An Open Letter to the Palms Daddies and Palms Mommas

This is where things stand (podcast): Tuesday was exactly seven weeks to the release of JACK WAKES UP. Seems like it’s really getting close, doesn’t it? At the same time, I feel like I’ve been talking this up all year (school-year) and turning your ears blue with my excitement about it all. Truth is, the excitement isn’t fake. You can tell that. At the same time, I think it’s safe to say I’ve talked it out to the point where I’m even tired of saying it, a bit. What happened here this week was that I slowed down. I’ve kept up the teaching schedule, but knowing that April, May and June… now planning things into July… things are going to be tough. Fast and furious like no Diesel’s business.

So this has been my week to stop and look around, Ferris Bueller style. You know, if you don’t do it once in a while you don’t ever appreciate life? That whole rap. But it’s true: this book release, tour, readings, notoriety of having Random House behind me, it’s all about to get real, people. Real real. And there’s nothing like that. It’s a goal I’ve worked a long, long time for and in the past few years you’ve seen me work at it really hard. You’ve supported me with encouragement and your fanship (it’s a word, now!) and those things have meant so much. I really would’ve never been able to work this hard without them. Totally true. Sure, a writer works at the desk in solitude and relative obscurity, but knowing you guys were out there, fans, listeners, readers, it made all the difference in me wanting to get to the desk every morning to crank out the day’s pages. It’s a process and a part of my life that I LOVE, and in many ways you guys have given it to me, just as I’ve given the products of it to you. We’re mutually beneficial, symbiotic even. ;-)

In any case, I’ve been writing all over and teaching out there about how good it’s been for me and my career to find you. I found you by podcasting and that’s the word I’m preaching in these classes but the goal of it was audience building, and even I had no idea how powerful that achievement would be. You guys have sustained me so much more than just being something to feature on an agent query letter. You’ve been the big, strong brassiere that lifts my Bette Midler man-boob wings every day and gets me to be as excited as you guys hear I am every week when I drop an episode.

True. All true. (But I don’t have man-boobs, thank gawd! – Ask Sigler about what it’s like to have those.)

And so this week, I’m just taking a little time to reflect. No, it might mean you don’t get an episode of Young Junius this week, and I hope that’s OK. You see, writing’s work and sometimes we all have to take a vacation. Maybe Joelle’s crash last week made me realize that. Like Ferris said, “You have to stop and look around…” So that’s what I’m doing this week. Here’s what I’m seeing: some strong writing in my crime fiction creative writing class that’s ending, some cool crime movies (Grifters, Double Indemnity, Gamora), some great, amazing LeBron highlights from this season that make me wonder if he isn’t or wasn’t ever on steroids or human growth hormone, more basketball, playstation 3 NBA 2K9, and finally the game that is Afro Samurai. I tried making candy (chocolate) for the first time in my life. Yeah. I did. And no, I’m not going soft.
I’m taking a pause, a breath if you will, just to smell the roses before it’s time to dive back in and swim full-bore for the finishline that is May 5th and Cinco de Harwood! Yes, the readings are scheduled all around the Bay (http://sethharwood.com/tour) and in Boston and NYC. The preorder forms and signed copies websites are all set up at sethharwood.com/preorder and sethharwood.com/signedcopies. Yeah, all that work is done.

The next project? It’s to finish Young Junius, wrap that sucker the best way that I know how, write our boy through to the end and get him home safe and sound at the end of the long, long day, whatever home winds up being when all this is said and done. I know it; I just have to write it. Usually I’m all guns blazing to get that done, but something this week, something said wait. And I listened. I heard it and stopped, focused on wrapping up my classes, and I took a few breaths.

When I was 21 and just out of college, working in New York, I started my first novel, a big old, 95% true crap tome called Texas. Man did I shove that thing around among my friends like it was gold. Even lost a few over it. That was 1995-6. That was a world and over 12 years away. I wrote in NYC, taking temp jobs to earn enough money to quit for a while and just write, I punted my way out of NYC and landed back in Boston where I took night-classes in creative writing and wrote for a small-time newspaper for almost two years, I got into Iowa, the vaunted MFA program I dreamed of. I went to Iowa, lived in Iowa City, and learned one hell of a lot about writing and teaching writing while I lived there in some kind of tortured existence. (Talk about being a writer without an audience: there I was a writer with a small audience of fellow-writers wielding knives. That was tough.) I got home from that (back to Boston) and just wanted to work a job. I taught high school English for three years. (To go into that would be an entire blog post of its own!) And then I moved to California with my wife where suddenly I could teach college (which felt better) and exist on a part-timer’s salary, which gave me real time to write. I wrote JACK WAKES UP. That was fall 2005. I started podcasting it in July 2006, after gearing up by learning how to build a website on iWeb and mixing my sound thanks to Scizzle Sigler. Some of you even remember that old site, god-bless-you. Karell or somebody named SkinkLizard in Australia posted a comment on my site asking when I was going to start putting out mp3’s of my casts. Shit, I didn’t even know mp4’s were different, or that mp3’s were more universal. My first reaction to that post was, “That’s what I’ve been doing!” And I learned.

Now Sigler and I are the poster boys of Author Boot Camp. J.C. Hutchins and I are going to team up on a promo spot together. Yep, this is kind of like podcasting nirvana. It’s great, and podcasting is great. And… And it’s all brought me to where I wanted to be all along: I have a contract with a major publisher! They’re putting my book in every store in the country and when I tell people I’m a writer, I can really mean it now and say it with teeth. I feel like I’ve arrived. It’s where I really wanted to be, and I’m stopping to appreciate that.

But that’s not all. I’m arriving at a time when publishing is “wrong” or in a bad way, or in trouble; the economy is down, marketing dollars are down and newspapers are at the door to their grave (I hope they aren’t!) and do you know what? None of this worries me in the least. Know why? Because of you. The same way we got here is the same way we’re going to keep going. I’m going to give you free stories, and if you continue to like them (fingers crossed!), you’ll keep listening and telling your friends, and occasionally you’ll buy a book by me or come to a reading, or tell all your friends to buy a book. That seems like a fair enough arrangement, doesn’t it? From all the wonderful responses that I’ve gotten from you guys over the years, I’m not even afraid that you’ll say it sucks, or tell me to go fuck myself and my $13.95 offering of ink-printed pages of goodness! We have that rare writer-reader/listener relationship like Barney. Know what I mean? (We don’t have to sing the song.)

In any case, I’m buoyed and proud and thankful for the fact that we have a system, one that many other writers don’t yet understand and one they may or may not ever get to realizing, no matter how hard Scott, Evo, Hutch, Tee, Matt and I (and countless others) try. And that’s what it is. But I’m really happy I found it. And today, when I’m walking my dog and looking out at the Bay or playing Afro Samurai and finding new tracks to reference in Young Junius, even to next week’s mornings when I’m writing, I’ll be thinking of that, and I’ll be glad.

Yer boy,