Synopses

Before I get started with the body of this blog, I just want to take a moment and read to you the synopsis for “Cody’s Army”, which I am currently 72 pages into. It goes like this…

“The sequence was familiar: Another jet hijacked to Lebannon. Once again America held hostage by fanatic rebels. And just to prove they meant business the terrorists dragged two innocent passengers out on the tarmac and shot them in cold blood. That’s when John Cody and his mone got on the scene. Their mission was to free the hostages. But Cody wasn’t going to stop there. This time he had to make sure it didn’t happen again. And there was only one way to do that. The hard way. The bloody way.”

If that doesn’t get you excited about reading a high-octane military thriller, I don’t know what does. Just from that synopsis alone, you can expect John Cody to be a literary version of Rambo. The reason I reposted that text verbatim is to make a point: it may be wrong to judge a book by its cover, but it’s nowhere near immoral to judge one by its synopsis. If you’re a potential author and you want people to be at least vaguely interested in your book, you have to hit them with something hard long before they delve into the first page. It’s called hooking them in and it’s not a new thing. Movies that don’t hook in their audience by the first five minutes are going to lose a lot of patrons. And when you write your synopsis, don’t worry about overselling your product. It’s much more practical to oversell something than to undersell it. If you’re advertising a dog turd to someone dying of hunger, you’re going to want to oversell it as tasting like a Butterfinger candy bar. Otherwise, there won’t be a sale. If you want an example that’s closer to my heart, let’s use a WWE example, particularly one starring Dolph Ziggler. When he gets thrown around the ring, he doesn’t just flop over like most guys do. He spins around and flies like a birdie just to make that hip toss look painful. Dolph Ziggler can wrestle a broomstick and make the broomstick look good. If you’re an author looking to get people excited about your book, be a literary Dolph Ziggler and oversell your product. Talk about the bloody and painful moments early on. People love blood and pain. Now if only I could take my own advice when it came to selling “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”. If you’re wondering why I keep mentioning my self-published book in my posts, it’s because I haven’t sold a single copy as of today. It’s pathetic, I know. One day, I’ll shut up about it forever. I promise.

　

***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“CM Punk could burn an orphanage to the ground and he would still be popular with the fans.”

-Me-

Books Made Into Movies

With this huge abundance of movies based off of books, there always seems to be an active debate going on about faithfulness to the original medium. Whenever something is slightly off-key, fan boys and fan girls fly off the handle and take to Twitter for a war of words. Then again, I’ve also heard arguments about how the director should have some control over the movie seeing as how he’s just as important as the writer. It happens in theater productions all the time. Sometimes the adjustments are agreeable, other times they’re nowhere near negotiable. I remember hearing a story about how the writer for a pornographic movie called Wild Side killed himself because the director changed the script drastically from its original intentions. Suicide because a script was butchered? Well, I’ve always heard about how artists can be insane sometimes. If you ask me for my opinion, I think there should be equal cooperation between writer and director. The director should be asking the writer about the way he wants the movie done and the writer should be flexible about the changes to be made. Writing and filmmaking are two very different mediums and therefore require completely different sets of skills. Wouldn’t you feel better if your project was in the right hands? The trust between two people is ultimately what will drive them to success whether it’s in a business, personal, romantic, or other kind of relationship. But of course, the tendency to dominate the project is ever present in today’s world. Wild Side is an extreme example of what could go wrong with domination. It typically doesn’t result in a suicide, but it can be struggled over in the court systems. If one thing goes wrong, a lawsuit will be ignited. It doesn’t matter who wins the lawsuit or even if it’s thrown out. Even if there’s no settlement to be gained, the money spent on lawyer’s fees and the delaying of the project will grind and wear on the people involved. Is it really worth suing over? We all know it’s not worth killing over as evidenced with Wild Side. If somebody wanted to make a movie out of “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”, I wouldn’t be heartbroken over the choices the director made. I would just be fucking thrilled to know that people care enough about my book to make it into a more relatable medium. Reading is fun, but then again, so are movies. When these schools of thought come together, it should always be a beautiful thing. Nothing more, nothing less.

　

***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“People got mad because Barack Obama thought mind-melding was from Star Wars instead of Star Trek. And I say to them, ‘Congratulations, you’re experts in every world except the real one.’”

-Bill Maher-

Doorstoppers

Discrimination is wrong, bottom line. But is it so wrong to discriminate against a book based on its size? Books that are so huge that you could beat someone to death with them are ever so affectionately known as “doorstoppers”. Not only are they five-hundred or so pages long, but they’re also printed on gigantic sheets of paper. Shit man, you could probably use the pages as window curtains if you so desired. Or if you wanted to give somebody a blanket party, you could rip out one page and beat the guy with the rest of the book. For books that are less than 200 pages and printed on smaller pieces of paper, the same kind of discrimination is true. People automatically assume that shorter reads are going to be literary flops. Not just flip-flops, not just belly flops, but big fucking flops when it comes to sales and popularity. The point of all these size jokes is not simply for a cheap segue into penis length. Those kinds of jokes are way too easy to tell and I will not sink below to that level. Ah, to hell with it, the bigger the book, the smaller the author’s penis! Authors with shorter books are growers, not showers. There, are you happy? The real reason for discussing the topic of doorstoppers is to decide whether or not judging a book by its size is unfair to the author. I say yes, it is unfair, because doorstoppers are still capable of having a quick reading speed. A lot of celebrity memoirs are written with a quick style and they’re big enough to give the faces on Mt. Rushmore reading material. In fact, there’s a book on my blog that could very well qualify as a doorstopper despite it only being less than 300 pages long. That book would be “Once Upon a Nightwish” by Mape Ollila. It’s a biography of a heavy metal band and it doesn’t use an overwhelming number of slick descriptions. The same thing is true about “Hitman” by Bret Hart when it comes to descriptive language. The difference is, “Hitman” reads so slowly that it takes god knows how many minutes to get through one single page. You won’t see that book on my blog anytime soon. The point of this blog is to send the message of not judging a book by its size. In other words, don’t have page envy. My self-published book “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart” is only 176 pages long and it’s printed on six-by-nine paper. It’s a grower, not a shower. Thanks for listening to this very sexualized blog entry about a topic that never gets discussed in the classroom. Usually whenever book size is brought up in an educational setting, the response is akin to something like, “Too bad!” It’s even worse when reading pace is mentioned.

