It’s My Birthday! Wanna Help Me Celebrate? I’ve Got Four Ways To Bring In My Fiftieth Year!

Today is my 50th birthday – normally a big milestone! But I’ve been in California helping my mother through neck surgery and some subsequent complications, so all the big plans I had just sorta evaporated.

(She’s fine now. I just got home.)

What also evaporated in the rush of mother’s surgery and daughter’s wedding trellis were my plans for promoting my book THE SOL MAJESTIC. I had grand ideas for getting the word out, and they all kinda collapsed.

Which means that basically, my beautiful baby banquet book now needs a lot of hand-selling to make it enough for publishers to buy more of my stuff. (Which is fine, in a way – when I was writing it, I was thinking of the idea of “the sacred book” where it wasn’t for everyone, but those it was for would push it into their friends’ hands and go, “Here, this weird book about soup and love and found families speaks for me.”)
So the first way to help me celebrate?

1) If you haven’t tried SOL MAJESTIC, and you have the funds, maybe give it a try for me?
It’s full of gorgeous cuisine and philosophy and romance, so whether you buy it on Amazon or walk into your local B&N to purchase it, or hit up your local indie book shop, you’ll be helping my birthday any way.

2) If you’ve read THE SOL MAJESTIC and haven’t left a review, please do?
This is important: the reviews that have been left have been the highest of my career, but there haven’t been that many of them. So if you can take three minutes to post a review to GoodReads/Amazon or even just a note on your social media of choice to go “I read this and liked it” (or, just as helpfully, “I read this and didn’t like it”), that would do a hell of a lot to help me celebrate.

3) And if you’ve done both, or neither, donate some spare bucks to RAICES?
Look, man, it’s my birthday and I’m doing well – I’ve got a home, I’ve got a loving wife, I’ve got chocolate milk. But I guarantee you there’s some poor kid in an American concentration camp who also has a birthday today, and it is sucking because, well, America is doing shitty things to immigrants. So if you have the dosh, donate to RAICES, who is fighting the good fight to help minimize, mitigate, and hopefully close these shameful camps, which is honestly more the fuck important than any book I’ll ever write.

4) Also, send me pictures of you.
I like seeing who you are! So if you’ve got my number, shoot me a smiling face. If not, post a picture where I can see it! I just like knowing who’s who when I’m on social media.

And enjoy the fireworks. As a child born on Fourth of July weekend, those fireworks are mine, but I’ll happily share them with you.