Pride month production, publishing and procrastinations

@ Fabulosa Books

Happy Pride Month! I know it's a bit late and it's almost over, but it's been a busy month. Who decided to make it a whole month, anyway? Remember when it was just a day or a week? It's kind of exhausting when you think about it.

This month, not only did I publish my novella, Lessons in Teenage Biology, I also arranged a reading at Fabulosa Books in San Francisco with two of my pal authors, Trebor Healey and Gar McVey-Russell. That was June 24.

 

And only days before that, I completed my 40-page portion of the Bay Area Reporter's annual Pride issue. I edited 12 articles and wrote two on my own. I'll get to those in a bit.

But the big news for me was publishing Lessons in Teenage Biology. I had a good time putting it together because it's short and sweet. It's based on a short story I wrote way back in 1986 and cleaned it up and made some artistic changes but basically tried to keep the same adolescent voice going for the story which expanded to 24,000 words. 

That's a bit too much for a short story. So that's why I didn't submit it to any anthologies, because I just wanted to do it myself and experiment with some marketing techniques. 

If you heard about the book, then it may have succeeded, but I actually found that several types of recommended promotions don't exactly work right, specifically the practice of giving away your book as an advance reader copy (ARC). Two different services mostly resulted in people who didn't read it, looked at it, or gave a negative review. So enough with that.

What's really surprising as a success are Ingram's promotions that go directly to libraries and bookstores for only $150. That was the real bargain. It saved me having to buy email lists, purchase them, do a mass mailing etc. 

I had a bit of a flop with MailChimp. I sent out press release to about 200 verified press email addresses and only got about three responses for any kind of coverage.

But moving forward, I set up reading event at the local bookstore Fabulosa Books, which is the location of the late great A Different Light bookstore. In its heyday before the Internet, the staff would hand sell-books by local offers like me. And going to see an author was a big big deal.

This time around we had about 20 people show up, including some known literary authors, which was great. Three people inquired on social media if there would be a live feed. We didn't set that up and that would not have been a hassle, but it's not the point. People have come to expect that kind of convenience since the pandemic and I've done quite a few since 2020 (including one at Fabulosa with Baruch Porras-Hernandez), but not this time around.

 For my day job as the Arts Editor of the Bay Area Reporter, the entire month was full of hundreds of emails. I had to sort articles, assign writers, collect photos to crop and edit, etc. It was a lot of work, and of course our big Pride issue came out today. You can read the PDF version or all the articles on the web of course. In San Francisco, you can get a print copy. It's quite a collectible.

One of those articles that I wrote was a review of the biography of Richard Hunt, the gay Muppet performer of who died of AIDS in 1992. Jessica Max Stein's biography is a very special and touching story about the affable and funny guy who played many characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and some of Jim Hanson's films. 

You can read my review here. I'll probably post that on Goodreads and Amazon later on.

So, when the actual Pride day comes, I'm so exhausted all the rainbow stuff that I've had to process and produce and publish, that I haven't even gone to Civic Center in a few years, even though it's only a few blocks away from my home. 

It's just a big crowd of young kids, which is great, but it's just not to my taste to be enveloped by clouds of cooked meat, loud music, and drunk people. In fact, most of my friends don't even go anymore. 

We went during the earlier days in the '80s and '90s when it was a radical thing to march in the Pride parade. Specifically, my New York days where I was just coming out were pivotal. 

Well, I had been out, but I was officially out and marching up (or down) Fifth Avenue to/from the West Village and Central Park. It was quite a revolutionary exciting wonderful time. Now it's more about consumerism and an overload of drag brunches.

Not that there's anything wrong with drag brunches! There's just so much going on now in terms of the entire month being full of LGBTQ events. It's hard to keep up. But that's my job.

I hope you're going to have some fun with your friends at Pride in your city, whether watching or marching in a parade; something I did many many times with sports groups and Mikes on Bikes in years past. 

It's always fun to participate and I've done my share to participate, and encourage other people to do so.

Happy June, happy LGBTQIAetc. Happy Pride.

Writing as an excuse for not 'Writing'

While I'm very lucky to have been employed through the past year, the additional writing and editing assignments for my day job have somewhat overtaken my fiction writing. But here's why that's okay.

While following a lot of author blogs and advice posts on social media, I've had to come to terms with the timing of my seventh novel Finding Tulsa being released during a pandemic and the most contention presidential election in twenty years. The mild critical acclaim and lack of sales were predictable. People have been distracted by the pandemic and it's understandable. 

