teslala:

A Review of my First Kickstarter Experience and Reading Coming & Crying

   Yes. 

   I could say so much. [I did.]  I might start gushing. [I did.]

   I whimpered on the couch after “His version: We met at a coffee shop. I don’t really remember how, we just started talking.”  At the coffee shop, I bit my lip to stop from shouting YES at lines like “through these tiny cupped hands, these two soft lips, this southern mouth wet with mischief,” but the laughter?  I let that live.  I laughed freely and I didn’t tuck my breath, didn’t hide my face when it darkened or flushed.

   In between stories I took breaks.  Brief pauses where I’d look around for someone to talk to, to shout at, someone to share this with.  Reminded I was in the real public where we refrain from initiating conversations that go “HEY STRANGER I JUST READ THIS INSPIRING STORY ABOUT FUCKING, LET’S CHAT ABOUT HOW IT MAKES YOU FEEL,” (unlike the uninhibited social saturnalia of the Internet) I settled for glancing over my glasses at the older gentleman pawing at the iPad on his lap—until he disappeared a few stories later.

   Fine, sir. Just leave me and the book then; and that’s when I noticed I was petting the thing, closing the book and running my palm across the smooth cover, my fingers trailing across the face for every story, digesting, resetting, allowing each story the space it deserved.

   I finished the book in my backyard, the sun going down on newly-born Minneapolis-in-autumn (wildly agreeable weather).  I felt many things, but mostly I felt satisfied.  The Internet At Large (i.e. Tumblr) set high expectations.  I tried to ignore them.  I wanted to enjoy the book on its own, untempered by the affections of others.  I didn’t want to love it just because it was the thing to do.  Worse, I didn’t want to be let down.  Too often I am let down.  Inflated to a contrived height and abandoned.  Yet, here, from the first words, the first story, I knew I was safe.  We were going someplace new and though it was unknown where we were headed or exactly who held my hand, I knew this feeling would stick.

   Something exciting was happening!  This book (this goddamn book! shout shout shout!) was exceeding every expectation I had.  I wanted to eat the pages and run naked in the street.  I fell in love with every author.  I was satisfied and proud.  Strange, I thought, to feel proud of this book I have nothing to do with, these people I don’t even know. 

   Then I really thought about this business from the beginning.  How I donated money on a whim.  Why not, seems exciting, I thought, and scraped together the dregs of an almost-depleted unemployment account.  Send it out, I reminded myself.  Give it away and it will come back to you.  (I managed to magic myself a job less than a month later, PS.  Although it wasn’t the money I meant as much as what I got later)  I forgot all about it.  Oh yeah I bought that book awhile ago someday it will come to me in the mail and wow my face off.  It better be brilliant for all this waiting.  How the trickle of backer updates began to affect me, how they began to arrive with eerie timing, when I’d begin to shrink from the world and need to be reminded of fresh life, of something hot beyond the horizon; that it is fucking possible to do it all and on your own (with a little help from your sometimes faceless nameless intangible friends) you just need to possess the will to take it all on, to grab hearts with your salty teeth, to sweat, to bleed, etc. </nike> 

   ANYWAY, yeah, and then, oh yeah, the book, that hard loving book with that sexy grey endpaper, I swear I tell you, I was sold as soon as I saw that grey

   I thought it strange at first that I was proud until I realized I’d sat down early on, positioning myself in the audience, the den of the silent participant.  But these days, we are not so silent or removed, are we?  We can be a part of anything, everything.  We can share what we create as we’re doing it, or even before we’ve started.  We can tune in as soon as we’re ready to listen.  The beauty of the new connection. 

New?  Or always there, inherent in humanity?  When I readied myself to leave the cafe, I found him—the gentleman I’d befriended when I peered over my lenses—sitting in the chair behind me.  His face suggested he’d been peeking at my reading.  It was such a short moment, it was so fast, but in that look I loved him too.

((thank you, mostly, for setting free the cages, loosening the stops in my throat))

ahem. 

now. next stop, Nanoka.

405:

“The expression on his face stunned me. He was open, hopeful, a little sad, and waiting. He was a man, a human being, sitting there on the edge of the bed, liking a girl. All of his armor was down and for a minute, he looked angelic.”

—

sarah dopp, THE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT (from COMING AND CRYING)

[ms dopp’s story thoroughly trashed me because it reminded me of dozens (hundreds?) of fumblings with people i didn’t expect to like for more than a couple hours, and whom i didn’t expect to like me at all aside from the fact i was willing and had a penis and mouth.  and i’m reading, and she’s telling her story and i’m reading and i start my little teary piece of the evening, remembering sex, remembering little unsure conversations and mornings after, and how not one of them held me the way she was held because that’s what i needed…

…my cigarette broke and i’m smoking the unfiltered piece.]

405 re: this.

