Just Wrought

Leveraging Just Wrought’s Obscurity as a Feature, not a Bug

 

Okay. So yesterday’s experiment with blowing the dust off of Just Wrought’s mic went… well… not poorly—experiments can only be said to go poorly if they don’t yield data, and this one definitely did that. The data I took away from yesterday’s post “Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?” is that not many people are going to hit my blog for information about what I’m up to during the Covid – 19 Corona Virus Crisis. Blogs are so 12 years ago. I get it.

But now that I know Just Wrought is (for now) a place where only people who really care what I’m doing go, I can shift its use from one-way information flow, to a two-way back-and-forth. For instance, I’m about to make a move in the space of virtual performance, but before I do, I’d love to sort of test drive the text of the crowd funding release to work out all the kinks, and answer all the questions that might come up.

The Pitch:

Help me pay actors to record my short stories.

The Gist:

I retired from theatre, particularly play-writing, seven years ago to pursue other sorts of writing and story-telling. In that time I have written a wild, weird quasi-memoir called The Starting Gate (published in 2016), a novel (yet-to-be-published) inspired by my time working as the only male executive assistant in the senior executive suite of Washington Mutual Bank during the run up to the Great Recession, and countless essays, poems and short stories. I. And am sad to admit that I have given those short stories (if you’ll forgive the lame proto-pun) short shrift. That I,s, I do sometimes post them on line and I do read them at my monthly literary reading Loud Mouth Lit (which I founded 3 ½ years ago), but other than that limited exposure, they sit on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust, perhaps never to be read again.

I’d like to change that by paying professional actors, first with my own money and then with yours, to record these stories and ultimately offer them back to the public as audio book quality recordings.

Here’s how I see it working.

I open an Indiegogo campaign, with a goal of raising $7,000 dollars. This is how I raised the money to publish my book The Starting Gate, so I can vouch for it as a tried and true method. The pitch will contain an explanation of my plan essentially paraphrasing what I’ve written above. I will set contribution levels as follows:

Story Patron

Give me $10 and I’ll give you a story, recorded by professional actor local to the Pacific Northwest.

Collection Patron

Give me $25 and I’ll give you all seven of the stories I hope to record with local professional actors.

Book Patron

Give me $50 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the paperback edition of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 15$ value.)

First Edition Patron

Give me $100 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the limited first edition hardback version of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 25$ value and there are only 20 of them left), PLUS I will record a sonnet of your choosing by William Shakespeare, written back during a similar epidemic which closed all of the theaters in England.

Casting Patron

Give me $500, and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but also I will give you the option of nominating a professional Pacific Northwest actor whom you wish to record one of my stories.

Commissioning Patron

Give me $1,000 and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but you also get to commission a brand new, original story from me based on beginning parameters that you help provide. And I’ll let you cast the actor, too, if you want.

 

For every $1,000 I raise, I will record a story, paying a local professional actor (whom I worked with back in my theatre daze) at least $500 to do so.

Why not the whole thousand? Well, there are several expenses associated with this endeavor in addition to the actor’s fee, such as:

• The director’s fee. (This would be for the services of the incomparable book artist, Lyssa Browne, and whose studio, Cedar House Audio, the stories will be recorded.)
• Post-production costs. These range from paying a sound designer to do the final mix, to any other costs associated with bringing you a professional audio book quality offering.
• Administrative costs. Indiegogo, just like every other crowdfunding platform, charges a fee for its services. In this case, it would be ~5%, which is ~$50 off the top of every $1,000 raised. Other hidden fees around distribution will also apply.
• Promotion costs. I would only be spending money to promote this if I had a little extra left over after everything else got paid.
• Paying forward. In the unlikely event that there is money leftover out of the $1,000 per story I’ve budgeted, l will plow the surplus forward into the next story. I honestly don’t anticipate this being a problem, but I am ready and eager to deal with it if it arises.

 

So that’s my initial sketch of my plan. What do you think? I welcome any and all of your feedback in the comments.

 

Also, what should I call this project?

THE STARTING GATE for Father's Day

The idea came from my good friend and former theatre collaborator, John Langs, when I handed him his copy of the limited first edition hardcover version of The Starting Gate and he grinned and said, “Oh, man. I gotta get a copy of this for my dad!”

Lightbulb!

