“Sure, I may have offended a few of the blue nosers with my cocky stride and musky odors.” – Homer Simpson
The site is starting to look like itself again, baby steps, but progress.
The first of ten preview posts for We Kicked Their Ass is now up. This one contains the preface, the author’s note, and the first section of chapter one. A new post/section will be added every Wednesday and Saturday until Fourth of July. There is an email address box for those who might later like to order it (but no pre-orders yet).
Work on this book actually predates DHS. I was most of a year into the book and kinda stuck when I decided I needed a blog and that blog might as well be the Simpsons one Mad Jon and Dave and I had been discussing. So having the two projects come back together now is a little weird, but here we are.
The first (shitty) version of the book was done in 2010, and I spent that summer (deep in the bowels of the Great Recession) soliciting literary agents and getting nowhere. I put it down and started working on Zombie Simpsons, which was published here in 2012. In 2016 I rewrote the book for the first time, getting it to a state where two agents wanted to represent it. After I picked one, we spent a couple years sending it out only to have it continually rejected due to my lack of “platform” (as in, literally every rejection cited this as the reason). Even if I spoke with an editor who loved it, the boss would always say no: “platform”.
This is the catch-22 of our monopolized publishing industry in our monopolized economy. The conglomerate book publishers have publicly announced that they don’t know what sells and doesn’t, that the only way they can survive is to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That’s why they give absurd advances to celebrities and anyone else they think can attract attention; their own marketing is monetarily trivial and totally ineffective, so they need authors who can market the books as well as write them (or “write” in many ghostwritten cases).
Well, this little project has lasted most of my adult life at this point, and I’m not going to let it be someone else’s toss on a roulette wheel.
So we’re doing this gonzo style, and you can start reading right here.