Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens Interview Series: Andrew W. Adams

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Bradley Sands

As some of you may already know, I am no longer the head editor of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, but the journal still lives on with Sam Reeve as my replacement. Out of all the authors who I published, Andrew W. Adams was one of my favorites. He was also one of the authors who I published the most. His final story during my tenure, “Romantic Fucking Comedy,” appeared in the last issue. I conducted this interview with him throughout the duration of our lives. At the beginning, I sent Andrew one letter (of the alphabet) in the mail each month. When I finished relating my question, Andrew did the same thing with his answer. This process continued through the years, and it was a lot of fun. I felt like a spy, which is something that I have always wanted to be since overhearing my first James Bond movie while in the womb.

Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens: Let’s begin with a very important question: What is your favorite color and what is your favorite number and why?

Andrew W. Adams: I have red-green color blindness and either can’t see certain shades or see them differently, so my favorite color is whichever of those shades is prettiest. My name for this imaginary color is “96 Tears.” My favorite number is phi (1.618…) because of the scene in the movie Pi where Max explains the golden ratio to that Jewish guy in the coffee shop.

Ha ha ha! You have 1.618 ninety-six tears haired girlfriends. You must have cut one ninety-six tears haired girlfriend into 0.618 and sewed the piece onto your other ninety-six tears haired girlfriend. Dude, that’s really fucked up.

I published your story “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus,” in the sixth issue of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. It’s about a man whose comatose wife is raped by a scuba diver. Since the story is written in first person, your comatose wife was also raped by a scuba diver. Am I correct?

That is entirely accurate.

Why do you prefer to write autobiographical stories with mushroom clouds?

The mushroom cloud motif probably has something to do with a kind of apocalypse fetish. And I write autobiography because I am afraid of death.

I’m changing the name of my favorite color to “Tutti Frutti.”

What is it like to have an apocalypse fetish?

It is like being a very normal person.

I can’t get past that Mad Libs thing you did with my favorite number and favorite color. It’s haunting me.

By the way, what are your favorite number and favorite color? I am not going to do any kind of Mad Libs thing with your answer. I just feel like I need this info before I can find closure and move on.

By the way, please explain your obsession with finding out my favorite number and my favorite color.

I am trying to learn everything about you so that I can make you fall in love with me.

Favorite animal?

Chia Pet

Wow, that is my favorite animal too! See how compatible we are?

There can only be one Chia Pet per household. It would turn into a Highlander Movie. Let’s switch gears, and I apologize for the insignificance of this question, but: have you written a book? You’re the best writer doing bizarro-type stuff who I’m aware of that doesn’t have a book. Give me a book. Just give it to me. Where is it? What do I have to do to read it? That? No. That? I won’t do that. Anything but that…okay, I guess I’ll do it.

I have written a few books that I now like to pretend do not exist. So:

No, I haven’t written a book. I am working on my first one now. If you send me a month’s supply of cocaine and protein shakes, I promise to write 5000 words a day and do 500 pushups a day. I can have the book finished in a week, and I will have very impressive biceps for my author’s photo. I think this is a good plan.

Or, if that doesn’t work: I will continue to do the best I can, and trust that my unwillingness to quit will eventually bear fruit. I should have something available by the time I’m 50, at least. I hope you can wait that long. I will dedicate the book to you. Its release will be a very “Rocky”-like moment for me.

Write your book while running up and down the steps in front of Philadelphia’s Museum of Art two thousand times. Let me know when you are finished.

Despite what I just said about an “unwillingness to quit”, I am considering giving up writing to study the art of mime. But I don’t know where to go to do this. Are there mime schools?

Wait, what am I saying; of course there are mime schools.

Why are you so damn hard to kill, Andrew W. Adams?

Because I’m just not worth the effort.

Thank you for the interview. By the way, there is a man behind you with a razor wire sombrero.

i’ll just leave this here

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Bradley Sands

For Writers: On Promotion

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Bradley Sands

I consider myself knowledgeable about book promotion, but not a very good promoter recently due my inability to do much of it due to problems. But a lot of the ways that people promote their books seems wrong to me. They promote the same over and over again. It is boring. It seems desperate. These are the only times that you should EVER link to your books Amazon page: your book is released, your book is now available for Kindle, the price for the Kindle book has gone drastically down (particularly if it is now free), and if a review is extremely interesting. You should not link to it every time someone writes a new review for your book. Do not link to a review on a book blog if it is not interesting. Instead, keep a list of links to reviews on your website if you want. Do not ask people to buy your book as “a birthday present” to you. Do not ask them to buy it to help you out financially. Unless you are more financially needy than the typical poverty-stricken writer, people do not give a shit about helping you out financially. They are more interested in reading your book.

