Prose. Season One. They drew first blood.

—Austin. 12:45 in the afternoon. A drop of sweat rolls down my neck into my shirt. It’s a disgusting feeling, not because I’m sweating, but because I’m sweating in the air conditioning of the convention center. Too much and too late last night. But it’s SXSW, it’s Austin. Hedonism is built-in for these ten days. That being said, I’m disgusted with my thoughts, tapping the floor with disgust at my fatigue burning up the flow of energy around me. I’m in town to talk about the new book, later in the week, but I don’t want to be sitting here on the floor, and I don’t want to reach back and wipe my neck because I am in the peripheral view of a beautiful Japanese girl sitting against the wall across the carpet. Something about wiping my neck dry would be admitting defeat, a blow against my virility.

HB Augustine walks the floors of the convention center. He’s a business partner of my friend up in Seattle, down here to promote a phone app called Note. I watch him approach people with a natural verve I will never possess, a personality that addicts strangers and makes them listen, gets them enthused. He disappears into the crowd, and I watch every single face in the convention center. The ones not engaging in network, the lone faces, are staring into their phones, each and every face is looking down into a phone. One guy next to me is on his back reading a newsfeed, another is scrolling Facebook. I see memes and photos of lunch. I glance away, look around again and stare at my shoes. They’re old but also old friends of mine, dear friends of mine. The thought brings me back to the words, the reading and writing, the way I have to keep doing it to burn off a film from my body, to keep my blood clean, my instincts gentle. My thoughts drift to dead writers, to Algren, Orwell, John Fante, and then to a few of my contemporaries, the thought of their early deaths, their unwilling resignation from the form due to nothing else than being pushed out of the picture by attrition, by the fleeting images of social media that have replaced words, replaced much of the need to read, the nectar of the true reader, replaced words with acronyms, innately recruited our youth into the arms of narcissism and isolation, of false competition and self-worth, of instant gratification through images, through “status updates”… Another look at the faces and something hits me, covers me, punches a hole through my chest and starts a fire in there, and the hangover is burned off at once. The faces should be reading writers again, they should be writing if they write, or if they’ve ever wanted to, they should be “laughing out loud” because a passage written by a writer across the States or ocean has just struck a note of truth in them, and they should be using that passage to first be enhanced, then to be improved. By them. The cognitive mind has been too long deadened by emoticons and TTYLs.

—Being hungover as shit in Austin was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, which is funny to write out, but it’s true. The mirror of social media long ago started breaking its humans, and it muscled a lot of us into shamed self-promotion out of need, it showed a lot of writers to look animal, a lot of us: screenwriters, poets, novelists, all down the genres. What was once a need to write and communicate became distant, then disdained. My mind bends at this negation.

In the offices of Taggle up in Seattle, talking with Zach Stiggelbout, the mastermind behind the coding of Prose., we had many long talks during its creation, about the value of it, the way it would make reading and writing cool again, hip again, necessary again: addictive—and it would make the readers’ and writers’ time online a lot richer and a lot more fun, which is what the biggest part of all social media really comes down to. Yet with Prose., we had something much bigger in mind, something we could contribute to the world of creators, and something that was needed. This fast age of instant approval/disproval, the need for a digital self-image, the often inauthentic mirror of it has taken a sizable chunk of flesh and blood from writing and reading, and it’s sadly mistaken creation for self-indulgence. What we decided upon with Prose., was that it would be a home for writers and readers on many levels, and it would be the new social media for writers of every type, to have and provide the opportunity for true readers, writers, and aspiring writers to not only remain, but to edify the world of reading and writing across their spectrum. To reclaim, to regain the grace of the sentences and feeling not only in restoration, but to push and move forward within the construct of our digital age—and we would push each other and ourselves, to be hungry again for the word.

