|
Filed Under
Moderately Amusing Website Wishes Itself a Happy Fiver!
Posted November 11, 2009
1 comment posted. Read it now.
Portland, Oregon
Conditions: rain. Or cloudy. Or misty. Definitely not sunny.
Five years ago, forged from the molten heat of a busted lava lamp, All Day Coffee was born. There were many early missteps, including a near-fatal encounter with Flash animation in 2005, but the site has rolled along as my personal mouthpiece, a voice speaking truth to power, whether that be inane presidential moves, the tepidity of the mainstream media or Ahab's lampoon launching into the whale of overly bloated business and the too-hyped technology sector.
And fart jokes.
(After introducing Jonathan Safran Foer for a reading in Beaverton, OR)
The earliest iteration of All Day Coffee served as a list of links for my other publications, just in case some literary agent came upon the site after Googling "william fucking faulkner."
When I launched the site as a weekly blog, and in 2004 I didn't call it a blog because the term sounded like what happens to your digestive system after you eat too many nachos, I'd also been asked to read a humor piece to a Portland radio show called LiveWire and I ended up writing about a superhero, because I had no good ideas and it was easier to rip off an earlier piece I'd written for McSweeney's. LiveWire was a relatively new radio show broadcast on public radio in Oregon and Washington and I imagined that my participation would bring in a Hummer limo full of cash and at least millions of page views to my site and I might as well prepare for the hordes. That's right: Public Radio will bring you wealth. Or a nice tote bag.
But then I realized All Day Coffee would be a fun place to showcase short humor pieces, often satirizing other news. I admit that I've never explained where the name All Day Coffee came from. Ask me some time.
A lot has happened since then. That superhero sketch became my novel, Captain Freedom, published at the beginning of 2009. My article "Baristas Claim Obama's Coffee Not Black Enough," a piece I'd tossed off between the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary, was selected as the top article for the HumorFeed International Satire Competition. Later I had the great pleasure of working with a fantastic and very motley bunch covering the 2008 election for Comedy Central.
In addition to promoting the book I've been able to perform standup comedy here and there, teach, lecture, and continue to write fiction and non-fiction and was recently interviewed by a South Korean documentary film crew because they discovered I am a superhero expert. Perhaps they were the ones who found me by Googling "william fucking faulkner."
Recently I wrote another set of sketches for LiveWire – it's fun to have your words coming out of the mouths of radio actors – and obsessively edit my second novel. Over the past five years I have been fortunate enough to meet wonderful readers, passionate book sellers and most importantly, people who dress like Boba Fett. I may write every single day but that's basically nothing compared to somebody who will spend an entire weekend in a Boba Fett costume.
Thanks for stopping by. I'm looking forward to the next five years.
GXR
* I'm not making that up - the Google search "William Fucking Faulkner" did bring one person to the site. But that person was not my literary agent.
 
copyright 2004-2024 G. Xavier Robillard
| 