Of course this is a good book for Father’s Day. Not only is there a chapter (or two) that zeroes in on my relationship with my own step-father, but also the entire book is dedicated to my boyos, Declan and Keelan. In other words, this book was written as a father, in an attempt to capture moments in my life that my own sons might not otherwise be able to conceive of: simple things, like telephones being attached to walls, and having to go out and look for a job by walking up and down the boulevard and sticking your head in ever business you passed.

Here are a couple of the things I am doing to promote The Starting Gate as the perfect Father’s Day gift (though a good bottle of bourbon never hurt either):

• Bought a week’s sponsorship of The Seattle Review of Books. (This excellent new site founded by Martin McClellan and Paul Constant provides substantial, thoughtful reviews of books of all kinds, as well as blogging about the literary scene here in Seattle and beyond. It is a growing force for good in Seattle’s literary scene and wider world of arts.
  
• Slashed the cost of the Kindle version in half. It’s now $4.49 (that’ s 82% off the hardcover version!) Available here. 
  
• Released the paperback version. It’s available here: https://www.createspace.com/6282351
• Will give away free Audible downloads of the audio book to the first 10 people who message me. (So message me! Auctioning the limited first edition hardcover version of the book over at eBay. It’s currently bidding at $12, which is over 40% off the $25 cover price.

If you can think of another way I can make the book easier to get in time for Father’s day, please let me know!

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Moving THE STARTING GATE

Since the start of my Indie Go Go campaign to fund the publication of my book The Starting Gate, that site was the best, and really only, way to order the limited first edition hardcover version. As of midnight, that’s going away. So you have half a day left to go here to get it while the getting’s good. After that, the hardcover edition will be available for list price at Amazon here: http://amzn.com/0997074701

But Amazon is boring, and arguably somewhat evil. They certainly take the lion’s share of the sale price for themselves, so I am adding a fun way to get The Starting Gate for a deep discount, over at Ebay. Every week, starting now, I will be offering the book for auction starting at 40% off. At the end of the week one book will go to the highest bidder (or, you can always just pull the trigger at the list price of $24.95). Just go here:
http://ebay.to/1Ww08VT

Alternative versions, electronic and audiobook are available as always…

Electronic:

You can purchase the Kindle version by clicking here.

You can purchase the Nook or iPad version by clicking here.

Audio Book:

The audiobook version of The Starting Gate, narrated by yours truly, is available across a variety of different platforms, including Audible , Amazon, iTunes, Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, The Audiobook Store, Downpour, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Playster.
 

 

How to get to THE STARTING GATE

 

If there’s one thing this retired playwright has learned about the independent publishing business, it’s that delays that would be impossible— unthinkable in the theatre—are par for the course. And so delivery of the hardcover version of my book, The Starting Gate, so beautifully designed by K. Brian Neel has been pushed back yet again, and may not happen until the very end of February, if then.

So here’s how you can, if you so choose, get to The Starting Gate NOW!

 

Electronic Versions:

You can purchase the Kindle version by clicking here.

You can purchase the Nook or iPad version by clicking here.

 

Audio Book:

The audiobook version of The Starting Gate, narrated by yours truly, is available across a variety of different platforms, including Audible , Amazon, iTunes, Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, The Audiobook Store, Downpour, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Playster.

That said, if you are interested in listening to the book, but are new to audio books on-line, just message me and I'll offer some "off-line solutions."

 

Printed Versions:

Despite delays, the limited first edition hardcover is coming! I’ll be passing them out to people who have pre-ordered them at the IndieGoGo site at my book release party on March 14, at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill, starting at 7 pm. For more information on the party, go here.

The paperback version of the book will be available in the Summer of 2016.

 

About THE STARTING GATE:

The Starting Gate is a smooth cocktail consisting of thirteen interconnected chapters, tracking my life from my first job as a stock boy at a Maryland country bar (called the Starting Gate) where my boss once shot a man dead for trying to rob the local drug store, to my days as the only white kid on an all-black labor crew at the National Archives. You'll learn what it's like to spend days cleaning the high-rise glass windows of Manhattan and the rules you need to know to enjoy a cocktail with the greatest living bartender, Murray Stenson.

