Adventures in publishing

My newly published novel, "Scar Flowers," is available on lulu.com. A brief description:

After a vampiric nocturnal encounter with a mysterious female apparition who infiltrates his dreams, iconoclastic film director Simon Mercer enters an elusive world of masked identities and erotic games of increasing danger. His struggle to reclaim himself spirals from the set of his Hollywood thriller to a lakeside Seattle mansion, where art and excruciation intertwine. In the contemporary literary novel "Scar Flowers," primal questions are acted out as physical tests: Do you desire me? Can I trust you? Will you be faithful?

Love and death are the most dangerous realms. Nowhere else are we so naked—or so human.

If you find that intriguing, please visit my lulu.com storefront, where you can read the first chapter to get a taste, and purchase if you so desire: http://www.lulu.com/content/4072766

What's with the photo, you wonder? REad on.

It's been an interesting journey to get to publication. I started writing the novel in January 2000, when I was sick with the flu and had recently gotten access to MTV, which still occasionally played music videos at that point. It was doing a countdown of the top 100 music videos, and that's when I saw the Nine Inch Nails video for the song "Closer" for the first time. [trivia: this video is part of the archives in the Museum of MOdern ARt in New York]

Wow. I was disturbed. I was inspired. I was jealous as hell--*I* wanted to make art like that. The look was inspired by Joel-Peter Witkin's photography and shot on antique film. I loved the song but couldn't quite explain why I liked something that had the lyric "I want to fuck you like an animal" in it. layered over a funky, amost disco beat--how can I stand behind something that? Isn't that horribly sexist? [turns out the answer is 'no'... stick with me to learn why--or look at the image from the video to get a head start]

So I started writing in my journal to explore the story behind some of the images, behind the concept of the song itself. a few months later i realized that i had a story, and after that, a novel. Then i started taking more writing classes (I majored in English in college), and rewriting and polishing. I workshopped what I had with writer's groups and started sending query letters to agents--about 160 of them. and queries to small presses (about 20 of them). Along the way I had a short story published in the SEal Press anthology "Shameless: Women's Intimate Erotica" edited by Hanne Blank, starring the female protagonist of my book; it was reprinted in Penthouse magazine. I also had a short story published on Clean Sheets.com--both of these were published under a pseudonym.

I had an agent for a year and a half, and the advice that I got was that if an agent doesn't sell for you in that time, you should move on. So I self-published on lulu.com.

So now I'm here, at the beginning of learning how to promote my book. I'll cover that and why "Closer" isn't a piece of sexist garbage in future posts... Until then!