Aftermath

I finished up my book last Wednesday night. When I say "my book" it implies the singular; _Chained_, in fact, represents my third completed novel. The first two, you will not have heard about. For all that each represented an enormous investment of my time and effort, when I reached the ends of those books I was ashamed of them. They seemed to me to be inexcusably naive, their ideas and characters half-formed. So I went back to that anvil that is the keyboard and started anew, and started anew, and started anew again. A Japanese swordsmith will fold a billet of steel many thousands of times before it is ready to form the core or skin of a sword; in much the same way, I hammered and re-forged my ideas and characters and words over and over and over again, trying to give my ideas and characters and words the definition they demanded for themselves, and trying to give my ideas and characters and words the definition that anyone who would use my work would demand of them. I have spent many of my free hours over the course of the past ten years--much of my young adult life--in this forging.

Shame. Always the feelings of inadequacy, always the feelings of failure. To have given so many thousands of hours of one's life over to this pursuit, to developing this skill, and to still feel so weak and so stupid--that is a bitch. But it is so easy to do. After a certain point, there are no meaningful metrics when it comes to writing. You craft a grammatically accurate sentence, and beyond that, all is haze--nothing firm to feel or to latch on to; conflicting theories, competing theories, no way is way. You slash through all the vague spiritual B.S., all the small-minded formulae that would reduce writing to a series of tricks you might impress upon a dog, the pat academic approaches that had the last drops of life wrenched out of them decades ago, the adulatory emulations that would turn any new writer into a mere mirror for an old, and you find that there's nothing on the other side. Nothing but a nihilistic void without referents to give it meaning, without points of reference to give it shape. Which makes it all the harder for one to know whether one's writing is any *good* or not.

But, of course, this is also the very process of life that any serious soul must contend with--that our experiences will, at some point, bring us to a blankness beyond which there is no certainty and where we cannot rely on traditions or formulae but must rather go into that blankness with nothing but our own senses and our own selves. That's my reality, anyway. And my writing must necessarily reflect this going.

I am resolved, this time around, to not surrender to the blankness. I am resolved to not presume the worst from uncertainty. I am resolved to not interpret the lack of meaningful metrics or immediate extrinsic reinforcement as failure. I am resolved, in fact, to believe that this latest work has good in it--that there is that within this book that people will want to read. This estimation is based on little more than my own sense of the book, and a few positive critiques I've received from a few people who've read the book; critiques which are easily matched in number and in intensity, if not in erudition or a maturity of aesthetic sensibility, by critiques which posit that my book is a humorless and clumsy piece of shit. Such is life, as the French say. Such is art.

What all of this really means is that I am resolved to try to get my book published. This book will not languish indefinitely as data on a hard drive; so I am resolved.

And therein lies the problem, really. I don't think the problem is in my writing anymore. I fancy that I am good at this thing--that if one should choose to take issue with my writing, that offense arises from a difference in priorities among more or less equal factors, rather than any actual finding of any actual inferiority in my approach. So I fancy, rightly or wrongly. No, the problem lies now in getting my work out to the people who would read it.

If I had been...good at social things, I would not be a writer. If I made friends easily, and if I attracted acclaim to my person, I would not have been a writer. My God, if I had any other skills--if I had people to draw me out, do you think I would have spent so many thousands of hours alone in the dark, starting at hard white emptiness of a blank word processor page? It would have been perverse of me, had I any other calling, to have frittered my life so. I am a writer precisely because humanity has left me alone in the dark to think for most of my life. And now--at this stage--I find that I must promote myself and integrate myself into societies about which I know little. When I would just as readily retreat back into my comforting darkness and start work on another book that no one would ever see, I must instead force myself to stand in the light, holding myself and my work up for public scrutiny as surely as if I were some performance artist standing nude on a pedestal in a park. I find I must take my book, which is about as anti-social as a book can get, and somehow make large groups of people want to read it. Oy vey.

This blog is intended to chronicle my vicissitudes with respect to the publishing of _Chained_. The title, of course, is indicative of the fact that, like the character in the Kafka short, that I have been too much on the receiving end of gatekeeping, although now I do my best to make it so that each gatekeeper will wish that he had been the one to allow me through.

A secondary function of this blog might also be to bolster me in my times of doubt, if I know there are a few other voices sounding into that blank darkness and that dark blankness; but this is perhaps more fancy than hypothesis bolstered by previous data; I have done a piss-poor job of even attracting readers to my work when it is offered freely on the Internet. This doesn't bode well for my prospects of trying to attract readers who are willing to give me money in exchange for my sharing of my words. But, again, things are changing. I am changing. I am learning. I am trying. And I hope that new ways will open.

In preparing one of my final papers for my M.F.A. at SDSU, I have taken on the task of trying to fit Joseph Campbell's model for universal myth to my own book. I find it is a poor match: Campbell's schema insists first on the hero distinguishing himself, then overcoming a series of trials, and then at last returning home and bringing boons and wisdom back to his community. The first two stages--the call to action, and the descent into the underworld--are abundant enough in my book. The last stage is all but absent. The protagonists never really go home again; there is no home for them to go to. They seen the shadow behind the sun, they say, and they have seen the darkness behind the daylight, and they can never see with unchanged eyes again. Again, this reflects my own experience: I have done the writing, I have spent those thousands of hours in darkness and solitude, how now to stand among men and women and pretend that our divergent experiences nevertheless allow us enough commonalities to make for meaningful communication? This is the greatest challenge--harder than Hell is the coming home. But this time, I will do everything I can to rise to the challenge, to not back down into shame and self-hatred.

This time will be different. I swear it.

Come with me, if you want.