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

The Poetry of Dance

Of all art forms, dance is one that has long held a special fascination and attraction for me. I think part of the fascination I, as a writer, feel toward the art of dance (i.e., dance as performance rather than social activity) is the fact that it is a form of artistic expression that uses means other than language to convey meaning.

Of course, this is a quality it shares with music and visual art. However, unlike those arts, which use physical objects like sound, color, and shape, dance uses the human body itself, and more specifically the movements of that body, to evoke meaning. I have always been deeply intrigued by the way in which movement alone (well, in combination with music and visual elements such as costume and scenery, but primarily and essentially the movement) can "speak". What does the dancer say when she dances? Is it something that can be translated into words?

I think the answer to that last question must be a definitive no, just as surely as music cannot be translated into words, and even in the way that poetry cannot be translated into prose. That is what I find so mysterious and fascinating about dance as performing art--the irreducible nature of its expression, the way it can express things that words cannot, a sort of supra-linguistic language, if you will.

Of course, there are many other things I love about the art of dance--the energy, the costumes, the sheer beauty of movement--but what gives dance its true depth, what raises it beyond mere spectacle or entertainment, is its nature as a mode of genuine artistic expression. I especially appreciate and admire ballet and modern dance in this regard, though I also love and appreciate the artistry and expression in, for instance, the dance numbers in musicals, and even the routines of Legs & Co., the troupe that performed on Top of the Pops in the seventies and early eighties (what many people might regard as kitsch or frivolous entertainment, but in which I see real art).

Though I have never discussed it on this blog, my artistic activity has never been limited to just writing. I am also a musician, and in fact when I was in college I considered music to be my main creative forte. It wasn't until I was 25 that I realized that I wanted literature to be my primary focus (although I had been writing stories since kindergarten and poetry since high school), and to define myself first and foremost as a writer. I have rarely recorded music since then, though I have a backlog of songs that have been accumulating in my head for the last eight years that keep nagging me to record them at some point. I have also dabbled in various forms of visual art and I long harbored the ambition of becoming a filmmaker (which I have since abandoned--my novels are my cinematic expressions, my fiction writing being very much influenced by that art form).

Dance, however, is perhaps the only major traditional art form that I have never seriously entertained the idea of pursuing--at least, not as a dancer. That, too, is surely one of its attractions to me--it is an art that I enjoy purely as audience, not as actual or potential (however accomplished or amateurish) creative colleague. In this way, dance, to me, is an "other"--and therefore holds a very deep appeal to me. But beyond being simply "other" (many things are an "other" to literature, such as, say, the study of economics), dance is an art that I see as being in some sense complementary to literature--a way to tell a story or express the human spirit through movement rather than through words.

However, while I have never really aspired to be a dancer myself, I have given more than a little thought to the idea of becoming something of a choreographer. I don't mean a professional choreographer, but rather a writer who sometimes "writes" dances. I have long been intrigued (I have entertained this concept probably since the nineties) by the idea of marrying literature and dance in this way--not merely in the way that literary works are often adapted for the ballet, for instance, but as a writer deliberately composing a work that is meant to be expressed in the form of dance.

In reality, if I were to write a dance piece, it might, depending on the scale and nature of the piece, be better left to an actual choreographer to translate my script into all the specific movements and arrangements of the performance (which would, of necessity, be somewhat generally and vaguely sketched in the written script). It is perhaps possible, though, that, as with a film or theater director, part of my creative process would be to explain or show what I want a dancer to do and then trust her talent for realizing the concept effectively, with skill and with her own artistic expression. This is largely uncharted territory for me, as I am not familiar with very many accounts of writers who have had the audacity to try their hand at the art of composing, not a poem or novel, but a dance performance.

As a side note, a variation on this concept (and of course much easier to achieve) would be to write a "closet" dance--akin to the closet drama, i.e., a play that is meant primarily to be read and imagined in one's mind (much as a novel is) rather than actually performed on stage. The ideal, however, would be to write pieces that become fully realized as performance.

In any case, as a writer, my role in actually creating the work would be only partial. This is because, as I said above, dance is a language beyond language. The dance itself would be the fullest expression of the work (though, as with a written play or screenplay, the dance script might still have artistic value of its own). The only one who can truly give full expression to the dance, to fully embody and communicate its meaning, is not the writer--working in the medium of verbal language--but the dancer, who gloriously transcends it.

Bluebird Briefing: April 2015

First, a preface about my second novel, Rainbow, which has been in production for about two years now (concept development started in February 2013, the actual writing that June). The manuscript currently stands at 28,000 words. That's about half the length of a short novel, but I have much more writing ahead of me than behind me, and Rainbow will not be, never could have been, a short novel. Like our protagonist Martin Lane, whom one character emphatically declares cannot be contained, the novel that tells his story seems boundlessly expansive and is not readily delimited.

The writing has been progressing slowly but steadily (isn't that the kind that wins the race?), propelled by a relatively low-key yet sustained stream of inspiration. Unlike the interior cosmic drama that drove me to create Bluebird in a six-week fever (or perhaps something more like a visionary trance), the fire which fuels Rainbow is not usually quite as blindingly bright, but has proven remarkably durable, and the project is still deeply, if a bit more quietly, exciting.