—To put it bluntly, we write because we have no other choice. Sitting on the floor of the convention center in Austin, when I had no need to be there, brought my mind back to the time I’d been wasting: the Sun wasting away, the Moon wasting away, all the time paid to stress when looking upon it realistically, the middle finger in the face of the workforce getting more emaciated by the week—feeling the force of the inevitable, knowing in the pit of my stomach I was slowly, no, quickly turning into a dinosaur. I stretched my feet out where he’d been sitting, rested my head upon the carpet and watched the ceiling, trying to quantify the amount of whiskey and Blue Moon coursing through my veins. I watched the crowd pass me in time-lapse mode, they walked, sped up, paused, shuttered, then moved along with tracers behind their calves. I closed my eyes at the ceiling and felt the sweat run from my brow into my temple. I thought of Brando in Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz slain by the sword of Martin Sheen. On my back I heard the laughter of the crowd, the conversation of them, the energy. I saw Brando’s bald profile in frame while he approached the gates of death. I heard the line, The horror…the….horror… I laughed in my head at the drama of it, my own, really, because I’d done it to myself. When you dance with the devil you wait for the song to stop. I sat up and shook off Brando’s bloated and bleeding body, then I sat back against the wall and felt a drop of sweat dive into my shirt collar from the back. Across the carpet I watched a young and gorgeous Japanese girl looking into her phone, then a guy next to me scrolling his Facebook feed. Down the wall where people would sit for a spell, I saw iPads and Kindles. Something hit me from above, the idea for Prose., and the good feeling of understanding that it wasn’t me I was worried about regarding longevity, in career or flesh, no: I was still madly in love with the word after all these years. I loved it enough to do all that I could to help stop its death altogether, sure, but also to help make it written stronger than it used to be, as far as its reach across the ages and events, but also for it to be read in that regard. I saw it as many things in that moment of beautiful bright color: I saw it as aikido, using an opposing force’s energy against itself and bettering our stance in the situation. I saw it as a clean wave across a dirty shore, I saw it as something that would do what all good writing does, regardless of genre: it brings the mind and heart together, it connects us to the mystery of life. It identifies with us, and it is there for another good reason, as I mentioned earlier, to improve it with your own thoughts, your own words.

In 1990, I was approaching the limbo year of twenty and working for a wholesale bulk warehouse, my main job being gathering the large red flatbed carts from the parking lot. Phoenix, hot as it got, summer, pouring sweat in the lot, thinking about how long it would take to save for another car. My life had waxed into a road of transience by choice, the constant search alone, the towns and cities, the blood of old writers running through me, the never-ending search for the next room in a strange city, the next page. That wanderlust would be stopped cold by my first serious relationship, when I would discover that love and the subsequent hate that ended it would be nothing but bad, and then good for a writer in that era. A fair stance to take was that the younger years can bleed a man blind to the fact that writing is a solo trip, and for the serious writer obsessed, being responsible for little else, let alone somebody else’s feelings, was a sure path up the ass of mediocrity. Henry Miller once said, “Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.” And yet another fair stance would be that the good people in life would only further your compulsion. I see both sides of it, objectively. Rather I can see it now, and I do see it now. With the impending death of the true reader and writer facing us, I felt that today we needed each other, we needed unity for the first time in history.

During that summer in Arizona when I was approaching the night when I would crawl into bed with Satan for the first time, HB Augustine was born in Seattle. Twenty-four years later, I was walking next to him up a side street in Austin, on our way to The Omni Hotel for lunch. I was on fire with the thought of Prose., the idea I had ready, the idea I was hoping would gun him down in the streets. We passed a group of students and I waited for a moment of silence, breathed the air of one their cigarettes and thought about the taste of vodka to clear my tongue of it. I looked over at him:

“I have an idea for an app.”

He rolled his eyes. It was understandable. He was already in town pushing Note, the mobile app that assigned music to photos, to videos, and incorporated many elements of most existing media’s A game. His eye roll took the sheer brilliance out of my brain, but I had my phone readied with the font for Prose., the Adobe Garamond Pro Regular, and what I’d picked out to show him was a word, a screenshot of a sentence from a PDF I’d emailed to my editor, one of my books in the same font, or rather one word to demonstrate the font, the word was pores, an anagram for Prose., which didn’t occur to me until much later. His phone chimed and he looked at it, “Shit, that’s Zach, hold on.” He texted a reply and put his phone back in his pocket. He looked at me, glazed over:

“Alright. What’s your idea?”

A group of people running across the street took his mind from the moment. I looked at him squarely, “I’m serious, motherfucker. I have an idea.”

He laughed and stepped back with me against the raised walk of a pub. I gave him the basic layout of Prose., the concept of it, then showed him the word on my phone, “Here.”

He took my phone and stared into it, looked at me, looked back at the convention center, and then down along 1st Street. He stared at me, “Holy fucking shit, man.”

I took the phone and put it in my pocket, “Let’s eat.”

Walking up 8th toward San Jacinto, we started talking about Prose., and the more we talked, the more it evolved immediately. My whole concept of it being “Twitter and Facebook and Instagram for writers and readers” started to grow buildings above its shoulders, and once I brought up the web app, the world of Prose., as I call it, began creating itself.

