Fear of Big Books

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I have to get over my fear of big books (I can’t find an official name for this and so I’ll coin machrysbibliophobia—and why did my autocorrect replace this with machrysbibliophobmia when there’s no such word?  It’s a scary world where my fears go unnamed—go, aporripsophobia!)  I’ve read many large novels with payoff (several by Stephen King and Neal Stephenson) and plenty of nonfiction from which I’ve learned a ton (perhaps literally).  But still, when a book I really want to read is big, I tremble.  I try to decide how to justify the time.  Now, I know I don’t have to justify time reading—that’s a constant activity.  I think it’s more a question of caesura, places to stop and perhaps claim credit for work done.  I’m not a fan of multiple volumes since that drives prices up.  Maybe just say it a bit more succinctly?

In my case—and I can only speak for myself—it’s all about a sense of accomplishment.  The distinct, discrete book that I’ve jammed into my gray matter along with its companions.  Some of us are driven by the shot of joy that accompanies completion.  I have a few compendia of authors/genres I really like.  I dip into them but never quite seem to have the time to finish them.  You see, recently watching the X-Files got me thinking about Charles Forte.  I have a compendium of his four books and I read Book of the Damned right through.  But I’ve got three more to go.  How are you supposed to count that on Goodreads, without its own ISBN?  Or the collected fiction and poetry of Poe.  It’s nice to have it all in one place, but will I ever read it cover-to-cover?  I tried once, really I did.

Scary books

As I write this I just started a big book.  It’s on a topic I really find fascinating but I’d been putting it off for some time because of my machrysbibliophobia.  I’ve been entrenched from before page 1.  I know it’s going to take me quite a long time to finish it—I have a job that takes its pound of flesh daily, and even when I do get a day off, well, mowing season is here.  And the porch needs painting again.  Maybe if non-Catholic monasteries were a thing I’d have time to devote to the reading I really must get done before my time’s up.  I like big books, but I’m also afraid of their ramifications.  Enough so even to name my fear.

Free Cookies

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The principle is a simple one.  People, being what they are, want more than just a nibble of something good.  Bakers know that giving away a free cookie generally leads to the sale of several cookies.  Most businesses realize this and give away freebies in hopes of selling more.  Something I don’t write much about (and this is related) is my artistic pursuits.  I love to draw and paint.  The fact is, were I able to do so I’d probably do that all day long just about every day without tiring of it.  The problem is I don’t have time for drawing or painting anymore.  Work demands increasing numbers of hours per day and writing is a time-intensive hobby.  I dream of illustrating my own blog since I know the kinds of images I’d like to use.  I just don’t have the time.  So I often use Unsplash.

Photo by Food Photographer | Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash

I discovered Unsplash in 2020, during the pandemic.  A website of free photos, you can search and download and reuse them for free.  And give the photographer credit.  They benefit from the exposure and you get a nifty free image to use any way you like.  Now it’s beginning to seem that was a free cookie.  (I told you the topics were related!)  Lately, when I visit Unsplash, more and more images appear with a “plus” in the upper right-hand corner.  The plus images are those you pay for.  If you scroll long enough you come to the free images, but only after you’ve seen the ones that look especially polished.  Hey, you’ve been eating free cookies for years, don’t you think it’s time you paid your tab?  Well, I don’t make any money from this blog—in fact I pay WordPress for the privilege of writing here—so I’ll settle for what’s still free.

The truly valuable things in life seem to be those under threat since the pandemic.  I skulk about the nonprofit world—I’ve never been interested in making money for money’s sake.  I see valuable institutions struggling to stay afloat because the free cookies are gone and nobody seems to want to pay for a dozen anymore.  In fact, we’ve come to expect some things for free.  And we’re not about to start paying now.  I still use and support Unsplash.  I give the artists exposure here (such as it is) and hope that they’re getting hired for their talents.  I know that if I had the time these daily posts would come with hand-drawn art from yours truly, but I see it’s time to get to work.

