In 2019, I was going to turn fifty and had my midlife crisis by wallowing in the comic books I loved as a kid.I started buying comic books again. Not new comics. Hell no. I was keyed into old comics.The shit I read when I was a kid.When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I spent all my money on comic books. I would go to the local shop on Saturdays and buy a large wedge of books and spend the next week reading them all.I loved all of them, but would they all stand up?

Bad writing doesn’t just happen. It takes time and effort. Bad writing is not something anyone can do. It requires a dedicated student to master the wrong turns and poor decisions that are necessary to excel in lousy work.There are many books and workshops that offer good writing advice. But none for bad writing advice. Where can we go to get the awful suggestion?Fret no more. We have spent years compiling this helpful and useless list. There is not a good idea in the lot. ...

So you want to be a successful bad writer. Well, who doesn't? We all want that sweet sweet hack writer money. And why shouldn't you have your piece of that cash pie?To get that lucre, we have compiled three of our best Bad Writer's Guides. They will aid you in your quest to being rich and barely talented. This is the goal. This is the dream.The first book is The Bad Writer's Book of Cliched Science Fiction Lines. All the bad lines you dreamed you came up with, they are your...

Wouldn't it be cool to call up Santa and find out what's going on up in the North Pole?You bet it would. And thanks to pay call system you were able to call up Santa and see how the preparation for Christmas will be. It cost fifty cents a minute, but it was worth it to get the skinny from Santa and the gang.But what would happen iif you called after Christmas? What would you hear? Would you hear the real story of what it is like to live in the North Pole? Would you hear abo...

Aren't you tired of books with plot and character and just want to read simple lists?Us too. And with that in mind, we have included four of the small books that David Macpherson wrote. They demonstrate the different ways lists can be presented as a piece of writing."501 Things to Be Wary Of" is just a goofy litany of stuff."367 Things to Do While Sitting Out a Pandemic" was written in March 2020, when the Covid lock-down began. This can be not seen as a historical ...

The universe is a woolly place.The universe is made of felt.The Big Bang was a soft though consistent annoyance.Dogs chase after runaway planets.When planets collide, it is okay because everything is felt.Neptunians are always cold and really just want to wear something cozy.And that's the thing. We want to be cozy.This issue of The Ekphrasis Take-Out is a cohesive collection of felt and the universe.This zine will be made of ...

Where is Fancy Bread?There was a seminar on how to write the best book copy and one of the main rules is to get the potential reader's attention by a quick and pertinent question. Ask a question. Grab them. Drag them along to the rest of the ad copy.And this question is the best one yet. Where is Fancy Bread? Not only is it the title of the book, it is everything in the book. Every chapter is another time where Fancy Bread is visiting some location. He is also dressed to th...

David Macpherson tried to write a book called The North Pole Hotline and could not get past the two thirds point. Five years later, he was back to writing it. He finished it. It took a lot of effort and thought.This book you are looking at is a companion to that process. It goes through the history of the writing project and why it fell off the road. It goes through the day to day processes David took to finish it once he found a way to move forward.David also talks about o...

What is your favorite concert?What band is your favorite?Do you still have the ticket stub? Do you have the concert t-shirt in a closet somewhere?Bands and the music they give us are a major part of what makes us the people we are.We love the music and we love to see it live.This is a personal collection of David Macpherson's memories of the concerts he has gone to. They started when he was a kid and saw Harry Belafonte. It goes from there to Pink Fl...

There are Gods for so many things.There are Gods for Writing.If you are a writer then you pray to at least one of the many Gods of Writing. There are the ones of getting an agent. The God of Following Trends. The Gods of Writing First Drafts and Multiple Drafts. There is the God of the Slush Pile.There is a God for all of your time as a writer.You need to believe. You need to worship. You need to know your deities.And the best way to do that is to re...

All creatures, great and small, dream. It is just what we all do.With knives being alive enough, what are the dreams they have?They will dream of cutting. Of exploring. Of creating. Of protecting.They are means to understand what dreams are and what they are not.Unsheathe this chance to understand what tools think of late at night.When we think they are, at last, asleep.

Welcome to the world of crap you keep instead of throwing out.It's the stuff that you love to have around you but are not sure why.There are over fifty essays about the little things in life in this book. Like coloring books and nip bottles. Why do we keep them? Why do we find joy in these things.There are a variety of items that people collect and decorate their lives with: glass eyes, vomit bags, cardboard music records.There is a lot of random things that...