Letting the Days Go By (including Self-Publishing Stuff #1)

For whatever reason, I woke up feeling great this morning. Suddenly this trip seems like the best idea ever, and all the days I’ve spent before it seem crazy in retrospect. We’ll see how long this lasts. The water I filled my five-gallon jug with yesterday was probably tainted.

The Baton Rouge reading was on Monday. In the audience were two people, a man and a woman, who’ve worked in departments similar to DMR. I was happy to listen to their experiences working with “Individuals.” The woman told all of us the first line of the book she’s been struggling to write: “On the day I found out my daughter had spinal bifida, I got a standing ovation.”

We all told her that it was a very interesting beginning. Then I asked her how much she had completed. She said, “That’s it. I only have the first sentence.”

The next day, at Tickfaw State Park (the name did not fill me with confidence and the people working there were not nice), I cleaned out my van, packed up my stuff, and got ready to hit the road, Amelia Bedelia style. I’ve got a lot of traveling to do in the next week. I’ll be attempting to get DMR into lots of bookstores and doing a lot of writing (since I don’t have a reading until next week). I’ll also be sporadically including information about my own self-publishing experiences in some of the upcoming blogs. I know this won’t be of interest to everyone, but hopefully it helps some people.

I woke up early this morning, took some pictures of my Jackson, Mississippi campsite, and started reading Going To Extremes, a book about a man’s travels through Alaska just before the pipeline really started to affect the area. It’s very good so far and I’m glad to be reading about one of the two states I won’t be visiting.

I met a man at my Florida campsite who told me he’s driven to Alaska three times. I told him about my trip but its details didn’t impress him much. He did, however, bring me a plate of fresh fruit to share with me. I don’t think he was impressed with the six scrambled egg dinner I prepared over the fire either.

At around 8 this morning, while I was still reading, my phone rang. I looked at the number and saw that it was an unfamiliar Louisiana number. I picked up, said hello, and recognized the voice at the other end of the line almost immediately. It was Marty from the bar in New Orleans, the man who single-handedly protected an entire neighborhood from looters during Katrina. He has a pretty unique sounding voice.

It took me a while to figure out how he got my phone number, but then I remembered. I originally gave him a postcard for DMR, the last one I had on me that night, but then this cute med-student from Nicaragua asked me for one. When Marty went out for a cigarette I leaned over the bar and reached for the card I’d given him. An hour later, after she’d gone, Marty asked what’d happened to the postcard. I told him that I’d stolen it back to give to the girl from Nicaragua. He smiled and asked no questions. I handed him a business card instead. Unlike the postcards, my personal number is listed on the business cards.

He was just calling to see if I was ok. Unlike him, I don’t have an arsenal. Lots of people I meet ask if I brought a gun with me. I didn’t. I’m not even sure I’d be allowed to carry a gun across all these state lines. I don’t really know anything about that kind of stuff and I’ve never fired a handgun. I have fired a musket, though. That was kinda cool.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve encountered or been involved in a few incidents involving race. For the most part, after the first few, I’ve chosen not to write about them here. This blog isn’t meant to be an exposé (neither is DMR, though many would disagree with that) and it isn’t meant to be a holy, liberal northerner’s journey into the land of Baptist churches (it’s too bad Christian book stores won’t carry my book), awful radio DJs (even worse than MA), strip clubs, and racism.

Maybe I'm just noticing all this race stuff because I came here expecting it. It’s not like these things don’t happen in Massachusetts. I have friends who defend their attitudes by saying things like, “I don’t hate black people. I love black people. I just hate n*****s.” It’s also common to hear things like, “Gay people are hilarious.” And before DMR, I used to throw the word retard around a lot.

That being said, something bad happened in a Waffle House the other day, but I’m going to concentrate on the awesomeness of the place rather than write about the jackassiness of one of its employees.

For me, Waffle House was a revelation.

