So it’s been a huge long time since I wrote one of these. Fact is, I lost money, I lost faith, I damn near lost my sanity these last months. When I say I lost my faith, I mean I became so beleaguered, I ended up wondering what the hell this was all about. Why work so hard? For what? Why be a publisher at all? Why bother, when you’re a writer? Why bother with other people? Why not just gaze at my own navel and forget the damn book industry? How can I win against these giants? Was I just insane to think it would go anywhere? Why drive myself half-mad with debt, impossible-to-access readers and work night after night, trying to edit books and publish books that no one seems to care about. Why?

This was the question that tapped against my poor and wretched soul all this time. I even toyed with the idea of giving it up and being just a writer, whatever the hell that is. And yet I knew. Throughout, like the repeating spasm of garlic in the esophagus, that Revenge Ink would not go away. I knew I would never give up on this, the only baby I will likely give birth to. I owe money still. I am not yet successful. And all the sensible folks tell me I am mad to keep trying. I have never been one for good sense however. I am uncommonly sensible. I am the most sensible person I know. But my sense of good sense seems rarely to match other people’s sense of what good sense should be. You see, theirs depends on one single root notion: security. But good sense can mean many things. It can mean – and should mean – the good sense to know what’s good for your life. Not what’s safe and practical, but what makes sense. To you. Which is entirely bloody different. This is why, when I am sensible, people say I am hard and cynical. But when I am clear, they say I am romantic. Conclusion? Most people are dunces and cowards, rarely to be trusted on what you should do with your life.

The difficulty of course is money. When you have none of it, it is hard to fly in the face of social pressure. It is impossible to be ‘cool’ while being a loser and a parasite. There exists around us a sort of Puritan view, that you should only have a right to your life if you can pay for it. This is sheer barbarism. The best things are done when money is absolutely not involved. When sex is associated with money, we frown at it. And yet, that we associate the very value of our lives, the richness of who we are, the unique talents we have, with money, this is somehow considered perfectly just and correct. Barbaric I tell you. Absolutely barbaric.

My solution to this pennilessness? Nothing. I refuse. I refuse to do anything about it. My view being that the universe will provide, now that I have struggled as hard as I can. I will never go back to ‘work.’ I have chosen this path and I will keep at it, and I say so knowing full well that my creditors might be reading this. I will pay them all back and I know I will. I know I will succeed, because I know I will never give up. Where do I get this determination and confidence from? From the fundamental conviction that if you refuse to give up, you will always, in time, get what you want. How do I know this? Because I hate ‘getting up and going to work’ more than I hate being a loser, a parasite, more than I hate anything else.

The question however continued to plague me. Why? Why was I doing all this? What did I think I was doing, even? Well I just sort of figured it out. Just a few minutes ago, so I thought I’d share.

You see, I just wrote something indefensibly outrageous on Facebook. Not really ‘indefensible.’ But if you know Facebook, you will know that it is the modern electronic version of a polite tea party thrown by what we call ‘aunties’ in India. Everyone is against tyranny of course. And they’re all against religion. And everyone believes in tolerance and democracy. There are a few who tell the truth about who and what they are, but mostly it’s because they get caught out. Sometimes, in a stray comment, they will allow the filthy truth to slither out. But mostly it’s all politeness and perfection. It is an ocean of platitudes and bonhomie. I myself have wallowed in it, so I don’t claim superior status. But one thing I do keep challenging (often in spite of myself) is this: Facebook is a place where you cannot be outrageous. You can defend the most outrageous people, but you can’t come right out and be horrifically tasteless and outrageous. Naturally. Because apparently democracy has come to mean that we must all be well-behaved ‘aunties’ – in the hope that the nice polite government and its genteel friends, the corporations, will give us what we have earned by being polite and well-behaved.

So every now and then, I put something on there that creates a bit of a stir. I don’t do it deliberately. I don’t seek to offend. But it appears I am incapable of sucking it in all the time. Of agreeing with the majority. I am incapable of fighting the easy fight. For this abhorrent tastelessness, I have been insulted, confronted and chastised on Facebook. But just as often, not. You can see what people are like, how much personal eccentricity and outrageousness they can take from incidents such as these. I myself come to wonder sometimes why I had to go and put something on there that challenged my usual penchant for sagacity and my aversion to moral turpitude (ahem). But today, this incident brought up the question: why do I do it? What is it about me that loves to bollock it up, most often for myself? What is it about me that loves to upset the apple cart, that refuses to kowtow, that refuses to ‘get it right’ and be careerist, sensible and genteel?

Well, as it happens, I am currently reading Vanity Fair by Thackeray. I am reading some of my author submissions as well as William Makepeace. I am also close to finishing the first draft of a very bizarre and eccentric novel I am working on. My second. I know. About eight people read my first. No matter. We soldier on, my writer self and I.

