DST Promotional Post

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, last night it dawned on me to finally do what I had been thinking of doing over the last year or so--create a blog for one of my books. Faced with more depressing appropriate thoughts about my future job and LSAT study (the LSAT is 3 weeks from today, BTW) and despairing over never attaining my idyllic dream of a career ensconced in the world of literature (undoubtedly affected by my present reading of American Pastoral, which should be reviewed sometime in the next week or two), I felt it was appropriate to put it out there, at least, that I had actually put my mind to something at one point. Last night I thought about doing blogs for all 4 books and immediately decided against one of them (the short story collection), because several of those items are already on this blog itself. Later, this morning I decided against another, my most recent, still in its rough draft form and one I am not sure will ever be seriously revised, my NaNoWriMo project from last year, titled Think and Grow Poor: Cultivating a Negative Mental Attitude, a memoir of my life from July of 2007 through Election Day 2008--I decided against this for personal reasons, and though it is no small achievement, it is probably my weakest overall work, with only a few chapters in particular (maybe 5) that eclipse most of my other work. Of course, we could not get to DST without mentioning S/M, which may follow suit on its own blog if DST is met with any small level of success. S/M is undoubtedly my finest work, but one that will also "offend a lot of people" and probably make people "concerned" about me. Still, while I don't really believe either DST or S/M is good enough to be published properly via an agent, etc., S/M is the more focused of the two, the more direct, the more emotionally powerful, and the more "something to say" of the two. I am putting these books up because, who knows, maybe someone will see it and want to publish it in book form, because reading a whole novel off a blog could get a little crazy.

That said, when I sent DST to a friend of mine a little more than a year ago, he wrote me back immediately saying that he had read it from start to finish on his computer without leaving his seat. It remains the best compliment I have ever received on this title. Later, I gave it to a very well-read future medical student in Beverly Hills who often spoke of her latest forays into Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, or Proust, and she gave me the second-best compliment about it, that she knew what good writing was and this was it, and that she would classify it as a kind of "sci-fi beat." Also, she had read it with her back up against a radiator and she had so lost herself in it that later she had a welt from the heat, never realizing what was happening. That was through a hard copy I had made for her, and the impetus for the second post on Flying Houses "Online Store"--a stint that has been over for 381 days now and so is no longer possible. In earlier times, before the rough draft had been officially completed, one roommate in particular told me that parts of it were good but that he was not impressed with it overall, and that I might be able to publish it as YA Fiction.

Now, this is not YA Fiction. S/M could be YA Fiction, but DST does not deal with characters in their teenage years--no, the time is clearly post-college for these characters. How old are they? That is up for debate. The setting is Chicago. There are many inconsistences (see the last name of the character Spencer as well as the name of the coffee shop where Ted and Penelope work changing from Mellow Grounds to Uncommon Grounds) and there was an abandoned gimmick about the novel being a post-humously published novel by the older brother of the author, but it was not necessary to pull that trick. Yes, the "twist" at the end is enhanced by the concept of all the events of this piece taking place in "true reality"--but it is ultimately not necessary, nor would it achieve any greater pleasure for the reader.

You can read DST by clicking on the link to the right that says "Daylight Savings Time." Why do I acronym all of my books? Because my titles are cliches. My books are not cliches though. I don't want to market this book to agents, and I don't want to market S/M either. You can take it or leave it. Of course I want to publish them and make money off of them (God knows how badly I need it), but ultimately it's more appealing for me to put it out there on a blog for anyone to read whenever they want than for me to keep it locked up on my computer for no one to ever realize it even existed.