Monday, February 6, 2012

100% at Last

So. Tired. This one probably won't be very cohesive.

I've been using pretty much every moment of my spare time over the last week cleaning up The Zeroes and formatting it for the Kindle. I uploaded it around four or five on Sunday evening. At around 11:30 the same night, I noticed a glaring error that would have made me look really stupid (to anyone in the know) and decided that I still didn't like how a few scenes toward the end played out.

That kept me up until 4:30 a.m. last night. Unfortunately, I had to wait another twelve hours before version 1.01 could be uploaded. It will be available probably sometime tomorrow afternoon.

I'm beat. I'm exhausted. If I wasn't sick and tired of looking at the damn thing before, I sure as hell am now.

But it's almost over. Three years since I first started writing the damn thing, two since I failed getting it published through the conventional avenues, and one after I said fuck it and decided to self-publish -- this thing is FINALLY going to be out of my hands.

I sure hope all the typos have been caught. If there are any left, they'll just have to stay in there. They've won; they've asserted their right to exist. I've probably subjected the whole 110,000-word manuscript to five editing rounds in the last two years, and I'd rather swallow glass than go for a sixth.

So it's already for sale on Amazon as a Kindle book. A print version will be available probably in another month or so. (If you were planning to buy it, I would wait another 24 hours so you're sure to get the corrected version.)

The initial release is on the Kindle just because it's faster. (Truth be told, I'm not a fan of ebooks.) The analog version (which will be coming from a print-on-demand subsidiary of Amazon) would have necessitated a lengthy back-and-forth between me and the printers as they sent me an initial copy for my approval and I discovered some horrible combination of font, print size, and margins have made the damn thing unreadable. The whole thing is going to take at least a week or two. This way there's no waiting. This way the thing's already out there. This way the print version is just the last loop in the knot. (And this way, I'm more likely to snag 8EB/RaFoFF fans who got Kindles for Christmas and are eager to fill them up with books they may or may not ever read.)

I'm more relieved than elated.

I'm not really thinking about what comes next. I've already moved on. I moved on almost as soon as I finished writing the damn thing at the end of 2009. Far as I'm concerned, this is just the long overdue trying of the last loose end.

I can already imagine myself checking the numbers compulsively, waiting month after month to see if sales have crawled past the single and double digits. Three years of rejection slips and hey man i've only looked at the first chapter but yeah so far it's good i'll read it though i promise have taught me not to get my hopes up.

But fuck. At least this will be one thing I'll never have to spend another day putting off or worrying about.

I still think it's a damn good book -- or at least a damn good first book. It ain't perfect, and there are still some things I wish I could change, but I refuse to fret over it any longer. It's about as finished and perfect as I can afford to let it be.

I have three -- three! -- other books at various stages of completion. I intend to finish them all and submit them for three individual rounds of mass submissions and mass rejection. Them's the breaks. Anyway, that's why I can't dwell on this project any longer. There's other stuff needs doing.

I've always had a hard time explaining The Zeroes to people. When asked what it's about, the answer I usually rely on is "it's about shit not working out." This is usually where people change the subject or feign interest even more conspicuously than before. (Perhaps a more blunt "shit don't work out (period)" synopsis would have piqued the interest of the literary agents at least marginally more than the spurious IN A WORLD WHERE SUCH AND SUCH AND HERE IS MY HOOK-style pitches I sent out because all the blogs written by literary agents told me that's what they wanted.)

When Woebin asked me about the book a long while back, I told him I was trying to write something as deliberately mundane as possible. He received this with some skepticism.

When he read it (and very, very helpfully pointed out some stupid typos I may have otherwise overlooked), he had almost nothing but praise for it. Almost nothing but. Like I said, it ain't perfect -- it's not To Kill a Mockingbird. But it doesn't suck -- and that's a bigger hurdle to clear than you might think. It might be better than The Rum Diary or Typee (I guess the point of contact between The Zeroes and Typee there is that they're both anthropological studies of a sort), but I'll have to get back to you on that after further reflection. (And maybe after rereading The Rum Diary and Typee.)

Oh, you've noticed that there's no cover art.

I think it works -- especially given the mood of what's inside, and the fact that nobody was going to buy this book based on any cover I could have given it.

If you've checked the Amazon page, you've also noticed the brief, vague description (maybe I should change it?) and lack of any sort of plot summary. Also intentional. I won't bore you with my reasoning, but I'll say that after assembling three or four different versions of a condensed synopsis for the ill-starred pitches to the agents and small publishers, I've discovered that it's beyond my power to break the thing down into a snappy play-by-play without making it sound like something nobody would ever want to read. (Probably for the same reason that Woebin was initially put off by my "deliberately mundane" remark. Or why those producers in that one episode of Seinfeld were so miffed when George succinctly and perfectly describes the program as "a show about nothing.")


One of the private jokes about the story is that it's about the punker kids in bands I knew in high school. I was never part of that scene myself, but I've been told I do an excellent job faking an insider's point of view as an outsider.

To get in the mindset of the place, the time, and the people, I downloaded Catch 22's Keasbey Nights as an .mp3 album (which I had heard here and there, but never actually owned) and listened to it on repeat for about 40% of the time I spent composing the original draft.

The fudged detail I mentioned earlier is that the last song on Keasbey Nights isn't "As the Footsteps Die Out Forever" (as mentioned in the uncorrected text), but "1234, 1234." When I downloaded the album, for some reason I missed the last track and went on thinking the record ended on one particular note when it actually closes with something much different -- which I'm now aware of, having downloaded and listened to "1234, 1234" six or seven times in the last twenty-four hours.

Truth be told -- there was a moment when, in light of this, I seriously considered rewriting or changing the book's ending. But at this point that's out of the question.

The implied silver lining epilogue -- which would have been more evident had the book actually ended up in a bookstore -- will have to suffice, I fear.

Okay, now I'm just rambling. I'm going to spend the rest of the week dicking around, playing Einhander, and drawing comics. I think I've earned something close to a break. Expect three or four months of updates punctuated with:


Maybe we can drive up/leech off each other's sales. Or meet over martinis and talk about how funny it is that one of our books called The Zeroes is about the people who fucked the economy in the 00s, and the other is about the people who were fucked by the economy in the 00s.


  1. Very many congratulations, and I'm very stoked to be able to finally read it. Will you update the blog when the revised edition is up, because I want to check this thing out ASAP.

    Again, congratulations! I really, honestly, and truly can't wait.

  2. There will be a print version in a few weeks.

  3. You don't need a Kindle to read it. Amazon has a free downloadable eBook reader-thingy, and I'm pretty sure you can read them on their site as well. I'm not an eBook person and don't own a Kindle, but I've been able to read it.

  4. I'll be watching for the print version, looking forward to reading it but I don't have a Kindle. Congrats, Pat, you've made it that extra step where all us other jokers couldn't.

  5. Made it the extra step? What? Self-publishing is the literary equivalent of staggering across the finish line two days after the marathon ended.

    Nevertheless, thank you!

  6. I think he's referring to the fact that you actually created a novel, continuously subjected it to rounds of testing, and then finally published it despite loads of rejection that was given to you solely on the basis of this being your first book. Whereas most of us wouldn't even be able to get through writing the novel, let alone the many steps that were taken afterwards.

  7. Yep, what John said. I have about 30 poems and 4 or 5 stories in various states of unfinishedness on my computer. I've always been impressed with the fact that you are an honest-to-god literate person on the internet, and to finish a novel is one more thing I'm impressed with.