The moment I walked into Waffle House, my sense of smell came back. And thank god it did come back. Waffle House smells frigging awesome. I could feel myself gaining weight just by breathing the sweet, cholesterol-saturated air in there. Also, all the waitresses looked like the lunch ladies from my elementary school, so I immediately felt right at home. The food was cheap, it was delicious, it was cooked right in front of me, and Waffle Houses are on every corner here. They’re like the Starbucks of the South! And they are so much better than Starbucks. I don’t know why we don’t have them in the Northeast. I had my press manager look up the location of the closest Waffle House to Brockton, MA. It’s in Pennsylvania! All the employees of One Tiny Pizza Publishing are taking a road trip there as soon as I get back. I’ll post some photos of us pouring syrup on each other.

There’s also something called Huddle House down here. Aside from using Hudd in place of Waff, and the fact that the colors of the signs are different, the places look exactly alike. Huddle House serves more dinnery type foods, I guess. I haven’t been in one yet—and I don’t plan on visiting one either. My allegiance to Waffle House is very strong even though I suspect both restaurants are owned by the same people.

Self Publishing Stuff #1 – Blurbs!

In these little sections I’m going to write about my experiences with some random aspect of self-publishing. (Here’s the name dropping I was talking about a couple blog entries ago.)

For those of you who haven’t actually seen a copy of the novel, or visited the Amazon page or otppub.com (shame on you), there are two blurbs on the back cover of DMR:

Daniel Trask reveals a world hidden from most of us, telling a story of individuals that most of society has chosen to forget. DMR tells a story about one man’s journey into the world of mental institutions for the severely disabled, but it is mostly a novel of human dignity, with all of its frustrations, joys, heartbreaks, and hilarity. In a media-saturated world, obsessed with banal images of self-improvement and skin-deep perfection, Trask’s novel strips away our pretensions and shows us the beauty of our imperfections.

− Harry Bruinius, author of Better for All The World

DMR is a compelling read that portrays not only the daily lives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but also the joys and frustrations of the people who provide their assistance. At times funny, at times earthy, the novel suggests that ability and disability may intertwine among care-receivers and caregivers. DMR is a must read for people interested in services and policies in the field of developmental disabilities. I recommend it highly.

– James W. Trent, Jr., author of Inventing the Feeble Mind

I’m very proud of them. Most self-published books do not have blurbs on them—at least not blurbs by respected, traditionally published authors.

Both Harry Bruinius and James W. Trent are professors and experts in fields related to the Department of Mental Retardation.

In addition to getting blurbs, it’s been nice corresponding with them and I hope to meet up with both soon after this trip is completed.

I wrote to ten people I thought would be interested in DMR. The letters I sent complimented their work before getting into what I wanted from them. I got eight responses, which I thought was pretty phenomenal. The people who wrote back included Fred Wiseman (Titticut Follies) and Philip Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment).

Of the eight who responded, four asked for a copy of the manuscript. In addition to Trent and Bruinius, Ted Conover and Thomas Szasz requested copies of DMR.

Thomas Szasz wrote The Myth of Mental Illness. It’s an incredible book and many many people read it in the sixties and seventies, so I’m flattered that he even read (and finished) my book. In the end he said he couldn’t blurb DMR because it was too far outside of his own area of research. He’s right, it is very outside of his field, but his book definitely influenced me (and millions of other people).

Ted Conover wrote Newjack (it won the National Book Critics Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and lots of other really great books. Ultimately, he also decided he couldn’t give me a blurb. But I’m very happy that he read and really seemed to like DMR (especially after he told me to send him the manuscript ONLY if I didn’t mind the fact that he’d probably never get a chance to look at it).

We discussed making the book nonfiction, but I decided I couldn’t do that. We corresponded about DMR quite a bit and it was pretty thrilling for me. I admire his work a great deal. And I’m hopefully going to meet up with him in New York either during this trip or after.

Conover also introduced me (via telephone) to his friend John Thorndike who wrote Another Way Home. His book isn’t similar to mine at all, but I enjoyed it a lot and we chatted about book-promotion road trips. Thorndike did something similar to what I’m doing, but he did it in the age before GPS and modern cell phones. Like me, he spent the majority of his trip in the woods.

Advice for other self-publishers? Write to more than ten people. Do it many months (at least eight) before the publication date.