So anyway. Right now, I am reading Thackeray. I am surprised too. At how much I am enjoying it. I should say enjoying him. Because bless him, Thackeray, like me, like all the writers I love and respect – even adore – writes absolutely and relentlessly as himself. He doesn’t give a crow’s droppings for ‘invisibility’ and ‘ambiguity’ – all that polite literary balls. He doesn’t come up with horrifically contrived sentences about the sun peeking out from this and that and bullrushes and something else. He talks right at you, he chats you up, he makes no bones about the fact that he is writing this story for you at a certain time, in a certain place with its peculiarities of social class. He interrupts himself by telling you his opinion on things like public schools, rack punch hangovers and education. He says he won’t tell you about something but proceeds to tell you anyway. He includes a huge amount of information from the world of his time, references to books, trends, linguistic peculiarities and all manner of background historical detail you have to look up in the notes. I like this because it creates an impression of the raw, chaotic moment. It is just as artificial a technique as any other, but its superiority lies in that it aims not at perfection, but at the imperfection of life. It aims, in other words, at something guttural and primitively theatrical that hits at the core of my own ambition. A something I have been wondering about. A something that defines why, as a writer, I am also and absolutely, a publisher.

Dario Fo once said that the theater must be as an act of violence upon the audience. Tarkovski railed against the dull acquiescent Hollywood-type public that knew the story of the movie they were watching but only wanted slightly to be surprised at the end. Or worse, to be confirmed in their prediction of the inevitable happy ending. Van Gogh tore the flesh out from his paints in an attempt to capture life. Céline puked out the most disgusting aspects of everything he was (and everything his world was) with the tripped-up, insane, jackhammer violence of his language. This is so with all the ancient forms of art. The primitive forms. Chaos – its intrusion into art – is for me, the most charming effect imaginable. I like a man who is honest about his seduction. I like the flamboyant. The undisguised has a talent to it that requires vastly greater courage than the hidden and the genteel. This is why comedy requires bigger balls in performance than tragedy.

To allow the chaos of life, the imperfections of it, the incompleteness of the fleeting moment, to let it burst out of the page, this to me is irresistible magnificence in art. The varying and unpretentious truth of personality. The ferocity of desire out in the open. The claim of mainstream art to ‘truth’ and that ‘invisible authorship’ somehow underpins this ‘truth’ is specious. Truth has nothing to do with art. Or with life for that matter. We write because it feels good. We do stuff in life because we want to. It is moral propaganda and puritanical oppression to speak of ‘truth’ as being superior to desire. When was the last time you did something because it was the ‘truth?’ If there’s one single universal truth to our lives, it’s desire. We are driven by it. Art is all about it. And without personality, there is no desire. There is no art.

What the hell is ‘truth’ anyway? Lies – even false emotions – can feel just as ‘true’ if they’re thought to be ‘shared’ by a majority of people. This is why so much of mainstream art is cliché, histrionics and contrivance. Because ‘art as truth’ can only either be an incredible pretention rendered possible by elite domination, or the crassest kind of appeal to ‘what we all think and feel.’ No, the whole business of ‘truth’ in art is diabolically abstract, and must be avoided as far as possible.

That leaves then, the truth of personality. What is true for me need not be true for you. But this is who I am. And it is my prerogative as an artist to challenge your sense of truth, with mine. Conversely, it is your prerogative as an audience to hate me for it. Or to love me for it. But at any rate, to expect from me, the necessary divagations of outrageous and unique personality.

This for me clinches it. It answers the question Why? Why I am both a writer and a publisher. As a writer, I feel obligated to expose the purely (insanely) unpredictable and outrageous spaces of my own personality. And as a publisher, I feel obligated to put forward this challenge to the mainstream insistence on ‘invisible authorship’ and ‘truth in art.’ Of course, some of my authors will write in the ‘invisible’ style. Style is not so much the point. After all, I am no tyrant (ahem), and sometimes, a book will appeal to me for reasons I cannot quite comprehend. But in my very passion for first-time authors, I would say I am underlining my preference for chaos, for a rambunctiousness, an incompleteness, a personality in the writing, because this to me is everything in art. Without it, with the artificial bloodless sheen that the elitist notion of art imposes on artistic products, art becomes dead. It loses its heart and its grip on the hearts of people. It becomes an elite commodity, while the slop people are made to watch and consume is called ‘entertainment.’