There are a limited amount of ways to promote your book. When you run out of ways to promote it, you should start promoting yourself. Make people think, “Hey! This guy is awesome! I want to read his book!” Constantly be calling attention to yourself without being a spam king or being boring. This is a lot easier to do if you are humorous. But if you’re not, perhaps you live an interesting life that you can write about. If you do not lead an interesting life, do not write about it. No one wants to here about how depressed you are. If you feel the need to overshare, start a new facebook profile and send friend requests to people who can stand your blubbering. Do not use the same account to promote yourself and to complain about your problems.

Use different social media platforms to call attention to yourself, such as writing blog entries. Do the same thing with your talents as far as making videos for youtube or putting images on tumbl (because people seem to think jokes are always funnier when the joke is superimposed over an image). My friend, Vince Kramer, takes pictures of action figures having sex. He is a great promoter even though he may not know he’s promoting his book this way.

Keep people coming back to your website or wanting to follow your status updates on facebook and twitter. Don’t bombard them with advertisements. Write about books that you like and other things. If you’re a very social person, use this to your advantage and talk to as many people as possible, but don’t mention your book if it’s not relevant. Stop being so lame.

Go the Fuck To Sleep

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Bradley Sands

A while back, a person wrote a review of Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You and complained about the book’s profanity. This inspired me to write a review about the book, Go the Fuck to Sleep. Here it is:

I stumbled across this book on Amazon and thought it looked cute, so I bought it to read for my four-year-old at bedtime. I was looking forward to receiving it, but when I opened up the package, I was horrified to see a sleeping child surrounded by tigers. Children should not sleep in the presence of tigers. Tigers are dangerous! Had I noticed the tigers on the cover from the start, I never would have purchased the book. I thought they were just really big cats from some magical land like Oz or The Magical Land of the Really Big Cats.

I should have thrown the book straight in the trash after seeing the cover, but I’m not exactly made of money so I taped a page from a newspaper to hide the cover from Max and read it to him later that night. I started reading it and it was really great, but then I got to the last sentence on the first page and was horrified! I’ve never read such filthy language in a children’s book. I wanted to stop reading. I NEEDED to stop reading. But Max is the pushiest four year old I’ve ever met so he wouldn’t let me stop reading.

I read more and more of the book and felt intense nausea, but I had to continued because Max would have would have squirmed away and told me that he hated me if I stopped reading before the end. The publisher of this book should be ashamed of themselves for publishing such filth. Not a page went by without one usage of the f-word. And there was even one page with the word for excrement!

Page after page. A few of them even had children playing with tigers like on the cover! I’m mortified that Max will leave the house and spend the night sleeping in the zoo surrounded by deadly predators rather than sleep in his room surrounded by his 27 teddy bears. And then there’s that page with the child falling through the air attached to a parachute. Oh my Lord! I don’t know what’s more dangerous: a child spending time with tigers or jumping out of a plane to go skydiving.

This horrible book is only 18 pages, but it felt like an eternity while I was reading it. I’m surprised I didn’t have a heart attack before I finished reading its last obscene sentence.

And then I saw the final page with the biographical data of the evil evil men who wrote and illustrated the book. I didn’t read it aloud to Max because it always angers him whenever I accidentally read a page like this. But I was shocked…absolutely shocked to learn that not only did the author have a filthy mouth and advocate putting small children in dangerous situations, but he is also an anti-Semite. Even worse than an anti-Semite. He is a proponent for the extinction of all Jews. I will never, ever read his book, The End of the Jews, especially to Max. At that moment, I felt like I had just read a children’s book written by Adolf Hitler.

Shame on you, Amazon! Shame on you for your false advertising. You are to blame for not listing the book’s actual title. How was I supposed to know what the book was actually called when you censored the title’s filthy word? I never thought anyone would use THAT word in a children’s book title. I thought it was a Sumerian word or something. I thought the book would be educational. Teach Max a few words from an ancient language before he went to sleep. But no–instead he’s been talking like a hummus and salsa factory worker ever since I made possibly the biggest mistake of my life.

