My second novel, Pendulum Pet, is FREE on Amazon this weekend (25 – 27 March), as a part of KDP Select. So during this limited time you can grab it without the risk of wasting four bucks on something you don’t like. In fact, even if you’re never going to read it, you’d be doing me a favour if you download a copy, because that contributes to its stats and visibility on Amazon. Head to this page for more information about the book.
My good pal Giulio Tarantino has just released his first EP, entitled “Suicide Circus”, as a (for now rather fictitious) band called “Bullet Democracy”:
According to his Bandcamp bio, Giulio Tarantino (a.k.a. Bullet Democracy) is an Italian film director, musician, singer & songwriter, currently residing in Berlin, Germany. He makes a living as an Italian deli proprietor and keeps buying useless junk at the local flea market.
All of this is true. Giulio would probably perish in considerable pain if he were prohibited from haggling at the local flea market, the exact purpose of which continues to elude me to this day. Be that as it may, I’ve gladly assisted him in the realisation of his long-time dream of publishing an album, so I recorded, produced, mixed and mastered his debut while also playing drums, percussion, bass, keyboards and additional guitar on it. I’d characterise the four-track EP – which Giulio is also determined to present live at some point in the future, at least with a limited acoustic live line-up – as a sort of grunge with Italian pronunciation. It may be interesting for some music aficionados to know that Giulio’s distinctive vocal has such a low register that we had to resort to recording three of four tracks on this album with a baritone guitar tuned to B E A D F# B (as well as drop A, where necessary).
The EP is available for download on the Bullet Democracy Bancamp site (name your price / free).
Originally I never planned on including a piece of software among my “Fortunate Finds” posts, as I only intended to babble about music I love and books I may want to mention, recommend or “review”. However, as I continue plodding along as an “indie” author, I keep discussing things with other authors – either those I happen to meet online or those I had already known before I’d actually started feeling like one as well. One of the issues that has already come up quite a few times during various discussions is the traditional, recurring leitmotif along the lines of “Woe is me, for M$ Word is driving me insane“.
I know the sentiment. I’ve worked in Word for decades, first as a student; for a while, eons ago, even as a part-time typesetter (even back then, as a teenager, I was aware that Word wasn’t really a proper text formatting or desktop publishing tool, but I did not have any other means of doing it; besides, the texts I worked on were relatively simple and scarcely contained any graphics); and then for almost twenty years as a professional translator, with and without computer-assisted translation tools. So, knowing almost everything there is to know about Word (except for advanced macro programming and various bloatware options I’ve never used), I also wrote my first two novels in Word. Due to my diligence or even obsession with keeping (several redundant) backups I’ve never had any serious problems with it (though I’ve heard many horror stories). However, as most people trying to work on anything serious and complex in Word will surely know, Word can drive you insane. I will not go into details here, they are very well-known, even infamous, and this is not a Word-bashing blog post: it’s a “Lookie here, a great tool for writers!” post.
When I started working on my third novel it soon became apparent that Word would make the project very difficult. First of all, the novel will be quite long, full of strange names and foreign words, so the spell checker would sooner or later come up with the completely nonsensical message I’ve grown to absolutely detest over the years: “Too many spelling and grammar errors”, after which the spell checker would take the liberty of turning itself off and not displaying any typos anymore. I mean, pardon my French, but what the fuck? Word 2016 doesn’t seem to be able to digest any more spelling “errors” as the one back in the 1990s? I mean, really?! What, am I still working on an Intel 286 computer with 1024 KB of RAM and storing my book on a 5,25″ floppy disk?
Furthermore, the structure of the novel I’m currently working on will definitely keep changing as I type away – and it’ll change A LOT, at that: the envisioned ‘masterpiece’ will consist of an intertwining puzzle of two main story lines taking place at two separate locations roughly half a year apart, digressions into a teenage “novel” attempt written 30 years before and rediscovered at the time of the narration in one of the story lines, as well as some folk tales, rumours, hearsay and perhaps even excerpts from a long-lost journal as well… So making all of this click together into a fluent narrative of interchanging scenes in Word would have been an utter and insurmountable nightmare.
Cue in Scrivener. This baby was brought to my attention by other writers on various forums, so I decided to give it a whirl before I started pulling my hair out due to all the horrors involved in continuously editing and restructuring a 120.000-word (or possibly more, who knows where I end up?) chunk of text in Word. To make a long story short, I downloaded the trial version, got acquainted with it through the simple and clear tutorial that comes with it, and was typing away merrily the very next day. Just one day after that I “shelled out” the radically sensible amount of $ 40 for a licensed copy, and I’ll never write a piece of literature in Word ever again, period.
