My First Book

First, an announcement: My novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth, which I wrote in 2013, is now available as a Kindle e-book, and will soon also be available as a paperback. I decided to go ahead and self-publish this one for a couple of reasons.

One reason is simply that it is a novella, that misfit of fiction forms that is too long to be published as a short story (for example, in a magazine or literary journal) yet not long enough to publish in a (traditional) single volume as a novel. Especially being one written by an unknown author, Angels didn't stand much of a chance at "legitimate" (i.e. big house) publication, and I didn't feel like putting the time and effort into marketing it the way I intend to do with my two novels once they are finally completed. I also want my first novel (not a novella) to be my real literary debut.

Of course, one might wonder: why not just sit on it until after Bluebird is published? To which my answer might well be: That long? Actually, my self-publication of this novella is intended only as the beginning of a larger program of self-publication of a number of my older works, some dating back to the 1990s, as well as of any number of minor works I may write in the future. I do not feel the need to limit myself, in this day and age, to any one avenue of publication.

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The publication of Angels has got me thinking about myself, not merely as a writer, but as a maker of books. Ever since childhood I have been deeply fascinated by books as objects and have always either made them or dreamed of making them.

I am now 46 and, after a lifetime of writing, have yet to have any of my work traditionally published. I have barely made any attempt whatsoever to get any of my work published in that way—have not submitted my short stories to magazines, have never submitted my poetry to journals, have not had a truly finished novel manuscript to submit to an agent or publisher.

Even though my literary obscurity would seem to be the only possible result of my own inaction—simply the logical consequence of keeping my work largely hidden (publication of poems and short stories on my blog being, in reality, not much more public than sharing with family and friends)—I do harbor, and have long harbored, the desire to get my work "out there". I just want to do it the right way, by basing my literary ambitions and reputation on what I consider to be my best, greatest, and most important work.

I am a librarian, so I see and am surrounded by books on a daily basis. As one who has, since childhood, felt himself to be one of the "book makers", the fact that none of the books in the world are yet ones of my own creation fills me with a kind of wistful longing and a deep sense of unfulfillment (if all these other people can make books, why can't I?). Because if there is one thing I feel I can contribute—that I feel I should contribute—to the world, it is books. And yes, I am working on it.

But I have long realized that my contribution need not only take the form of ambitious literary novels. As a writer, my interests have always been quite varied, and my ideas so numerous that it has often seemed fitting that many of them should find their home in some form of self-publication—especially considering that, as I said above, I have always been fascinated by books as objects and have always enjoyed designing and making them myself, in whatever form.

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And now the main question of this post: What is, or was, or will be, my first book?

The short answer is: It depends what you mean by "book".

My first book—my very first book—was one that I made when I was in kindergarten and just learning how to write (probably late 1976 or possibly early 1977). This book no longer exists, and my memory of it is vague, but it consisted of one or more folded sheets of paper, a technique I often used in childhood for making my own books, and it contained a story about dinosaurs, one of my major interests at the time.

Or perhaps my first book was The Lazy Scarecrow, a set of science fiction stories which I wrote and illustrated as part of a creative writing course for gifted students when I was in fourth grade (begun in the fall of 1980, completed in January 1981). The teacher and a classmate bound it and created a cloth cover. I still have that book. It is certainly my oldest surviving book.

Or maybe my first book was the first novel I ever wrote, Eastway Beach. This novel was handwritten on about 200 pages of a notebook and followed the lives of high school students in a fictional Florida beach town. I wrote it in 1990, and then wrote a sequel, Eastway Beach Sharks Come Back, in 1991. The sequel was a bit longer, taking up some 300 handwritten notebook pages. These works no longer exist; I destroyed both manuscripts in 1993.

I also made a few poetry chapbooks between 1993 and 2000, as well as (in the late 90s) a number of short stories (and one novella) printed as booklets with cover illustrations.

Or possibly my first book can be considered to be The Librarian’s Apprentice, which was, ironically, not even intended to be a book. I wrote the story as a work of blog fiction in 2008, and my father, who has also written and published a number of his own books, decided to surprise me for my birthday that year by publishing it via his imprint. When my parents presented me with the book version of my blog story, I was not only surprised by the book itself, but also by how long it looked in printed form (not a novel, but long enough to qualify as a novella). It was as though I had written a book without even meaning to (and not only that, but gotten it into print without even trying!).

