City of Legends / William F. DeVault

Anyone who knows me at all knows Ihave the attention span of a fruit fly and a very mercurial sense of creativity.  "It started out as a cat, but about halfway through I was thinking about the way a coyote has such great facial exprsssions and horses have long legs and bulls have horns and how dumbfoundingly beautiful my second wife was and remembering a lovely woman-child with full lips, incredibly perfect breasts and dark, haunting eyes and the image of a woman dancing in just a man’s black shirt to the sounds of the night while I am pondering the evolution of the concepts of pantheism versus polytheism and suddenly the sculpture looks more like…er…something else. And why did I give it a prehensile tale with a stinger on the end?"  Yep, sounds like me.

The new book, loveaddict is getting much the same treatment as it evolves.  It is lucky to held onto it’s name this long (Well, "Throbbing Python of Love" is already an album name by Robin Williams, so that one was out.  Besides, do you really want to go into a bookstore and ask the clerk if he as a "Throbbing Python of Love"?  You might get smacked around.).  I have a mind to explain the forces behind the evolution, but I won’t (do you really need another parody of a travesty of a comedy of errors like unto last year’s "As such…"?  I don’t.  I will say that this is shaping up to be the most perfectly romantic and erotic collection of my work to date.

I am…pleased.  And that is not something I often say about my books projects.  While I find the writing of poetry painful but effortless, the stress of making decisions and pondering existing works as I put together a book is overwhelming.  I can rejoice in it when it comes out well, but I also have to deal with my ambivalence during the blacksmithing of the hot iron into a usable implement.

I have a cover photographer and model.  I have most of the works.  I have a concept.  I have a dedication (!).  Now it is the nature of the anvil against the fury of the hammer and the power that together they wield against the iron.  Oh, and the throbbing python of love.

Finally, after much fumfering and threats of jihad, the first two of my books to be made available specifically for the Amazon Kindle, that remarkable eBook reader that is dominating the marketplace, are now available at Amazon.com.

The Compleat Panther Cycles, that darling of the intelligentsia of the digital renaissance, is now available for your Kindle device at a fraction of the tree-killer, massive 700 page volume it normally is.  With all of the poems, forewords, annotations and jaw dropping internal artwork featuring Jillian Ann, it comes in at just (get this) $9.59!!  Amazon retails the hardcopy for $36.00.  That’s almost 75% off!

As such…, last years dynamo of passion unfurled and hurled defiantly into unsympathetic winds, got turned around in record time and is now ready for your paper-free purusal for a mere $6.39, that’s more than half off the cover price!  I actually feel a little cheap at that price, but if they want to sacrifice their margin, I’m good.  The poetry is no less passionate or penetrating or, sadly, ironic. 

In any case, this means I now feel compelled to push on with adding more of my books.  Watch this space for updates.

Not ten minutes ago I got a response from the help desk for Kindle at Amazon.com (slogan:  "Don’t fight us, you will be assimilated"), informing me that once As such… goes live, I will be able to edit the messed-up title, but that once the process is started, you can’t change it until it comes out the other side.

I thank them, then told them they need to work on their "12 to 72 hours" thing.

I promised a surprise.  Nothing expected.  Nothing about my love life (I have a love life?  Amazing.)

What I am about to announce means I am embracing a shifting paradigm in books.  The amazing part is perhaps how slow I have been, considering my relationship with the digital renaissance and the elements of that movement over the last two decades.  Ah, well, even Odin is blind in one eye.

To the point:  I am working this weekend to bring several of my books to Kindle, the eBook reader that is marketed through Amazon.  This will provide my content of my books, in the layout and form originally presented, available to the audience that is embracing the paperless book movement.  The books will be provided at a lower price than the hard copies, particularly with The Compleat Panther Cycles, and will be the full books, no detail lost.

To assist in the market, we’ve come up with a series of marketing slogans (isn’t this fun?  No.  It makes me feel like a pimp, when in fact, as the author, I am the hooker.)

The books selected to be the first wave of my transition, along with their "clever" slogans are:

The Compleat Panther Cycles 
slogan:  Kindle the legend

As such
slogan:  Kindle the fire

The Morgantown Suite Poems
slogan:  Kindle memories

A Ronin in the Temple of Aphrodite 
slogan:  Kindle a quest

 The slogans are subject to tweaking (I am an editors’ nightmare).  The whole idea is to use the name of the device as the verb.  The final prices will be released when the books go live, sometime in the next three days or so.  I will keep you informed.

Now, back to dealing with some interestingly erotic text messages I just received.  Bad girl.

Just off the top of my head, in response to a friend’s request.

1. You never know what is going to happen next, so be prepared for anything and everything and learn to have faith in your adaptability.
2. I will be traveling abroad within the next two years.
3. Tales of the Amomancer will be my best selling book in my lifetime.
4. The longer I live, the more I value couer rage and passion.
5. George Bush will go down in history as one of the two or three worst Presidents of the United States.
6. As such… remains a most remarkable book, regardless of the irony of its very existence.
7. Most people who seem to be liars are not malicious, just gullible or assumptive enough to believe something not true that they heard or perceived.
8. I am going to have to learn to perform my music live. This scares me.
9. God has one wicked sense of humour. And isn’t afraid to roll it out, especially when you get cocky.
10. Brad and Angelina would make a dynamite Ant Man/Wasp team for the Marvel Avengers film.