No indeed. To bring back the magic of the book, you must bring back the magic of personality as it shows through the book. Lack of personality has all but destroyed the pleasure of reading, by making it the dowdy sister of entertainment. The artist-writer must be the Fool of the modern age. The Fool is a phenomenal character in the culture of medieval Europe. He challenges power and entertains, usually by affecting an idiot outrageousness, a blithe sort of ignorance of convention and the layers of domination which envelop and strangle those around him. He pretends to be a nincompoop but in doing so, takes enormous risks. He leaves ‘truth’ to the church and the priests, and adopts the far more dangerous path of scandalous, scabrous personal authorship. He challenges truth with personality. Above all, he rejects high seriousness. As does the earliest ‘modern novel,’ which is the very soul of personality. The earliest novels are outrageous and have authors who speak directly to the reader as Thackeray does. As I like all authors to do. The Fool is who I am, who I see myself as. His chaos, his outrageousness, his rejection of high seriousness and ‘truth’ which are relegated to the sphere of religion, this is what I aspire to.

But damn, who would have thought it? That I would figure this all out, thanks to Facebook and Thackeray?! (mumble grumble mumble…) Pfft…

Revenge Ink is looking for rad new material for 2011, if you have insanity, craziness, utterly OTT magnificence, if you risk losing your job for your ideas, your wife or husband for your beliefs, if you’d rather rot in the street than work for the dickwipe who’s your boss, NOW’S THE TIME to send us your stuff people!

It’s sad, it’s fantastic, I’m writing again. I’m working on a novel, a second one, in case you were confused and hadn’t bought or read my first, UGLY DUCKLING (big crime in my book!). It feels wonderful but the cycles of creativity are hard to bear. A friend of mine used to say to me, oh no wonder you’re in a crap mood, you’re writing again! It was a variant of the ‘oh you have your period’ jibe, but unfortunately true.

My novel-writing isn’t a fun thing. I mean it is when I start, it feels like being in love again, like being with a sacred lover. A sacred, secret, deep and extremely fulfilling lover. But then it starts to go downhill because such a jealous, exhausting lover, I hope you never have! Like I said in my last blog post, writing is a sculpting of the emotions. All art is strictly speaking the same, but writing and music are the most mystical. They don’t use solid materials. They use abstract units of meaning, even if words require paper and books, and music requires a recording medium (now). But in actual terms, writing and music use no materials for their creation. They go straight to the heart, soul, brain, nervous system. Music is perhaps the most mystical of the arts. But words themselves are mystical if you think about it. Why certain sounds to express meaning? A constantly shifting use of sounds among different peoples? Words themselves, in this sense, being formed of sounds, are a subset of music. And therefore profoundly, undeniably, inescapably mystical.

At least that’s how I see it. In today’s shit-bucket world, good writing is all about rules and highly schooled gibberish. But I don’t like that kind of writing. Perfect form doesn’t move me. I like writing that reaches beyond the intellect and the rules of form and literary crapola, and enters the heart in a rapturous, unmediated, gut-munch sort of way. I like it messy, I like words that feel unique, immediate, unrehearsed, and even if they are rehearsed, I like it when they feel they are made of raw human flesh, when they aren’t fantastically perfect and artificial. Such writing has emotional weight as far as I’m concerned, it carries mystical possibilities. Bukowski moves me for this reason. John Updike does not.

The way I write is, if not mystical, definitely mysterious. It builds up, to paraphrase Bukowski, and then gob-smashes down on me like a giant wave. WHOOSH! But unlike Hank for whom it was a pleasure, with me writing is not. Well not entirely. I am deeply happy when I’m writing at long last. It feels like I’m alive again, like I was dead all this time that I wasn’t writing. So it isn’t work either, I don’t mean that. But when I write, I control little of what’s going on. I feel like I’m in a trance or something (although I’m not) and that the book is writing itself (although it isn’t). Of course it isn’t. But it sure feels like it is. I have to run almost, like a child who’s being dragged along the street by a mother who’s too tall and so the kid has to rush and run constantly to keep up. It’s exhausting. Debilitating, depressing. The images arrive, the words, in a rush of blindness, they don’t wait, the mood descends, the movement is there. It must be followed. And followed NOW, relentlessly, without time or space for rest. It’s like a rhythm that must be kept up with, snip snap, clip clap, no time for sitting, reflecting, looking out at the trees. I do not form, set down or create. Gopal, my brother, writes like that. I do not. I write like a bedeviled fool, like I’m possessed by demons, a despicably divine madness. And this is why my emotions do the f*cking shimmy when I start to write a book. It sounds crazy when you put it like that. Write a book. It sounds impossibly huge. Unfeasable. Last year, when I was accepting manuscripts from authors and doing no writing myself, not a word (except something resembling a diary), I marveled that anyone would be fool enough, insane enough, to waste their lives writing a book. It seemed absurdly time-consuming, I admired anyone who could do it. And I wondered how I had been able to do it, me! And why, why on earth! Like other people, I even used the word ‘discipline’ about writing. Man, I thought, these people who stayed home for days on end and sat in front of their computer and wrote this stuff. But how?

