Book Giveaway

Today I’m giving away free digital copies of my debut novel No Generation. If you like clever, meaningful, brilliant writing that opens up your life in a bunch of unexpected ways, then this is a novel for you. If not, whatevers.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EC424R2/

The Land of Exhausting Extroversion

So this week I put out a novel called No Generation. I think it's a smart, insightful take on the lives of people in their twenties. I think it's the kind of thing I would have liked to read in my twenties, and that's why I wrote it. It's got grit. It's got drama. It's got honesty. And it has a lot more than airheads who think they're the most interesting people in the world. They're in there, but they don't get to drown everyone else out.

There is, however, a problem that occurs when you put out your own novel. You have to promote. You have to promote a lot, and you have to win out in a world where every fuckwit with some bandwidth can trumpet constantly about how awesome they are. It's exhausting. In moments of self-loathing and self-pity, you even start to feel like you yourself are a participant in this endless fuckwittery. Maybe you are. Who can judge?

The worst part of it all is that people with empty ideas are able to produce so many more of them. If you don't have to think about what you're saying, if you just talk everything out on Youtube instead, then you can produce a huge volume of material without effort. When you are the type who likes to ponder words and try to give them some meaning before sharing, you can vanish.

So what to do? Can the quiet survive? Should they? Maybe it comes down to a question of luck or fate, but if you leave it all to forces beyond your control, then you could wait a lifetime and only ever hear silence. Ultimately, for me, it has to come down to the desire to connect with people in a way where everyone involved feels brighter and more energized. That has to be the motivation to push through exhaustion, whether it works or not on any given day.

I promote on. Thank you for reading this.

Ricky Allman, "Undertable" (2011)

I've started an Indiegogo campaign to try and fund a novel / webspace that I want to create. I'm interested in how we shape and are shaped by our cities, and how this can respond to the global shifts in consciousness that are taking place with regards to old institutions and borders.

View it here.

Pretty much exactly what I felt like teaching first year English classes.

Billarity ensued.