An Update 31 Years in the Making

It seems like it’s been awhile, doesn’t it?

I guess ‘a while’ is only ‘a month’ in this case, and given how often and lengthy my hiatuses can be, that doesn’t seem like too much of a strike against me. Then again, maybe it is. Maybe the seven or eight people who read this blog are refreshing it on the daily in the hopes that I’ll post some sort of groundbreaking insight into the craft and works that make up Luke Ganje. Is that likely? Well, no. Are you insane? I’m more likely to be the cover model for the novel “How to Have Great Hair and Keep It.” But the simple fact of the matter is that I actually have some news to talk about this time, so while I’m approaching this post with the same level of professionalism and panache as everything else (see: None), that’s pretty spiffy.

See, I’m publishing a book in a month and a half.

On August 7th, 500 pages of my most demented imagination will be exposed to the world and I’m pretty excited about it. It’s called “It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time” and showcases work that I’ve never posted on this site. While the majority of the work here is contemplative and (some would say) morose, this collection is part of the opposite end of my writing spectrum. It’s absurdist, it’s bizarre, it’s strange and bleak and often nihilistic, and it’s funny. Or at least it’s supposed to be. It’s a collection of 11 short stories (12, if you count the appropriately titled “Author’s Notefesto”) that all weave and intersect into one another to build what I’m calling “The First Ever Almost-Novel”. It’s basically like the movie “Crash” or any one of those crappy vignette films that came out for a while except, you know, better.

I know I’ve written at length about my disdain for self-publishing in the past, a topic I tackle with humor in the aforementioned Notefesto, and rest assured my view on the topic hasn’t changed. I still loathe the saturation of the market that occurs when a company says anyone with a functional PDF file and an Amazon account can be a published writer. I hate the fact that my first ever book will not be coming out with the fanfare of a publisher at my back, that when people ask who published my book I’ll have to swallow some lingering disgust and say ‘Myself’. But the one thing that has changed is my annoyance with the publishing world has grown a little over the years. I’m getting older every day and with each of those days comes the potential for a time when I can’t write anything ever again, and I’ve found that to be uniquely sobering as we all stumble and fall through the nightmarish hellscape that is 2020.

See, we’re always running out of time. And as I sat back one evening, thinking about what I’ve done and why I’ve done it, I decided that at least once I would take matters into my own hands. I take immense pride in what I do, I always have, and it didn’t seem right to me that 11 stories I enjoyed writing very much would never see the light of day. It would be having a child and locking it in a closet until it eventually died. (Don’t argue with me, parents of the world, it would be exactly like that). In short, I came to despise the nature of the publishing world with all of its form letter rejections and pretentious narratives that said they didn’t have a home for my epic of absurd violence, dead children, and profanity. Okay…I’ll admit, when I put it like that it doesn’t sound nearly as victorious as I hoped, but my point remains:

I wrote these stories. They represent me as I take a baseball bat to the institutions and traits seen in humanity that I loathe. They’re me dealing with the world the only way I know how… by showcasing the things I hate most and killing them. Well, in print anyway. That’s what humor is for, at least to me. It’s looking at something despicable and then ridiculing it to such an extent that you’d feel embarrassed for ever thinking that could one day be you. That’s not to say these stories will make a better you, as they almost certainly will not. Hell, some of you might even find the contents of the book to be uniquely upsetting and offensive, but that’s not why they were written.

In my own way, I’ve had enough. Not just with the fact that the still-laboring pulse of my Dream hinges on the acceptance of someone I do not know based on a cover letter and two pages of a 600 page novel, but with the type of people who inspired each one of these terrible stories. And I wasn’t going to wait around for someone to tell me that they’re good enough.

Because they are.

I wrote them.

And even if they’re not for you, even if you dislike the content in these pages, they will exist somewhere beyond a file on my computer. They’ll be out in the world where they deserve to be.

See, I’ll be leaving the city I grew up in after April of next year and I wanted to leave behind something to show for all the time I’ve spent here. For better or worse, this is it. There may come a time when I look back and think I should’ve published one of my books of depth and emotion, but oh well…you know what they say: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Preorder here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-a-novel/x/22598182#/