A few highlights – the main reasons why I love working in Scrivener:
So, what’s not to like? To find out more, head over to the Scrivener homepage.
First of all, let me get the following out of the way: yes, I count the writer Rick Harsch among “real-life” friends (i.e., not one of those you only “talk” to via one of the antisocial networking sites), so my review of his first e-book (but hardly Rick’s first book – he has previously published a heap of those… what were they… oh, paper artefacts!) might not be entirely objective (as if any review is). The thing is, Rick’s relentlessly critical outlook but nevertheless remarkably positive opinion of my own debut novel was what I desperately needed at a time when my confidence in my scribbling ability was faltering on a daily basis, and he has also been invaluable in his efforts to help me polish my own books and get them in front of readers. This was, as far as my own previous experience had indicated, rather unusual for “old-school” writers such as Rick.
As it happens, Harsch is not (yet?) a member of the modern, agreeable, happy-go-lucky gang of “indie authors”: he hails from the “olden” days when the stereotypical image of writers was still – with good reason, I suppose – that of obstinate, loopy, unsociable, disgruntled old geezers who most likely hate all other writers, but especially any who might materialise in their vicinity. After all, Rick was, once upon a time, on his way to becoming quite renowned for his traditionally-published and widely acclaimed “Driftless Trilogy” (The Driftless Zone, Billy Verite, and The Sleep of Aborigines), which has also been translated into French and made its way into the curriculum of the somewhat obscure University of Tasmania (as Rick defines it in Snake, “the intellectual center of the only block of land to exterminate all its aboriginals“). However – rather unsurprisingly, if you know what an onerous conundrum of uncalled-for incidents tends to surround Rick most of the time – due to an extremely unfortunate sequence of events, including but not limited to the vastly premature death of his Hollywood agent, a bitter though hilarious (to an external observer) dispute with his subsequent literary agent, the bankruptcy of his French publisher and other similarly torturous circumstances, Rick Harsch’s tenacious infiltration of the world literary canon has been on a rather involuntary and undeserved hiatus of late. The infamous downward spiral of the traditional publishing industry that has got out of control after the advent of e-readers has only further complicated Rick’s theretofore cunning world-domination scheme.
In light of all of the above (as well as because I practically forced him to), Rick has recently decided to join the indie author tribe. Arjun and the Good Snake is the first book of his to be re-released as an e-book, hopefully in a series of others that should follow. I’ve had the honour of formatting it for e-readers, and it should look good – I certainly hope so, and if it doesn’t, feel free to complain to me and hold me personally responsible, and I mean that! This I did most happily, for Snake has been, to date, my favourite book of Rick’s (with the possible exception of an upcoming “paper” one, which is still in the works); though I, unfortunately, haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading the Driftless Trilogy, because it is, sadly, out of print. (Rick is currently looking at the possibility of resurrecting it, but the fact that he doesn’t have the manuscripts in the electronic form will make this “project” difficult and, above all, long-winded.)
Reading Arjun and the Good Snake for the first time a few years back was the perfect way of getting to know Rick better, along with all of his numerous remarkable qualities as well as considerable faults. As he puts it himself in the introduction to Snake, “No character, especially that of the author, is safe” (from assassination, I guess). The (sort of) journal supposedly focuses on the six weeks in India (without alcohol, woe was Rick!) that the author spent on a quest to track down a cobra and hopefully also a Russell’s viper, the ophidian preference of his son. However, the “diary” is interspersed with the author’s intimate musings and ruminations: on his own failings, particularly the harrowing alcohol addiction (paradoxically, simultaneously soul-sucking and soul-giving, as anyone who has ever struggled with their share of problems with alcoholism will surely know); on his family, especially his relationship with his wife Sasikala and son Arjun; on India and all her unknowable depths; on philosophical, existentialist, even suicidal enigmas; as well as on the various goings-on back at the Slovenian coast, where the author had emigrated from the United States, primarily, as far as I know, to escape oppressive idiocy… Only to witness, to his dismay, the quickening of rabid, unhinged capitalism in a former socialist country, with all the savagery that has entailed.
