Disruption, White Space, and New York City in 1979

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The first lines of text of Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 are short and succinct:

SOME people say New York City is evil and they wouldn’t live there for all the money in the world. 

These are the same people who elected Johnson, Nixon, Carter President and Koch Mayor of New York.

But of course, rending it like this undoes the impact of that statement, because it’s divorced from the important context of the page. When viewed in the book itself — or, in my most recent re-read, the ebook file — that same collection of words is framed very differently by the white space around them. 

I come back to this opening — this prologue — repeatedly to appreciate the heavy lifting it does within the text. The content of the text sets us up for the book that follows, but I’d argue the presentation of the text is equally important. The book starts with an immediate defiance of the most basic of prose conventions, eschewing the page full of text we normally assume is part-and-parcel of such narratives. It foregrounds the coming disruptions in the book, the refusal to obey conventions in style and content alike, but it does so in a way that is unassuming compared to the audacity that follows. If you dislike this four-line opening, the rest of this book is likely to alienate you in ways not yet imagined.

And yet, it’s also a promise to the reader: the effort of engaging with this lack of convention will still bear pleasurable fruit. Prose narratives have always been a curated experience, the author surveys the broader landscape of a character’s fictional life and deciding this moment is worthy of fictional scrutiny and that moment is best kept hidden in the ellipsis between scenes or chapters. This moment is significant for the narrative we’re crafting, and that one is easily ignored.

In this respect, the space around the prose is nuanced and loaded with potential meaning. Acker tights her focus like a poet, evokes a moment — a sentiment — and gets the hell out. Trusts the reader to stitch together the greater meaning in the patchwork of moments that follow, and that the choices where we dip into the flow of the world are highly targeted despite their disparate content. Part of me wishes I had a spare three thousand pounds to invest in some of the original transcripts and publications, to see how the work developed and evolved.

I read a lot of Acker back in the days when I first transitioned from poetry to prose, but it’s only recently that I’ve figured out why her work resonated with me the way it did. The most recent release — a stand-alone Penguin chapbook, which brings me joy — is an interesting study in just how much you can do with 6,000 words if you’re inventive and willing to think about the document as much as the story. 

Cost vs. Value

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

I’m running short of time today, so I figured I’d come here and post one of the emergency drafts I occasionally store on Patreon specifically for this purpose. Except, of course, Patreon is currently restructuring their layout, and access to the drafts folder seems to have disappeared completely on the web interface.

So, instead, here’s a little insight I offered up to a fellow author recently when they asked for next steps when giving their books away for free wasn’t leading to read-through sales.

What strategies can you use after free promos aren’t leading to a readership?

The least satisfying answer is probably “time and more books”, but it’s the secret weapon in the indie arsenal.

Everything we do to appeal to readers basically boils down to two core tactics: decreasing the cost to the reader so they’re willing to take a chance on a book, and increasing the value of the book so they want it bad enough to buy it.

Value isn’t a monetary thing — it’s more what the book means to the reader and why they want to read it. If decreasing the cost to nothing doesn’t find the readership, you’re onto increasing value. There’s a bunch of ways to do that: reviews increase the value of a book, as does refining blurbs and covers to appeal to your ideal reader a little more (If you’re sending a lot of traffic at a free book and it’s not converting, this is probably your starting point).

But a deep backlist increases value too – we’re predisposed towards authors who do a lot, because if we enjoy I book, there’s a lot more to engage with. Books that don’t take off on release can take off five or ten years later, simply because the readership that wasn’t there for them upon release discovers them. Each new release feeds people towards your backlist, even if it’s only happening by one or two people a time.

There’s other slow build things that increase value too: content marketing/newsletter lists, building up a presence in appropriate reader and writer communities, publishing/appearing in things that aren’t books (articles, podcast appearances, interviews, etc), going to events and building a network. Anything that builds your reputation as an author, even if it doesn’t immediately translate into sales.

The downside is that its slow. The upside is there’s an awful lot you can do without a huge amount of extra cost, and some of the stuff (like content marketing) can feed into your list as future books if you approach it the right way.

And you’ve got decades to make money from your current books, so slow and steady pays off in ways other businesses would kill for.

—

And really, what you have there is basically the Brain Jar publishing philosophy in a nutshell, except for the fact tht we generally only have 5 to 7 years to make a profit on a book instead of the decades I have with self-published works.

Of course, publishing other people makes it far easier to build up value around the work than publishing your own stuff…

Cortisol and Coffee

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to make my spouse happy is having a cup of coffee waiting for them the moment they wake up, perched on their bedside table beside the phone delivering their wake-up alarm.

Fortunately, this is pretty easy for me to provide, given that we live on slightly different schedules (I get up early to write, they sleep in because they find it harder to fall asleep than I do).

Unfortunately, drinking coffee first thing in the morning is actually a pretty terrible thing to do to your body.

The logic here comes down to cortisol, aka “the stress hormone”. Despite it’s nom-de-plume as a stress marker, bodies naturally produce three cortisone surges throughout the day, and the first of them is right as we wake up. This phenomena — the Cortisol awakening response – means we’re 50% to 77% more cortisone within a half-our of waking up each day. Think of it as your body’s acknowledgement that waking up means shits about to get real, so you’re primed to be alert and deal with the shift from relaxed to engaged.

Except there’s a bunch of stuff that can affect the level of cortisol in your bloodstream upon waking up, ranging from whether you’re a shift worker, whether it’s light out, whether you’re a lark (who naturally produce more cortisol) rather than a night owl, and whenever you have ongoing pain conditions.

It turns out the caffeine in coffee interrupts this cortisol production, causing the body to produce less of the hormone and rely on the coffee instead. Instead of getting the morning energy boost from cortisone, we’re getting it from a substance that we quickly develop a tolerance to.

In this light, optimal coffee consumption usually happens later in the day, when our cortisol levels ebbs (Can’t stomach the thought of going without a hot beverage? Tea might make an interesting substitute — Arthur Chu has a twitter thread on the impact on theanine in tea alongside the caffeine, and why it makes a difference),

Of course, if you’re enjoying your morning coffee, none of this is really meant to be an admonishment and a demand to stop. I read all of this — and wrote all of this — with the mindset of someone who figured “you’ll take my morning cup of coffee out of my cold, dead hands, assholes.”

Except…well, here’s the thing: I do regularly skip the coffee first thing, which has less to do with the science above, and more to do with crime writer Elmore Leanard’s morning routine when he was initially building his career. Leonard would wake up before work and write, and he motivated himself by refusing to drink coffee until he’d written his first 750 words of the day.

I adopted that habit myself when I started a full-time work last year, and the result is that I’m usually y awake for an hour or so before the first cup of coffee hits my system. And it’s definitely taken an edge off my mornings, and made the routines a little easier to cleave to, so long as my day-to-day stress levels aren’t off the charts.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be one of those people who waits two hours for my morning coffee, but I could well be on the way to becoming someone who doesn’t wake up to a cup of Joe first thing.