The Wrath of Kon

Back on April 11, 1997, I had a stupid idea.

I used to write in these journals, spiral notebooks, every day.  I started doing that in 1993.  I never wrote stories, and it wasn’t a diary either – it was some strange mix of both.  But any writing I did there was trapped forever on paper, unless I transcribed it, which I never did.  So my thought was to move some of this to the electronic world, to create a public web page where I posted some of these entries.

Jorn Barger coined the term “blog” on December 17, 1997.  They didn’t become popular for a few more years.  Livejournal started in 1999; so did blogger.  This diary project of mine was born before anyone knew what the hell a blog was.  I’m certain some other site influenced me to do this, and I didn’t pluck the idea out of thin air, but I don’t remember what I was reading on a daily basis back in 1997.

I did everything in emacs back then: email, book writing, usenet news.  I bugged my friend Bill Perry for some elisp help, and he wrote a little thing that would let me hit a magic key combination and open up an html file with today’s date as the filename.  So I’d hit Control-x Control-j, and the file ~/www/journal/html/041197.html would magically appear.  I then hacked out a C program that I could run and generate an index of all of these pages.  There was no database, no themes, no CMS.  This was five years before wordpress was a gleam in Matt Mullenweg’s eye.  It was rough, but it worked.

So on that Friday, I posted my first entry here.  Back then, this project didn’t have a name.  I called it “the journal” for a while.  It eventually got the name “Tell Me a Story About The Devil”, which has its origins in a Ray Miller story.  The name “The Wrath of Kon” is a more recent change.

I always hated the word “blog”, though.  There was this whole journal or diary movement in the late 90s that everyone has forgotten, and all of a sudden, blogs were “invented” in the early 2000s.  That meant I had a good five or six years of entries, when all of a sudden, everyone and their mother was a “blogger” and started getting book deals and money thrown at them.  So yeah, I was bitter.  But I kept at it.  Now, I don’t give a shit about the term “blog”.  I have bigger fish to fry.

There have been many changes over the years.  My Rube Goldberg mechanism would break on January 1st every year, and I slowly duct taped more functionality to the system, adding a bit of CSS, a comment system, and eventually ditching the entire thing for wordpress.  The page originally lived at speakeasy.org, and moved to rumored.com/journal in 1998.  I eventually dropped the /journal part.  The content also slowly changed, moving from diary entries to stories to news to travel reports and back again.  I never had a solid theme, but I think that prevented me from painting myself in a corner.  I think if I originally would have only blogged about the books I read or a quest to collect every Atari cartridge, this would have died a long time ago.

So.  15 years.  1149 entries.  I think the last time I was able to calculate a word count, it was something like 650,000 words, and Infinite Jest is something like 460,000.  I did a book that collected the first three years, the Seattle entries; I keep thinking about a book that collects some of the best essays of the last dozen years, but I’ve got something on all four burners right now.

Anyway, here’s to fifteen years.  I don’t know many other sites that have been around this long.  I wonder where things will be in 2027.

I have a story, “The Zombies of Kilimanjaro”, in the upcoming anthology from Bizarro Press.  I just did an interview with Etienne DeForest, whose most recent book was Texas Biker Zombies From Outer Space, a choose-your-own-adventure book about a zombie outbreak.

The interview’s over on the front page of  the Bizarro Press web site (http://www.nxebooks.com/) but I’ll archive it here, too.  You should head over there though and check out their books.  More news on the anthology when it happens – you will want to check this one out.

BP: Soooo, what are you wearing? (I never know how to start these things off right.)

JK: I work from home these days, so I’m almost always wearing the same exact thing: jeans and a t-shirt, tennis shoes. The shirt is one of those old-school Milwaukee Brewers shirts, the one with the logo that’s a glove with a ball in it. (Milwaukee’s not my favorite team; I just buy most of my clothes in airport gift shops, and I end up at Mitchell airport a lot.)

BP: Ya, but they’re named after beer…. Anyways, sounds like a tough commute. So what’s your “real” job?

JK: I work as a technical writer for a big software company that nobody’s heard of. I had a programming background in college, but hit the wall when it came to math. I started writing around then, and totally lucked into tech writing, right around the time the internet really exploded in the mid-90s.

There’s not too much crossover between my job and writing fiction. I think people expect me to eventually write some Office Space thing about corporate culture. Maybe some of my need to write absurdist fiction comes from that. And I guess I learned a lot about the tools I used to self-publish, page layout programs and distilling PDFs and that kind of junk.

BP: I could tell that you did some form of editing or writing when I read “The Zombies of Kilmanjaroo”. You didn’t make a lot of the mistakes most people do. So are you one of those formatting Nazi’s that gets all pissed off when you see a “;” or a “:” used incorrectly?

JK: Nah, I don’t get that pissed off about formatting, although it’s hard to avoid sometimes. Like I grew up in Indiana, and although there are plenty of people who can spell there, every time I go back, I see some incredibly illiterate hand-painted signs that make me want to stop the car, get out a can of spray-paint, and do some quick edits.

