Ah, nostalgia.

I'm sitting here trying to do anything aside from filling out my bankruptcy paperwork.

Funny, never thought those particular words would ever be typed by yours truly. I promise that I'll be back next week with the usual snark and candor. Until then, allow me to wallow in a bit of nostalgia and go back to the halcyon early days of Monkeys Gather Publishing, aka 2003. You know, back when I wasn't bankrupt and actually thought that I might someday be a novelist.

What is Monkeys Gather Publishing?

One could ask oneself why the world would need another internet publishing house. A Google search turned up almost 500,000 of them in under a second. So why on earth did someone create another one?

It’s simple, really. Most of them are downright awful. The rest of them are pretentious. And if you really want to do something right, you have to do it yourself.

Monkeys Gather Publishing is a loose association of writers who are committed to the idea of free publication of quality work. This work includes short fiction, essays, and poetry.

Monkeys Gather is the brainchild of Joan Bolander, who was frustrated by her inability to get her work published by conventional means. That, and she has an understandable laziness about sending her babies out to the slaughter. Needless to say, she is somewhat neurotic, being raised Catholic and all, and this project lessens her guilt about not being able to write 24 hours a day. It’s bad enough that she was supposed to win the Pulitzer by 23, and the Nobel by 35. At least there’s still is time for the Nobel.

Thus, while she spends her time typing horrible amounts of code, tending bar at various awful restaurants in the Portland, Oregon, area, and attending business classes at a horrendous community college, she at least can keep one eye on the fact that every time she goes into a bookstore, she creates a place on the shelf for her opus. Who knows, someday, it will actually be on that shelf, and someone will actually read it.

Crap, now I just want to go back to Portland. Oh well, I still have four more years to go for the Nobel, although now it will probably be for Raising Multiples rather than Achievement in Literature. And it's nice to know that I still don't want to slaughter my babies, although now they're ACTUAL babies, not horribly punctuated juvenile prose. Sigh.