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UPSTATE is Hypertext One Question + Excerpt.

· UPSTATE,Tortoise Books,Hypertext Magazine,Short Stories,Book Promotion
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UPSTATE is indeed Hypertext One Question (and that question is: “WHY RE-RELEASE A BOOK THAT THE WORLD HAS ALREADY HAD THE CHANCE TO BUY AND READ?"), which you may read here + Excerpt (and that excerpt is "Things Start"), which you may read here. If you are so inclined there is even some One Question excerpt below. Cool? Fabulous. And many thanks to Hypertext for all of it.

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“WHY RE-RELEASE A BOOK THAT THE WORLD HAS ALREADY HAD THE CHANCE TO BUY AND READ?"

"Good question. The simple answer is that the original publisher of UPSTATE, first released as The New York Stories, is now defunct, and though the collection is out in the world, it’s also not, with no real distribution, or anyone to care about it beside me. The more involved answer is about me and my relationship to not only this book, but writing, work, my connection to the world and feeling alive, especially as a creative. Let me pause here for some quick backstory: The New York Stories was a compilation of three shorter collections of intertwined stories – “Repetition” Patterns (2008), “So Different Now” (2011) and “After the Flood” (2015) – which are further intertwined from collection to collection.

"The New York Stories was released in 2015 when I was riding a sort of professional and authorial high in terms of cool work and publishing opportunities, as well as a semblance of balance between both. In 2016 however I lost my long-time job and my subsequent efforts to land something similar, or at least interesting, did not pan out.


"Further, the release of the book that followed The New York Stories, an essay collection titled Be Cool, was poorly executed and a novel of mine that had been moving toward publication was pulled when the publisher decided to no longer publish fiction, and I suddenly didn’t feel at all certain how I should do anything anymore, because everything that had once worked no longer seemed to be working. And so, at the end of 2017, I decided to build a business comprised of my side hustles, or at least a lifestyle focused on the kind of work I wanted to do. I kept writing, but I stopped pitching, doing readings or even accepting invitations to submit work, all things I had been doing practically nonstop since at least 2007, to focus on making this lifestyle business thing work. Which felt fine for the next year or so. Until it didn’t."