That said, I probably have tons of typos in my books that I’ve stared at so many times, I don’t notice them. I am thinking of doing what Cory Doctorow did, and asking everyone to email me their corrections, in exchange for a thank you footnote in a future version of the book.

BP: Whenever I picture Indiana in my head all I see is a bunch of white guys in short shorts playing basketball. Is that an accurate description?

JK: Well, there’s meth labs, too. I actually went to high school with NBA all-star Shawn Kemp, so between that, being a hundred miles down the road from the Bulls during the Michael Jordan era, and then going to college at Indiana University during the Bobby Knight era, there was a hell of a lot of basketball.

I wasn’t exactly a star athlete when I was a kid — spent most of my time obsessed with Star Wars and Commodore computers and Dungeons and Dragons. I guess all of that’s cool now, but back then, it was like wearing an Obama t-shirt to a Klan rally. So my time in Indiana was pretty depressing, and I spent every second of it trying to figure out how to get the hell out.

I wrote a lot about Indiana when I was still writing “straight” literary fiction, before really getting into the absurd stuff. My first book, Summer Rain, was about spending a summer at a college campus, trying to figure out what to do in life. I also wrote a lot of short stories about that era, but now that stuff bores me. Indiana still comes up a lot in my newer stuff, but mostly when I need a setting that verges on the post-apocalyptic, which is pretty much what the state looks like, now that all of the manufacturing jobs have vanished.

BP: Do you still get all boned-up when you see a 20 sided die?

JK: There’s still a certain nostalgia to it. Maybe every year or so, I’ll fall down this k-hole and start googling Gary Gygax, or looking for those old books on eBay. (I think I sold mine off for pennies on the dollar for beer money back in college.) But I haven’t seriously tried to get into playing again. I think part of it is when you’re a kid, it’s so easy to focus large amounts of time on stuff like that, and it would be easier for me to build a functioning helicopter than it would be to get four or five adults in a room for three hours straight every week. Like, I’ve got a nephew that’s 14, and is really into that game Minecraft. It looks awesome, so I installed it, thinking I’d build an aircraft carrier or a scale Astrodome or something, and about seven minutes later, I’m thinking, “I’ve got shit to do – there is no way in hell I can make 347 more mortgage payments and focus on this thing.”

I also wonder if D&D would lose its allure in the internet age. I think half of the fun for me was we could only get the books and figures at one store in our town, a Kay-Bee Toys, and they only had the most popular stuff, so we had to really search to find the rare stuff, like drive to Chicago or mail away for a xeroxed catalog to a PO box somewhere. So when I did run across a copy of some rare module at a garage sale, it was a huge win. Now, you could just google that shit, buy it from Amazon, or find it on eBay. It’s probably not as rewarding.

BP: I think your right man, I’m pretty sure all those kids play WOW now or something. It really is amazing how fast the internet changed everything.

You talk about a lot of hard drug use in The Earworm Inception. Soooo, do you like to party?

JK: I’m too old for that shit. I wake up every day feeling like it was new year’s the night before, even when I’m stone cold sober. I think my days of drinking a gallon of rum and puking in the middle of a high-end steakhouse are behind me.

I think most of the drug use in “The Earworm Inception” was self-medication, along the theme of how to make life complete or finding your place in the modern world. There’s this recurring character that’s introduced in “The Chapman Protocol Conundrum” that’s a prescription-happy shrink, and that’s something I constantly ponder, because I can’t go to a podiatrist for a hangnail without someone trying to write me a prescription for Lipitor. Between allergies and mood, I’m taking more pills per day than my grandparents were taking on their deathbed, but I also am fascinated by the idea that there could be medications that somehow unlock parts of your brain that would completely change your world.

BP: Who’s going to the World Series this year?

JK: I don’t know, because they changed the way the postseason works this year, and there will be two wildcard teams per league. I think they only did this to guarantee that the Yankees and Red Sox will always go to the postseason, because those TV executives have boat payments to make.

I think for the AL, it’s pretty much locked down to Rangers, Tigers, Yankees, Red Sox, Angels, in that order, with a chance of Tampa making the fifth spot if New York or Boston really screws something up. For the NL, it’s harder to predict, and there will be a close race in the NL West. I’m still a Rockies fan from when I lived in Denver, but they have to get past the Giants and D’Backs, which would take some kind of Buster Posey in 2011 broken leg injuries on those teams, plus a lot of luck with their pitching.

I’d ultimately like to see a couple of teams that don’t normally go to make it, like a Rays-Brewers matchup, but it will probably be something boring like a Phillies-Yankees matchup, which is like watching a demolition derby where everyone’s driving indestructible armored cars.

BP: It pisses me off that the Rangers magically got good. I used to be able to walk around in my Tigers shit and not get shit about it. Dallas fans are assholes.

Well, any closing thoughts?

JK: Thanks for the interview, and I’m looking forward to seeing the anthology get in the hands of the readers. Make sure to check me out over at my home on rumored.com, or on twitter over at @jkonrath. Also, that answer about how to make your own full-auto AK-47 from stuff you can get at Home Depot was just a joke, so make sure to cut that question out of the final interview. Thanks!