Tech Warning

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My moon roof is open.  That’s what the late-night alert says.  Thing is, I don’t have a moon roof.  Maybe I should go out to the garage and check, just to be sure.  You see, these new cars, which are as much computer as they are a means of conveyance, are subject to glitches just like the computers at work always seem to be.  And if this is true of a massive and lucrative company like Toyota, how can the rest of us really trust what our devices tell us?  After all, mainly they exist to sell us more stuff.  So whenever we take the Prius out, after it’s put away I get some kind of warning on my phone.  Nearly every single time.  If somebody’s been sitting in the back seat—or even if a bag was resting there—I’m cheerfully reminded to check the back seat once I get into the house.  I appreciate its concern and when I grow even more forgetful I may need it.  But that moon roof…

I use and appreciate technology.  I believe in the science behind it.  It makes life simpler, in some ways.  Much more complex in others.  I confess that I miss paper maps.  Do you remember the thrill of driving into an unknown city and having to figure out how to get to an address with no GPS?  Now that seems like an adventure movie.  Our cars practically—sometimes literally—drive themselves.  I’m no motor-head, not by a long shot.  I do remember my first car that didn’t have power steering or power brakes.  It had a stick-shift and you had to wrassle it at times.  Show it who was in charge.  With technology we’ve all become the serfs.  It breaks down and you have to take it to an expert.  Not quite the same as changing a tire.

I worry about the larger implications of this.  As a writer I worry that my largest output is only electronic.  Publishers don’t seem to realize that those of us who write do it as a way of surviving death.  We have something to say and we want it etched in stone.  Or at least printed on paper.  Tucked away in some Library of Congress stacks in the hopes that it will remain there for good.  I often think of dystopias.  The stories unfold and ancient documents—our documents—are found.  But unless they get the grid up and running, and have Silicon Valley to help them, our electronic words are gone.  It’s as if you left the moon roof open, even though you don’t have one.

Six-Hundred and Sixty-Six

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I have to confess to never having read a biography of Aleister Crowley.  I’ve known of him since I was a teenager, however, since you can’t read very much about esoteric stuff without running into his name once in a while.  Crowley was famous for starting the religion called Thelema, revitalizing interest in magick (the additional “k” was to distinguish it from stage magic), and for generally being a bad boy.  In fact, he declared himself the “wickedest man on earth” and liked to be called “the Beast” and loved the number 666.  It was the latter point that caught my attention recently.  In pop culture, 666 really only took off after The Omen.  (Movies often dictate, or at least inform, our religion.)  Crowley, who lived much earlier than the film, saw the marketability of 666 and I wondered how it caught his attention.

Aleister Crowley, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As I recently posted, the end of the world as we know it is a fairly modern construct.  I happened to be reading about Crowley recently and learned that he was raised in the Plymouth Brethren tradition.  (They don’t loudly claim him as a native son, for some reason.)  He is probably the most famous of the Brethren, across all walks of life.  He even earned a place on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The Plymouth Brethren were massively influenced by John Nelson Darby, the inventor of dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is the fairly new Christian belief that time can be divided into ages, or “dispensations,” during which God has a plan already mapped out.  He apparently waited for Darby before letting the rest of the world in on this secret.

Things about Crowley then began to make a little more sense.  His choice to name himself after Darby’s preoccupations adds up.  I haven’t read any biographies so this may be old news, well known among scholars of esoterica.  It nevertheless bears pondering because the religion we teach our kids may have unexpected consequences.  Crowley rejected the Brethren (whose moral predilections were not to his liking, especially as a hot-blooded young man) but the religion influenced him nevertheless.  I wonder if the teachings Crowley received as a child encouraged him to become, in his own mind, the opposite.  Crowley wasn’t “the Beast.”  His precepts included “love is the law” (granted, his version of love was a touch earthier than Christians with whom he’d be raised, but still), not a bad start for an ethical system.  Even the wickedest man on earth believed in the power of love, even if his religion introduced him to 666.

Forgotten Books

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Would you rather never write a book or write a book that’s easily forgotten?  This question springs from a recent exercise of trying (unsuccessfully) to count the books I’ve read.  I mean going through and putting a finger on each one and counting, if I’d read it.  I encountered a surprising number of ordinals that evoked a blank stare—I don’t remember the book at all.   Or I remember having read it, but don’t recall what it was about.  (In one instance, the book was one my wife read, and not me.  That explained a lot!)  This got me thinking about what it takes to write a memorable book.  I’ve always been one to prefer either speculative fiction or the classics.  (I’m aware that “classics” are now being dismantled because they don’t represent all groups.  I’d call them “white men’s classics,” but a surprising number of them were written by women.)  If a book has a speculative element strong enough I will recall having read it.  I like weird stuff.

