“Koala Whisperer” Comes In From The Cold; Frodo Represent!

Jeebus bless Mike’s and Shawn’s naughty little monkey-hearts. They’ve taken affirmative action to preserve the welfare and mental health of their fellow man. (I mean me, as I am a human male known to them personally.) This morning, their faces appeared on the supporters’ page of Digging Up the Bones‘ preorder and contribution site. Actually, only Mike’s face appeared. Shawn was represented by a little square full of Elijah Wood’s kisser claiming to be Shawn, but wasn’t, because it was Elijah Wood’s face in a little square, all Frodo-ed up.

Mike and Frawn claim to be Republicans—McDermott actually belongs to the party and holds a city councilman’s chair, for chrissakes. Nevertheless, they ignored the GOP’s manifest hostility to big words, arts spending, and the collectivist sin of yoking time, money and labor to the intention of producing a book. Of fiction.

The entire conceit seems shocking, profligate, and insane; stinking of hubris from go. From a strict, utilitarian point of view, and certainly according the dogmas undergirding America’s grimmest economic concepts, such a thing as a book is almost entirely useless.

If money must be wasted Mike and Shaw-Fro, have plenty of stuff to waste it on before getting to me and my literary fetishes. Undeterred by good economic sense, and perhaps inspired by gentle prodding, Mike and Frollow dropped a nice pile of dough. Contributions like that enable a boutique press, of the kind that publish what I write, to meet challenges of cost that only a decade ago would have been nearly untenable for reasons of scale and volume.

Time was, in the bad old days, publishers needed to buy lots of substantive editing, copyediting, proofing, layout, artwork, and graphic design before costs fell low enough for the enterprise to make any sense at all. All that’s on the agenda before arranging a healthy offset first-run of a couple thousand copies, then mounting a focused, efficient, and proportionate marketing effort to sell a thickish book from a smallish press, the pages of which vibrate in the spine glue from thrilling depictions of the types of scenes people hate to love in my slice of meatspace. It’s all there: condescending fundie-baiters, class-angst fussbudgetry, mind-scorching drug abuse, sexy violence, violent sex, and 60,0000 words of prose laced with more swears than the cover of a bailiff’s Bible.

I’m humbled our supporters seem to understand the importance of this project. If nothing else, such generosity brings nearer the hour when a massive, spinning press platen’s whirr will exorcise this kit of dark fantasy that took up housekeeping in my skull.

The Nash family’s braided fates lurked in my thoughts for a long time. Their surroundings do not welcome, and they are not pleasant people. Despite that, when in possession of unspoken-for moments, their world was one place my mind would wander. Mike, Shawndo, and the rest of the Honor Roll, are doing me a real solid here. Finally, this seductive, wicked family must wend its way through my world, and I need no longer wander the dog’s-hind-leg paths scoring theirs.

Well then—here we sit, willfully blind to the almost certain outcome of pretensions to art: vain, futile, and fungible in the worst, rotting-fruit sort of way. Pestering you like you owe me something. All of you, you awful, silly, wonderful people. Patient, good humored, you’re seeing things get sorted, aren’t you? I love you for many reasons, but especially for that. The campaign isn’t yet halfway to its goal yet, but frankly, I could give a damn. Hearing folks whose voices you know holler back when you call is f’in priceless, and if that’s all that comes from this little adventure, I’ll call it a win.

So—thanks? Yes. Thanks.

That is, unless you’re one of those still wallowing in the muck of the Most Wanted list. In that case, you’re a jerk. Seriously. No. Not really. But yeah. Just kidding. I’m not though. Except I am. Not. Kidding. Yeah—no.

Shoggo, of course, is too refined to ever allow himself to be grouped with a crew motley as that found on the Most Wanted list. Mike needed reminding, but once we removed all shiny objects from his field of view, he was on it, stat. He’s back in the Hell Yeah! pile where, it should be noted, he always belonged.