book project – The Portly Politico

Ah, yes, Bandcamp Friday has returned, which means I hope you will consider pitching in a few bucks to buy my music—or my second book! After a long hiatus over the summer months, this celebration of indie musicians is back.

The first Friday of a bunch of months in 2023—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.

In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.

To celebrate, I have a brand new release: Spooky Season! Spooky Season is a collection of seven new compositions with a spooky, autumnal vibe, perfect for pumpkin-spiced living and ghostly vibes. These tracks won’t hit streaming platforms until October, but you can purchase them now via Bandcamp!

Spooky Season is just $5, and includes full scores and individual parts for every track—a $28 value!—plus a bonus track. It’s also crammed with videos, handwritten manuscripts, and other goodies.

Currently, my entire discography of eleven releases is $18.39, a savings of 50%, which is not bad for eleven releases. That’s $1.67 per release—not too shabby! To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.

You can also listen to a ton of my tunes on YouTube (and it’s free to subscribe!).

I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase. They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.

I’ve also joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover). Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?

I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (now SOLD!). Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).

I have a few new paintings in the works, and hope to be attending the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival to try to hawk some of my works. We’ll see how that goes!

My first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.

My second and newest book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, is $20 in paperback and $10 on Kindle.

Finally, after I finish Offensive Poems: With Pictures, my planned third book, I’ll be uploading those doodles to Society6 as well. I have high hopes (perhaps naïvely) for this book, but we shall see. The doodles are some of my best work—and in glorious color—and without notebook paper lines!

Thanks again for your support!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

The following is a re-posting of this past Sunday’s edition of Sunday Doodles (Sunday Doodles CXCV), which is normally a perk for $5 and up subscribers to my SubscribeStar Page. The post serves as a preview, of sorts, to the kind of content that will make up (I hope!) my third book, tentatively entitled Offensive Poems: With Pictures. I thought I’d bring it to the masses—you, my beloved free subscribers and daily readers—to get feedback—and to let you in on this new project. —TPP

Typically, Sunday Doodles is reserved for the classy $5 and up subscribers, while $3 a month gets the first Sunday of the month to gawk at doodles. However, I’m opening this post up to all subscribers.

That’s because this weekend’s edition of Sunday Doodles features a preview of my current book project, Offensive Poems: With Pictures. This project started almost by accident—I was doodling at an open mic night on Tuesday, 18 July 2023, and started sketching people around me. Two nights later—Thursday, 20 July 2023—at another open mic, I drew “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial”; he prompted me to write the haiku “Learn to Code.”

That got me thinking: what if I wrote a red-pilled haiku for every doodle? I was already toying with the idea of writing poems to accompany each doodle, but I wasn’t thinking of making them a satirical commentary on the strange times in which we find ourselves. Now, I can’t stop coming up with pithy verses about the various sacred cows and empty bromides of our time. It’s remarkable how many Leftist slogans are seven-syllables, which works great for that second line of each haiku.

Why haiku? I like the challenge of stating a complex sets of ideas in seventeen syllables. The structure of a haiku—five syllables in the first and third lines, seven syllables in the second/middle line—means I have to be extremely efficient with words.

And, to be totally honest, I just find haiku easier to work with than other poetic forms. It offers enough flexibility in terms of rhythm, meter, etc., for a hedge-poet like myself to play around with. Once I have to worry about iambic pentameter, for example, and stressed and unstressed syllables, it’s a bit too much for yours portly.

That said, I wanted some form, as I find most free verse to be too loose. There is something to be said for structure, as it forces me to think intentionally about every word. Also, I find that much free verse quickly becomes indistinguishable from prose. Much of it seems like prose writing with random or mildly clever line breaks.

So! Enough rambling. Let’s get to the doodles!

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Tag: book project

September 2023 Bandcamp Friday; NEW RELEASE!