I’ve read books where parts of them, at least, have stayed with me for half-a-century.  I remember specific things I read as a child (and no, I’m not talking about Barney Beagle—although I do remember that too).  I like to believe that even the bits that are hazy indicate that the book isn’t truly lost, but buried somewhere.  The human mind has an amazing capacity to absorb things.  I’ve read at least three thousand books in my life—I have no idea how many, actually, but Goodreads has me at 1,000 and I started using it in 2013.  I’d been intentionally reading for about forty years already, at that point.  Three of them while working on my doctorate.

I recently (within easy memory) read a Doc Savage novel.  I’d read the entire series, or pretty near, as a junior high schooler.   Anyway, there were well over a hundred of them.  I remembered nothing in my recent re-read beyond Doc’s band of five companions.  The story was completely unfamiliar to me.  One of the more recent books I know I read but couldn’t remember the story at all was a New York Times bestseller.  I guess if I’ve forgotten the author he’ll still be okay on Mars in the future since many others must remember something about it.  I’ll be long gone by then, both on Mars and down here, I’m sure.  I do hope even by then something will remain of all the books I’ve read.

Price Drop

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Here’s a public service announcement for your Friday.  If you’ve been wanting to read Holy Horror but found the price too high, McFarland has now lowered the cover price to under $30.  Here’s the link: Holy Horror.  Of my non-academic books, this has been my “best seller.”  Since I’m currently shopping around another book, and since agents aren’t interested (at least not any more), I wondered whether McFarland might look at it.  The editor who handled Holy Horror had left, and the new editor responded to my concern about pricing by telling me that they lower prices after a couple of years.  She noticed, however, that Holy Horror had been overlooked in the price lowering process, so voila!  It’s now affordable.

This model, while not the same as trade publishing’s efforts to get primarily front-list sales, seems to make sense.  Too many publishers raise prices year after year, so if you don’t buy immediately you’ll pay more.  McFarland tends toward a paperback first model.  The first couple of years are aimed at library sales—and they do well at those—then they lower for individual purchase.  All I had to do was ask.  Two years ago I asked Lexington/Fortress Academic if they’d do a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That poor book never had a chance.  The editor said they were considering it.  Instead they did the trick that publishers seem to like: decoupling the ebook price from the hardcover.  So you can buy some expensive electrons instead of holding a real book.  So it goes.  I’ve written a museum piece.

It’s a little too soon to say about The Wicker Man.  My experience has been that university presses, particularly British ones, like to raise prices rather than chasing sales.  If you’re reading this blog you know that I’ll market my books.  I even printed bookmarks for Holy Horror at my own expense.  Maybe it’s time to start distributing them again.  What a difference ten dollars can make!  I’m a book booster.  (You might not have noticed.)  I’m glad that McFarland understands that individuals will buy books, even if they’ve been out for a while.  The standard wisdom among academic publishers is “three years and then you’re done.”  If you’re inclined to help prove that business model wrong, you can now get Holy Horror without having to take out a second mortgage.  That’s cause for hope—any writer has the dream that her or his book will keep on selling.  Sharing this information will, it seems, make it wider known. Please pass it on.

Writ Small

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I have a loupe on my desk.  Two, in fact.  I bought them for examining rocks up close, but they have other usages.  The other day I wanted to post a comment on a friend’s blog.  Of course, WordPress still doesn’t recognize me after thirteen years, so I had to enter my password.  I write small.  I couldn’t make out my own scrawl, so out came the loupe.  Problem solved.  (But WordPress, please!  Don’t you remember me?)  Here’s a true story.  When I was in college I had very little money.  In fact, losing three dollars one day sent me into a week-long depression that I still remember.  I bought college-ruled notebook paper for writing reports (before typing them up).  And I wrote three lines per ruled line on the page.  I dearly wish I’d kept some of those symbols of my extreme frugality.  Growing up poor will do that to you.

