Florida Heat Wave is a book put together by this dude Michael Lister, and I was lucky enough to be included in the collection, with a story called Escambia Counties. I have an extra review copy that the publisher sent me like two months ago to give one away inside the interwebs, and I never have yet, mostly because one copy got buried beneath old issues of Sports Illustrated, Harper's, Juxtapoz, and the weekly free newspaper they put in our mailbox that has the Food Lion circular tucked in the middle. I anxiously look to see what's on sale that week that might afford me to cook giant amounts of foods in the back yard for hours and hours and hours while drinking beer, which hopefully will be on sale as well, though they rarely advertise that, probably because of god and shit.
Anyways, there are two ways this will probably go. One way is the path I've felt destined to follow from a young age, where fame shines its ugly light on me, no matter how hard I try to avoid it or how many times I fuck it up. The second path is I have the life sucked from me like the liver cancer rats at my work, and all I do for the rest of my life is work, come home, watch TV shows, drink beer, have the weekend to piddle around the yard, and then go back to work.
For the sake of argument, and to remain hopeful for the future like Whitney Houston before cocaine, let's hope for the former, which means a pre-print copy of my first published short story will eventually be worth like half the cost of the paper it's printed on. But honestly, if you are still here, after all my flame outs and freak outs and nonsense, you are either somebody who knows me or someone who enjoys my bullshit or maybe both, though those people seem to be few and far between, which is probably best for this stupid world.
Nonetheless, I have a copy to give away. Here is the deal. Let's pretend for the sake of pretending that the eventual winner has me show up in their town on the Greyhound around 10 am on a Saturday morning, and you shall host me, probably after not sleeping and making friends with some kid from east Tennessee who had traveler's flask of Jim Beam to share, through the Saturday, and I’d catch a bus back home the next morning around 9:30. Feel free to make me sleep wherever and do whatever, judging my personality from what you expect of me, and pretty much plan on me having $23 to blow during this visit. But I will leave you a copy of my stupid first short story, a pre-print review copy in fact, where they throw in extra “l” in my last name because I don’t smoke blunts, I smoke els. Tell me what we might do that day, what you’d expect to happen, whatever. Email it to my shit over in the sidebar, which is ravenmack at gmail.com in case you are lazy as fuck, which means you probably wouldn’t enter anyways.
I’ll give it a couple weeks roughly, let’s say like middle of August, whittle it down to three, let the publisher dude knock one off the list, and my wife knock one off the list, and then we’ll see what kind of balance is left on my credit card at that point, and maybe I’ll bring this shit straight to you, via the glorious Greyhound bus system.