Out of the heat and into the Omni. HB ordered a beer, and I’d decided on a Jack Coke once I glanced at a vodka/tonic on the table next to us. Being graced and cursed with mild synesthesia, the look of the clear liquid reminded me of sweat. The drinks arrived, and I slammed mine. HB smiled at the empty glass, “How’s the hair on that dog?”

“It’s beautiful.”

The waitress looked down at me, “Another?

“Put some Jack in it this time, please. I thought everything was bigger in Texas. You’re destroying a good stereotype for me.”

She disappeared and returned with the drink and the menus. I sipped it, and it was no different. Measured pour spouts. I could have ordered a double, but I was medicating myself. The buzz from Prose. had erased the pain, but the fatigue from last night hadn’t pulled a punch. Not even one. The menu blurred and came back into focus: hot wings with ranch for both of us. We handed her the menus and I went ahead and ordered a pint of beer. Inside it was quiet and cool, and not busy, which was good news, because the glass arrived quickly and cold. Outside it wasn’t summer, but the humidity was pure Hell for someone from the Northwest like HB, even with the overcast upon the town. He downed his water and a respectable length of beer. I looked at him, “Prose., HB. Prose. has action to be the next social media.”

“It really does. Think about the reach of something like that.”

I drained my water and stared at him. The idea was so dense on the air there was no subject to move it. It occurred to me there that being in Austin with HB and the fact that he and Zach owned Taggle, a universal review system for reviewing products, services, brands, and people, was a major subliminal component for me for which to land upon Prose., to really get into its construct, its world. Having zero understanding of writing code, of anything in the way of making something like that jump alive, I knew we’d have to rely on Zach to bring the action to the screen, which only made me feel more confident. I squeezed the orange wedge into my beer, “And with Zach to write the code, really make this scream. I mean, think about that, having a poem or story leave your mind and get published all over the world, right then, and the world wants to read it.” I let the orange rest on the surface, then tasted the top. HB smiled around the room, “When I get back to Seattle, I’m going to have a sit-down with the Taggle board about this. This is beyond big.”

The wings arrived. The waitress stared at our faces, “Anything else?”

I stared in love at the bowls of wings. All legs, each of them dark orange and giant. I looked at her, “These are the biggest damn hot wings I ever saw. I take back what I said earlier.”

“Figured you might.” She laughed and walked off. HB stared into his bowl, “Jesus, man. What a great day.”

My phone lit up with a text. Todd Kimball up in Seattle, a main character in a book I wrote about his clothing company last year, and the reason I was in Austin, to promote that book with a signing during SXSW. I’d taken the job because I was challenged with writing a clean novel, spanning all ages and a few genres, and because I’d never written a book for someone else, and also because I liked him and his family, and his team, for that matter. It was through the book that I met HB and Zach. And Todd met HB through a friend of his with whom he’d played baseball for five years, a friend who’d met HB on the site causes.com, through a cause HB started on there, “The integral world of revolution,” and the guy was one of the first people to join HB’s cause. Through that, when Zach and HB conceived the final aspects and name of their review company, Kimball stepped on. Todd lined up the whole Austin trip for me and HB, set us up in the same Airbnb house in south Austin, flew HB down, and wired me gas money. I was living in Bisbee, Arizona, for the winter, just north of Mexico, to work on the new book and escape the rain. I drove the 14 hours east because of my dog. Separation anxiety of ten days apart would kill the both of us. Right now he was back in south Austin passed out in the air conditioning. After SXSW, HB was flying to Los Angeles to watch a runway show for the clothing company, then back to Seattle. I looked at my phone, “Kimball.”

“What’s he up to?”

“Checking on the progress.”

HB laughed. I texted back that we were busy in a brothel on his dime, which was returned with the good message, “Perfect.”

I flipped the phone over, “Think they’ll all go for the idea?”

“They have to. This is probably the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

I took a drink, and we ate in silence, destroying the hotel linen napkins with orange smears, eager looking graffiti, a race to get back to the next leg. HB nodded at me and brushed his finger down the far right side of his mouth, “You got a little right here.” I found it and got it with the napkin, “Good eye. Never trust anyone who doesn’t tell you that you have something on your face.”

We destroyed the wings and the entire table. HB’s girl called from Seattle, and he walked off to talk to her. It occurred to me to text my ex-girlfriend and tell her about Prose., but I thought against it. The last idea of hers, for us to move in together, was shot down by me in bad form, and I was afraid that even the best idea I had would be too sweet a revenge for her, and I also realized it was best to tell nobody about it, except those involved and a rare and trusted few. HB sat down and we slammed our beers, got our things together and walked out into the grey oven of Texas.