You will probably bleed out in the next ten minutes. The totality of every bad decision that brought you here has become a laser, cauterizing the hole in your chest. You can tell that nothing inside you will work properly anymore. You’re just an engine now, pumping fluid through a ruptured hose . . .
Welcome to Akashic in Good Company, a weekly column highlighting some of the amazingly talented, hard-working, committed people Akashic has had the pleasure of working with over the past fifteen years. Taking a break from the interview format, this week and future weeks will feature virtual tours of some of our favorite indie bookstores, written […]
Ricardo Cortés (illustrator of Go the Fuck to Sleep and Seriously, Just Go to Sleep; author and illustrator of A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola) and Simon Tofield (Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos) took a break from their events at the LA Times Festival of Books so we could snap this photo!
Bad Penny, She Always Turns Up. That was one of my most popular campaigns, back when the porn business was referred to as Adult Films, not “triple-X content.” Not that I’m a porn guy. I’m not. Anymore. I’m the kind of writer you don’t hear about. The guy who always wanted to be a writer—who read the backs of cereal boxes as a kid—dreamed of being Ernest Hemingway, then grew up and wrote the backs of boxes. You don’t think about the people who write the side effect copy for Abilify or Olestra ads . . . It’s not as easy as you think. You need to decide whether anal leakage goes best before or after suicidal thoughts and dry mouth . . . I take a ribbing from some of the guys (and gals) at the office—which, I have to admit, gets to me. They know I’ve been working on a novel, but it’s been awhile. I guess I should also admit that the heroin helps with some of the shame I feel about writing this stuff. Or life in general. I’m not, like, a junkie-junkie. I use it, I don’t let it use me. And I’m not going to lie, it helps. It’s like, suddenly you have a mommy who loves you. You just have to keep paying her . . .
If he is wearing knives for eyes, if he has dressed for a Day of the Dead parade—three-piece skeleton suit, cummerbund of ribs—his pelvic girdle will look like a Halloween mask.
“The bones,” he’ll complain, make him itch. “Each ulna a tickle.” His mandible might tingle.
He cannot stop scratching, so suggest that he change, but not because he itches—do it for the scratching. Do it for the bones . . .
En route to her job at the morgue, Jinx walked on JFK Boulevard to the PATH station at Journal Square. It was hot for June, the evening cloud cover an airless ceiling pressing on the street. A grimy storefront diorama displayed mannequins behind plate glass, girls with bald heads and painted-on lashes, clad in cheap, thin dresses. They stood frail against the hard gray light. Commuters hustled by, indifferent to the girls’ orphaned gazes . . .
Every Friday, the Akashic team highlights industry news, reviews, and features from around the web. This week’s roundup comes to you from Akashic interns Melissa Bean and Gabriella Balza.
Date: November, 18 2013
Moderated by Jef Czekaj, author of Cat Secrets. View this event on Facebook.