Then again, perhaps the moment in 2012 when I typed the last sentence of my first “real” novel (the Eastway Beach books being, not only no longer extant, but also works of juvenilia) was the moment when I had at last made a real, honest-to-goodness book.

And yet… 5 years later, The Bluebird of Happiness remains a work in progress. So perhaps—hopefully sometime later this year—when I finally bring my first novel to a state of satisfactory completion—perhaps that will be the moment when I can say that I have made a book.

Or maybe it will be that moment when Bluebird is actually published—when I can walk into a bookstore and see it on the shelf—that I will know, beyond any doubt, that I have made one of the books in the world—I hope, I like to think, I dream, perhaps even one of the great ones.

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In a way, Angels feels like the first, in the sense that it is the first book I have intended to publish (and, for that matter, the first one published that I intended to be a book). But of course, as I have illustrated above, it is not that simple. Further complicating the picture is the fact that Angels is a novella, a form which is not usually considered long enough to publish as a book unto itself. That may be changing these days thanks to self-publishing and print-on-demand titles, and of course the very definition of what constitutes a “book” is undergoing the strain and stress of technological and cultural change. In the future, will the word “book” even have anywhere near the same meaning or importance as it has traditionally? Who can say?

People always talk about the death of the book—and the death of literature, the death of the novel, the death of poetry, and so on. But, as a librarian and author in the twenty-first century, I can’t help but feel that such pronouncements on the death of the book are greatly exaggerated. Much closer to the truth, I think, was the ancient philosopher who said, “Of making many books there is no end.”

Certainly there will not be as long as I can help it. Making books is one of the things I am made to do.

The author at age 5

Remembering Ray

Ray Bradbury, long known as "the world's greatest living science fiction writer", has left this world at the age of 91. The news of his passing bears a particular poignance for me, as his tremendous literary talents had exerted an incalculable influence on my imagination starting at the age of 7, and ever since he has maintained a consistent place among my favorite and most esteemed authors.

I was first introduced to Ray Bradbury in the fall of 1978, when my father showed me the Heritage Book Club edition of The Martian Chronicles. The magical illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini certainly helped to stoke my fascination, but above all it was Bradbury's words and stories and the strange, wondrous worlds they conjured up that captured my young mind, and that played a large part in inspiring me to become a writer.

Throughout my adolescence and adult life I read many more stories by Bradbury, in addition to revisiting The Martian Chronicles. I came to feel that the well-intended epithet "world's greatest living science fiction writer" did not in fact do him the greatest service. Even though Mr. Bradbury was perhaps more responsible than anyone else both for popularizing science fiction (pushing it beyond the domain of a few SF nerds) and also for making it respectable to devotees of "serious" literary fiction--both feats due to his deeply humane and poetic style that dealt with real human issues and feelings rather than technical details--he was not exclusively, nor even primarily, a science fiction writer. He preferred to think of himself as a fantasist, but in reality his work spans a wide range of genres and subject matters.

In addition to stories about the exploration and colonization of Mars, depicting crassly materialistic Earth people's encounters with a dying race of noble Martians, and other outer space and futuristic tales, Bradbury also wrote a large number of gothic tales (e.g., the stories collected in Dark Carnival and The October Country, as well as the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes), nostalgic and wondrous stories inspired by his childhood in 1920s Illinois (especially Dandelion Wine), stories set in Mexico, and a number of other stories that can only be described as realistic fiction, about ordinary people in the real world. His stories are often punctuated by bitterly ironic humor but also by bittersweet longing, and always by a marvelous sense of wonder at the endlessly amazing, mysterious, and miraculous universe in which we find ourselves.

