David Yoo's Blog

Here’s an interview I did with NPR that ran earlier this week, where I discussed The Choke Artist.

I have a guest post up at Amazon’s blog, Omnivoracious, in which I describe publication day and my career-long frustrations with it…

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2012/08/guest-post-from-underachiever-david-yoo-publication-day-paranoia-.html#more

I’m “Angry Reader of the Week” over at Angryasianman.com! If you’re curious as to what kinds of drivers infuriate me, and other grievances, check out my guest post:

http://blog.angryasianman.com/2012/07/angry-reader-of-week-david-yoo.html

I recently put together a song playlist regarding The Choke Artist, describing songs that are mentioned in the book (and a few that weren’t, but played a role as I wrote it). Curious what rap songs I listened to cruising around the mean streets of Avon, Connecticut in the early 90s? Ever wondered what’s the most depressing song to hear when you’re a lonely single guy in college? Check it out at Largehearted Boy’s Booknotes…

Today the paperback version of my middle grade novel, The Detention Club, is available in stores and on-line. Which makes this that rare occurrence (think Halley’s Comet) where, in some stores, for just a short while, you’ll actually be able to find two different books of mine on the shelves. Be different. Buy one. Or at least slip it into the stack of Fifty Shades of Grey sitting on a table out front, so I can enjoy in a few weeks the gratification of receiving an email from a new adult female reader, saying something like, “I’d intended on reading Fifty Shades…but instead accidentally bought your book, and it turned out that what I was really needing to read was a novel about two sixth graders trying to clone miniature cats.” Dare to dream…

Well, the day’s finally come, and now I’m tasked with trying to tell people about the book’s arrival. Below is the mass email I sent out this morning to all the contacts in my Yahoomail address book., which is pretty much the only thing I do to promote it on publication day. It’s the one tradition I have with pub day, and so far the day is playing out just like it did with my other books:

9-10AM: hastily whip up a mass email announcing the book’s release

10-11AM: send it off to the 330 people in my address book.

11-1115AM: Receive in the neighborhood of 90-120 return-to-sender notices informing me that said email addresses no longer exist.

And that’s pretty much my day. Woopity doo.

Okay, so here’s what I wrote this morning…

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Hey everybody,

Today my new book, The Choke Artist: Confessions of a Chronic Underachiever (Grand Central), is available. It’s my first book for adults, a collection of personal essays about my misspent youth (which lasted until around age 28). Up to this point I’d written books for teens and younger, so as you might suspect, this book is a bit of a departure from what I usually write, and I feel I should warn you of some of the ways the writing in these personal essays for adults is markedly different from what you’ve come to expect. The main difference is language. Where I used to use juvenile words/phrases like “poop” and “doody disco,” even in bathroom scenes where the tone was unquestionably grave, I now have the freedom to use decidedly more mature terms that you’re more familiar with, like “smash” and “yet another unceremonious, half-hearted dump,” which are considered taboo terms in the world of YA literature. Other examples of heightened vocabulary employed in this latest book:

-instead of starting sentences with “If that wasn’t a wicked doozy…” I now start with something more refined/adult, like, “To my chagrin…”

-Rather than describing an older woman as a “milf,” I now typically refer to them as simply “a handsome contemporary” or “an attractive former classmate”

-”boners” and “super-chubbies” are now referred to as “erections” and “pleasant surprises at this advanced state”

Well, you get the picture. The result is a reading experience you can probably relate to more, as fellow adults. Another difference this time around is that the book can be found in the adult section of bookstores. It’s already a lot to ask you to consider buying my book, but I’ve always felt guilty that to do so in the past you’d have to brave walking through menacingly giant giraffe arbors to get to where they temporarily stock my books and in merely making contact with the end of a shelf you would immediately develop a runny nose.