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Meanwhile, developments have been occurring with my first effort in novelistic art, The Bluebird of Happiness. One thing I have realized of late is that, even though the novel was written during that aforementioned six weeks almost three years ago, it is, even today, not really finished, and indeed the production of the novel has been a process far greater than those six glorious weeks. Yes, the novel was essentially written during that time period, but it had a long history prior to that, and, despite having felt that the manuscript was polished and ready for prime time two years ago, I have come to feel that there is more work yet to be done before my debut novel is all that it can be and is, well, ready for its debut.

For background, here is a brief outline of the history of Bluebird:

1999: I first conceive the idea for the novel, at the time titled The Terrible Blue, set in a decadent near-future America and centering on the character of Thomas Fairchild.

2003: I reimagine the story as set in the present day and revolving around the lives of three characters: Thomas, Martin Lane, and Aurora Nightingale. Martin, who was actually first imagined back in 1997, becomes the lead character.

2004: I write several pages of the story, some material from which ends up in the eventual novel.

2007: After setting the project aside for a time, a viewing of the movie Velvet Goldmine provides me with fresh inspiration for the story.

2009: Early in the year, I decide to abandon the novel altogether. By the summer, however, I have taken up the idea once more. I change the title to The Bluebird of Happiness.

2010: I make yet another start on the manuscript, writing the first few pages.

2011: Late in the year, I decide to make Thomas the main character once more.

2012: In early May I receive a powerful new inspiration for the story, which now centers on the seemingly impossible love of Thomas for Alexandra Grey (with Martin and Aurora as important supporting characters). On July 3rd I begin writing; on August 17th I complete the 100,000+ word initial draft of the manuscript.

2013: In May I edit the manuscript, believing it at the time to be ready for submission to agents and publishers.

2014: I decide that I wish to rewrite one section of the novel, consisting of a long letter from Thomas to Alexandra.

This last development was significant for me because it entailed reversing my decision of the preceding year that the novel was in fact finished. It has been a bit difficult to deal with too because it means that the novel is taking much longer to complete than I had previously thought. However, I have also come to realize that this is normal and good; however inspired, however wondrous, however powerful that blaze of literary creation in the summer of 2012 might have been, however important and central a part of the creative process that is producing The Bluebird of Happiness, it is still only a part of that process. The above timeline amply illustrates this fact. The writing of any novel must be a combination of passionate inspiration and arduous toil.

I have also, in recent days, come to a greater acceptance of the need for diligent and careful revision, editing, polishing, and not to be afraid that this will tamper with the purity of the initial inspiration. The two processes are complementary aspects of the same greater process of artistic creation. I know that other authors have put years of effort and work into their novels too, and that this is okay. It is crucially important that I do not release my Bluebird into the world until it is fully ready for flight, until I feel no nagging reservations about any part of the manuscript. Of course it will never be perfect (it is questionable whether any literary work, particularly a novel, can ever truly be "perfect", even more questionable what "perfect" might mean), but part of my hesitation about marketing the manuscript has been due to misgivings about certain parts, especially the letter to Alexandra, which I feel could (should, considering its fictional author and the nature of the novel) be much more poetic. As it stands now, it feels too prosaic and explanatory whereas I feel it could and should be a more mysterious and sublime expression of mysterious and sublime emotions. In short, I didn't write that part quite as well as I could have, and that needs to be fixed, I think, before the novel is everything it was meant to be, before it becomes the one true Bluebird.

Sometimes I feel a bit of trepidation about undertaking such a task of rewriting (which I have yet to begin, though I have been developing ideas for it). The major reason is that the fiery inspiration that produced the initial manuscript was a passing phenomenon. I suppose it is possible that the muse may seize me again as I begin to rewrite Thomas's epistle to the object of his undying love, but no author can completely control things like that. The muse may aid the poet, but the poet serves the muse. However, if the task must be done, then it must, and I can only trust the muse to guide me as she has so faithfully done before. (I realize that for non-writers all this talk of muses may sound a bit mystical, but it must also be understood, as it is by poets, that some things can only be expressed poetically.)

I have also been troubled by the thought that any addition or substantial revision I make now to the Bluebird MS seems, inevitably, like a later interpolation to the "real" text that I produced under such effulgent inspiration three years ago. After all, it was written at a particular moment in my life, and as the philosopher Heraclitus says, one cannot step in the same river twice. But if anything is mystical, it might be the belief that only what I wrote during those six weeks can possibly count as the "real" Bluebird. No matter how romantic I might be in some ways, I am also worldly enough to understand, as I alluded to above, that literary creation is always a cooperative effort between the heart, the head, and the hands.

So, while it is true that I might never be able to recapture the full power of the vision that so ravished me during that summer of suffering and splendor, it is also true that I am still, in a deeper sense, the same person, and it is also true that any literary work is produced over a period of time, whether it be a single day to write a lyric poem or very short story, or many years to write a great novel. As I mentioned at the outset, Rainbow has already been in production for two years, and I am not precisely the same as I was when I began its composition--and I will surely be different still by the time I finish it. And of course Bluebird itself existed as a concept for 13 years prior to its writing, so it is not as though it sprang fully formed from the ether, however much it may have felt that way at the time. (As I mentioned in the timeline, a small part of the text was actually written several years before. So why not some of the text written a few years after the main event?)

