For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

My friend Alison. Musing en route home.

I told Alison I’d thought long and hard before I got my own tat back in the wayback days.

(1) Not on a spot subject to sagging with age.

(2) Not an image that will “date.” (No J. R. Ewing. No “Empire Strikes Back.”)

Alison ventured that a “Who shot J.R.?” tat would be pretty rad. And I see her point. Thinking: On a bicep. The traditional location of “MOTHER.”

Then Alison’s friend Jimmy suggested a tat of Betty Loren Maltese.

Which I can imagine. So I am pondering. A hyper-real Betty Loren Maltese tat. Like those heart-wrenching tats of dead toddlers that some aunties and grannies display.

Life will deliver a few moments when something substantial is about to happen, when you know it’s substantial, when you’ve done everything you could to prepare for the moment, but still, you just don’t know. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. I felt that way when I was getting married, when both of my kids were being born, when I graduated college, and incredibly, when I was standing in front of that stupid Carl’s Jr. Oh my God. There is no stopping this now. Please tell me this will turn out all right. You take a leap of faith with life. You inhale and exhale. You hope.

In addition to a great many bad books lost to the sands of time, there’s also a long history of successful self-published authors getting big deals with major houses. Today, though, self-publication crackles with possibility as never before. Witness the March news that the thriller author Barry Eisler had backed out of a half-million-dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press, his new publisher. He’d decided that he could, over time, make more money publishing without their help. Conversely, young Amanda Hocking, she of the vast success generated from self-publishing nine e-books, accepted a seven-figure advance from St. Martin’s, the same publisher that had just lost Eisler. Hocking issued a sassy statement that she was tired of answering e-mails all the time and just wanted to write.

Don’t miss the rebuttal.

That does it. This is it. 1979 marked some kind of something, the likes of which we may never again witness.

Published in 1979: India’s brilliant How to Care for a Guinea Pig.

I can never get enough of this.

This year’s Calamari “ePress” financial report features rants on eBooks, Facebook, distribution & other things useful or not to others crazy enough to have a small independent press.

Amanda Hocking is 26^* years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published. This is her blog. And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per book¹/70% per sale for the Kindle store – that she makes a lot of money from her monthly book sales. (Perhaps more importantly: a publisher on the private Reading2.0 mailing list has said, to effect: there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.)