Change My Mind?

Well, Maybe Just This Once: A Follow Up to Why I Decided to Publish My Novel Online

In December 2022 I wrote a piece about my decision to publish my novel, The Dead Lion, online. The reasons I gave back then for doing so concerned maintaining creative control, making an income, and a catch-everything-else category I labeled Letting Go. The first two are pretty self-explanatory and the last one spoke mostly to my angst of having taken so long to finish the damn book. The idea of entering it then into the excruciating, slow-motion train wreck I imagined would come from traditional publishing gave me little assurance that anything would come of it. Read simply: I had no heart for it.

That said, I'm not sure where exactly my heart was at the time because a few short months after that post I began sharing chapters of the book on this site and then I stalled. Like for months. At first I was writing them, just not sharing them. Then I wasn't writing them at all. I don't know what I was doing. Changing words here and there, not finishing things. Taking a sledgehammer to the plot at times and in others a tiny nail file. Typical writer bullshit.

At one point I re-started sharing and then stalled again. My writing was like a computer you had to keep re-booting to get it to work. Only I was the computer.

I could say the delays were to allow my editing to catch-up (I could've also just stopped editing) or that other, more essential and important things got in the way (they did), but those would be only half-truths.

I could say some crazy, circular dopamine loop was driving me. That is, my mind wasn't processing things in the real world but in a world that existed only in terms of some future expectation. I mean, come on. Finishing the book would undoubtedly be a letdown. Wouldn't it be so much better to flee the present and take refuge in the comfortable world of my own imagination? Put another way: To travel is better than to arrive.

Either way, I had both time and inclination, trust me. So why, after sharing some third of the novel to you lovely people, did I find myself questioning, well, everything. The book. The plot. Points of view. Hell, I concerned myself with even the process of writing itself (Am I sitting too much? Would my work—and my body—benefit from a standing desk? Are there too many distractions in my writing room? Answer to that last one: clearly, yes).

Why wasn't I able to just follow through for fuck's sake?

In spite of all that talk of dopamine driving our decision-making, writing is not like other professions I've had. Just today I heard someone on a podcast answer the question "Why do you write?" with "Because the silence is too much to bear". I can't imagine having said that about being in the Army. There it was just the opposite as I would've loved a little peace and quiet (and a lot less narcissism).

So I plodded along. Making a habit as I have for over thirty years of sitting down to face the silence with the purpose of writing something down. Which I then came back to after returning home from the Camino and once again I got serious about finishing the book. And this time, I did (yay!).

Around the same time, I found my news feeds bombarded with articles detailing the sad, sad state of book writing. Or more specifically, novel writing. Actually, to bring it closer to home, the issue didn't concern writers at all, but readers. As in: Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch? Where Have All the Novel-Reading Men Gone? And one sounding truly apocalyptic alarms: When Novels Mattered. One more of particularly personal interest: The Death and Life of the Straight White Man’s Novel. (An eye roll here is warranted—“You’ve run the world for thousands of years, and now you’re feeling disenfranchised?” writes Francine Prose. But also consider the many young, white MAGA men who don't read. S'pose any of them would benefit from cracking a book every now and then?).

The point is a career in writing books is looking pretty gloomy, mired in a forecast that speaks less of hope than of crawling inside a hole.

So I thought maybe the universe was speaking to me, offering a warning. I was already aware that writing the book was half the struggle, publishing it would be the other half. But the most important battle, the one no one really talks about and perhaps, the only one that really matters, is the one that asks the question: Who fucking cares?

So, all that is to say, yes, I've finished the book. And what a bittersweet moment it is, to end something that has been a part of my life for so long, for so, so many years. Over twenty if I'm being honest. The first time I finished it– the real, proper first draft—came with tears a decade ago. This time, the emotion of typing The End feels more akin to saying good-bye to a relative, than, say, burying them. Because a novel is a thing to which writers give birth, we must then see it through the toddler years, and teenage years, and one day turn it out into the world as a young adult. It is, indeed, very hard to let go.

It's hard to be content with the fact that with any birth comes the knowledge that one day that person/thing will exist solely on its own. Living and breathing, perhaps, in some sense, but only in the minds and imaginations of those who are currently or have yet to read it. The fate for those characters is the same no matter. The future is over for them. They who have lived so vibrantly on the page, doing this and that, making plans, making mistakes, being frustrated and frustrating others with their coming and goings, their struggles, their yearning for longing, purpose and place. For them there is no tomorrow. Only now. And whatever conclusion you've written for them.

But I am filled with a heavy desire to get it out there, to push it out the door and see it thrive (or not) amongst the many other stories out there in the world. At this moment, however, I'm not going to do that. I will eventually, but for now the reasons to keep it close outweigh the reasons for letting it go (oh, how easy it is to return again and again that job of fulfilling one's heart).

For one, enough has changed from those early chapters that the book just flows differently now, which may be a disappointment to any of you who invested time reading the posted chapters only now to be told Not so fast. Start over. Here's Page 1 (which is why I've removed all previously published chapters). It could also be that one of those articles I shared above speaks directly to me, as perhaps it did to you. Maybe reading literature has become, as one of them suggests, less central to my life, shoved aside by an attention span that's held captive by the internet, or with work (which is... writing fiction?? wtf) or family affairs. Or a hundred different things.

I myself have found reading a book—especially for leisure—is easily pushed down. Way, way down. I am trying to change that now.

But the real main reason I am holding off on publishing the novel here is because something came about this past summer. Or more correctly, someone. A fellow writer, a poet, who has bought a house here in Sicily and has graciously offered to share it with her agent and publisher

(pause here for eye roll)

and while the question of why this would even appeal to me now, considering my own experience of working with the traditional method of publishing, is not one I take lightly, it is something I feel I must do. I feel this way partly because of those articles I shared above. Partly because of my own pride (who wouldn't want to hear that their work is good enough and meets or exceeds the professional standards set by, well, another breed of narcissist?). And partly because of the challenges self-publishing presents (imagine writing a letter to a lover and then stuffing those beautifully penned perfumed pages into a bottle and plopping that bottle into a choppy sea. That's what it can feel like to self-publish).

Everything I've read and shared here, plus my own experience, suggests that it doesn't really matter. The reader is gone. There is no one out there to reach, no one standing on the sea's other shore. So why bother trying?

Because I can't bear the silence? That only applies to the writing, not the sharing.

What about the peace of not publishing? Is sharing, as J. D. Salinger found, a terrible invasion of privacy? That publishing is a thing done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity, as the poet Charles Bukowski contends.

Or is it as the comedian Steve Martin insists: [For] me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

I don't know which is way is up, I only know that it feels as I've been practicing one without the other for a very, very long time and so maybe it's time to take a chance (once again) that the universe, when you want something badly enough, will conspires to bring it within reach.

Maybe the universe is the comedian. Or maybe it's just dopamine talking, which loves more than anything else in the world to discover that something is better than we had ever anticipated it would be. But those are, as they say, stories for another day.

... to be continued

♺ Invite a Friend: Share what you read here with others you know via email or wherever else you fancy spending your time online, every mention helps! Facebook, LinkedIn, X.

☯︎  Be Yin to My Yang: Most of what you'll read here is free, it's everything else that costs money. Become a paid subscriber for as little as $5 per month, or make a one-time donation in any amount, to help me bring balance between the two.