I have a book officially coming out in a month (July 17) so I’m obliged to honor the outlay of time and money on the part of my kind and generous and courageous and understanding publisher, as well as the time and effort on my part, by writing something and posting it on the internet.
Such a something could translate into sales, or bring the book to the attention of a reviewer who posts a review on a blog that interests someone for an official reviewing organ who introduces the book to the culture in a way that doesn’t vacuum-suck my soul from the dank dark cavity in which it habitually hides.
What I’m writing a month in advance of publication is about the expectation writers feel to write something to “raise awareness” or to “market” the book, to feel like I’m “doing the right thing” by trying my best to bring the good news of my creative-writing hobby onto thee.
But seriously whenever you read something on one of those sites don’t you think oh this is just something they’ve written to publicize their book? Doesn’t it feel as rote as those “unboxing” photos authors so often post? This sort of behavior is expected, going through these motions is a given, and even encouraged and momentarily celebrated. In the months leading up to publication authors increase activities on social media. Way more reels, retweets, comments. Energy that had previously transformed life and imagination into text the writer devotes to peri-literary promotional activities, such as creating unnecessary content to post on an online internet-based weblog to raise awareness of a forthcoming book.
The stereotypical Gen-X meta-angle exhibited herein is an effective engine for generating text that can be linked to on the social sites, reminding potential readers that the writerly aspect of the writer’s overall entity still exists and that a pivotal part of its existence has chronically involved the creation of Word documents lucky enough to merit transformation into becoming physical products, the most recent of which is available now for pre-order — but I think even though it’s a “pre-order” in advance of the official July 17 pub date if you order now (from Asterism, Bookshop, B&N, or Amazon) you might receive a copy in a few days. I don’t really know how it works.
(I’m doing the best I can is something I’ve been saying a lot recently — in a self-soothing more than a snippy way. But I don’t know how it works would work too.)
I feel like the new book works, as they say, even if I don’t know how it works. It’s not my role to reduce it for the reader, but I’m also a reader of what I’ve written, and so after I read it over in print I deemed it chaotic and good. It seemed to hang together how I hoped it would.
It’s in part about trying to maintain order when faced with the mess of life. It’s essentially a first-person autobiographical polythematic narrative essay-type book-length novel about going to see a famous jamband at a famous arena in a famous city, about time, all the lines in the limestone of life, moving to suburbs from city and raising a kid with special needs and an extra-special wife, among other things like old friendships, mixed identity, the ever-changing nature of New York City, but it’s also about shapes, circles, recirculation, and the related concept of flow, about improvisational music and improvisational writing and improvisational life, ye olde yes and, and what else?
All of which when presented like this seems to deserve automatic dismissal, and as such at first when trying to execute its conception demanded I deploy skills and talents in defense. I could probably write something about this expectation of dismissal, about reveling in irrelevance, about how anticipating dismissal or eye roll based on a superficial list of what the book focuses on, each item in the bulleted list viewable below a conventionally contraindicated anti-algorithmic “bad idea,” energizes me by creating a conceptual obstacle I need to write as well as possible to overcome. Anti-algorithmic “bad ideas” increase the difficulty of the dive and therefore interest me as something to write about. I could probably write a larger piece on anti-algorithmic bad ideas and submit it to a well-known site that posts such pieces by writers with books coming out. And I may very well do something like that to post on or soon after publication day.
But this, this I’ve written so I have something to post and publicize, part of a plan to transfer my perception of the world to you, dear reader, via the vehicle of static text imprinted on old-fashioned bound paper otherwise called a book. Which you can buy at one of these places (Asterism, Bookshop, B&N, Amazon) and place on your shelf and read one day if you ever get around to it.
Note: the image of inflamed eye above is from here. In some browsers you may be able to see the Visine bottle. (The artist sells funny prints you may find suitable for gifts and/or home decor. Recommended.)