Norman Green

ARGUMENTS WITH MYSELF

I am still on the fence.  I have not been able to decide what, or even if, I want to write next.

I know, nice problem to have.

However, if insanity, as the saying goes, can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, I might be nuts.  What good will it do to write the next chapter in the life of Alessandra Martillo if the resulting novel meets the same fate as the last one?  I must have blinked because I did not see a single copy of Sick Like That for sale in a bookstore anywhere.

Of late, I have been thinking about my goals as a writer, my reasons for doing what I do.  When I started out I wrote because it felt good, and if you had asked my my goal then I suppose the answer would have been ‘publication.’  Things have changed since then but I still write because it feels good.  If, however, I had to sum up my hopes for what I write next I really think my answer would have to be ‘readers,’ and if that is the case, in all honesty I have to admit that I haven’t been getting it done.  It is not news that the publishing industry is in a state of flux.  The old business model is on life support and we should probably start digging the hole.  Editors and agents have a harder time keeping the doors open, former bookstore owners are polishing their resumes, librarians are getting laid off in appalling numbers.  It is difficult to believe that we will read even less in the future than we do currently, but it seems certain that the process of getting stories from inside the author’s skull out to the public will look much different than it does now.

I am very lucky, I have a great day job which I love and it allows me the luxury of overlooking the financial aspects of publishing entirely, at least as they relate to me, so the question really boils down to, how do I reach more readers?  As technology changes, and changes us, maybe the process will become simpler, if not any easier.  Writers will always have to wrestle with empty pages whether real or virtual, they will always have to throttle their stories to coerce them into some legible and readable format.  I can’t see writing, at least for me, getting any easier.  And I’ve thought of simply posting my next novel somewhere so that anyone who cared to and owns a Kindle, I-Pad, smartphone or whatever can download it.  I’d leave payment to the honor system.  Send me two bucks after you download.

Or don’t.  See if I care.

Stephen King tried something like that once but he did it in chapters, with the proviso that if he didn’t get paid by a given percentage of downloaders he wouldn’t write the ending.  I don’t know how that worked out.  If I thought it would get me enough new readers I’d give it a try, but I see a few drawbacks.  First, I would hate to see the few remaining small bookstore owners cut out of the process.  They are people who, by and large, do what they do for the love of it and they’re already contending with Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon, et al, and I’d hate to add to their difficulties.  Second, editors, agents and publishers do perform necessary services both to writers and to the general public.  Perhaps their most important function is separating the wheat from the chaff.  When you pick up a book in a bookstore or library you can be reasonably optimistic that the writing therein will rise beyond a certain level of craftsmanship, although that is by no means guaranteed.  If you’re a fan of whatever form of celebri-doodling happens to be hot right not, a pox on you, you deserve what you get.  The point being, self-publishing, whether on the web or anywhere else, smacks of vanity press and I don’t want any part of that.  And third, if what I write now seems to be lost in the morass of the conventional publishing process, how could I avoid being lost in the on-line swamp?

Bottom line, I guess I will continue to write for that oldest of reasons, it feels good, and besides, it’s what I do.  Beyond that, if anybody has any ideas I’d be glad to hear them.

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