On February 5th of this year, I actually did make a small but significant revision to one passage in Bluebird (not the letter), because I wanted to leave certain things about Thomas a bit more mysterious and ambiguous than they otherwise might have been. This was the first time since the edit of the manuscript in May 2013 that I made any changes at all to the text. I am thinking now that I would like to reread and re-edit the entire manuscript, in addition to rewriting the letter. For a novel that I have always intended and hoped to be an enduring work of art, it is well worth the time and the effort to make it as close to perfect, as close to my highest vision, as I can possibly make it.

On a final note, only yesterday I thought up an entirely new scene for Bluebird. This scene, once written, would constitute the first substantial new addition to the story since 2012 (I have hardly entertained the notion of making any actual additions to the text, as opposed to revising or rewriting existing parts of it, until now). Thomas, Martin, and Aurora, as well as a number of other characters from Bluebird, reappear in Rainbow, and some of them may possibly appear further in other shorter works of fiction, but this particular scene that occurred to me yesterday struck me as being especially suitable for Bluebird itself.

It is a scene that I believe would fit the tone and spirit of the first novel perfectly, while also standing out in a rather striking and bold sort of way, and thereby adding a single but important note to the entire symphony. I am quite excited by this, as this development has made me feel more than anything else that my first novel is not yet complete, and that its final completion need not be entirely tedious, but rather may involve fresh inspiration. One of my hesitations about rewriting the letter is that it seemed more an act of obligation, a chore, than the act of passionate eros that the initial writing of the novel was; but that task, too, as time goes on, is being fueled more and more by new ideas, increasingly more by desire than by duty.

The new scene for Bluebird, incidentally, involves a certain piece of music by Purcell which was referenced in my 2013 novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. That novella is set a hundred years in the future but the three main characters share a passion for the poetry of Thomas Fairchild, making it not so much a sequel to Bluebird as a story set in the same fictional universe. The new scene in Bluebird will provide a further connection between the two tales. It occurs to me that future readers may see the scene in Angels involving the Purcell piece as making reference to the scene in Bluebird, even though in reality the passage in Bluebird was not written (or even thought up) until two years after Angels was written. Thus do I weave a complicated web among the various works of my literary oeuvre.

I read somewhere the other day that poetry is an act of daydreaming. And so it is. The worlds I see in my head, those worlds that seek realization in works of fiction or of poetry (literary fiction being, ultimately, a form of poetry... you might say, poetry by other means), are essentially dream worlds. That does not mean they are not real. They are of course not real in the same sense that the empirical world is, but they are realities of the mind, of my mind, and, through the concrete expression of art, may also become realities of other people's minds as well. And, like all art, these constructions, these made-up things, help us to see reality more deeply and more fully. Art may not be life, but art helps us live.

The Rainbow Report: November 21, 2014

My sophomore effort in the art of writing novels, Rainbow, has, after 17 months, now surpassed 20,000 words in length. That is obviously a very slow rate of expansion (especially compared to the sudden supernova appearance of its predecessor, The Bluebird of Happiness), but is perhaps closer to the norm of novel writing.

One thing I have realized is that I do feel very inspired about Rainbow, but my inspiration is working in a different way than it did with Bluebird. The inspiration this time around is perhaps not quite as dramatic and intense, but is more diffuse and remarkably long-lasting; after all this time, the project is still very exciting to me, I am constantly thinking up new ideas for the story, and (thankfully) have not been suffering from writer's block.

That last situation is perhaps largely due to the fact that, since my last progress report back in May, I created a loose outline for the remainder of the novel. This served the double purpose of giving me a greater sense of direction by helping me to see more clearly the overall shape and flow of the narrative, having put the multitudinous individual scenes I had thought up into some kind of workable order (one that is not completely linear in chronology, but rather a narrative sequence that made sense to me as the author, the order in which I wanted to reveal the various parts of the story), and of providing me a rather thrilling view, from on high, of the entire grand, vast scope of the novel, which further added to my inspiration.

As I have mentioned before, Bluebird and Rainbow are related stories, involving many of the same characters, but neither is a sequel or a prequel to the other. Their relationship is much more ambiguous and complex. One thing that I have found both challenging and fun is to write Rainbow in such a way that, no matter which book someone reads first, there will be surprises in store when they read the other volume. Each book reveals things that the other one conceals. You might say that they keep each other's secrets. So it really does not matter greatly in which order someone reads them. The fact that Rainbow is being written after Bluebird hardly matters if at all; if someone starts with Rainbow, they will still encounter surprises and revelations in Bluebird.

Not only that, they will no doubt also find themselves a little perplexed as to the exact relationship between the two narratives. I am also attempting to write the second novel in such a way that nothing in the narrative creates explicit discontinuity with the first novel, but also in such a way that it may create a vague tension in the reader between the claims of the two narratives. (When, exactly, is this scene in Rainbow happening in relation to that scene in Bluebird? Et cetera.)

