(Original blog date: 20/12/09)

I was recently at an event where I experienced what I call an Oscar Wilde moment. You know the kind when you’re at a party and everyone looks like they’re with you, they like you, but you actually feel like you’re a million miles away? Like you’re not even there? And then the waves part when you let slip a word about your ‘real’ self?

I have these moments all the time, I’ve been having them since I was twenty. Far too often, my Oscar Wilde moments have shaded into Christ/McCarthy moments. The kind you don’t want to experience but which tend to determine your character pretty much instantly. To get Foucauldian about it, these moments tend to determine what kind of person you will agree to be: whether you will agree to remain inside the asylum branded as insane, or ‘free’ on the outside, a chronic, forgettable slave.

An Oscar Wilde moment is one where you realize that no matter how much everyone smiles, laughs at your witticisms and claims to like you, they will not lift a finger to help you when things go crazy. By this I don’t mean ‘not giving you money when you’re down and out.’ I mean that if you have the insane audacity to go against the current, to ostensibly throw your life away by challenging convention or authority, well then you will be pilloried, abandoned and finally banished (to your own cell, murmuring hell is other people***). Your friends will say tsk tsk, I told her so and go about their business shaking their heads, adding how sad it is that you turned out so completely (tragically) insane.

Henry Miller describes this lonely predicament far better than myself. The judgments, the I told you so’s, the sense of bitter exclusion felt by artists (and all manner of idealists), all imposed on them by the West in its horrific idolatry of Mammon. My favorite example is Cervantes, who from a debtor’s jail, in bitter self-hatred, wrote the story of his idiot hero, Don Quixote, whose unbearable sufferings he detailed with startling cruelty. Of course, Don Quixote was none other than Cervantes himself, before jail, a man who dared to believe his profligate life would not destroy him, who was foolish enough to think perhaps friends and people (in general) would come to his aid. Like Oscar Wilde. Like me.

Yes, Oscar Wilde was a bit of a Don Quixote, and so am I. He was La Fontaine’s cicada. He was any fool who dares to believe they can survive while being patently unreasonable. Naturally, being unreasonable simply means doing your own thing, giving it away, not wanting to do what everyone else is doing. It means to be ‘crazy,’ to not live to make money as a pill-popping, obedient hack. Cervantes saw rightly that the world had no pity for him. And he had none for his hero, Don Quixote. As far as he was concerned, Don Quixote, the artist-idealist, was so isolated and his ideal so ultimately futile, that in the eyes of the world, he might as well be battling windmills.

The reasonable people, the good banking calculating people, are also cruel that way. They don’t like the weirdos, the profligates, and they delight in their punishment.

Quite honestly, anachronistic patronizing bullshit Hollywood movies about Wilde apart, nothing’s changed since Wilde or Cervantes. The artist’s passion for throwing it away, his prodigality is still despised by the industrially minded, utilitarian ant-souls, who can’t see beyond profit and calculation, who are concerned, above all, with their vacations, their savings, their comforts and interior deco.

And my Oscar Wilde moment? Well it was a dinner. They arrived, they ate, they drank, they laughed and were warm and friendly. But a great unspoken accord hung in the air. ‘Don’t speak of it.’ Her ‘madness.’ The company, her writing, her insistence that book sales don’t make the artist. And (worse!) her embarrassing use of those outdated words: rebel, anarchist, revolution, good lord! Yes it was a silent consensus: our friend of otherwise sound mind, wonderful literary tastes, and excellent party-talents, has essentially lost her mind.

From here to the next level, there was only a small step. And so she will be punished for it. Indeed why shouldn’t she? Not that my friends will say so. If pressed on it, they’ll say they wish me to succeed. It’s the same with everyone I meet. Even folks who say they’re with you, when they meet you, will give you the shifting feet, the embarrassed smiles, the change of subject. Books are books, business is business. To think otherwise is to be cracked in the head. To be stupid. Sheer insanity darling. Do us all a favor. Stop battling those damn windmills and do what you do best: make money with your startling wit and irresistible personality.