Thing is, I never outgrew writing small.  My handwriting is minuscule and my eyes aren’t as young as they once were.  The loupes date from when I was teaching and I was free to pursue my love of rocks.  The glacial til of Wisconsin brought up interesting things and some locations in the state (I joined the Wisconsin Geological Society) had wonderful possibilities for collecting.  I’ve never told any movers, since what happened at Nashotah House, that, yes, those boxes do contain rocks.  I’ve always had plenty of interests outside what my career happened to be.  Even now what passes for a career is just a job.  Life offers too many other things to explore to limit myself to one.

Indeed, if we had a Universal Living Wage or something like that, my job would be “writer.”  At least in this phase of my life it would be.  Of course, if justice were anything but a joke I’d still be teaching.  And I’d probably still be hunting rocks.  My wife puts up with me bringing home unusual ones that I find.  The earth is full of gifts and it seems a shame to squander things.  Even paper.  Especially paper.  It takes a lot of resources to produce it.  I may not write three lines per line anymore—wide-ruled pages look absolutely criminal to my eye—but I still write small.  The things we learn when we’re young often come back to us as adults, reminding us of the freshness with which we first faced the world.  It seems our initial assessments may have been correct after all.

Excess Ideas

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I sincerely hope that after I’m gone someone with more sense than me will look through my notebooks instead of just tossing them in the trash.  There are a ton of creative ideas there that I have no time to develop into stories.  I know that writers are frequently looking for new angles and ideas that haven’t been presented before.  I have them in spades.  Of course, unless someone is noticed at least by shortly after their passing, their stuff becomes detritus lost for all time.  I was thinking of family heirlooms recently.  I come from a poor family, not rich in stuff.  Indeed, most of what we still own is made of paper.  The rare family heirloom is something imbued with history.  One of my grandfather’s things (I have two of his books) that survived was a brief account of his life.  (Also paper.)

Members of his family—I’m still uncertain as to who—experimented with photography.  This was in the days of holding still while being shot, but there were some very interesting prints that made their way to me.  (Paper again.)  This was from the time that negatives were preserved on glass.  I imagine this led to storage issues over time.  And I also know that families have to move from time to time.  Things get lost during every move, from my experience.  In my grandfather’s very brief autobiography, he notes that these glass plates were kept under the floor of the barn and were forgotten at the time of a move.  I very much doubt that they’re still there.  Developers greedily come in with their backhoes and knock and dig and dump and pour.

I sometimes wonder what small, local history was lost on those glass plates.  Some families are erased from history—most of us are, in fact.  Generations on down the road there’s little evidence that we were even here.  For writers, a stab is being made at remembrance.  I tend to think of writing as being like a radio receiver for thoughts.  They may not originate with me.  Some of them are quite bizarre—trust me.  It makes me sad to think of them left rotting in some landfill.  My “Kilroy was here” is inscribed in notebooks.  If anybody’s interested, I’ll warn you in advance that my handwriting’s quite small.  And the ideas are uncensored.  There are so very many of them.  I don’t mind sharing, but I would appreciate the opportunity to try selling them myself, first.  If only I had the time to write them all out.  And I won’t be leaving them under the barn floor.

Conference Voice

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“Conference voice” is a phenomenon that began with my career malfunction.  While teaching I attended the AAR/SBL annual meeting every year but one.  Even the year that Nashotah House fired me I attended, through the generosity of a seminary colleague who’d left for a parish and who used discretionary funds to help me afford it.  (Churches can actually help people from time to time.)  In any case,  I always met many colleagues at the meeting itself, and had many conversations.  Besides, I taught a full docket of courses every year.  Then the malfunction.  I was eventually hired by Gorgias Press but I had to do adjunct teaching to make ends meet.  I taught up to about ten courses per year at Rutgers, all in the evening.  Then I was hired by Routledge.  The commute to NYC precluded any adjunct work, so I settled into the quiet world of editing.

I also began attending AAR/SBL again.  I came home with “conference voice.”  After going for days, or even weeks, with no substantial conversation, I’d lost my lecturing vocal stamina.  At the conference I had five days of back-to-back meetings, often in a crowded and noisy exhibit hall.  I’m a soft-spoken individual (I can project when teaching) and my larynx was stressed by the concentrated five days of constant conversation.  My voice had dropped in pitch by the time I got home and it took a few days to get better.  I would lapse into cenobic silence for another year.  After the conference I’d return every year with aching vocal cords.  My family sympathized, but I really just don’t talk that much.  Especially at work.

