Finished!

PS I’m Still Sorry About Your Dick

Last week I finished the final draft of the novel I’ve been working on for nine months. Though working on it wasn’t always easy, the writing itself was definitely the fun part. Next come two tasks I don’t love. Preparing it for the printer and, most challenging, marketing it.

I’ll get the formatting and design done without too much trouble. That’s all tedium. But the promotion? This is where I fumble. This is where I revisit past efforts to get the word out about other books I’ve written. This is when I recount the obstacles.

My first book, All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy was published by Simon & Schuster in 1999. While I was writing it, the editor who contracted me left the company. The editor who took his place made it clear she had no interest in my book. Though legally bound to see it through to publication, she was not required to champion it. I was informed there would be no marketing money put behind it.

Despite some really good reviews and my own personal publicity efforts, sales were pretty terrible. This, in turn, made it difficult to get future book contracts, because publishers focus at least as much on sales numbers as they do on writing talent. 

I did get a second contract eventually, from UT Press. As the release date drew near, I received an email from the marketing director explaining that I needed to lower my expectations and recognize that I was “just a regional writer.” Further, she described a personal crisis—depression I think it was—that meant she didn’t have the energy to promote me, adding that I mustn’t tell anyone that she said that.

Back then, I honored her confidence. I should have reported her. That was a really shitty thing she did, totally unprofessional and unfair to me (and her employer). As with the first book, I made heroic efforts to do my own marketing. I staged a mock wedding at BookPeople, wore a big white wedding dress and “married” my career, represented by my very first typewriter. (I still have it, it’s 52 years old now.) That was a very fun event, even if it didn’t move the needle on sales.

My first book is out of print now. Sometimes I buy used copies to give away. Last year one of these copies arrived with a review tucked inside, clipped by the previous owner. I had forgotten all about this review from the Statesman, but even before re-reading it, I had a memory that it was very negative. Now that nearly a quarter century had passed, I figured it wouldn’t come across as bad as it did at the time. 

I was so wrong. The review, incredibly mean-spirited, was worse than I had recalled. 

A well-known writer friend had warned me that I should steel myself for crap reviews like that one, promising the worst would come from hometown critics. He was more than a little bit right. The aforementioned review wasn’t even close to the meanest. That designation goes to one Dick Holland, who was afforded an astonishing number of column inches by the Texas Observer to pen a deeply misogynistic character assassination. Among other things, he wrote:

Turning to Spike Gillespie’s All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy is such a drop in literary depth that it almost gives a reviewer the bends. This is a truly terrible book, but one I suppose that needs to be looked at since Gillespie has pulled together quite a following and is considered by some to be a Texas writer.

Holland’s “review” was such an exercise in calculated cruelty that friends who read it did all they could to shield me from getting my hands on a copy. (The Observer was not yet available online.) My friend and mentor, Molly Ivins, the greatest champion of that little paper, called me to personally apologize. (To the credit of the Observer, they did publish, in full, my very long, equally biting rebuttal which, yes, began with: Sorry about your Dick. To their detriment, they added a super snarky response.) 

When my last book, The Tao of Bob, came out in 2018, I wrote to the editor of the Austin Chronicle, asking if I might get a little mention. The essence of her reply was that readers of the paper had no interest in my work. Since I got my real writing start at that paper, and since readers of it had already twice voted me Best Writer in Austin, I found her disinterest especially disheartening. (It was amusing when, after her rejection, I again was voted Best Writer in Austin by Chronicle readers both that year and again in 2019.)

If all of this sounds like complaining, it isn’t, not anymore. Sure, back then I was bummed out, defensive, pugilistic. Now sharing these experiences is merely necessary preface for me to make this point: it is so very refreshing to be old, to have arrived at last at a place of truly not giving a fuck about the naysayers—past, present or future. For while I have not entirely accomplished the art of not taking shit personally, relative to the younger me, I have made tremendous strides toward that end. 

It’s like turning sixty flipped a magical switch. I can finally see with the wisdom of age what does and doesn’t truly matter. I couldn’t care less about “moving x number of units” or bully critics who don’t connect with my art and so condemn it. 

Mostly I just feel very, very lucky. From the time I first started putting words together as a child, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I made that dream come true through hard work, crazy persistence, and no small amount of good luck. Getting to be a writer still feels like getting away with something. The older I get, the more humbled and grateful I become, thinking about all of the amazing connections I’ve made thanks to this fortunate livelihood of mine. Embarrassment of riches, indeed.

When I was writing this latest book, I wasn’t thinking about sales at all. Instead, I returned to the essence of my passion. I was, as I had as a child, simply enjoying arranging and rearranging words and ideas, adding and cutting, shaping characters and storylines that excited and amused me. I shyly shared it with a few early readers and was tickled that they enjoyed it. Now I’m going to shyly tell you that if you’d like to have a gander, I’d love to share it with you, too. 

In a few days I’m going to launch a Kickstarter to pre-sell copies. I am not going to engage in publicity stunts or court reviews and interviews. My goal is very modest. If I can sell two hundred print copies and three hundred e-copies, that will be very satisfying for this old DIY Gen Xer. If I don’t sell that many copies, there will be no juice stewing. More than anything, I’d like this book to reach the eyes of those of you who will get as much of a kick out of reading it as I have writing it—if that’s just ten of you, so be it. That connection will be the best reward of all because in the end—oh I am so grateful to have realized this in my lifetime—there is nothing more joyful than connecting.

NOTES:

As a heads up—in addition to the Kickstarter notice I will send you all soon, I will send a second announcement in the middle of the thirty-day campaign, and a third one at the tail end. I don’t like overstuffing your inboxes with Me, Me, Me notifications. That’s the hardest part of marketing for me. So please bear with the added notifications and know that I’m going to keep them to a minimum. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering a copy. And, if you dig it, I hope you’ll help me to get the word out. 

If you’re wondering about the title— Grok This, Bitch—that will be explained in the FAQ that accompanies the KickStarter campaign. 

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