In this way, the second novel is independent of the first, yet does not definitively contradict it. So, while a reader may wonder--may feel, if not be able to explain just why, there is a subtle tension between the two stories--it will still be entirely possible to maintain the belief that somehow the two novels provide quite different but non-conflicting accounts of the same fictional universe.

Even within the sprawling, non-linear context of Rainbow, it will probably be challenging to piece together the exact sequence of events (hell, it's even challenging for me, and I'm the one writing the damn thing). The narrative ranges freely throughout the span of Martin Lane's life, at least from his childhood up until middle age, and, unlike Bluebird, there does not seem to be any clearly defined temporal center to the story--in other words, there is no specific time period that feels like the main "present" of the story (other than Martin's entire adult life, or the roughly three decades of it that are covered). I do not know that I did this on purpose, but I think the decentered temporal setting has the effect of making the story feel somewhat uprooted, which is entirely appropriate to its nature.

Just as the relationship between the two novels is ambiguous and complex, so are many of the relationships among the characters, and so is, above all, Martin Lane himself. I like to think that Rainbow is a mystery novel of sorts, only one where the mystery is not a crime to be solved but the main character, who, like a real human being, is never really solvable or completely definable. It is not the nature of my stories to provide tidy endings where all uncertainties and ambiguities are resolved; I rather delight in leaving the reader with a feeling of open-endedness and an even deeper sense of mystery.

I recently took a look at some of my early notes on Rainbow and was happy to be reminded of some of my more playful descriptions of the story: "barbaric, vast, and wild"; "the higher form of decadence"; a "fashion epic". (I only hope I can live up to such visions!) Those are as good descriptions as any of what it is I am attempting to do with this work of fiction. As for what it all means, what it is about... well, I must leave that to my readers to discover for themselves. It would be impossible to explain anyway (or, as I often say, I can only explain by writing the novel itself).

In any case, Rainbow still is to me a grand vision, just as it was at the beginning when it first emerged from the mists of my imagination, only now it is much more fully developed, and the story continues to grow ever larger in my mind each day. It is actually rather amazing to realize how that small seed of a story, so vague at first yet rumbling with low, distant thunder, has evolved over the months into such a vast, complicated, intricate novel with its multitude of concrete details and subtle meanings. I am aiming to paint a lifelike portrait of one human being and his life, which is something that defies easy or neat summarization. I like to think that Rainbow is a realist novel in the best sense of the term, that is, a grand, elaborate story, completely made up, that shows life for what it is: something enormous, unexplainable, and wondrous.

"The answer, of course, is Martin Lane."
--Rainbow

Why I Write: A Confession

 

When did I first know I wanted to become a writer?

 

For me, the question, upon even a moment's thought, becomes strangely unanswerable. I realize that it is perhaps not even the right question to ask. For in my case, I can say that I have always been a writer. As soon as I learned how to write, it seems, at the age of about six, I began writing my own stories. The activity just seemed to occur naturally to me, as though it were in my blood. I was a born storyteller.

So, for me, writing is not something that I see, first and foremost, as a "career", much less a "profession". It is just something I do, as inextricably bound with my being as the color of my eyes.

Nevertheless, writing is something for which I have long felt a sense of aspiration. I am a writer; I aspire to be a great one. But why? And what does it mean to be a great writer?

Let's start with the second question. For me, being a great writer certainly does not equate to being a financially successful one. Anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with literary history knows that many, perhaps even most, of the world's great writers—which is to say the ones that we still remember today, even though long dead—were not necessarily commercial or popular successes. In some cases, true enough, they may have achieved fame, and perhaps even fortune, but in many other cases, they labored in obscurity, never to enjoy the rewards either of money or of admiration, sometimes having very little of their work published during their lifetime.

It should seem obvious that only a certain type of writer would engage in an arduous, lifelong pursuit of the craft of writing regardless of what worldly rewards may (or may not) come. Many writers, especially in today's world, very much strive for "success", defined in commercial and popular terms. And there is certainly nothing wrong with doing so.

But there are other writers who regard their writing not so much a career as a sacrament, and who see the integrity and creative freedom of their work as sacred, money and popularity be damned. There is nothing wrong with that either.

As I have already indicated, I am the second type of writer. This type of writer cannot be overly concerned about achieving fame and fortune, indeed must be willing to give up all hope or expectation of ever achieving such measures of worldly success.

Then, one may well ask, why be a writer?

Well, as I said at the beginning, for this type of writer, writing is not so much a choice—certainly not a career choice—as it is an innate drive to express oneself, to give form to one's own idiosyncratic ideas and imagination, through the medium of language. (I am certainly not saying that more commercially-minded writers do not also feel this same desire for self-expression, and that that is not an important part of the reason they choose to pursue a writing career; but I would suggest that, as evidenced by the conventional style of most commercially successful fiction, and by the prioritization of values that commercial success itself implies, the drive to achieve an almost sacred purity of unique and unrepeatable expression is not as intense for these writers as it is for the more literary-minded ones.)