Like many authors I adjusted and did online chats and readings all of which you can find on my YouTube channel. The views, subscriptions and likes are always appreciated.

But it's also disappointing to have completed and published one of my better works so far and have it be either ignored or just get the occasional virtual pat on the back on social media posts promoting it. 

The important thing is that, like me, many of us have endured. Perhaps we've written about our situation amid the pandemic or even taken a dive into escapist forms of not writing about it.

Fortunately for me, the obligation of editing and writing many stories a week for my day job –yes, while mostly working from home– has kept my creative juices flowing. It's also improved my skills, not just writing, but editing for our website; deciding on photos and videos to use, and promoting hundreds of LGBTQ artists in visual media, film, comedy, theater and nightlife.

Possibly the most momentous aspect this year is the 50th anniversary of the Bay Area Reporter. I got to assign almost a dozen lengthy feature articles in different media in the arts and nightlife in the B.A.R.'s history that recounted the decades of journalistic accomplishments in the newspaper I've worked with on and off for 30 years. I even created a short video promoting the anniversary, and will produce monthly video chats with our writers, photographers and special guests, all viewable on the B.A.R.'s new YouTube channel.

My own personal essay is excerpted here, and you can read the full version on www.ebar.com. I talk about my early employment and changes in my duties from an assistant editor to a freelance sports columnist and, in the past year, due to some unfortunate staff cuts, being promoted to the Arts Editor as well as doing nightlife coverage.

It's been an amazing three decades, particularly when I think about that career day in junior high school where I said I wanted to be a writer (meaning books) and my misinformed English teacher said there were no novelists in my small town. So I ended up following a photojournalist that day and learned that it was a good entryway into learning how to write. That's proven to be a good recipe; having daily and weekly deadlines improves one's writing and is highly recommended. 

So here's an excerpt from my essay honoring the 50th anniversary of the Bay Area Reporter. Read more on the website, along with the many other anniversary features I assigned, plus News history articles.

Go West: How the B.A.R. brought me to California and halfway around the world, twice

With more than 900 articles penned for the Bay Area Reporter, I feel a strong connection as the newspaper celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. I've written columns, listings and reviews since 1992. Having assigned and edited the expansive features in this section, I thought to share some behind the scenes tales as well.

My career in journalism started in 1989 in New York City with OutWeek, the revolutionary weekly publication that emerged from ACT UP, Queer Nation, but didn't last long.

After a 1990 visit for the OutWrite literary festival, my second working visit to San Francisco was in early 1992, on a freelance assignment for Frontiers magazine to cover Ggreg Taylor's Lavender Tortoise bus trip to Reno. I got to witness the 'marriage' of 'Elvis Herselvis' Leigh Crow and Justin (not then Vivian) Bond.

Along my immersion course on wheels into the Bay Area's cleverest nightlife folks, I'd also brought a few resumes. While a Guardian editor offered me an internship (as if!), the B.A.R.'s publisher Bob Ross offered me a trial run to replace Mike Yamashita, who was compiling event listings and had a month's vacation planned. While my start as a San Francisco resident and B.A.R. reporter was initially tentative, my residence and the fill-in job became a permanent one.

From 1992 to 1994, along with assembling events with multi-colored fliers from Josie's Juice Joint and Theatre Rhino, I also typed up the BARtalk personals ads, a duty that revealed the varied desires of multiple anonymous San Francisco men. I revamped the listings to be more visual, assisting production guys Robert Dietz and Robert Hold in the drafty downstairs back room that sometimes smelled of Photostat chemicals and the burning waxer machine, still used for assembling printed-out 'boards' of the newspaper's pages. I'd also retrieve computer floppy discs and print-outs from visiting freelancers like Michael Botkin and Kate Bornstein.

I also had the more serious task of writing up handwritten obituaries, some of them of men I knew who had died of AIDS. I'd often have to call back surviving partners who'd omitted their own names.

Daily staff lunches were gossipy and fun, particularly with assistant editor Patrick Hochtel, advertising's David McBrayer, and assistant news editor Dennis Conkin. But the shining inspiration to me —for many others at the time, and years later— was the late Mike Salinas, the B.A.R. News Editor from 1992 to 1999.

Mike Salinas had been creator of Theater Week back in New York. He and I shared a love of Stephen Sondheim and other musical theater. His deft ability to create what he called 'the triple-entendre headline' was an inspiration, as was his focus on celebrating the community as well as critiquing it where deserved. He took no prisoners in his sassy responses to Letters to the Editor, a standard response being: "If you are dissatisfied with our publication, you may return it for a full refund."

Read more on www.ebar.com