Recently I met a friend for lunch.  I hadn’t seen him to chat for a few years so we spent over two-and-a-half hours talking.  Part of it in a restaurant where I needed to raise my voice.   I awoke the next morning with conference voice.  This bothered me because I’d been invited to do a podcast episode about a horror movie and I faced an existential crisis: what does my real voice sound like?  In my mind, my profession is teaching.  The voice I had at Nashotah House, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Rutgers University and Montclair State, was my real sound, such as it was.  Life has landed me in a situation where I seldom speak, and almost never to groups where I need to project.  Conference voice is a reminder of what I was meant to do and what I, of necessity, must do.

Wonderful Impossibility

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I used to tell my students that a semester break without reading a book that challenged your assumptions was wasted.  I tried to lead by example, but jobs are such fragile things.  Since I have no semester breaks I try to read books that push the limits more frequently.  I’d heard about Carlos Eire’s They Flew before the author had settled on a publisher.  (I don’t know him personally, but would be glad to.)  In case the title doesn’t do enough heavy lifting, the subtitle A History of the Impossible might help.  Yes, we’re stepping into the world of the post-secular here.  It’s a wonderful place.  Although much of the book deals with early modern cases of levitation, the study ranges wider than that.  Written by a respected historian, this is a very important book.  For many reasons.

I am glad to see Yale University Press joining with Chicago and some noted others (Rowman and Littlefield, for instance) in challenging a paradigm that is no longer upheld by science.  I can hear the howling already, but if you read carefully, with an open mind (which is required by science) you’ll quite possibly learn something here.  Our minds do influence our reality.  We haven’t figured out how because secularism ends the discussion with scorn.  That was true of the study of UFOs as well, until the U. S. Navy said, “Nope.  They’re real.”  (It only took about seven decades, so don’t expect instant results.)  We cut off our possibilities when we mock things out of habit.  I remember the Turok comic where one character said to another (give me a break—this has been five decades and I can’t recall all the names) “Fools scoff at what they don’t understand.”  Truer words have never been penned.

The impossible happens when scientists aren’t there to witness it.  It sometimes happens when they are.  Doubt that?  Read about the Pauli Effect.  Or call it gremlins, the choice is yours.  It’s real in either case.  Academics are often among the last, with the exception of Trump supporters, to see what’s been staring them in the face all along.  I’ll say more about this book on Goodreads, but let me float a hope here.  I want to go back to that indefinite article in Eire’s subtitle.  This is A History of the Impossible.  May more follow.  Others, such as Jeff Kripal, have been doing similar work for many years now.  We can ignore it, or scoff at it.  But I think that character in Turok got it right, even if I can’t remember his name.

Too Much TMI

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Okay, okay.  I admit I get overwhelmed.  There’s just too much stuff to read.  I currently have 25 tabs open on my browser, afraid that I’ll forget about something that seemed so urgent when I opened the URL in the first place.  (Two decades ago that sentence would’ve been nonsense.)  I limit my time on social media.  This can be a death-kiss for a writer, but for sanity’s sake (and work’s), I look at Facebook for literally about five minutes a day.  (If you want to reach me leave a comment on my blog.)  In those five minutes (or less) I often come away with two or three articles that I want to read but don’t have time just now.  I open a tab and hope I’ll get to it before I lose interest.  There’s a lot of information.  Too much.  Too much TMI.

I’m a slow reader.  I sometimes wonder if I have borderline dyslexia—it once happened on a test and led me to phone a professor at night to explain—but dear reader, it slows me down.  And a writer, no matter how obscure, needs time.  I told a friend the other day that I don’t do things I enjoy, such as painting and drawing, because writing takes up so much time.  (And work does too—it gets the lion’s share.)  But those articles!  They look so important!  Some have health implications and, if you lose your health you have even less time.  The internet gives us TMI constantly.  And this field is riddled with rabbit holes.  Just ask the white rabbit about time.