So, again, the question is not exactly the right one to ask. Literary writers, in a very real sense, do not have much of a choice about being writers. They may choose to use their talents, or to neglect them; but for them, the neglect of their gifts would be far more tragic and unbearable than would be arriving at the end of their life without ever having sold a single book or having won a single fan.

This is because, in a particularly deep way, writing is intrinsic to their being, and is a fulfillment of their being. I very much feel this way myself. For many years I did not make nearly as much use of my writing talents as I knew I was capable of doing, and this caused me to live with a quiet but profound sense of desperation. No matter how successful I may have appeared in other aspects of life—getting married, earning a graduate degree and embarking on a professional career, buying a house, becoming a parent—somewhere inside I felt deeply unfulfilled because I was not writing.

This was of course no one's fault but my own. Two years ago, after my marriage fell apart (but in a way that was only indirectly related to that event), I experienced a renaissance of my literary talents, and began composing poetry and fiction in a way that was more intense and inspired than I ever had before. I found that an idea for a novel which had been lingering in my head for 13 years suddenly exploded into brilliant life, and I was amazed to watch it flow through my fingers and onto the screen, complete, in just six weeks.

The moment after I typed the last sentence of my first novel, I felt myself overcome by a rare sense of breathless euphoria. It was not simply that I had at last written a "real" novel; it had nothing to do with feeling myself that much nearer to literary fame, much less fortune. It was not even the fact that I suddenly felt, for the first time in a lifetime of writing, like a real writer, proving at least to my own satisfaction that I had some genuine literary potential. It was, rather, the fact that I had given concrete form to my highest and truest personal vision—that I had just told a story that felt, to me anyway, powerful and beautiful and original, a story that only I could have told. The emotion was uncannily similar to what I felt when my daughter was born—and indeed, in some sense, I had just given birth—I had brought into existence something that was, in fact, unique and unrepeatable, just like a human being, and that had the potential (in whatever large or small way) to change the world into which I had brought it.

In a very real sense, the writing of the novel was its own reward. Of course, novels exist to be read; if not read, they might as well not exist. And this points to what is perhaps one of the defining features of literary writing—it is, above all else, not a commercial product, but a deeply meaningful and significant communication. I write because I wish to communicate, and because I wish to communicate something important. I am much better at expressing myself in writing than in speech, but that is not why I write. As I keep saying, I cannot help but write. It just so happens that writing is the vehicle through which I can most effectively express what I think and what I feel, and to show other people who I really am inside.

And I think part of my elation over completing The Bluebird of Happiness in the summer of 2012 was that I had at last given voice, in a much more powerful way than I ever had, to who I really am. That certainly does not mean that the novel is autobiographical. It just means that, no matter how fictional and imaginative it may be, it expresses something deeply real and vital about who I am. My goal was not to write a bestseller but simply to express myself in the truest and most powerful way I knew how. And when I reached the end, I knew beyond any doubt that I had done just that; and, for that reason, I felt immensely successful, and I exulted in my success. I had done what I had always dreamed of doing.

*

Almost two years have passed now since that glorious day, and the novel remains unpublished. This is largely because I have made hardly any effort at all to submit it to publishers. A small number of people have read the manuscript, and I know that at least one or two of them have been sincerely, strongly affected by it. I do not think it is a matter of pride as much as a sense of responsibility to my talents that makes me feel it is vitally important for me to have the novel published, to get it out there in a place where as many people as possible can have the opportunity to read it.

I am aware, perhaps too aware, of the novel's flaws (or at least what some may regard as flaws—I suppose it is a matter of artistic judgment and taste), but at this point I do not wish to attempt to change them, even if they are flaws. I do not mind having certain types of flaws in my novels to the extent that they may be seen as revealing flaws in the characters themselves, who I allow to tell most of the story in their own words, in their own way. Or, to the extent that the flaws in the novel can be regarded as my own, I do not entirely mind letting them be—as someone who has battled the crippling disease of perfectionism his whole life, I have become something of a champion of the strange beauty and power of imperfection in art.

But, while I cannot discount the fear of criticism and rejection (even as proud and cocky as I can sometimes, half-jokingly, be about my own talents), I do not think that is the fundamental reason for my procrastination. I think that, more to the point, I have a deep lack of faith in the publishing industry as it exists today. It is not even a matter of doubting that I will ever be able to make a living as a writer—no matter how talented I may be, no matter how well received by critics and reviewers. It has more to do with feeling that I, and my work, do not fit in anywhere in the current publishing system (other than, possibly, the relatively underground exposure of an indie publisher, or the oblivion of self-publishing).

On the one hand, I feel that Bluebird is perhaps just a little too strange and idiosyncratic to be truly popular (and therefore to seem like a good bet for a major publisher to take a chance on in today's bestseller-driven publishing climate). On the other hand, the story may seem perhaps just a little too narrative and emotional to satisfy many in the literary avant-garde. At least that is my own perception. I did not write to satisfy any particular audience, only to be true to my own vision. I expect that each of my succeeding novels may very well appear a bit more outré than the last; Rainbow, my second novel which is currently in production, is already a shade or two stranger (even to me) than its predecessor, and I feel that many of the other ideas I have for novels may very well prove, once written, to be outright bizarre, perhaps even incomprehensible, to most readers. I am not trying to be weird just for the sake of being weird; it is just that writing the kinds of stories I really want to write, and being true to the stories as they develop in my mind, turns out to be quite unlike most other stories that are being written, and certainly unlike the ones that are popular.