No, it is not Kevin Costner’s speech from Bull Durham, but I wasn’t going for profound and sexy. Those lists I save for private conversations. By the way, when you have the time (this is even for you stalkers out there) head over to Amomancer today, it is getting a lot of new stuff, and the tagging proceeds.

I write. You can criticize me for what I write, what I write about and my style, but you have to admit, I write.

I’ll try to keep it to two posts today…then maybe I’ll fade it back to one a day, soon…

I started laying the musical framework for Aubergine last night. Challenging, as I am demanding a lot from myself on this one. It won’t be easy, it won’t be simple. But, I am game. A reader has suggested I post a link to my version of I rained poetry, and maybe even let readers vote on the selections for the Evangelist CD. I don’t know. Too many things to ponder. My brain hurts.

To those of you who find my promotion of my book As such… a bit surreal, or even hypocritical, I apologize. The simple truth is that I am keeping a promise I made, in both letter and spirit. I have broken other promises in the past (and, sometimes, keeping one promise means breaking another), wrestled with definitions of faith, truth, honor and morality, sometimes losing, sometimes winning, and sometimes being caught in those webs where no matter what you do, you are doing something wrong in absolute terms or someone’s eyes. It is exhausting, and exhaustion sometimes leads to errors in judgement. I actually considered, for several days, pulling the book from circulation.

It is one of those 51/49 percent situations where no matter what I do, someone will find ample room to criticize me. That’s just part of the terrain. Life has no easy answers, no cut and dried resolutions. Someone, somewhere, will take offense at anything you can imagine doing. Anyone who even dreams they know everything that I am doing or why needs therapy. Hell, I probably need it…but it makes it so much more interesting to see me work it out in anapest hexameter, no? I’m going to screw up more in this life, those of you without sin…buy a catapult, I’ll stand in the open and let you snipe. If it makes you feel better to use me as a lightning rod, then I consider it a public service I am rendering.

I began packing my cargo boxes for the tour. A bit early, you say? yes. But I need to keep a running inventory on this trip, as I am traveling with a massive amount of books, CDs and merch (do you have any idea how much a single copy of The Compleat Panther Cycles weighs?). The bookstore reads are nice, as they order their own stock…but the coffeehouse, cafe, etc., type reads need me to drag my own stuff. Pain in the ass. But the boots are nice

I was very tempted to stay in Los Angeles. Very. It would have meant leaving some things and some people behind, I don’t do that. I may not enjoy the role always, but I’m the guy who is supposed to hold the collapsing mine shaft open so the maximum number of people can escape. The concept of saving myself is difficult for me. I’ve done it, but I’ve always felt terrible afterwards and tried to make amends…and tried to do better the next time. Another of those promises. Ohana. I texted it when I thought of it.

The read was good. Very good. There was only a handful in attendance and we held it indoors due to the raging heat (it was in the nineties). I wasn’t 1000% satisfied, and I don’t think I could’ve gone that far for strangers, but it played well and I said what I had to say and I even sang (a’capella which, as Father Guido Sarducci used to say, means "without hats") "I love you more than gods can comprehend".

I may keep that in the tour. Definitely a crowd pleaser (not my voice, God knows, but the purity of it all). Rough on me, but the people are there to see the matador get gored. Don’t think I would keel over on stage, but that would make a great legacy moment.

I got to speak with Peri last night. We mostly talked about the casting of Robert Downey in Iron Man and Marvel Studios’ master plan. I kept getting texted by a friend whose long-distance relationship was crumbling and was losing her mind, perhaps even contemplating suicide. I finally lost patience with her and told her to do what she thought best. Atlas gets tired of people complaining about backache.

The trip, on the whole, went well. Guerrilla reading in New York, the SLC read and then the Long Beach "As such…" reading (I had forgotten how powerful that was…although I did not read the forewords (laughing)). Thanks to everyone who assisted and insisted. Thanks to Karla, Jenn and Sabrina for the emotional support, Jazz for the irony and Vox for not taking pictures.

Later today I start a special training diet to help prep me for the tour. I need to focus harder, work harder and continue my vocal exercises (I do a few things a few hours before each read: I sing the Three Stooges’ "Alphabet Song" to tighten my elocution (I am not kidding), recite a couple of the key works I will be doing in that reading, and sing Don Henley’s "Heart of the Matter" to burn off excess emotion). I need to make some key decisions about the reading list for the tour…I may do a reading book…a pdf of the works I can then pick from for each read, print off a copy for each different event and annotate it as I see fit.

God, but I need laid (did I just say that out loud?). Karla found out about my vow of celibacy and, being aware of my appetites asked "What is up with that?" I thought she was going to smack me from a thousand miles away. Maybe I should add a little clock to the website "Number of days since the poet shared his flesh"? The mind boggles.

Love is all you need. But I want more, I want truth. I want it all…I want it all…I want it all…and I want it now.