 

What some Amazing Authors are Saying about The Starting Gate:

"Do you want to know how to behave in a bar? Do you want to know how to live? Maybe they're not so different. Paul Mullin finds a real honor and wisdom in the messy practice of a life, and he makes me wish I too had learned how to work as a kid at a little country tavern in Maryland called the Starting Gate—even on Taco Night. How am I suddenly nostalgic for a life that wasn't even my own?"
– Tom Nissley, Jeopardy Champion and author of A Reader’s Book of Days

“Paul Mullin enters sacred territory in American Letters, the Temple of the Tavern wherein both grace and alcohol are dispensed. Like its successful predecessors, FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH, THE LIARS CLUB, and THE TENDER BAR. Mullin’s entertaining memoir is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, to explain the mystery of the now with a Drunkard’s Walk through his past of hard manual labor, art, and Zen Buddhism. It’s funny and moving, and Mullin’s chapter on how to properly appreciate a bar should be required reading for all those coming of age.”
– Robert Schenkkan, Tony Award-winning author of All the Way

"Playwright Paul Mullin deploys his gift for vivid storytelling in this lively memoir of work, play and apprentice barkeeping."
– Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 

 

 

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Official Finisher! "Gateless" - Chapter 13 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

I got a compliment from a friend the other day that made me feel very proud in a modest sort of way.  He said, “Well, Paul, you do tend to finish things.” We were talking about a novel I have recently started. I have no idea if I will finish it. But with my friend’s kind approbations added to the analysis, I like my odds.

 

"The Ending Gate": Chapter 12 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

In what I can only describe as an attempt to kick my own butt with a leap of faith, I started publically reading chapters from The Starting Gate at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill in Green Lake long before I had finished the book.  Now it’s a year later, a strong first draft is finished, and there are only two chapters left to present. Will you consider joining me as I read “The Ending Gate”, the twelfth chapter? This chapter tells the story of what happened to me and my brother when our home away from home burned out of existence, and threw us forward, for better or worse, into the rest of our lives.

Here’s a little taste:

Back in 1985, neither my brother nor I had any strong theories on how the fire happened, but one fact quickly dawned on both of us, and I have to assume nearly everyone in town. The Starting Gate stood there, condemned and vacant, but also packed with thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor, some, if not most, of it salvageable. This fact must have dawned on John too, because within days of the fire, photocopies of this posting went up all around the property:

ANYONE FOUND HERE AT NIGHT
WILL BE FOUND HERE IN THE MORNING.

 

Here are the details:

When: Monday, February 9, at 8pm

Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

Why: Why not?

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"Confession at St. Andrews": Chapter 11 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

 

We’re getting close now.  I finished my book, The Starting Gate, a month or so ago. And now we’re even coming up on the end of my public chapter readings at the St. Andrews Bar and Grill. There are only three left now.

So I hope you’ll  consider joining me as I read “Confession at St. Andrews”, the eleventh chapter of my book, about my favorite bar in Seattle.

 

I’m at the St. Andrew’s.

It doesn’t matter when. Unlike the Starting Gate the St. Andrew’s still exists in what I’m currently calling the present, and so there’s a changelessness to the time I spend here.

The bartender Mark, who also happens to be one of the owners, is again holding court, again stringing along some beer and food salesmen, who sit a few stools down from me. Mark has told me that he has the vendors come in only on Thursdays, which is his day to open the bar. He’ll listen to their sales spiels, but they in turn have to listen to his shtick: his filthy stories, his dumb dirty jokes, and his cutting critiques of the products they’re hawking.

I sit on the corner so I can watch both the stage (i.e behind the bar) and audience, (i.e the bar stools.) It’s an old trick from my playwright days. Always watch the audience. Mark knows I’m watching and he knows that I plan someday to write about this place, so his performance takes on an extra enthusiasm. I’m waiting for him to say something utterly filthy and outrageous. Something designed to shock the salesmen and even me. It’ll be tough. Together we make a pretty jaded crowd.

“These young guys, come in here, trying to score some hot chick their age. I say, ‘Let me give you some advice.’”

Okay, here we go. This should be good.

Here are the details:

When: Monday, January 12, at 8pm

Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

Why: Why not?

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I was the One at Home: Chapter 10 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

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“I was the One at Home”: Chapter 10 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

 

I finished a solid first draft of The Starting Gate about a month ago. Then I spent another two weeks putting a polish on it, rewrote the ending on some excellent advice from a good friend, and sent it under his cover to a literary agent in New York. The reply was surprisingly prompt, but, not surprisingly, discouraging. Apparently the book’s “candor and soul, art and wit” are “admirable”, but alas, the work is too “quiet and thoughtful… insufficiently sensational” to attract a publisher. If I were famous enough, maybe; but since I am not, no dice.

