A milestone

If I have any regular readers, first off, welcome. I apologize for my lack of updates recently; with any luck, the fruits of my labor will be available to the public somewhere, sometime in the near future.

Today marks my first attempt at serious publishing.


Yesterday, I finished the final tweaks on my novel and printed all 401 double-spaced pages of it. I lined my old briefcase with some eggcrate foam to prevent the manuscript from scattering as I hauled the mass of it to my mercifully close post office.

After some confusion with the lady behind the glass about media mail rates and procedures*, I asked how much priority mail would cost because that's how I packaged my novel. Under $9 for Brooklyn to Manhattan for 402 pages, a SASE and a postcard. I didn't even want to hear how much media mail might save me, as it could not possibly have been worth the time and effort to pack it differently. She very kindly agreed with my assessment. I thanked her, and took my wife shopping, briefcase still in hand.


It feels weird.

I've been working on this novel since I bought my first computer, a Performa 6200CD named Leela. Sixteen years that felt like five. In that strange aeon, I've upgraded computers 8 times, my novel and its growing ancillary forest of ideas appearing on all but one of them. I've had to restore my data from backups in an emergency situation twice. Both times, the most important thing, my work, survived through emergency preventative backups.


There's this mild sense of loss. I stay up to greet the dawn nearly every night, and for the past month almost solid, and for countless days before that, my mornings have been consumed with writing and editing my novel. Now, where I once toiled with imagination and pronouns, there's currently a void. Of course, if the problem is a lack of something to work on, the solution is the same now as it's always been: start on the sequel.


...
I'd like to thank Hewlett-Packard for their Laserjet P1102w printer. Every printer I've ever owned I've wanted to shoot, except this one. It prints text, it does it reliably and quickly, and that's all. It's not one of those shitty scanner-phone-printer-copier-dishwasher-yurt-birdhouse-fax combos; it does text and nothing else. I used to not like HP because as a kid (and still to this day) I liked Macs, and Apple's market penetration didn't seem commensurate with the quality of their products. HP just seemed like another amorphous blob manufacturer, especially after the advent of iVe's iMac. Now, if there was any feud, I surrender. The HP Laserjet P1102w is the only printer I've ever loved.

*Incidentally, If the USPS is listening, please, bring me in as a consultant for customer service design; I promise to increase customer service efficiency by at least 300%. I swear I can do it, too: I used to corral tired and sleep-deprived Army recruits every weekday at 4:30AM at Fort Benning, GA. I know how to help confused people in a way they will understand quite readily; just ask my Algebra tutorees.

The Writer

I can extrapolate from the Rum Diaries, Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, and from my own personal experience that a writer's own worst critic is always himself. Cursing his self-seen inability to create, he'll pity himself in the most prosaic of ways in voice or in text, but never only to himself.

Writers self pity. I do too, I can't avoid that charge. I find my lack of production highly pitiable. I'm thirty years old since December, and all I've ever officially put out were a few video game reviews and a column in my short-lived high school paper.

Realizing that, though, is a step in the right direction. Like recovering alcoholics will tell you, the first step is to admit that you have a problem.

The question then arises: can you be a great writer without that stripe of self-pity? Can you become a novelist or any other kind of creator of fiction without sitting down from time to time and looking at yourself and saying "you're worthless" ?

I understand now what Stallone meant when he said "you shoulda seen me." Sometimes, and this happens in every profession, you hit on something genius, something great, a brilliant innovation, or a work of art. It could be something as obscure as a literary-quality lab report, or something as mundane as the perfect parallel-parking job; these and millions of other events on a day-to-day basis fall into the category of unacknowledged greatness. A flash of grandeur alone in a jungle with no memory.

This is why I've decided that today, I will never again hate myself for my lack of product. I will instead spin this void, I will apply a PR-slant. Without further ado:

I wasn't not producing. I was building a catalog of experience to vitalize my work.

After all, you can't really be great if you don't know what shit is, can you?