　

***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“I’m not the goddamn weak link!”

-Daniel Bryan-

Marketing Wizard

I’m an author first and a marketing wizard second. Actually, you couldn’t really call it second. Maybe third. Or fourth. Or one-hundredth. The last time I learned anything about marketing was when I was 14 years old and studying it in my freshman year of high school, where my brain was melting into a puddle of liquid shit on account of PTSD from being bullied. So naturally, I retained nothing from that class, particularly as it relates to advertising a product. The product I want to advertise is my self-published book “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”, which was written under the name Garrison Kelly. The most I’ve done to advertise this book is approve distribution on Lulu.com (my publisher) and start an ad campaign on Goodreads.com. That’s about it. Now I have to ask, where do I go from here? This is one of the dangers of being a self-published author: aside from posting advertisements on various websites, you’re not going to get much out of it unless you’re a marketing genius. Think about Christopher Paolini for a moment, the author of the Eragon series. He self-published his books and became successful doing it, mainly because his story fell into the right hands, Carl Hiaasen’s step-son. Say what you will about the clichés he uses, he is successful nonetheless. In fact, there are a lot of authors out there who use traditional publishing and become successful despite being piss-poor writers. I’m not saying Christopher Paolini is piss-poor, because I’ve never read his stuff before, I’ve just seen the movie. But you get my drift, right? Success is all about being in the right place at the right time. Or if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of guy, not pissing off the wrong people. I’ve asked various people on the web about what I need to do to market my book and I haven’t gotten a definitive answer as of yet. So now, I’m using this forum, my book blog, to ask you guys if you know anything about advertising and if you do, how far should I go? The easiest answer you could give would be for me to close my Lulu.com account and go traditional. It’s easy for you to say, but harder for me to do. To be a traditionally published author, you have to have the best agent money can buy and you have to send your manuscript to tons of companies. And most of the time, they’ll say “no”. Not because you suck, but because they’re just plain not interested. Lots of great authors go unheard and it’s all because editors at publishing companies simply don’t give a damn about them. So instead of spending tons of money sending out my manuscript to people and getting told “no”, I’m going to say “yes” to myself and use Lulu.com. If no one else will reward me for my hard work, I’m going to reward myself. The question now is, how do I reap these rewards and turn this book into a marketing machine? We’ve got ears, say cheers!

　

***THE NEXT BOOK***

If for some reason I don’t publish another post on my blog reviewing a good book, it’s because I’ve run out of books to talk about and need to read new material. The book I’m reading now is “Skin Tight” by Carl Hiaasen. The problem? I’m only 20 pages into it. Who knows? I just may burst through it all one day when the skies are cloudy and new age music is serenading me through the TV speakers. Look forward to a post about “Skin Tight”. It won’t be too much longer, I hope.

　

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“Back at school it never made much sense. Now I pay but I can’t pay attention. Teaching me the hardest lessons of my life. Too dumb to die I guess, but that’s the way it goes. Sometimes I must regress these. Sex, drugs, and violence. English, math, and science. Safety in numbers. Give me, give me danger. Well, I don’t want to be an imbecile, but Jesus made me that way.”

-Green Day singing “Sex, Drugs, and Violence”-

"Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart" by Garrison Kelly

All of this reading of quick novels had to lead somewhere. For me, it lead to me publishing my first book on Lulu.com under the penname Garrison Kelly. It’s an anthology of my best work called “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”. You’re probably wondering why I chose to publish under a penname instead of Garrison Haines-Temons. It has nothing to do with my need for privacy, though that would be nice. To be honest, the name Kelly is harder to butcher than Haines-Temons. Throughout school, I’ve been called “Hynes-Tea-Moans”, “Hainees-Tee-muns”, and a bunch of other weird names that are obviously a product of linguistic ignorance. I used to embrace the idea of having a page in my books that told people how to pronounce my name, but I opted not to since Kelly is a more attractive last name anyways. But if you still want to know how my last name is pronounced, here it is. Haines rhymes with “chains” and Temons rhymes with “Simmons”. I know it seems weird that the E in Temons would be pronounced like a short I, but trust me, that’s how it’s said. Temons is a very old Gaelic name. It looks strange, but it’s pronounced only one way. Same thing goes for the name McLeod. It’s not pronounced “Mick-Lee-Uhd”. It’s pronounced “Mick-Loud”. I chose the name Garrison Kelly because it’s easy to say and we don’t have to have a debate over how it’s said. You’re probably wondering why I chose to talk about my last name instead of the actual anthology I’ve published. The answer is simple: if you want to know what to expect from my book, go to the link provided and read either the description or the back cover. I’ll warn you right now that none of these stories, letters, and poems are intended for the squeamish. I don’t do TV-G stuff except for on very rare occasions. This is not one of those occasions. There’s a reason why there’s a TV-MA logo on the American flag book cover. And yes, that is my older brother with the knife in his mouth. I took that photo of James back in 2006 and thought he would make a great Waldo Spiegel, one of the characters in the book. You’re probably wanting the link right about now. Okay, here it is. Happy reading!

　
http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-kelly/red-blood-white-knuckles-blue-heart/paperback/product-20672921.html