For this reason, I do not expect ever to become a popular (and therefore not a commercially successful) writer. But that has never been my goal. As I stated above, my goal is to be a great writer. And the fact is that great writers, though they may seem conventional to us (but only because we are familiar with their names and are taught them, sometimes, in school—not because we have actually read their works, which would no doubt shake us out of our complacency), are great in large part because they are strange. "Strange", of course, simply means that which is not familiar to us. And great writers are great because they write something new, something that no one else has ever written, something that no one else ever could write. So, for that reason, although I would never be so unseemly as to pronounce myself a great writer (I only said that I aspire to be one), I do feel that I at least have the potential to become one, if I continue to develop my talents and remain faithful to my gifts (and true to my vision). If nothing else, I feel that I am far more likely to become a great writer (meaning one who is read long after I am gone) than a "successful" one, if successful means selling a lot of books and having a large fan base.

In one of my blog posts from 2012, as I neared the end of Bluebird, I mentioned a certain philosopher named Gadamer who spoke of reading as producing a "fusion of horizons" between the author and the reader. That idea really speaks to me because, as I said, for me writing is primarily my way of communicating with the world. (As Emily Dickinson so beautifully put it, "This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me.")

According to Gadamer's view, when I read, say, "Ode on Melancholy", a fusion is created between my "horizon" (or experience) and that of a certain Englishman named John Keats. In other words, despite the fact that we are separated by 200 years, Mr. Keats and I, in that moment, arrive at some shared experience, some shared understanding, of the world, and of life. To put it in (quite properly, in this case) poetic and romantic language, you might say that John's soul meets mine, and we have a moment of shared humanity, of brotherhood, of friendship in the dark world. That is indeed the true magic of literature. Writers you love are not just distant celebrities; they are friends—which is true even if they can never know you.

I often think, more than I do about any fantasy of having an ardent but small group of fans in the present day (as I have always imagined myself becoming a cult writer more than a literary superstar), those who may read my stories in future centuries. I imagine some other solitary soul, perhaps feeling lost in the world, coming across an old beat-up copy of The Bluebird of Happiness (or, perhaps more likely—though who really knows?—an electronic edition), and setting out to read it.

I imagine that she (I say she because, if the future is anything like the present, the majority of fiction readers will be women), this lone reader, as she quietly but raptly listens to the story I am telling her, will come to see something of the truth, and the goodness, and the beauty, that I, this man long since vanished from the earth, like a ghost bearing a message from the mists of time, am attempting to communicate to her. She will no doubt find the story a little strange, perhaps even more than my contemporaries did; but that is part of the experience of reading true literature. It expands you, startles you, makes you see things in a new and fresh way. I imagine that she might, at moments, and despite the distance in time and culture, laugh, and at other moments cry—both responses evidence of our common humanity, despite whatever separates us.

But most importantly, in the process of reading my long and complicated story about a group of imaginary people (who will nevertheless come to seem very real to her), her soul will be moved, and ultimately transformed. And when she reaches the end—perhaps finding herself emotionally devastated, or perhaps only quietly but deeply touched—she will feel that she has known me, and that I have told her something that is of vital and profound importance just for her. And, even more than knowing me—this stranger from the 21st century who has somehow, mysteriously, become her intimate friend—she will know herself just a little better; and she will feel just a little bit closer to understanding the strange, fearsome, but beautiful world we have the privilege of sharing; and she will feel, wonderfully, not quite so lost in it.

It is for her that I write.

The Summer of Martin

On Memorial Day last year I finished editing the manuscript of my first novel, The Bluebird of Happiness. My intention at the start of last summer was to write (or at least to begin writing) my follow-up novel, Rainbow. I did indeed make a brilliant start, but, due to struggles with depression, my progress was sporadic. I have done some occasional work on the story since then, having amassed 13,000 words so far, and, as the summer of 2014 arrives, I hope to catch a wave of renewed inspiration and vision and to ride it as far as I can go--perhaps all the way to Rainbow's end, or at least much further along the arc.

I sometimes feel rather like an actor when I write my stories, inhabiting and identifying with my characters, in some sense "becoming" them in my mind. Since my fiction is primarily written in the first person, it perhaps has a greater affinity for dramatic forms than it does the objective style of the omniscient third-person narrator. For the most part, I do not report what he or she did or said as much as I pretend to be him or her, and to speak in their voice. So, in a very real sense, I am acting when I write, although my performance is expressed through the written rather than the spoken word.

I am starting to feel that with my second novel, I will perhaps take my "acting" beyond its usual level, that level where it exists entirely within my head and so is not visible to the outside world. In other words, in order to understand and therefore communicate who Martin is, I will perhaps, to some degree, attempt to "play" him in real life. Call it "method writing".

