry books by Jewel and Billy Corgan fared better than mine!

Oh well. At least it's nice to hear what people think! The reader is obviously a wrestling fan - I wonder if The Muscle pissed them off?

Onwards and upwards (or downwards!)

Saturday morning thoughts: Poetry as Jazz

Turned on the good ol CBC radio 2 app this morning and had this revelation:

It seems like contemporary poetry is a lot like modern jazz. Half the time when you turn on the radio or open up some journal you get this this overwrought, overthought construction that only musical theorists could love (and you still wonder if they actually do like it - or if they are just trying to impress themselves), and half the time (if you're lucky) you'll get that something smooth and meaningful, that something you'd actually want to settle down with on the couch on a Sunday.

Anyway it, and this ensuing blogpost, inspired this poem:

Saturday Radio Jazz time

Just looking for something

to waste the morning

reading poetry to

and all I get

is five guys

treating their gear

as an arsenal of noise

and running their fingers

madly

up and down

every key in their possession

like they were paid by the note

while I do the same

with the radio dials

just trying to escape

just trying to just find

something

Heartfelt

and Meaningful

not overwrought

or overthought

or overplayed

just something sweet

smooth

and true

like a girl alone

writing poetry in a coffee shop

somewhere

and not

overwrought

or overthought

or overplayed

like too much poetry is

these days.

From my upcoming comic book...

My good friend Mav and I are starting up a comic book serial sometime this year called RAILS - the Royal Alberta Illustrated Literature Society. Our first issue probably won't be until later in the year, but we'll be launching issue 0.5 in April and presenting it at the Kazoo Zine & Comics expo on Sat April 16th. Should be about 24 pages and will include some of my work (comics and poetry) and a good chunk of Mav's as well. Come check it out!

Here is a preview from my comic short, The Owl, that I'll have in it:

And check out some of Mav's great work here: http://royalails.tumblr.com/

Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea Contest Winners!

Recently there was a Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea giveaway over on goodreads.com. Congratulations to Lisa, Rachel and Ina! I have sent forth three copies to the three corners of the globe (USA, Australia and India) with your names on it. Hopefully they will find you there to inform you of your mission: enjoy the book!

(Bonus mission - review the book! Extra points!)

Fuck a Poet

The fuck-a-poet club

Forget

those clubs

mile high or higher.

Any fool

can pay

to ride on an aeroplane

and get bounced around

in a plastic shell.

Forget those

swinging swingers parties

where swingers swing

their swinging bats at any ball

that slings its way

into the park.

How many people

will you ever fuck

that will write a poem

about it afterward?

Schluff off

those other suitors

in their tailored bravado

boring people

fuck boring people

over martinis

between business hours and television shows

Who the fuck orders

a grilled cheese sandwich

in a restaurant?

Who the fuck orders

a grilled cheese sandwich

in a restaurant

when they could

fuck a poet?

Water in the Desert

I stumbled across this review for Game Quest the other day. It's always kind of delightful to come across reviews for my self-published work. Partly because I had no distribution model other than Amazon and my own site, so the chance of Game Quest being read, let alone reviewed, is very very small. Game Quest has kind of had a life of it's own. One of my first orders was to Abu Ghraib (yes, that Abu Ghraib - insert your jokes about my book being a good implement for torture due to its size, weight or content here) and though I've stopped promoting the book years ago, still sell ~3 copies a year on Amazon and the ebook version sells quite well - about 1 a month. Despite being the most daunting (for most people) of my books in both theme and size, it seems to have found some tenuous foothold in the underculture. Anyway, so it's extra great when you find out that someone read it and actually took the time to review the book. In this case it was particularly nice because I could tell that the reviewer engaged with the book, understood it on a deeper level and had some interesting things to say about the work.

I'm not sure what most author's motivations are for writing. Mine is a desire to communicate. I don't particularly enjoy the editing, the printing and, especially, the promotion that goes into translating a story from something cool in your head to something real on the page. All that effort is a LOT of work and the end goal is to present it to the world and hope to hear back from them on what they thought. I don't really care if it's good or bad (of course, good is preferable), I just like to hear what people thought to see how and if it engaged them. Reviews are my favourite part after coming up with the idea in the first place. It's like getting the chance to reread your book from the POV of a reader...and loving it, or excoriateingly tearing it to shreds. Which, in turn, makes the hardest part about being a small-beans author is you don't get a lot of that. But boy does that water in the desert taste good!

Incidentally, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea also just got reviewed (huzzah!) by the University of Lethbridge Student newspaper, which you can read here.