Since I honestly don’t know what to do next, I am going to do what I’ve already promised myself to do: read the next chapter, as scheduled, at The St. Andrew’s Bar And Grill next Monday night. So would you please consider joining me as I read “I was the One at Home”, the tenth chapter of my book The Starting Gate? It’s about the night in the house on Sweet Air Road when it was just me, my step-dad, and his massive left hemisphere stroke.

Here’s a quickie excerpt:

.... He reaches out his hand, grasping for things on the table that aren’t there. “Do you want me to get you something write with?” I ask. He nods vigorously. I get him a ballpoint and a small pad with some advertisement on the banner. He begins scrawling, but it looks funny. I turn the pad around to read it.

“Call your mother.”

“Dad, mom’s in Towson.” Towson is 10 miles away. “I should call 911. Let me call 911.”

He shakes his head more furiously than before. He taps fiercely on that pad with his fat forefinger. (The same meaty hand that slaps our faces, heavy and fast.) So I call my mom at the real estate office, where she’s manning the phones in the hopes of picking up a loose lead. Mom needs loose leads. She’s not exactly a born sales woman. But there’s another reason she volunteers to work essentially unpaid for three or four hours nearly every evening. It gets her out of the house at the time when my Dad’s most likely to be drunk.

Mom answers the phone at the real estate office. I tell her the situation and ask her to let me call 911. “I’m pretty sure he’s having a stroke, Mom.”

“Oh Paul, how can you know that?”

“He’s not talking, Mom.”

“Well let me talk to him.”

“Mom, I can’t let you talk to him. HE CAN’T TALK.”

And here are the details:

When: Monday, December 1, at 8pm

Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

Why: Why not?

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“Bars: A User’s Guide”: Chapter 9 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

 

Next Monday I’ll be reading the ninth chapter of my book The Starting Gate at St. Andrews Bar And Grill in Green Lake. This chapter is titled “Bars: A User’s Guide”, and offers a brief review of the rules everyone should know when availing themselves of that venerated technology, the public house. As reward for close attention paid, I will offer a bonus virtual visit to the Zig Zag in the time of the incomparable Murray Stenson, the most perfect cocktail experience anyone could hope for.

Here’s a quickie excerpt:

 

Just as there are certain poems that can only be best understood once you have learned more basic poems, Murray will strike the uninitiated as a rather average bartender, friendly, unimposing, as eager to pull you a draft as he is to stir you a handcrafted cocktail. In fact, Murray has a joke he loves to tell:

A few years back a bunch of guys, maybe five, came into the Zig Zag after a Seahawks game. The first four all ordered different fancy cocktails. The fifth guy asks for a Jack and Coke. His friends erupt in outrage. “You can’t do that here. Don’t you know what this place is? This is that place for fancy cocktails. The Zig Zag. And that’s Murray.

“Oh, okay, okay,” the guy says, throwing up his hands in surrender. “In that case, I’ll take a Crown and Coke.”

Murray tells that story, I’m sure, to deflate a little of the pomposity that has blown up around the cocktail scene over the last decade or so, but also to let you know unequivocally that, if you order a Jack and Coke, he’ll happily make you the best goddamned Jack and Coke you’ve ever had.

 

And here are the details:

When: Monday, November 3, at 8pm
Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103
Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know
How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.
Why: Why not?

“Johnny Got his Gun”: Chapter 8 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

 

Next Monday I’ll be reading the eighth chapter of my book The Starting Gate at St. Andrews Bar And Grill in Green Lake. This chapter is titled “Johnny Got his Gun”, and tells the story of what happened when some hillbilly hold-up artists tried to rob the pharmacy across the street from the bar I worked in as a teenager.

Over the years, my views of the role of the gun in civilized society have evolved to a position practically diametric in opposition to the one inculcated in me as kid; but nothing in life is truly clear and simple, and if you think the myth of “The Good Guy with A Gun” is nothing but that, a harmful myth, then you might want come consider this story.

Here’s a quickie excerpt:

 

“See what happened was there was a guy at the door that was holding the girl and this other fellah with the screwdriver on the little girl’s throat.”

“Who does that?” my brother interjected at the table.

“Right?” said John. “One guy’s got this cannon of a .357. The other’s got nothing but a screw driver.” All three of us shook our heads and grimaced at the occasional idiocy of rednecks. Then John continued, “So I said ‘Frosty, are you carrying.’ Or I might’ve said, ‘Are you packin’?’”

“And he said, ‘Yeah.’”

 

And here are the details:

When: Monday, September 29 at 8pm

Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

How: Quick, dirty and FREE! PLUS the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

Why: Why not?

 

 

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