In Which I Correspond with FUP
Posted on May 13th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
So yesterday I got this e-mail that totally made my day: the creator of the brilliant and hilarious blog, Fuck You Penguin, dropped me a note of thanks for having written complimentary things about FUP.
His name is Matthew Gasteier, he writes about hip-hop for the Boston Phoenix and elsewhere, and he wrote:
I just wanted to write you to thank you for what you wrote about FU Penguin on your blog. Someone sent it to me and I was very flattered. It’s always nice to get good feedback on the humor on the site, but I do put a lot of work into the writing style to make it look easy, and it’s a real pleasure to hear that people are appreciating that work.
I wrote back and said that it really is difficult to write in a style that reads casual and funny and irreverent but is in fact structured and deliberate, and I admire him for doing it so successfully. Also, I asked how he started the blog. Here’s the answer:
A silly blog deserves a silly origin story. My fianceé and I have always joked about cute animals knowing that they are cute and being shameless about it. One day, I saw a coat by Penguin, the clothing company, that I really loved but was extremely expensive and I thought, “Fuck you, Penguin.” I immediately grabbed a picture of an actual penguin (my favorite animal) and it just clicked. If you look at the early ones, you’ll see it took me a month or so to really find my rhythm and get to the point where I could actually see it being funny past a few posts.
There’s a good lesson in writing and the value of blogging there: Blogging, as a daily exercise, can improve your writing. It’s just practice, practice, practice, and eventually that’ll get you to writing a hilarious blog in which you make fun of cute animals.
The good even better news? There’s soon to be an FUP book. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy, and I would buy copies for my nieces and nephews except they are too young to swear, much less understand that, sometimes when you swear at cute animals, it’s because you really, really like them.
You should pre-order your copy too, right here on this Amazon link.
As Bill O’Reilly once said to me, “We know how to sell books on this show.” And by “we,” he meant “I.”
5 Responses
5/13/2009 3:31 pm
How cool are you?!
5/13/2009 7:24 pm
Penguins are always cool. One of the best literary magazines was called “Angry Penguins.”
5/13/2009 8:56 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPlvpN-7xyI
5/14/2009 7:49 pm
When did we become a society that “pre-“does everything? Pre-register, pre-select, pre-order. Why not just ‘order’? Even you, Rich, have fallen.
5/15/2009 7:23 am
Interesting point! I like it. I think the underlying argument is that sometimes “pre-ordering” feels like a scam. You’re being tempted to buy something even when you don’t really know what it contains, because you haven’t been able to see it. Natural to resist that.
However, from a writer’s point of view, let me offer this perspective. First-week sales on a book are crucial to that book’s success. They determine whether you stay on the front tables at Barnes & Noble, whether your publisher takes out an ad for you, whether you hit a bestseller list—and it’s much easier to stay on the list once you’re on it, if you know what I mean, because of the self-reinforcing nature of the attendant publicity and marketing.
So pre-orders for a book bump up those first-week numbers because they are registered the second the book is published. In that sense, pre-ordering is a favor to a book or author you’re trying to support that goes beyond simply buying the book….