Arjun and the Good Snake is not an “easy” book. If you’re an ardent believer in the magnificent contemporary Western world and appreciate the constant pursuit of instant gratification, ravenous consumption as well as instantaneous excretion – then this might not be a book for you. However, if you’re willing to put a bit of effort in a literary work rather than just be “entertained” by it, you’ll doubtlessly unearth and come to appreciate many a touching contemplative passage such as, for example, the following:
“We arrived to the sea – and this is where if I were ever to commit suicide, the time would be as appropriate as it would get, a wretched man standing apart from the alienated cluster representing all he’s got, unable to enjoy himself alone, alienated even from a circumstance too familiar to generate true despair; the waves relentlessly formed and reformed with their concealed force, spent themselves falsely, the sea sucking in with greed: There is much to be learned standing with pants rolled above the knees and feet planted on damp sand as the lace of water passes ankle high, and then the sand around the feet is stripped away with a surprising, even sinister, force that badly wants to take me under, too…“
The soundtrack for the upcoming theatre performance “Kratko in jedrnato” (Short and to the Point), directed and co-written by Marko Djukić, has just been released as a 15-minute EP, entitled “Short and to the Point“. You can download it on Bandcamp (free / name your price) or grab a free download here.
All tracks on Short and to the Point were composed, arranged, recorded & produced by Borut Praper (a.k.a. Ray Kosmick). All instruments performed by Borut Praper. Produced, mixed and mastered by Ray Kosmick in S.U.R. Studio, Berlin, in 2016. The cover artwork is a screenshot from the film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F.W. Murnau (1927).
Theatre performance credits:
Starring: Branka Hočevar, Helena Bevc, Renata Jančar, Neli Mlinar, Tamara Kragulj, Aja Kobe k.g., Roman Tišler, Urh Props, Maks Kovič, Žiga Rappl, Gal Mavretič
Set design & costumes: Katja Sladič Rudolf
Assistant set & costume designers: Tina Baš, Tjaša Doblekar, Tessa Adamič
Hair stylist: Nina Vozel
Light design: Aljoša Vizlar
Technicians: Jure P. Končar, Matej Bračun
Performance produced by the TOMBAS society in cooperation with the Litija Cultural Centre
I am overjoyed to report that my second novel, Pendulum Pet, has just been released on Amazon! It’s currently enrolled in Amazon KDP Select, so it’ll remain exclusive to Amazon for the foreseeable future. I might change my mind and release it elsewhere at some point, but for now let’s see how this arrangement works out.
I would hereby like to thank my precious “beta readers”: Monika Fritz, Rick Harsch, Vesna Žagar, Barbara Drobnak, Jure Rudolf, Sunčan Stone and Marko Djukić for their invaluable insight, assistance in the never-ending whack-a-typo hunt, as well as their involvement in advanced mental fart eradication. Furthermore, hats off to Matej Peklar, top-notch illustrator and my best friend back in primary school (in another millennium, in a now deceased country), for his witty cover design. Yay, we’ve got a thoroughly grumpy pooch on the cover!
Over here you can listen to the complete soundtrack for this novel and download it for free.
I can only hope Pendulum Pet manages to find a few readers whose sense of humour is convoluted enough to enjoy it. By the way, the price on Amazon is $3.99.
ABOUT THE BOOK
PENDULUM PET
(Cynicism Management Series Book 2)
Satire / comic fantasy / sci-fi
Pendulum Pet is a romp through the vicissitudes of a gregarious advanced culture with too much time, information and technology on its hands. Paranoia is placed and misplaced, the devious succeed through manipulations of those who gaze in wonder at the mundane like chimps on acid, or fail when the truly bizarre and unthinkable inadvertently stand in their way.
Civilizations clash, as they will, when Metaore, a transnational mining corporation headed by CEO Budd Dimples, purchases a field behind Boris and Beeba’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Tavern, a cult concert venue and meeting place of an eclectic collection of feckless artists, in order to undertake a remarkable experiment: drilling a geopunctural borehole to heal the Earth. Budd has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and taken a sudden turn toward esoteric wisdom, much encouraged by his healer and sex therapist Ashtara Wolf.
Bogomyr Yadvig, one of the more outré of the regulars, lives in a tent nearby with Rex the tavern hound – his idea of communing with Greek Cynics in preparation for an upcoming performance piece. He has cause to lose sleep and accumulate suspicion that the corporation has nefarious unstated ends in mind, particularly when he has his Roswell moment, if that is indeed what it is.
The corporate endeavour comes to a sudden halt when their drill runs into an impenetrable barrier, leading to mutually unfortunate and potentially combustible discoveries, along with stunning truths about parallel evolution and devolution. Yes, the world of the techno-information age has gone mad and survival may very well depend on the whims of a pendulum pet.
Please note that this novel is adult, poignant satire. As such it contains explicit language, sex scenes, politically incorrect depictions, and may be offensive to the more irritable readers. Even though the work is part of a series, the story is self-contained and can be read independently of the other Cynicism Management Series novels.