I have a new story at The Mustache Factor.  It’s called “Peak Oil”, and it’s about a guy whose sexual perversion involves watching people pump gas.

I think I wrote this the same week I read J.G. Ballard’s Crash, which has nothing to do with the Paul Haggis movie of the same name which came out in 2004 and won a bunch of awards.  I secretly hope some dumb fuck watched the 1996 David Cronenberg adaptation of the Ballard book, which is full of creepy fetish mindfuck stuff like James Spader fucking the scar on a disfigured Rosanna Arquette’s thigh.

Anyway, go check it out: http://mustachefactor.blogspot.com/2012/04/peak-oil.html

My first royalty check

No, iUniverse isn’t going out of business.   (Well, maybe they are – I haven’t checked.)  I’ve just decided to pull my books from iUniverse.

I’ve done three books with them, and the idea of print on demand radically changed my writing career.  I mean, I have not made millions from it, but prior to the advent of PoD, I thought the only way I’d ever hold a printed copy of my book in my hands would be if I wrote a million agents and publishers and found one willing to print it, or if I payed thousands of dollars to fill my garage with a short print run, or maybe if I went to Kinko’s and printed my own copy.

Someone told me about iUniverse back in 99 or 2000, and this was around the time Summer Rain was close to done.  It was an incredibly revolutionary idea back then, this thought that I could get real copies of my book, and get them in Amazon and other book stores, and even have it so brick-and-mortar book stores (remember those?) could order copies through Ingram.

There were a couple of issues with PoD back then.  One was cost.  Summer Rain was incredibly expensive compared to the per-unit cost of offset printing a few thousand books.  There wasn’t the setup, and you didn’t have to produce a bunch of books at once and then warehouse them, which was awesome.  But selling a paperback book for thirty bucks was never easy.

The stigma was the worst part.  Back in 2000, everyone looked down at PoD as hackneyed and just another extension of vanity presses.  The party line was that real writers don’t self-publish, and you weren’t shit unless you had a book deal.  The irony of this is that the proponents of this attitude are the same people who can’t shut the fuck up about the kindle revolution.  (You know who I’m talking about.)  To some extent, this didn’t matter to me; I had a copy of my book on my shelf at home, and friends could buy it and read it, and people enjoyed the work.  That’s all that ultimately matters to me, but there was still a nagging feeling in the back of my head when the “real” writers talked shit about self-publishing.

I also didn’t have high hopes that PoD publishing would reap all of the rewards that getting a book deal with a Big 6 publisher would.  There was a lot of PoD backlash from people who dumped a book onto a PoD publisher, and then bitched and moaned when it didn’t take off.  I never saw iUniverse as anything more than a printer, and didn’t expect them to do anything more than fulfillment.  But some people thought you would just upload your PDF and your book would suddenly take off like a Dan Brown release.  Truth is, PoD involves just as much hustle as printing off copies yourself and trying to sell them one by one.

So, why am I dumping iUniverse?  A few reasons:

• When I first started, there was almost no initial setup fees – I may have paid some trivial amount, like a hundred bucks, but it wasn’t much.  This fee went up and up, and after my third book, Lulu came on the scene with no setup fee, and that was the end of the line for me and iUniverse.  Now, their most basic package is $899, and the “Book Launch Premier Pro” is a whopping $4499.
• All I really wanted was fulfillment and distribution.  iUniverse tried to differentiate themselves with all of this “value add” stuff that was mostly useless.  I have no need for bookmarks, press releases, book signing kits, or other crap I could get online for a dollar.  (Vistaprint is your friend.)
• Without asking, iUniverse decided they would create e-book versions of my books and price them the way they wanted to price them.  And they made it damn near impossible to remove those versions.  So while I made a new version of Rumored to Exist for the kindle and priced it at $2.99, they made a crappy version and priced it at $3.99.
• The per-unit pricing was too high.  Summer Rain was $29.99 on iUniverse.  The lulu version was $14.99.  The createspace version will be $13.99.  My profit is roughly the same on all three.
• All of the processes at iUniverse are antiquated.  To find out your royalties, you have to wait for the next month’s statement.  To pull a book from publishing, you have to write them a god damned letter.  Ugh.
• One of the things iUniverse had over createspace was that createspace is part of Amazon, which meant you wouldn’t get into B&N or brick-and-mortar stores.  With iUniverse, you could get into anyplace that used Ingram’s database.  In practice, 99.99999% of my book sales are through Amazon.  I don’t know if I’ve ever sold a book through a brick-and-mortar store.

So I wrote a letter to iUniverse and pulled my books.  (Seriously, a letter?)  There are currently only three books on there: Summer Rain, Rumored, and Tell Me a Story About the Devil, which is a journal archive from 97-99 that none of you ever bought.  The first two are already moved to Amazon/createspace.  The last one can die on the vine.  If you’re really desperate to get any of the iUniverse editions before they go away, I think you probably have a few days to grab them.  But the newer versions are not only better, but cheaper.

Next up will be hemming and hawing about what to do with all of my books on lulu, and if they should also get moved.  I should probably stop screwing with all of this and actually write new books, though.