SpiralTruth

I find myself with mixed feelings about being a writer today. On the one hand, I heard via BoingBoing that poor Harry Nicolaides has found himself in a Thailand prison for the crime of – get this – insulting the royal family. Hell, he didn’t even throw a shoe at them. He just made some harsh remarks in a book hardly anyone had read. Reading the comments I was, on the one hand, inspired by the Western rally cry of free speech, one person after another taking shots at Thailand’s royalty. On the other, I wonder how brave we’d all be if we were in Thailand right now. Hell, even CNN is silent about the actual insults, due to the fear that any correspondents in the country could get similar treatment. And here’s the real kicker. Only fifty copies printed. Fifty. He sold seven. That’s gotta suck. On its own, not so bad. I’ve found that it’s a difficult thing to even write a complete novel, and I remember every so often, between the nail biting of and self criticism that comes with knowing others are (or will be) reading it, to give myself a pat on the back for getting it done. But to write a flop is one thing. To have it come back and bite you in the ass like that (three years in jail!) is insult to injury. Funny thing is, he might very well sell a lot of books this way. I’m certainly interested in seeing what the fuss was all about… and whether it’s any good. In other news, I have made my first submission to an agency and that has since been forwarded to a publisher. Gulp. It would be great if it really is that easy (easy being a relative word – I, like many others, have slaved over various artistic projects for a long, long time, without hitting on anything that could even come close to freeing me from my day job). But at the same time I’m excited. Maybe this time I won’t have to try and do it all myself. Maybe someone who knows way more than I do about marketing and promotion will hop into the driver’s seat. Maybe I’ll get a great editor who will chip off the rest of the rough edges and really make the writing shine. I remember a friend of mine telling me about Raymond Carver and how his short, edgy style was largely to do with his editor cutting out tons of material from his stories. No, you couldn’t have just substituted any writer, but his editor made Carver’s writing shine. So, unlike the cliché of the egotistical writer, I’m actually looking forward to someone saying, “Dave, I know you love this part, but it has to go. It’s just not needed. Why don’t we try this…” If things don’t go well, I’ll try pushing it with another publisher and/or another agency. And I’ll keep doing that until I get tired. And when I get really tired, I’ll go ahead with the route I’m used to – self publishing and guerrilla marketing – even if it only lands me seven sold copies and a reservation in a Thai prison. The one thing peddling my book to agents and publishers has done is force me to think about what would make a good back cover. My logic is that if it’s the kind of back cover that would grab my attention in a bookstore, it might do the same for an agent and/or publisher. I also realized for the first time how much reading a back cover changes the way you read something. I mean, think about it… have you ever read a single book without reading the back cover first? The only one I can think of that I’ve read that way is my own, simply because it had no back cover. And just adding that back cover synopsis made the story seem much more tied together than it was before. I don’t know if I could resist reading a back cover, but it might be an interesting experiment to read a new book, from front to back, without first reading the synopsis, and seeing how what you just read compares with the synopsis. Do you think about it differently? Anyway, here’s my synopsis: Meet Nick Strangeski. He works in your office and goes for coffee exactly twice per day, every day. He’s analytical, highly dependable, and a bit reserved. He has a degree in engineering and he pays his rent on time. He drives under the speed limit and never walks across the street on a red light. He’s average in pretty much every way. And last night, while you were sleeping, he and his friends took another little trip to a place you didn’t know existed. Some of them didn’t come back. This is their story. It’s about good and evil – and psychedelics. What do you think? Is it just enough to make you curious? That’s what I was going for.