When I write, it has nothing to do with discipline. It is a type of enslaved dementia. If I have a sense of clear controled words that I am typing, when I do have a sense of that, the writing is crap, banal, laborious. So over the last few years, I have learned not to write when I’m in that state. When it doesn’t ‘come,’ I don’t write. This can be depressing too. When I’m not writing, and the mood can disappear for days, I feel like I’ve been dumped by that ruthless (but divine) demon lover. And I get wrenchingly depressed. It is good to have a boy around at such times, or booze, friends, restaurant dates, but life doesn’t work that way. I hope not to go through that this time. This time I have Revenge Ink (yeah right). No really, I hope this time, to be good about it all (?!).

For all these reasons, there is the slight wearing thin of my emotional state when I write. I write when I’m in the mood, but I tend to work to exhaustion. Outside of the world of what I’m writing, I become alone and moody. It’s ups and downs all the way. I have to admit, this time, my inner imaginative world has yet to fully come alive. I am too distracted with Revenge Ink. But I am buzzing around it, I write and scratch and carve. Even if the world doesn’t fully show itself and only peeps out dimly from behind the Bodhi bushes, I hack at it because I have no choice. I tell myself it is showing itself gradually and even for that I must be grateful. Because even this feels fantastic. It is an unbelievable act of grace to be able to write. To be bestowed this gift, this inner beautiful world. Even if it is the world of my already lived life.

When I’m not writing, I am equanimous, well ok, not quite, but I am even-keeled. Self-contained. I am pleased to potter about, I pass the time, I watch TV, I do this and that. But when I’m writing, time begins to hang heavy, things go cock-eyed, I feel like I’m hanging off a cliff of some sort. And I don’t like it.

But here I am. Damned bloody grateful for the new book that is installing itself in my soul, and f*cking delighted to accept the shit with the bliss, the beatitude, the sheer incredible honor of writing. I thank the stars. Or my own inner spirit. For having chosen this life.

Amen!

No doubt about it. You have to make a choice. You have to choose between the expedient and the true. And the true always feels better. Even if it’s tougher to live with.

It’s strange. Things are starting to go really well for Revenge Ink, but certain people only count success in terms of money and not a little money but a lot. They talk patronizingly to me and tell me but you have to do this and you have to do that. You can’t do this and you can’t do that. All I want to say is WHO DIED AND MADE YOU THE BIG CHEESE, ASSH*LE? Luckily I work with people who are like me, who have got what I’m about. You cannot imagine how lucky I am. And how hard that is to find.

I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell again. After years. And he talks about the Hero and the stages of his life. And he says everything must be given up. I don’t mean I am something extraordinary here as THE hero. We are all heroes and our journeys are always similar in this respect. We have to give sh*t up and at other times, stand firm and give nothing up. Knowing the difference is to work from within, from the heart, not from some dictated outward principle. It’s not intellectual, it’s a thing you get from the blood. The spiritual is nothing abstract. It begins with the raw bare simplicity of the blood. It ends with the simplest things. Kindness. Warmth. Tipping the waiter. But it always starts with something real simple, your desire, which sits in your blood and thumps up your heart when you know what you want is close at hand. Fear of not getting it, of f*cking up, losing everything, this kind of sh*t blocks you and then you’re stuck and unhappy and you have to LEARN how to be spiritual. You have to read books and listen to Gurus and stuff, but the bare-bones naked truth is, YOU KNOW. Fact is you don’t need to learn to be spiritual. You just have to have the balls to look within. To go from your own lies to your own truth, the ease of one, the difficulty of the other, and then, when you’ve tasted from the gutters of hell, from the difficulty to joy. This is the path of evolution, whichever point you start at. It sucks for a while but when it starts to work it really does.

I want to thank all those who’ve been supportive because it feels like we really are making friends, getting through to people and it feels f*cking fantastic. Ironically, people in your personal life tend to get confused and wander off when this happens, I mean men. Men aren’t comfortable with a strong successful woman, even when they know me. Even when they like this about me as it pertains to them. But yeah, I hear you. Screw them. (No kidding!)

But today was a good day. I was out today. Zooming through the city on my Piaggio Zip. Like one of my authors said recently, Zips are cool. They sure are. I zigged and zagged through the cars and man it felt good to speed up on an open road in the unforgiving cold. The freedom was exhilarating. This is the freedom I feel when I think about Revenge Ink. Ecstatic, breathtaking. And some dipsh*t thinks he can tell me that’s no good? Why? Because I’m not buying cars with my profits? Well, do what you want f*ckhead, but stay out of my way. This is sh*t you don’t get it if you’re giving it to the Man. You may think I’m lucky to have it, but luck has nothing to do with it. Persistence and a slight penchant for excess combined with an almost perilous recklessness. That’s what I have. But man, wouldn’t trade it for anything.

So there it is. Have a good one and see you soon!

(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!