Welcome to 2012, Ludic legions!
Whoa, I was channeling Stan Lee for a minute there, he must have gotten bottle service and nodded off. Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to usher in the new year and let you know what’s up for this site and for me in general, because if you’re reading this, you’ve expressed an unexplainable interest in my activities.
First of all, as you may have heard, thanks to our dynamic American economy, I have recently become what is known as a “victim of reduced circumstance”, or, to put it in more Objectivist terms, a poverty-stricken loser. Thanks to the good fortune of having a Southern family, I’ve avoided homelessness (or, to be precise, houselessness), and things will surely be looking up, but if any of you are inclined to donate to FailureThon 2012, I can be PayPalled via leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com. As a great political leader once said, “I’ll take any motherfucker’s money if he givin’ it away.”
But, thanks to a series of birth defects and the entirely unsupportable vestiges of a Protestant work ethic, I’d rather earn money than just take it! I’m happy to say that there will be a number of exciting projects coming your way this year that I hope will pique your interest and earn your dimes. This blog will be updated at least three times a week in the coming year with the usual vaguely referential pseudo-humor, politely bitchy political opinionizing, and reviews of things you will never read, watch, or listen to, and it will continue to be free as always. But I have a major endeavor, launching (hopefully) in the spring, that will feature new and original writings — by myself and, eventually, other creative and talented folks — to which you can subscribe or buy a la carte at exceptionally reasonable prices. It’ll be a micro-pay set-up, with no administrative or production fees built in, and all the money will go directly to the creators. After a Kickstarter start-up, I hope to get it going as soon as possible, and while I want to keep the details mum until the official announcement, I think it’s something all of you will find compelling and worth your couple-of-bucks. But you’ll get new fiction each month, delivered in the format of your choice, and a full book at the end of the year of new material. It’ll be an exciting new experiment that gives you well-written and exciting short and long-form fiction from talented writers, with a large degree of participation from you, the reader. I’ll give the specifics here once the Kickstarter campaign begins, but if you’re interested, please feel free to e-mail me for details at leonard at ludic live dot com.
There will also be some merchandise for sale, because everyone has merchandise, and why shouldn’t I have merchandise? There is no reason why not, so within a month or so, you can purchase Ludic Lessons apparel from the already overstuffed pantry of American t-shirtery. Stay tuned for more on that later this month. I also hope, by spring or early summer, to have a new print-on-demand book — made from actual flayed tree corpses — for sale, comprising a collection of my best blog posts from the last decade of internet tomfoolery. This book, entitled Moods from Marbletown, will feature the ‘greatest hits’ of my previous web-work, as well as some new material just for purchasers of the book — and if you never read it before, it’s all new to you, wot wot. Of course, my latest released-through-an-actual-publisher book, If You Like The Sopranos, is still available for purchase, and I encourage you to pick up a reasonably priced edition at the outlet of your choosing. I hope to have another new book out this year or early next, but more on that later.
2011 was a rough year, and there’s no guarantees that 2012 will be better. But if the job market isn’t going to provide, I’m going to do my best to make my own opportunities by providing you with the chance to support quality fiction and non-fiction writing at low prices, and feel like you’re involving yourself in a creative enterprise that’s filtered only by you, and not by endless layers of editors, publishers, agents and middlemen. Louis C.K. proved last year that the internet really does offer new and exciting ways of bringing your art directly to your fans and still making money. I don’t have that level of ambition (or talent, or audience, let’s not fucking kid ourselves), and I don’t know if these projects will succeed or fail. But I want to test the theory that it’s possible for a single creator, working with a small audience, can still make a living, even in a highly mediated economy, instead of, as another great political leader once said, having to “just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket“. That’s up to you, up to me, and up to a whole lot of luck. But I don’t want to spend any more time not trying. Maybe this is the year the world ends; maybe it’s a new beginning. But either way, now’s the time for trying things. I hope you’ll try them with me.
Tomorrow: back to our regularly scheduled.