Rather than try to describe the book, which I’ve never been good at doing, I’m going to admit defeat from the get-go and simply point you toward my new web site, which features descriptions and reviews and details regarding The Choke Artist.

www.daveyoo.com

I suppose if forced to describe it, I’d say it’s kind of like Fifty Shades of Grey, if the guy in the novel was alone and not so glaringly prude. Or it’s like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, except it’s about people who fail. Or, and this is nakedly targeting the bulk of my friends, it’s a lot like The Mammoth Book of Sudoku, if you were to replace the numbers with letters.

The good news is that it’s in paperback, which means it costs half the price of a hardcover, and it’s easily my shortest book, clocking in at 259 pages (although this is admittedly a bit of a mirage, given that my previous books, published for teens, were printed in three-times-as-large font), and it features the only known photo of me from my “Korean Jesus” days in Boulder, Colorado. That alone is worth the price of admission, no?

Anyway, I feel, as ever, truly embarrassed having to send a mass email out. For one thing, I always feel like a snake oil salesman even glancingly talking about my books, but also because I’m otherwise not great at keeping in regular touch with people. As of late I can earnestly say that this is due largely to the time-crunch of fatherhood, but that’s no excuse so forgive me if this feels mercenary to hear from me for the first time in a while only to find that you’re the recipient of a mass email hawking my latest book. Whether you believe me or not, I DO care about you, and I AM deeply, earnestly curious about what you’ve been up to, and I would have asked sooner if I wasn’t so focused on raising Griffin (now 2), but it’s never too late to catch up, right? So now I’m asking. Better late than never. Purely voluntary on your part, but if you have time please reply to the following questionnaire because I DO miss you and want to hear an update. So if you will…

Question #1: How are you doing these days?

a) Fine b) Really wonderful! c) Hmph d) Not good, unfortunately, for I blah blah blah

Question #2: I’d love to get together some time to catch up. Where do you live these days?

a) Same place I lived five years ago, jerk. b) More than 25 miles away from where you live.

Question #3: Do you still owe me money?

a) Don’t know, don’t care b) Probably, my bad c) Is that why you’re emailing me now, after all these-

Anyway, I hope you’re doing well, and if you actually have no idea who I am, my apologies, I should have been more careful about adding contacts to my address book. (True story: the first email reply I received last time I sent one of these things out was from a confused employee at Roto Rooter). Lastly, if you’re in the NYC area, I’ll be reading at Word in Brooklyn on Thursday, June 21st, 7PM. Would love to see you there if you’re around. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that one of the more confidence-boosting (by way of comparison) things to do is to go watch me try to read in public.

Warmly,

David Yoo

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www.daveyoo.com

“David Yoo’s essays in The Choke Artist detail the hilarious agony of being a chronic underachiever.” (Vanity Fair)

“David Yoo’s memoir, The Choke Artist, will make your own childhood blunders seem totally boring.” (Boston Magazine)

“The Choke Artist is brilliantly sneaky. David Yoo is so funny that sometimes you forget he’s writing about his (and America’s) deepest, most basic fears. In a country that worships success, failure is taboo. Yoo embraces it head-on, his humor leavening yet never concealing the pain of not having enough faith in oneself.” (Stewart O’Nan, author of The Odds and Emily, Alone)

Grand Central will be giving away 5 copies of The Choke Artist on Goodreads between now and June 30th. For more information, check out:

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/26813-the-choke-artist-confessions-of-a-chronic-underachiever

Monday, June 18, 2012 7PM I’ll be reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. For more information, here’s a link to details on the bookstore’s page:

http://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/david-yoo-choke-artist

Meanwhile, for people in the NYC area:

Thursday, June 21, 2012 7PM I’ll be reading from THE CHOKE ARTIST and talking to Dave Cullen at Word in Brooklyn. For more information, check out the links below…

http://www.wordbrooklyn.com/event/david-yoo-conversation-dave-cullen

http://www.facebook.com/events/397418380303607/

June 18, 2012 7PM

Reading/Signing

Porter Square Books

Porter Square Shopping Center

25 White Street

Cambridge, MA 02140

http://www.portersquarebooks.com/

June 21, 2012

Book Launch Party

Word

126 Franklin Street

Brooklyn, NY 11222

http://www.wordbrooklyn.com/