Of course, just as with any acting, this should not be interpreted to mean that Martin is me (i.e., merely a fictionalized version of his author). Martin is his own person, and even I do not fully know who he is. Rainbow is, in fact, as I have often stated, an attempt to explore (though not definitively answer) that very question. Any impersonation I may do of Martin Lane is a part of my investigation of this singular and compelling character that, for reasons I do not yet fully comprehend, I feel driven to show forth into bodily existence through the magic art of writing.

One thing I cannot readily imitate about Martin at this point is to inhabit his physical environment, which is in my home state of Florida. But lately I have begun asking myself "What would Martin do?" if he were, say, in Missouri? The question has opened up avenues by which I might more closely connect life and art, by thinking creatively about how I might parallel some of Martin's ways in a different regional environment.

In any case, Rainbow is not a regional novel, but an American one, and thinking about all this is helping me to see all the more clearly the common experiences Martin and I may share by virtue of the fact that we both live in the U.S., which in turn helps me to perceive the qualities that make this an American novel and an American story, despite its strong regional flavor.

The theme of home, always central to the story, is becoming ever further developed and elaborated in my mind. I am beginning to understand more fully the philosophical reasons for Martin's strange lifestyle, and to see how it is a physical manifestation of his metaphysical lostness.

The dreamy Aurora Nightingale, already a character of primary importance in Bluebird, is lately growing into an ever fuller and richer personality in my imagination, perhaps not so much a further development of her self in the first book as an entirely different iteration (which is also true of the other major characters that carry over from the first novel, none more so than Martin himself). Intimately linked to the evolution of her character, Martin's ambiguous yet deep relationship with Aurora is becoming all the more compelling, intriguing, and richly suggestive to me.

Lastly, I must confess that, in the year and more that Rainbow has been developing in my mind, I have sometimes "feared" that it might come to surpass Bluebird, in terms of either its actual quality or its reception, or both. I am no longer afraid of that. Not because I doubt the quality of Rainbow, but because of the opposite, as I feel more and more that Rainbow may in fact be, on average, the better novel (just as Huckleberry Finn is widely considered superior to the still classic Tom Sawyer).

But now, instead of fearing that my sophomore novel might overshadow its predecessor, I am beginning to feel that Rainbow will only more greatly illuminate its point of origin. 

The Rainbow Report: May 12, 2014

 

 

It's mid-May now, so that must mean it's time once again for my mid-May Martinmania. And surely enough, just like this time last year, my inspiration for the novel known as Rainbow is in the ascendant. Why else would I be experimenting with designing book covers for a novel of which I have so far written only 13,000 words?

 

One thing I know is that I am determined to write this thing, one way or the other--whether it needs to be written, slowly and tortuously, in the erratic fits and starts which have seemed to characterize its progress thus far, or, more hopefully, in a steady drive of inspiration that will carry the novel through to its completion this summer.

 

Of course, that is what I hoped for when I started writing the story at the beginning of last summer, but in any case, I am not set on that timeframe of completion as a definite goal. As I have stated before, this is my art, and it must be given the time it needs to grow and develop and evolve in an organic and natural way. I must have faith in Rainbow that it will continue to reveal itself and, through my hands, realize itself in its own good time.

 

Lately the story has in fact been doing just that, continuing its wondrous unfolding in my mind "like some kind of crazy, beautiful, glorious flower" (as one character describes Martin).

 

One quality of the story that helps me to maintain faith in it and in the value of writing it--no matter the difficulty, the daunting grandeur of the ambition, and the occasional loss of vision and inspiration--is what I might call its "untranslatability". One of the texts that inspires and underlies the novel is Whitman's line "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable." 

 

I see this line as being pertinent both to Martin as a character, in the sense that he is a mystery who cannot be contained by any simple definition of who he is as a person, and also to the novel itself, in the sense that Rainbow cannot be contained by any simple definition of what it is as a story.

 

I think that this quality is something it shares with many other literary works that rise above formula and conventional expectations and standard categorizations, and this is what I mean when I say that the quality of "untranslatability" helps me to maintain faith in the novel. I mean that it helps to remind me that this is one of the best ideas I have ever had, that I have here something original and fresh and new, something that might even be (as it indeed feels to me) powerful and grand (or, as a friend put it, "monstrous and majestic"), and that this story is a living thing, i.e., a story with a sparkling, vigorous life of its own, as Bluebird was (and still is... literary works always live as long as they have readers who bring them back to life, in an endless variety of iterations, with each individual reading).

 

I myself cannot explain or define this novel Rainbow. I can scarcely understand, at an intellectual level, what the story is about, why it is such a powerful vision for me, or why I feel so compelled to write it. That inability to adequately articulate the concept is not because it is devoid of substance, but indeed the very opposite: its substance (speaking here only of the idea that presents itself to my mind, not of my actual work) is, on the contrary, so full, so rich, and so deep, that it does not permit itself to be reduced to any simple explanation or summarization.

 

The closest thing I can compare it to is a fairy tale, or, perhaps even better, a myth. It centers on the character of Martin Lane, an artist and poet, and, to the extent that one may summarize what Rainbow is "about", it is largely about who Martin is, and the way in which he gradually discovers and expresses who he is. It is like a fairy tale in that Martin seems to transform, or rather to realize (both in the sense of "become aware" and in the sense of "make real"), himself, from something apparently ordinary and plain into a wondrous and magical being.

