It has been a tough year, 2010.  It has been a year where we saw the economy continue to crumble, the environment destroyed by an oil spill, and Christine O’Donnell.  And after all of that, most of the country is paralyzed by an unexpected blizzard just as we try to ring in a new year.

There is a bright spot out there, and it’s taking the form of humor writing.  What better way to usher in 2011 than with books that can actually make us laugh?

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Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Hannah Ensor for getting a free copy of Color Plates by Adam Golaski.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox. This second novel by Lambda Literary Award finalist Daniel Allen Cox (Shuck) is an incendiary story about two pyromaniacs who fight homophobia in Krakow, Poland, one of the fronts of the Solidarnosc revolution that eventually toppled the Berlin Wall in 1989. It’s 2005, and Poland is grappling with its newfound role as a member of the European Union; the nation dips into moral crisis as Pope John Paul II (a Pole) hovers near death while the country’s soon-to-be president makes homophobic declarations. Radek, a bisexual artist and a practitioner of the extreme urban sport parkour, is convinced that fire is the great stabilizer. While creating miniature replicas of the world’s great infernos―Chicago 1871, San Francisco 1906, London 1666―he meets Dorota, a literature student and budding pyromaniac. Driven by rage, sexual curiosity for one another, and Pink Floyd, they buck church, government, and the LGBT community to find sexual freedom, escaping their enemies by scaling the crumbling walls and ideas of the city. Provocative and unnerving, Krakow Melt is at once a love letter and a fiery call to arms.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Arsenal Pulp Press.

There’s an old New Year’s superstition that whatever you do on January 1st will set the theme of what you do for the entire year. The truth of this has yet to be determined; however, on the first of every year I have faithfully avoided touching the laundry, doing the dishes, or paying any outstanding parking tickets.

This January 1st, I’ve decided that I’m going to spend as much time as I can writing, and recommitting to my goals as a writer and as a person. I’m absolutely committed to finishing the revision of my novel. I may still have to do laundry this year, but I do believe that by determining now, you can set a new tone for the approaching twelve months. That starts today, with you deciding to make a change, no matter how small it is.

For resolutions that writers can make in the upcoming year, check out Tanya’s “New Year’s Resolutions for the Weird.”

Starting January 1st, what will you do differently to help yourself improve? What are you committed to change?

I’ve just finished downtown fixture and prolific rock and roll poet Patti Smith’s latest, Just Kids. I expected a full autobiography and, in a way, it is, but what’s really special is that it’s an incredible love story for the tomes. Smith shows us what love looks like in all stages, even when her partner, the famous Robert Mapplethorpe, admitted he was gay and eventually died from AIDS. Robert and Patti are always one—a string the weaves through them and that glows when either is in need of the other.

I’ve been a huge Patti Smith fan for a while. I learned her through her music. Her 1975 album, Horses, is one of the best albums of the century. Her voice has a girl-like-Leonard Cohen-mixed-with-Tom Waits ramble and her sound is simple. But what really shine are her words. Once I discovered this, I jumped into her poetry.

I consider myself a poet and have been writing seriously for over ten years. Until yesterday, however, I hadn’t written a poem in almost a full year when I wrote one daily. My website grew static, no one had visited. It was dark and dull—perhaps a relic from Victorian England. Poetry is part of my soul and I felt I were dying, suffocating with lack of creativity.

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Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Ben Campbell for getting a free copy of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Color Plates by Adam Golaski. Color Plates is a museum of stories, curated by a sort-of Mary Cassatt. Four rooms of Mary’s museum are open to the public, and they are named Éduoard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. Color Plates contains sixty-three little stories—plates—spun from real paint­ings by these painters. The stories range from sweet to weird, from melancholy to funny. This isn’t just a short story collec­tion, and it isn’t a novel, but something else entirely. The plates each stand alone, offering startling visions and situations. Yet at the same time, Color Plates of­fers the depth of a novel, with recurring characters, themes, and motifs. The mu­seum says: My name is Mary and Mary is my museum. Paintings are brushstroke upon brushstroke. With a pencil I lift each brush­stroke and make lines. Line upon line, story upon story, the small fictions in Color Plates will engage you, delight you, and challenge you to consider the intersections between art and time. Read an excerpt here.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Rose Metal Press.

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A lot of writers I know are really weird people. They are not conventional characters. They are introverted, awkward, and often act like wallflowers in social situations, taking mental notes rather than fully participating.

But the holiday season is the great leveler: even the weird ones have to get together in groups with family and/or friends to eat, drink, and exchange gifts.

But writers also have the chance to do their own version of a holiday tradition: the New Year’s Resolution. This is the one time of the year in the U.S. when it is socially accepted even sanctioned to talk about self-improvement. So why not take this somewhat cheesy and unrealistic tradition of promises and make it a literary goal? Why not recommit to your own writing? Why not do more reading? This is a good way to stay weird, since pretty much everyone else’s resolutions will have to do with losing weight and exercise. Here are a handful of literary suggestions:

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Keep a nice little notebook in your back pocket, it'll do you wonders.

SIFI is the name of a little notebook I carry around in my back pocket at all times; it stands for “Shit I Find Interesting”. It’s full of scribbles and illegible statements in no real order. Snips of thoughts, ideas, musings, observations and well, anything I find interesting. It’s the type of book every writer should have.

Ideas strike writers at all times of the day. You can be on the train and over hear an interesting conversation, maybe see someone who looks eccentric maybe wearing something odd––and an idea for a story or a character might follow. You can be in class, zoning out in the back and in that moment of lapse, your mind jumps to a vivid thought, a memory of use in a story maybe even a scene. Or, you could just be lounging with your friends, talking shit around a table. One might say something, a statement that summarizes a complex belief of your age group, maybe a bit of slang that’s poignant, possibly useful for your narrative.

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“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

—Oscar Wilde

There is something just unmistakably awesome about books.  They love you unconditionally and give to you without ever asking for anything in return.  Something about them gets down deep into your soul, like a favorite relative or a tapeworm.  Plus, they make you smarter.

So, which book is it that changed your life, with exactly the right words at the right time?

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Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Daniela Olszewska for getting a free copy of How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic by Peter Jay Shippy.

This week, we are giving away a copy of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness. The four chapbooks collected in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness revel in the succinctness of their form. Three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the first annual short short chapbook contest held by Rose Metal Press, each author explores the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical. Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith combine four multi-layered portrayals of beautiful uneasiness into a collection rich with wit, grace, and originality. Read an excerpt here.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Rose Metal Press.

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Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Alexander for getting a free copy of Brevity & Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories, edited by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney.

This week, we are giving away a copy of How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic by Peter Jay Shippy. A book-length narrative poem, or a novella-in-verse if you prefer, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic is a novel-poem with a literary sci-fi bent, a shadow-text to Oedipus written in a style that is up-to-the-minute. With wit, dynamism, and cutting senses of urgency and humor, Iowa Prize winner Peter Jay Shippy tells the tale of Isaac Makepeace Watt, a melancholy man living in a Thebes that is much like contemporary America.  The House of Cadmus still rules (and will fall), but they only appear in the poem as media white noise. Isaac’s concerns are personal, his father’s illness and his own moral decrepitude. There are talking monkeys, plagues, oracles, and nano-robots—the usual agoramania. Read an excerpt here.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Rose Metal Press.

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