Ah yes. It was a fine time. They ate, they drank, they ignored the best parts of me completely. Not for the first time, but this time I saw it with the clarity of a tiger’s eyes. And sure. I am crazy. Prodigal. Shamelessly idealistic, foolishly stubborn. I even have the gall to demand my friends acknowledge me. Indeed, all artists ask for the same despicable thing. Not tolerance, not even acceptance but outright idolatry. We ask for this because we are the few who insist on working not for money (or even fame) but simply because we exist. We also ask that our friends recognize our battle to be a real one. That they believe with their hearts, not with their brains. The heart is an absolutist. The brain is full of side entrances, display fronts , rear exits. Your brain may fool you, the heart never will. When it stops, it stops. The brain spins fantasies, dreams, lies. The heart? It stops and you’re dead.

So I ask my friends to care, to understand, to participate. To see that the windmills are not windmills but evil f*cking giants and that it is not a worthless battle after all.

But yeah. I know. Boo hoo, bla bla, tell me another sister, we all have our own problems.

Compassion? Sh*t, I might as well party with Godot.

***For those who don’t know, this is from Sartre’s play No Exit.

(Original blog date: 07/12/09)

Let it be clear, I am not a publisher. I am a writer who publishes. Why? Because I am doing what the publishers out there should be doing, but aren’t. Not properly anyway.

Today’s writer is a slave to the money society. The money society as represented by the marketing cohorts of the ‘publishing industry’. But books can never be part of an INDUSTRY. No more than can children, family, love, sick or old people.

The money society is not a trading society. Trade has existed forever. No, the money society is one where everything is subsumed under the capitalist obsession with value-addition. A vulgar stupid despicable concept. A transactional stencil that we apply to everything these days: to women’s bodies (they must be of the model-type, the pornstar-type, or the young-girl-type to command a high price); to our own selves (we must have ‘marketable’ skills to matter); and that has even made love transactional. So that now you have two kinds of love: conditional (that comes with a money-back guarantee if you get fat, old or ugly) and unconditional (the old-fashioned kind, which I gather exists somewhere under the rainbow, where Sex and The city meet).

Let it be said: a civilization that runs its affairs according to such a low, conformist, anti-spiritual, inhuman concept can have no future but the shithouse. It will leave no trace. And indeed, while ancient civilizations have left behind monuments built to the gods, the West prepares to leave nothing behind but toxic waste. The only vestiges of Western capitalist culture will be its monumental hillocks of trash.

Anyway, once I had created Revenge Ink (in a fit of enthusiasm upon reading Blake, as I think I’ve mentioned before) I figured I might as well share my good (or bad) fortune with other writers. Now this is truly heroic. It is a generally acknowledged (and largely true) fact that writers are not the nicest brand of people. They aren’t the worst either. But insecurity, narcissism, vanity, passive aggression, envy, neuroses of the most unbearable kind plague writers. Worse than other people? Probably not. Then again maybe. I don’t know. But the point is, for one writer to deal with other writers is nothing short of miraculous. A rare and award-deserving show of solidarity. Especially since writers tend to be so self-obsessed, solidarity means as little to them as caviar to a camel.

But I don’t care. I’m not in this for the moral satisfaction, pleasure or the money. Revenge Ink is for me a side-dish, a service rendered to contemporary society, a big up-yours to the big guys who believe publishing is a favor done by their august selves to what they believe to be a mentally-challenged (and largely useless) species (writers). This is why they (the publishers) like a certain kind of mythologized writer best: the bourgeois hack who sucks their asses for a living but in public claims to write high, anti-populist literachure. Not me. I prefer writers who don’t give a crap. Who behave like self-serving dickwipes if they have to or as poised and mature professionals if it comes naturally to them (a rare type, but they do exist). Either way, they must be themselves because this proves they are individuals. I don’t like to make writers feel they are children. I don’t like writers who conform.

Why? Because I am a writer. And I don’t demand that I like myself. I don’t demand that I be like other people. I don’t demand that I be popular. I demand that I be myself. And so, while publishing is a side-dish for me, the main and most delicious course will always be my writing. My world. My words. Ironically, this is the only way, I believe, to guarantee that I will respect other writers. Because I will prefer to leave them alone, as I expect them to do with me. We can only ever respect each other as true individuals. As unique and surprising human beings. Never as predictable ants in a fixed hierarchy. We are not ants. We were never meant to be.

So go ahead. Spread the word.