 

I do not mean that the story is a fantasy; I use the term "fairy tale" metaphorically. As I said, however, I think the word "myth" might be a better instrument to capture the nature of this tale. Martin Lane is a mythic figure, and his story is of mythic proportions. Despite his uniqueness, mysteriousness, and strangeness, I believe that Martin can also stand for human beings in general, a symbol of the uniqueness, mysteriousness, and strangeness of each one of us.

 

There is far more to the story, and far more to its mythic nature, than this one aspect can possibly suggest. The novel is "about" a multitude of things, and is also, above and beyond and encompassing all of those things, about one thing. That one thing I can only explain by writing the novel itself. I cannot give words to that one thing other than the words (every last one of them) of Rainbow.

 

In other words, Rainbow is, like Martin Lane, untranslatable.

Take the Long Way Home

 

As I have mentioned before, I have two ideas for novels that are of truly epic proportions, which, if the fates are kind enough to allow me the time to complete them before I leave this vale, would no doubt constitute two of my greatest literary accomplishments. I do not intend to say much about them before I write them, or even while I am writing them, but I just decided last night that I may begin working on one of them now.

I will tell a little about it here, and then probably remain relatively quiet about it until it is completed. That may be years from now, as it will be an immense work, in the hundreds of thousands of words, and taking up several hundred pages.

One may well question why any writer, in this day and age, would want to spend the time and energy required to compose such a long work. Will anyone actually take the time to read it all the way through? (I am reminded of the great Dr. Johnson's "Do you read books through?")

There are multiple good reasons, though, why I wish to create a vast epic novel in the 21st century Internet age. One reason is simply because we live in the Internet age. I believe that our fragmented, distracted experience detracts from the deep experience of life and of art, and in all of my writing, poetry and prose, I wish to work against that tide, in order to do my part to create space for true contemplative leisure, and therefore the ability to experience true intellectual, emotional, and spiritual depths. Perhaps only a small number will avail themselves of the opportunity for the slower, richer, fuller, deeper experience of life that my works, or any other literary works, offer to provide, but their value does not lie in their popularity. They are offered as treasures for those who will take them.

Another reason, more particular to this novel, is that the very nature of the story requires it to be big. Part of what I want to convey in this work is a scale of almost inconceivable vastness and immensity. That would be much more powerfully conveyed in a work that requires the reader to journey through many hundreds of pages, with a far greater commitment of time and attention, and a much deeper investment of mental and emotional energies, than would be required by a shorter, easier-to-digest work.

So what is the story about? Well, as always, it would be difficult to summarize while doing justice to the story. But I can say a few things about it.

First, the title is simply House. It is the type of story that will undoubtedly be labeled as fantasy or science fiction, but I do not label it as such myself. I simply consider it a novel, one that is deeply symbolic (not in the sense of easily explainable allegory, but more in the strange, obscure way that dreams are symbolic), and deeply philosophical.

The philosophical ideas and themes cannot be reduced to a simple formula or thesis, but the central idea is that of home, as suggested by the title. It is the story of a man who mysteriously departs contemporary Earth and finds himself traveling into unimaginable reaches of the distant cosmos and the far future. As his experience thus radically expands, so does his perspective. I will not reveal much more about the trajectory of the story, except to say that, in terms of time and space and philosophical ideas explored, it is probably about as large in scale, scope, and ambition as it would be possible for a novel to be.

Just yesterday, I was thinking that I might need to focus on a new writing project for awhile, taking a break from Rainbow, or at least finding a new channel for other ideas while that work is in progress. At first I did not entertain the idea of starting on House, since it is itself an incredibly long story.

However, last night, while discussing with a friend my desire for a new project, my friend casually suggested "the one on home". I then realized that I had first developed the basic idea for the story ten years ago this month, and on further thought (and after checking my notes to make sure), that it was actually ten years ago today (April 2, 2004). The timing seemed uncanny and, therefore, perfect.

In addition to its length, the story will also prove challenging to readers, no doubt, because of its symbolist nature. But I want the story to appear, not only so vast as to induce a sense of vertigo, but also exceedingly strange. That is part of what it will communicate. It is largely about the protagonist's bewildering, sometimes painful expansion of consciousness and understanding, and it should be so for the reader as well.

Therefore, I expect that perhaps only a few intrepid and determined souls will undertake the journey and see it through to its conclusion. But I believe, if I am true to my vision and skilled enough to realize it in writing, that they will never forget it, and that they will be changed by it. My desire is that readers will leave the story feeling shaken and haunted, in the best possible way, with thoughts and feelings that are impossible to put into words, yet that are deeply resonant and profound.

So much for my vision (outlined here only in the barest form). Now to see how well I can realize it. Yes, it is quite an ambitious project. But I am nothing if not an ambitious writer. If this is a science fiction story, then my intent is to raise that genre to a literary level it has never before known.

It will be a long and challenging journey, both for me and my protagonist. But, if we succeed, then at the end a treasure of immense worth shall be found. As the Tao Te Ching says, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."