RDSP made quite an impression at this year's festival. Just about everyone commented on the name. People were fascinated by the covers and compelling titles and we made a lot of converts. Here's more pics and the complete lowdown.

Lawson's short poem Where the Heart Isn’t from The Troublesome Amputee will be included in the Dwarf Stars Award anthology and is eligible for the Dwarf Stars Award which is given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA).

Jeremy Shipp's August signing at the Redlands, CA Barnes & Noble was quite a success. The newspaper later reported that "Vacation" was the #1 best seller of the week at the store.

Here are pics from the event.

An irreverent and illustrated look at death featuring 26 ways to die, one for each letter of the alphabet. This collaboration between John Edward Lawson, Dustin LaValley and illustrator Darin Malfi absolutely is not suitable for childen!

The book will debut at Zombiefest in Pittsburgh, PA over Halloween weekend.

October 13, 9 am - 4 pm
MonsterFest
Chesapeake Public Library
298 Cedar Rd.
Chesapeake, VA 23322
Matthew Warner

October 19, 7:30 pm
BottleWorks
Johnstown, PA
Michael Arnzen poetry reading with Gerry LaFemina at the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center (3rd Avenue & Chestnut in Cambria City), sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

October 20, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm
Book 'Em
Waynesboro High School
1200 West Main St.
Waynesboro, VA 22980
Matthew Warner

Although it was just released this year The Million-Year Centipede was actually written quite a long time ago. Explain a little about the history of the book.

I began work on the novel thirty years ago. I was a confused, more-than-a-little-addled music-obsessed late teenager and had just tuned in, turned on and dropped out of college. I had developed a deep fascination for the music of the Doors, and I heard an interview with Ray Manzarek that left me convinced that Morrison had faked his own death. So I figured I'd go find the guy. Trying to decipher clues in his music, I figured that he'd return seven years to the day after his disappearance, and that he'd return to "the land of the fair and the strong and the wise," presumably his beloved Los Angeles. So I went there in July 1978 and stayed in the Morrison Hotel that was featured on the cover of the Doors album of the same name. I kept a journal of that experience, and then returning from there, I decided to wrap that into a novel about a fan who was obsessed with a rock star....I was being gaslighted by some "friend," a former roommate I think, who thought it'd be funny to call me and hang up the phone everywhere I went. I got hang up calls at work, at home, visiting my parents, everywhere. Paranoia was in the air. It all made for a pretty interesting book.

Have your views on writing changed since you originally wrote the book?

Yes and no. My essential views on writing are, I guess, the same. I frequently quote Kerouac's statement from his Biographical Resume from 1957:

"I have been writing my heart out all my life, but only getting a living out of it now, and the attacks are coming in thick. A lot of people are mad and jealous and bitter and I only hope they also can be heard by an expanding publishing program the size of Russia's. Because it's not a question of the merit of art, but a question of spontaneity and sincerity and joy I say. I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it HIS OWN WAY and then we'd have something to read in our old age, instead of the hesitations and cavilings of "men of letters" with blear faces who only alter words that the Angel brought them. . . "

The writing that speaks to me is the writing that no one else could have written but that one writer. I love idiosyncratic work. I love that Robbe-Grillet and Arno Schmidt and Ken Patchen and Brautigan and Calvino and Federman and Beckett and all my other favorite writers are completely and unmistakably themselves. How that's played out in my own writing is that I have always tried to learn and grow, to add more to my arsenal. I've always tended to maximalism rather than minimalism. I remember having a great conversation once with Hank Harrison, Courtney Love's dad, for whom I did some editing. He told me that when he finished a manuscript the first thing he did was take out his "corny-meter" so that he could detect and excise anything corny from his prose....I told Hank that corniness is a part of life, so why arbitrarily choose to exclude that from one's work? Why exclude anything? We read Joyce, Nabokov, and Thomas Mann for what they included rather than excluded....I am open to as many possibilities as I can imagine so that my characters and narrators can be who they want to be. That's there in Million-Year Centipede and in my recent work as well.

Obviously music features in the book prominently. Do you often find inspiration in music?

I would say that hearing is my primary sense. I have learned more and been inspired more by auditory input than by anything else. As significant as my favorite writers are to me, I may actually have learned more of my chops from folks like Firesign Theatre and from rock and roll. I frequently fall in love with rhythmic patterns in music that I feel I must then capture in language. A large section of Cistern Tawdry, for example, is built on a riff by the German band Faust. I've recently built a large section of a novella called My Landlady the Lobotomist on music by Magma, a French band that sang in Kobaian, an imaginary language created by their drummer. Who knows what the heck they're singing about. Who cares? It's amazing stuff, all gutteral and fascinating. I imagine what they are saying, and that inspires me. My imagination is triggered by their music, but no one else would probably ever seen the connection.

I hear that you've recently released a CD. What is Scuff Mud all about?

Ah, Scuff Mud. I always used to say that if I ever began a band, I'd name it Scuff Mud. I grew up in the punk era in Chicago, hanging out with bands like the Cunts, DA!, Bohemia, Paynterband, the Objects and such. I was actually in a band called the Occupants back then. Scuff Mud has such a punk name, doesn't it? Read it backwards!...the CD, includes text from my novel Cistern Tawdry, a forthcoming novella Nin and Nan that's going to be in the new Bizarro Starter Kit (about which I am very excited!), and mostly from My Landlady the Lobotomist. I have characters who sing, narrators who write poems, and so on. I thought it'd be fun to collect some of these pieces and give them musical life. I was talking with my friend Brian Poloncic, who's this brilliant musician in Omaha...and Brian hooked me up with a friend of his, Bryan Day, who runs Public Eyesore Records. Bryan Day has an improvisational music ensemble called Shelf Life. For a couple of tracks, he culled some jams from their pre-existing catalogue and engineered it together with my spoken word. For most of the tracks, he actually got the band together in the studio, and they recorded a bunch of stuff to go with my tracks. He put it all together. He's a genius engineer....Actually, there is a lot of great music-and-fiction stuff coming out these days. Michael Arnzen's CD is terrific. Ripe for Shaking up in Wisconsin is really good. These are things that need to be heard, so Daily and I are starting up an audiojournal for music-and-fiction and are calling it ATTOHO, which is an acronmyn for "After They Tore Our Heads Off."