Down From the Underground

Independent bookstores and saddle-stitched fanzines will be the death of me yet. I was already a writer, of term papers for hire, yes, but also of material for the first generation of online magazines—Feed was big for a second there—and even for portals (remember portals?) such as Disinfo.com, which soon realized that print was still king and became a publishing imprint. I’d graduated from $50 paydays online to making a few hundred bucks a pop writing tech pieces for the Village Voice, and I’d even published short fiction in a slick men’s magazine, Razor, for $1000. I’d published a radical ghost-story novella with and edited several political works on the left fringe for Soft Skull Press, at the time run out of a Ludlow Street basement on the Lower East Side. The publisher was also the building’s janitor and would soon become a full-fledged 9/11 denialist. It was 2002. Clearly time for me to write a novel.