Most readers agree that Bradbury's greatest and most significant work is his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, named for the temperature at which book paper burns. Although it is widely known as a dystopian work decrying the evils of censorship, I realized upon reading it for the first time that it is more about a society which has become shallow, a world in which the masses lead superficial lives distracted by electronic entertainments and hectic lifestyles. Book burning is almost an afterthought, since very few people in this society bother to read anymore anyway. Nevertheless, the main character, Montag, whose job as a "fireman" is to go around destroying the remaining illegal stashes of books, discovers the existence of an underground subculture made up of people who not only read books, but also take the time to have real, meaningful conversations and to enjoy the simple beauties of the natural world. The ending of Francois Truffaut's 1966 film version makes the ending of Bradbury's novel especially moving when it shows a succession of book lovers, hiding away in the woods, reciting great works of literature that they have committed to memory, in an inspiring and magnificent effort to preserve these cultural treasures for future generations. In the process, each one takes on the identity of the book he/she has memorized... "I am Moby Dick", "I am Great Expectations", etc. It is enough to make any bibliophile choke up.

Many film and television adaptations have been produced of Bradbury's works, but it has become almost a truism to say that it is impossible to capture the full magic of his writing on screen. You have to read his books to really get it. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, paid Bradbury a high compliment by calling him "a poet". Although Bradbury has written actual verse poems, Huxley no doubt meant this to refer to Bradbury's writing as a whole, which of course has been dominated by fiction. Many others have noted and appreciated the poetic style of Bradbury's writing--some dismissing his style as overly florid, while his unnumbered fans admire the evocative beauty and richness and lyricism of his distinctive language. In the larger sense of the term, Bradbury was indeed a poet, a writer of immense imagination and vision, who easily and naturally perceived the magic and wonder of the world we live in and who was blessed with an incredible talent for communicating that vision to the rest of us. So, while it is no insult to call him a science fiction writer (a genre that he, after all, helped to make respectable), it is important to note that he is far more than that.

Or perhaps, since one adjective in the epithet cited at the top of this post no longer applies, perhaps we can now just call him "the world's greatest science fiction writer".

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So long, Ray, and thank you for sharing with us your wonderful talent and imagination, in themselves miracles as amazing as anything you told us about in your marvelous tales. To paraphrase a line from the Chronicles: "Your bibliography is beautifully complete."

Raymond Douglas Bradbury

American author

1920 - 2012

Home Pages

I have always been at home in books and in those homes for books that we call libraries. I developed my love for books from a very early age, and cannot imagine life, or a world, without them. However, having been a child in the 1970s, I am among the last generation that remembers what life was like without ubiquitous personal computers and Internet access. I'm sure that many people younger than me cannot imagine life without these things, and that a significant number of them see books as being far less central to their experience than I do.

To me, a life without books, by which I mean traditional printed and bound paper volumes, is a life that is greatly impoverished. The reasons for this are varied and complex, and it is not something I could fully explain in a single blog post. Many people my age and older will understand this instinctively, and I am hopeful that many younger people continue to share this feeling as well, despite their (and our) increased dependence on digital technologies.

One reason I am hopeful that a love for books will survive my generation is the fact that I myself grew up on television as much as I did on books. Both media were equally old (and, for that matter, equally new) to me, since both had existed before I was born. Even though I loved to watch TV, my love for reading was at least equal in its intensity. Perhaps the children of the 21st century, at least those who are so encouraged by their parents, might still develop a love for printed books alongside their understandable fascination with electronic media. To me, a life without books, in any age, is as culturally deprived as a 21st century life completely devoid of the Internet, TV, movies, or recorded music.

Both at work and at home I am surrounded by books. There are more books in the world than any mortal can ever hope to read or even know about, a universe of knowledge and expression that was already far too vast for any single person to comprehend even before the Internet came along. The overwhelming majority of this knowledge is still not "online", and much of it perhaps never will be, despite Google's best intentions. But, like knowing a few precious souls in a world of billions, we can know a few of these books, and they can become friends that continue to enrich our experience throughout our lives. The books I have known have contributed to my own mind, have helped shape my intellect, imagination, emotions, and spirit, and helped make me who I am. I delight in reconnecting with old, long-lost books as much as discovering wonderful new ones. For each book is the voice of one or more of our fellow human beings, sharing something useful or something entertaining, something profound or something absurd, something funny or something sad, something strange or something familiar, something wonderful or beautiful or remarkable about the world we live in or about the things we can dream, and always something human.