I’ve been working on being more vulnerable with my writing, getting comfortable with the imperfections, throwing a book together that doesn’t make much sense. I like the messiness of it, the process. But a traditional publication route would not have given me these opportunities. This is a long way of saying Naked Parrot, as it stands today, would never find a home in a traditional publishing house. I designed the book with that in mind, resisting a cleaner manuscript. This writing is not workshop approved.
Some of the stories and poems in Naked Parrot I revised meticulously, over years and years, starting from when I was about twenty-one. Others I wrote on my phone while sitting on the toilet or riding in a Waymo. Those went into the book more or less the way they came out. I left some spelling errors and typos in on purpose, just to show the process.
Publish or perish?
I never sent this book to an agent or a publisher. In my twenties I tried hard to make it as a writer, and a lot of these pieces come from that stretch. If you happen on a more serious story, one with Big Themes and even Bigger Words, it more than likely came from a period in time when I thought there would be nothing as cool as publishing a Real Book. Some of the more playful pieces, the pieces with more expansive prose, and most of the poetry, came from a more mature place in my life, usually written in my mid-thirties, when I stopped tying my identity to Becoming a Writer, and started just not really giving a fuck. The book takes readers through that.
So, I turned to self-publishing. I find that self-publishing lets my work be messy, devolving into tangents and fragments with no real center to hold them together.
This book is not cohesive, and I don’t think I could pitch it in one sentence. The quality goes up and down, but I like some of the writing in there precisely because it isn’t any good. I don’t want to be a Serious Writer with Big Ideas about the World. You’ll find quite a bit of levity here because of that.
Think about Naked Parrot as a mosaic, a long, disjointed string of tiles piecing together my life. Fragmentation is how I interact with the world.
What am I searching for?
A publisher would have wanted to take eight to ten stories, or a series of poems, and tie them together neatly into a book with one Major Theme and a Clear Voice. That’s a fine idea — one I dreamed of writing for most of my life. It just isn’t this book.
Self-publishing let me hand the reader the whole pile and say: this is me, look. Even the drawings are felt-tip doodles I made during the pandemic, and I’m pretty bad at drawing, although scanning them into the computer fixed a lot of that for me. The computer is our friend now, I guess.
It took me 20 years to get to this point, but the publishing part was cheap. Amazon makes the process basically free, and who doesn’t want to design a book cover?
Should you self-publish?
If you’re thinking about self-publishing, do it, but take your time with the manuscript. Read the book a few times before you publish. You’ll catch little things you want to change, typos you may (or may not) want to fix. I already put out a second edition, because I re-read the first edition and hated it. In the age of AI, it’s seductive to have something like this just produced by a machine, but sit with it before you publish. Or let AI do everything for you. I don’t care!
Naked Parrot is out now in paperback, hardcover and Kindle. Read more about the book, buy it on Amazon, or read What is a Naked Parrot?