Image credit: John Tenniel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What are the curious to do?  I actually get an insane amount of satisfaction from closing a browser tab.  It’s a sense of accomplishment—I’ve done something that brings closure!  If I do it enough times I’ll get down to the URLs I always keep open lest I forget my place.  Some of these tabs have been open since the Obama administration.  If you’re critical of such as I you might suggest “why don’t you just read an article instead of writing about not having the time to read?”  The interlocutor here is clearly not a writer.  Or at least has different writing habits than me.  There are some non-negotiables in this world of TMI.  I suppose I’m adding to the problem.  At least if anything thinks what I present here is information.  For that I defer to Klima, who, happily, still has some time.

Springing

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Life, for everyone, has difficult times.  Katherine May has a reassuring, but not always cheerful way about her.  She calls troubled times Wintering.  The subtitle of her book explains that it’s about The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  My wife and I read this one together.  It reminded me, in some ways, of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.  In a society vapidly preoccupied with an often shallow happiness, admitting, even pondering the things that are difficult is an act of courage.  May has a disarming way of writing, a humility and self-deprecation that are an antidote to the brazen self-assurance we too often see in the media.  She looks for lessons in her own experiences of pain and loss, and yes, surviving through winter. 

Winter is often a quiet time of reflection.  In our bright, loud, beeping, buzzing world we don’t take much time for such things.  Indeed, capitalism (which is generally not deep, although deeply engrained) doesn’t encourage it.  “The more you can work,” it whispers in your ear, even while sleeping, “the better you’ll feel.”  Winter slows things down.  Makes life a bit harder.  Think of all those days when you just don’t feel like going outside in the cold, snow, and sleet.  When the chill drives you next to the radiator, covered in lap blankets.  When it’s dark most of the time.  Such are good times to think.  As May shows, when you turn a difficult situation around and look at it from different angles, truths about yourself, about life, begin to emerge.  What is it we’re after that keeps us running all the time, dangerously overheating?  We need winter.

The anecdotes here are deeply personal.  This is particularly difficult for a writer because many of us face rejection frequently.  When you’ve poured yourself into a book, blithe casting aside by agents and publishers hurts.  I admire the bravery and the wisdom of writers like May.  She shows that wintering is possible, and that it is followed by spring.  Lives, she notes, are cyclical.  We can find quite a lot of meaning in that.  I often find myself fearing winter.  The heating bills.  The wearing of many layers of clothes for months at a time.  The dark and cloudy days.  Yet a good part of me welcomes the retreat.  I know that, in the cycle of the year with few days off from work, that if I can make it to Halloween, some rest—some wintering—awaits.  And that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Poe’s Novel

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Certain authors, some great among them, excel at short stories.  I know from personal experience that trying to publish a book of such stories is a very hard sell.  For a writer like Edgar Allan Poe, who was trying to live on his words, it often led to periods of poverty.  Thinking of him as a short-story author, I had never read his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  Hailed by fellow brief-tale writer Jorge Luis Borges as Poe’s best, I figured I’d better give it a try.  I’m glad I did.  I had, however, no idea what to expect.  Those who write on Poe seldom pay it much mind.  He was famous for his poems and stories, and this gothic, sea-faring novel was, according to the introduction, suggested to him by those who felt his making a living as a writer might improve if he used long form.

Concerning the edition: the novel is in the public domain.  Penguin Classics, however, often contain nice introductions.  Indeed, the intro by Richard Kopley in this edition is excellent.  A few of his observations stood out to me—this novel was, in some measure, about Poe’s family.  Both the protagonist and the author have five-syllable names with the same cadence, ending on a three-letter surname beginning with P.  Also, as both the introduction and notes make clear, Poe was deeply steeped in the Bible.  You seldom read about Poe and religion.  Writers from America’s first generation, however, were uniquely brewed in it.  I’d never considered that about Poe before.  There are many editions of Pym available, but I recommend this one because of its introduction.

The story ends without resolution, just so you know.  Pym, talked into an adventure by a somewhat devil-may-care friend, goes out on the ocean on a boat after a night of drinking.  And herein hangs the tale.  Well, actually, the friend convinces the young man with a taste for the sea to stow away on a whaler that his father captains.  A mutiny, however, leaves Pym “buried alive” onboard.  A shipwreck leads to near starvation and a boon companion survivor.  Picked up by an explorer headed south, they discover a surprisingly temperate Antarctic circle where a native tribe turns treacherous because of their fear of the color white.  It does seem that there’s a race narrative taking place here too.  I enjoyed the story although the chapters about longitude and latitude don’t quite rise to the level of Melville’s maritime writing.  It’s a tale worth the read, however, but find one with a good introduction and it will be smoother sailing.