I checked.  It had been more than 6 months since my last podcast of ‘from out of the city’.  I should be ashamed, but I am not.

But, to make it all up to you all, here’s the way to catch the second wave.

Just follow the link to Peacat on the right, and you will find a link to the newest podcast, just uploaded, where I spend the whole time discussing and reading from the new book As such…

Enjoi!

Vic Burkhammer, of the blog Mountainword, has updated his interview with me, to include the 38-minute interview we did last Saturday via Skype (thanks, Candy, I know you turned me onto it for selfish reasons, but it works for me (btw, I love you)).

Also included are my readings of the poems "the grande" and "I will dream of you till morning" from the new book "As such….

Enjoi: Interview for Mountainword.

And we have the ISBN for the new book, as well as other official details:

ISBN: 978-1-4357-1448-9
Publisher: Lulu.com
Rights Owner: Peacat Press
Copyright: © 2008 William F. DeVault

The suggested retail price is $13.50

And I make no bones about the fact that I remain on the POD route, loving the control I retain over the muddles of mediocrity that are the mainstream publishers. Every time I sit down with a publisher, I am disgusted by their pretensions that they know my work (they don’t), my audience (they don’t) and what is best (ha!).

Happy World Poetry Day. Whoooooo! Let’s go down to the town hall and watch the fireworks tonight, then we can…

what? I mean, WHAT???? No parade? No fireworks? No World Poetry Day Chili Cookoff? Sheesh. Maybe Nancy was right…poetry will never…

Ah, screw that. She was wrong. Poetry may not be as easily marketable as novels or as profitable as exploiting 17 year old girls to make sex videos, but when the novelists are forgotten and the pimps are in jail getting their asses treated the way they treated others, the poets will still be here, subtly influencing hearts and minds and fates.

We are the subtler gods, the gentler hands of fate.

In honor of World Poetry Day, I am presenting a sneak peak at the new book, "As such…poetry of a romantic rebirth", which will be available as an eBook download starting at 6 pm EDT, Sunday, March 23rd for 24 hours, to coincide with the book’s editor, inspiration and cover model (Ms. Candy Tothill) birthday, Johannesburg time.

We begin with a poem I got a big kick out of when I wrote it:

the grande

it isn’t what we asked for
it isn’t what we planned
but somewhere, somehow on the way
we landed in the grande.

I’m not sure of the moment
where Cupid took his stand
but the arrows found these sparrows and
we landed in the grande.

I don’t know all that is to come
or the measure of the sand
we have left to share, but foul or fair,
we landed in the grande.

Then we proceed with all due haste and respect to a poem that chokes me up every time I read it.

I will dream of you till morning

There are dreams that make you smile. Dreams that make you weep.
There are dreams that come in moments between nights when you sleep,
touching all the shallow hallows and the questions that lay deep
far beneath the linen layers that will catch us if we leap
from the precipice of discontent to seek a better day,
from the lies we prize and subsidize with silence, on the way
to the long deserted schoolyards where our avatars did play
on the road to where we’ve lost ourselves, mislaid our earnest clay
as we sought and fought and thought we caught a moment in our hands
that slipped away in light of day, exposed as others’ bands.
We are more than we remember, taking less than life demands
if we let our dreams just dance away, across the midnight sands.
I will dream of you till morning. Then dream of you till night.
I will dream of you till mourning. Then touch you at first light.

And finally we have the lady’s foreword from the book, available at her blog,
Inside Candy.

Enjoy the day and drop by and download your free eBook copy of As such via a link at either Candy’ blog or here, while it is available.

"I wish to announce that a miracle has just been performed. Yesterday I finished editing "As Such…" and I have, just this instant, completed the Foreword." - Candy Tothill

I hijacked this draft message from Candy (she didn’t know I was going to…but I saw it and went…what the hell…), as she is currently suffering under one of those patented "load shedding" events that Eskom likes to inconvenience people with. They regularly shut down power to entire cities, as South Africa has a problem generating enough power for their developing infrastructure.

I have gone over Candy’s edits: Excellent. She was thorough, even brutal. But I loved it. I can get lazy and sloppy, but she was willing to go toe to toe with me.

And the Foreword? I have told her that if she wishes to post it here or to her blog Inside Candy she is more than welcome. It is a beautiful piece of writing by a woman who takes my breath away with her talent.

I am honored by her words and her affections.

Over the next few days a select group of ninja wordsmiths will fan out around the world with eBook editions of the volume, for the express purpose of writing blurbs for the jacket.

Then, at 6 pm, EDT, on Sunday, March 23rd, which is the stroke of midnight into March 24th in Johannesburg, South Africa, I will activate links in several places that will make the eBook edition available as a free download to any and all who want it.

For 24 hours.

Yes, I know there will be those who will be content with the eBook and not hustle to buy the hardcopy, which will be available initially from the City of Legends, but eventually (it takes a few weeks if you don’t want to buy access like the major houses of mediocrity do) the book will be available through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, et alia. But this is something I want to share. Something I need to share. And while money is nice and would solve a few logistical problems in my life, the spiritual rewards of affirming that love is alive to the world are far greater.

Look to the skies for some surprises over the next few days. I’m just getting warmed up.