“BETTER THAN A REBOUND FUCK!” should be one of our blurbs.

luckypaperstars:

I just noticed my edition of Coming & Crying is number 156 out of 651.

I got the palindrome edition.

shycynical asked: Will you send a copy of the book to Christine O'Donnell? My treat.

Our first action as C&C PAC! (Maybe we should have you donate the $24 to Scarleteen?)

elleeyeessay:

I actually finished this the weekend I got it, because I got so excited that I had a numbered copy and its kind of like getting an autographed book, but I finished, then kept reading what people said about it on the blog (omg its such a weird feeling. like a bookclub but one-way. like stalking a bookclub) and then read it a second time. This is all a weird thing for me to do, but alas, this is a pretty weird book.

I mean, I have a numbered copy for crying out loud (356/651), which means that I was a backer, and my little donation financed this book. I made it happen. Well, loads of people made it happen. I feel close to the book and the editors and the contributors and the writers in a way that I feel close to reality TV stars, because I watched this book come into being, and in the few months that I started my last quarter at business school, got a part-time job, got another job at the god awful mall, thankfully quit that mall job, got a MBA, still only have a part-time job with no full-time opportunity in sight, this book got some contributors, got edited, got printed, and arrived at my doorstep. An internet idea became a REAL book in like six months. WTF. How is this not weird and totally amazing.

The book is also weird because it is so honest even though it’s the INTERNET. The internet, to me, is a place that a lot of people come to so that they can remain anonymous but say shit and have their words go out there without being held accountable. Well, at least that’s why I probably have a blog, with a reading population of one, because of this passive-aggressive, bi-polar desire to want to say something without people knowing and yet publish it on the world-wide web. But so many people now have these words attached to a full name and a picture, just a google search away from people finding out, and yet they’re just as raw about it as I get when I bitch about my daddy issues and my all around fuckedupness. It kind of makes you think, just maybe, we can potentially be more honest if the internet can spill hearts and make you cry.

It’s hard to pinpoint what to say about the book, because the IDEA of the book is in it of itself pretty rad, but the STORIES are just as, if not more. I’ve been calling it “the sex book,” because this is really the only book I’ve ever read that said “pussy” so many times. And I hate that word. It really freaks me out, I guess, in the same way that these stories freak me out. They’re so raw. I think that’s the right adjective. It’s that feeling you get when you’re watching a movie, and you see how a character just made an awful ass of himself in front of people in that all-too-familiar, unfortunate way, and you can’t help but cower a bit, wanting to look away, and you feel your stomach knot up. But the stories in this book are a lot more brave than I am, and they don’t look away from that awkward, messy, disgusting, unlucky, etc. etc. part of life, and instead capture that knot in the stomach into lines that you’re not gonna be able to look away from or forget, like when she tucks her underwear in her leggings, or when she feels naked in the shower for wanting something and asking for it and then feeling like he was embarrassed for her, or when she relives the pain and then writes it and deletes it and thinks about it and feels separated by it and then retells it just to be a part of it.

And then the messy/awful/tragic moment passes, and you were vulnerable, but you survived, and its that heartbreaking honesty that makes you want to cry and laugh and and hope.

(reblogged from the room where I sat and numbered all 651 of the backer books, where there’s absolutely nothing else I could add.)

lamebot:

gpoyw - reading coming and crying edition

lluviaestelar asked: It's three in the morning, which is significant because last time I was awake at three in the morning I almost quit my job (which I still might do, you never know) and I woke up to see if my roommate was back or not, because we both live where we work and I know, JUST KNOW, she is going to skip out on her shift tomorrow, and so I was outside, mumbling to myself because her car isn't here, and decided to walk to the mailbox because how tragically poetic is it to hope that the there is mail at three in the morning when you are barefoot outside wearing the christmas pajamas you wore when you were ten years old, except then they came down to your feet and now they are just a t-shirt? And the sad thing is, I wasn't even expecting the book, no, I was hoping for my new SHOWER CURTAINS. And then I opened the mailbox and gave a shriek, because my package was NOT lost, and Maryland was NOT too far from New York, and I ran inside because how awful would be to get mugged at three in the morning in christmas pajamas, and now I am here, typing this up for you in the dark, and being so giddy and proud and elated that I already texted a few sleeping friends and told them they HAD to borrow the book I just got.

So. Thank you. All of you. Including the little Pomeranian reading the book on the Tumblr dashboard.

(I totally give stacks of mail a knowing side-eye after this. YOU. YOU! I KNOW WHERE YOU GO NOW.)

(Next time we will ship by Pomeranian.)

ohheymary:

this is my, “i’m postponing my homework to read this book cover-to-cover right now” face.

My sister sent this to me today. It is way funnier than it should be.

Also in a perfect world, petsreadingcomingandcrying.tumblr.com would exist and get a book deal.

(I think I just solved publishing?)