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Shameful self-promotion

One of the best things about my friend Jeff Gilbert is that, at least in the last backstage photo he sent, mugging with Kiss (or at least some old guys in makeup), his hair still flows clear to his butt. And none of it seems to be falling out, which is less easily forgiven.

The other thing is that Jeff Gilbert was Chuck Klosterman before Mr. Klosterman - whose first book I liked well enough to use as a teaching tool last fall - played his first air guitar lick, much less drank his first beer. Which is to say that most of Jeff's writing and listening career [sic] has been devoted to a deep-rooted appreciation of heavy metal.

The rest of it he saves for Stephen King.

As the story goes, Jeff was kicking around Seattle in the early '90s and The Rocket needed somebody to answer the phones and I promised if he'd take the job I'd teach him to write; there may also have been health benefits thrown in, or not. Against some odds, it worked. He was and is one of the few readable writers about metal, and it's been a real treat recently to find odd bits of crossover music close enough to what we cover here at ND to add his byline to our trophy case.

None of which altogether excuses the amended republication of his first collection of short stories, Two Werewolves, A Six-Pack And Elvis, the opening salvo in a genre which I suspect he invented: humorous horror fiction. It's one of those self-published control freak things (he calls the enterprise Hairball Press, which fits, even if he doesn't have a cat; he also publishes a tabloid called Mansplat), much the same way Mike Perry began tooting his own horn on the way to becoming one of my favorite confessional writers. (Mike's new one comes out in the fall, and you'll like Truck: A Love Story, but that's another entry).

Thing is (bear with the digression, though we should all be used to them by now), last week Liz Mandrell (no relation), visiting between sessions at a three-year MFA writing program run by the University of Texas, was lounging in the family coffee shop with a strange guy she introduced as the editor of a literary magazine in Ohio. Twenty years ago this meeting would've made my day, as, twenty years ago, I had literary aspirations. Instead, when he asked if I wrote fiction, I reflected on the years it had been since I even tried and shrugged, another magazine writer gone astray.

But in yesterday's mail, there it was, my first published fiction, a co-writing nightmare masquerading as the bonus cut to Jeff's new edition of Two Werewolves.

It had seemed a harmless and thoroughly forgettable joke (and probably still is). One night, bored, and probably after copy-editing the original edition of Werewolves, I wrote a paragraph or two of faux horror and e-mailed it to Jeff with a taunt: Your turn. So we pingponged the story back and forth, each trying to leave the other in a corner one couldn't write out of, both of us cleaning up the tone of earlier paragraphs until, now, we can't quite tell who wrote what. Well, we can, but neither of us wish to admit to such folly.

And, anyway, why'd he keep that? I had enough sense to delete my copy five computers ago.

So. After all those years I'm finally a fiction writer. Who knew? The story has nothing in common with the rest of my fiction except that there's a dead guy at the middle of it, and that's all I'm giving away. Jeff, he's selling the wretched thing on Amazon. You've been warned.

Posted by grant on June 27, 2006 10:35 AM | Permalink