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I posted it on Amazon’s main site and their British site and the review received great comments (which is the main reason why I’m posting this blog entry). Check out the comments here -

Amazon

Amazon UK

It Is All Happening Now

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Bradley Sands

Here is an expose about what author, Jeremy Robert Johnson, did during the decades between the release of his current book and his former book: http://bizarrocentral.com/2012/03/07/jeremy-robert-johnson-behind-the-music/

Here is a prose poem of mine that I wrote for the Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster anthology that ended up on the cutting room floor:

Global Pirating

Captain Jolly Jill Rotgut is very concerned with the environmental issues facing the world today. She is extremely concerned with the dangers of global warming. As she turns the wheel of the Shoddy Barnacle and orders her crew to decimate the sunbathers on the mainland, she thinks about the decisions that had brought her to this moment. Was all the looting and pillaging and decapitating worth becoming an environmental activist? Her first mate fires a cannonball into the belly of a tourist from Wisconsin and dives into the ocean to steal the postcards the deceased man bought from the beach’s gift shop. The pirate captain winces at the tattered remains. She wishes she could sail up and down the Long Island Sound without engaging in this sort of violence. She wishes she could show off her swashbuckling garb as smiling children wait for her on the shore so she can bring them candy. But those days are long gone. Pirates who revel in peace and love are attacked by the coast guard. The law enforcers of the sea are so intimidated by those who rape and murder and brew grog that they leave the pirates alone. Leave them alone so their mere existences will diminish the average temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and oceans. Smiling to herself, Captain Jolly Jill Rotgut admires the corpses decorating the blood-soaked sand and says, “Oh what an environmentally-conscious citizen o’ the world am I!”

To read Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, buy it here.

Online Bizarro Writing Workshop

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Bradley Sands

Interested in writing bizarro fiction? If so, consider enrolling in the online workshop that I’m co-teaching with Garrett Cook in April. It should be a great time.

Garrett is the author of Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective, Archelon Ranch, and Murderland Part 1 and 2.

My own books include Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You, Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel, and My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! I’m also the former editor of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens.

I have taught writing at a rehab center, a high school, online, the summer writing program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, online, and The Public School New York.

For more information about the workshop, click here.

Beachfront Property

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Bradley Sands

Back when I was a teenager, I was returning home from a trip with my parents. We drove past my old elementary school. I noticed that the front of it was set up as if it were a beach with chairs, towels, umbrellas, and sandcastles. When we drove behind it, there was an ocean.

This was peculiar. There had never been an ocean there before. I asked my parents about it. They told me the town had created an artificial ocean for the sake of tourism.

We arrived at our house. Across the block was a small body of water that connected to the new ocean. Behind the water were the houses that had always been across the street in the same positions. For some reason, their front yards had been filled haphazardly with trees. I knew the trees had been transported there whole rather than grown over a period of time. My neighbors’ cars were still in their driveways, but the location of the trees and the water made it impossible to move them. My mother said the value of our home had reason because it was now a beachfront property.

We got out of the car. I noticed that the small body of water across the street from us wasn’t as picturesque as it seemed. People and cars were floating in the water. Neither of them looked happy. I felt relief because we didn’t have to go through these problems because our house was on the other side of the street. But then I looked toward the book of the houses on our side of the street. There was a flood of water coming up from behind it, headed toward our house. People and their houses were floating in the water. There would be a town meeting with the men who had put together the artificial ocean on Wednesday.

I remember this dream from a few dream from a few nights ago somewhat vividly. I like to watch horror movies, but it’s no fun when most of my dreams are straight out of a horror movie. Nearly all of my dreams is a terrible nightmare, but this one was less nightmarish. Even though it’s usually very boring to listen to someone recount a dream, I hope this wasn’t boring.

I don’t think I’ve ever written on a blog entry on this site that didn’t have to do with some sort of promotion. I’ve been extremely lazy lately due to daily pain for the last couple of months. But I’ve been feeling a bit better due to buying a new awesome mattress. The reason why I feel pain is I clench my jaw while I sleep. I think this is mostly due to all the nightmares.