SOBER IS MY NEW DRUNK: 850 Days (and Counting) without Booze or AA. A Comedy in Twelve Steps.

A New Byliner Original by Paul Carr

SAN FRANCISCO, March 12, 2012 -- Paul Carr's new Byliner Original, published today, is Sober Is My New Drunk, a wonderfully bracing (but zero-proof) tale of recovery. In it, Carr—the bestselling humor writer and notorious tech blogger—explains why he avoided Alcoholics Anonymous and instead found salvation through social media, including using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the Internet to get (and stay) clean and sober.

 

 

Paul Carr gave up booze with the same verve and originality that he brought to his life as a drunk.

For one thing, he didn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that, he writes, "breeds an 'it's not my fault' mentality that refuses to accept that anyone can ever truly be cured of the 'disease' of alcoholism."

Instead, Carr quit in the most non-anonymous way imaginable: He posted an open letter on his popular website and took to Twitter and Facebook, inviting others to police his progress.

As Carr writes, "Fortunately, we live in a time when it's easier than ever to share our secrets with friends and strangers alike. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter and blogging and video sharing and all that good stuff, a decision to give up drinking can easily be publicized for all to see. Which is precisely what I did."

The letter was both a confession and an invitation for public scrutiny. "No matter where I was," he recalls, "there was always a chance that someone had read my post and was waiting to catch me with a drink in my hand." To help keep himself on the straight and narrow, Carr still has a counter at the top of his site, ticking off the number of days he's gone without a drink.

In this no-holds-barred essay, Carr delivers his own twelve steps to building a life without booze. His hard-earned advice, punctuated with anecdotes that are both cautionary and comic (a bender once took him to Iceland, where he drunkenly believed he'd get better Wi-Fi), is given with humility and goodwill. Along the way, Carr celebrates the simple yet overlooked pleasures of sobriety—weight loss, a renewed love life, the ability to buy a phone or laptop without promptly losing it in a bar. As he slowly discovers, a sober life actually can be fun. What's more, he'll remember it.

Paul Carr is the author of the memoirs Bringing Nothing to the Party and The Upgrade. Sober Is My New Drunk is his first book since quitting alcohol. A former columnist for TechCrunch and The Guardian, he makes his home in a series of hotels in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Byliner publishes compelling works of original fiction and nonfiction written to be read in a single sitting. Among its bestselling titles are Amy Tan's Rules for Virgins, Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit, Ann Patchett's The Getaway Car, William T. Vollmann's Into the Forbidden Zone, Taylor Branch's The Cartel, Margaret Atwood's I'm Starved for You, and Mark Bittman's Cooking Solves Everything. The companion website, Byliner.com, features curated archives of the best fiction and nonfiction writing and allows readers to easily find, share, and buy new and classic stories by their favorite authors.

Sober Is My New Drunk is available for $1.99 as a Kindle Single at Amazon, a Quick Read at Apple's iBookstore, a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and at Kobo.

SOURCE Byliner

Exclusive Julian Assange Interview Show to Launch on RT in March

MOSCOW , Jan. 25, 2012 -- RT will launch an exclusive interview series by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange called "The World Tomorrow" in March 2012.




Host and show author, Julian Assange, will engage with ten key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries – figures who in the author's opinion will be shaping the political agenda of tomorrow.

Julian Assange is filming the series from the location of his house arrest where he has been confined, with no charge, for 413 days. Filming commences a week before his Supreme Court hearing.

"Upheavals and revolutions in the Middle East have commenced an era of real political change that is still unfolding. Wikileaks, as the world's boldest publisher, has been at the frontline of this global movement for change, and our project is designed to catalyze the global discussion about the world of tomorrow," said Assange. "Are we heading towards utopia, or dystopia and how we can set our paths? Through this series I will explore the possibilities for our future in conversations with those who are shaping it".

RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said, "We're proud to host Julian Assange's new project. RT has rallied a global audience of open-minded people who don't take things around them for granted. Our viewers are open to the discussions that will be presented at Julians' show on our channel".


Source: RT.com