Sold an “I Will Keep You Alive” to an 80-ish poet at the health club, we have known for a couple decades. She had read “Cheesesteak,” and, I guess, wanted to catch up on Bob and Adele: The Golden Years.
Anyway, with her $15 in my pocket, the coronavirus has not impacted negatively upon my economy yet.
In other news…
1.) Faithful readers will recall that Spruce Hill Press (me) had the benefit of a distribution deal with Ingram/Consortium through a Bay Area guy (Let’s call him “Bernie” – as in “Madoff,” not “Sanders”) who bundled together several small, indie publishers to make a package big ernough for I/C to handle. This went well for a minute. Then Bernie stopped sending checks. His excuses had not quite reached “The dog ate my homework,” when he announced he was broke and Ingram was dropping him. So now I’m trying to figure out (a) how much Spruce Hill has been shorted; (b) how to keep Ingram from sending more of my money to Bernie; and( c) how to get my books still in the a=warehouse returned to me, not him.
2.) Remember how last week I got the nicest fan letter I ever received? Well this week I received the nastiest. (The first was about a collection of essays about transgressive cartoonists I’d published in 2005. The second was about an article about Frank Frazetta in 2011.)
“Bizarre,” she called it. “Disjointed,” “incohesive (sic),” “nearly unreadable,” “distorted,” “unskilled,” absurd,” the product of “a bad batch of peyote” or “LSD addled.” “It is readily apparent,” she concluded, “you have always been considered a bad joke, poor critic, and a lousy writer.”
It felt like the universe had felt the need to restore some balance. Did I hear someone say “yin” and “yang”?