(Original blog date: 25/11/09)

Money money money. It seems all anyone cares about these days is money. And they’re all talking millions. It would appear you’re not SOMEBODY till you’re making MILLIONS. No one gives a crap until you’re putting away boatloads. Truly an age where the superfluous is believed to be essential. I saw a PR website recently where someone promises not just to make you rich but to make you a millionaire. Isn’t there any other reason people do stuff anymore?

Running a publishing company is hard. But it’s probably even harder (and more brain-numbingly dull) if you’re obsessed with the cash. It’s interesting to me that the very businesses who complain their books aren’t selling are those who’re OBSESSED with millions. It’s all they ever talk about. The next money-maker. It’s the same reason everyone works constantly but no one’s happy, the publishers are churning out trash that no one reads, and people spend vast fortunes on useless shit like weddings only to shed their loveless marriages a year later.

Fortunately, I’m not in this for the cash. I’m never in anything for the cash. I’m in it because I can’t take the atrociously elitist monopolistic domination of the book business lying down. I have to fight it. Feel free to call me crazy, I know I would.

Interestingly, every project I have tried to get into only for the moolah has ended disastrously. And I find this to be true of all people who as I watched, have gone in for the fast and easy quick-buck solution. Things look good at first, then fall apart rapidly.

It’s an important lesson and a vital one to being happy. Don’t do anything for the cash. Don’t even do it because it’s useful or because people say it’s the right thing to do. Do it only because you want to. There’s no better reason! And if it costs you, all the better. Nothing that costs you nothing can bring true happiness.

(Original blog date: 11/11/09)

I am first and foremost a writer. An artist. I stay up nights working and don’t get up until well past noon. Those who inspire me are those who lost everything in their desire to live intense, authentic lives. Lives not lived with a masochistic need for pity, quite the opposite. Lives lived with a hunger for the kind of respect and independence the artist has never had in modern utilitarian Western societies. Business-people don’t inspire me. Nor do writers and publishers who talk of money.

Kerouac, Henry Miller, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. These are the ones that make me dream. Publishing is a battle that I have thrust upon myself only because I don’t do it as a business. I run it as well as I can. And it is tough work. But I don’t think of it as a ‘business’ the way most business courses demand that you think of a money-making enterprise. Everything I do is done the same way: with an inspired do-or-die rashness, never a calmly reflected ‘let’s-sit-back-and-churn-the-numbers’ kind of poise.

I created Revenge Ink with my brother Gopal because I didn’t find the kind of publisher out there that I liked. CS Lewis said famously that he wrote the Narnia books because he couldn’t find the kind of children’s books that he would have liked to read. Well what’s good for CS is good for me.

But I miss writing now that I’ve taken on publishing. It doesn’t flow as freely as Bukowski would say, because emails flood in and business needs must be met. Who knew things would take off for us as they have? But fantastic writers send in material everyday and samples must be read, writers contacted, covers designed, printers paid.

It is a tough but thrilling business. Why? Because I never think of it as a ‘business.’ I think of Revenge Ink as a boat out into the unknown. The kind King Arthur or the pharaohs of Egypt were buried in, to take their souls into the afterlife.

Publishing is a kind of afterlife for me. As a writer. And when I was only a writer, I had a certain kind of passive awareness of the world of publishing. It was this passivity that allowed publishers to take control and dictate terms to writers like me. Like you. The view that we all need to be governed, taught, led and told what to do all the time (for our own good) is what keeps us down like bored sheep. But I believe every one of us has untold capacities. Which never express themselves unless we are forced to use them. When I was a child and forced to do PE, I hated running. As I got older, I have developed a passion for running. But only because I do it myself. Without any coach telling me what I should or shouldn’t do.

Guides, yes. Helpers, by all means. Leaders, sure. Bosses? No.

A spirit of rebellious initiative is what we all need. From and for our own selves. I don’t believe in monopolies. I don’t believe in a few stars eclipsing the many. There’s plenty to go around. We can all be fulfilled, well-fed and happy.

Well that should suffice by way of an introduction. I hope you like our books, not only mine but all the others we have on sale here and will continue to publish in the future. We have some exciting authors coming up next season. We put every single blood vessel of faith and belief into every single one of our books. I make no difference between my books and those of others. It’s what makes us different. And difference is what makes for a happier society.

Let’s drink to that!