Morte d’Author

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I recently learned of Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author.”  Originally written in French, Wikipedia warns it’s not to be confused with Le Morte d’Arthur.  Or is it?  Barthes’ idea is that to truly appreciate a piece of literature you must dissociate it from its author.  I’m of conflicted feelings about this.  To truly understand an author you should read everything they’ve written.  Perhaps that’s a task best left up to biographers and historians.  I have trouble, especially when an author’s name is well known, and perhaps the very reason I purchased a book, of leaving the author out of the equation.  On the other hand, sometimes I’ll read literature merely for the experience, and the author is often someone I know nothing about.  If the book moves me, however, the first thing I start to research is the author.

Said author may not give the ultimate meaning to the story, but I believe it’s a more subtle  interaction than “La mort de l’auteur” might suggest.  It’s not unusual to enter into parasocial  relationships with an author.  In fact, I suspect it’s quite common.  After reading a Neil Gaiman novel I sometimes think we’d recognize each other across a crowded room.  Compelling writing will do that to you.  And from a writer’s perspective, what you write does contain part of you.  Captured in literary form.  As much as—no, more than a photograph does.  An author does not determine the final meaning of what s/he writes, but they mean something by writing it in the first place.

When writing fiction I often find myself exploring themes that require other stories I’ve written to give them fuller texture.  Perhaps this is why finding publishers is so difficult.  I’ve had people tell me that they understand my nonfiction better after they get to know me.  There’s a natural progression here, in this age of endemic loneliness: a story, blog post, or book catches your attention.  You want to know more and what do you do?  Await the death of the author or reach out to the writer?  I’ve done both, and I generally find that reaching out to an author can be satisfying.  It depends, of course.  Some don’t like to be disturbed by those they don’t know, their parasocial paramours.  Of course, there is a way to get to know an author, even remotely.  Read what they write.  It won’t give you the whole story, of course, but the more of their work you read the better you’ll get to know them.  Thus I’m conflicted about “La mort de l’auteur.”

Image credit: Florence Harrison, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Learning to Write

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It’s a reciprocal relationship.  Ideally a symbiosis.  The publisher has a reach, and know-how, that an author lacks.  An author provides content the publisher needs.  Yet publishing is a business in a capitalistic world and has to (unless subsidized) turn a profit.  As an author who works in publishing I’m skewered on the horns of this dilemma.  It’s heartbreaking to see the lengths some authors go to only to find out their book is priced the same as a week’s worth of groceries.  Or three tanks full of gas.  Who buys a $100 book?  Libraries.  Well, some libraries.  Occasionally a publisher will run sales, if you order direct, but by then interest in your book (which may be timely) has passed on.  You become just another name on the shelf in the Library of Congress.

I’m looking for a publisher for my sixth book.  This has to be someone who understands that even $45 is beyond the reach of most intelligent readers.  “What the market will bear” feels like the death sentence to the years of your life you’ve put into writing the thing.  A friend once asked me, “Why do you do it?”  For authors the real question is “How can you not do it?”  The need for the validation through publication runs very deeply in some people.  More deeply than our national love for Taylor Swift.  It has to do with meaning.  Purpose.  A sense of what we’re put on earth to do.  

Image credit: Codex Manesse, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The standard “wisdom,” and practice, is to publish in hardcover, priced for the library market, and if it sells well at $100, perhaps offer a paperback.  Hopefully priced lower than $45, but don’t hold your breath.  “What the market will bear,” should be your mantra.  It’s a wonder that civilized people ever got educated.  I grew up on cheap books from Goodwill, which is all I could afford.  College, on borrowed money, taught me the price of reading seriously.  It was a lesson I never forgot.  I’d begun my faltering steps to writing books while in high school.  I started writing short stories even earlier than that.  It has been a life of writing.  Even series books, I’ve come to see, are too easily exploited in this way.  My shortest book is priced at $40.  At least I know that I’ve written some collectors’ items.  Take heart, my fellow writers trying to emerge from academe.  There are other ways of being in the world.  And some of them may even be symbiotic.