Larry Beinhart's Blog - Posts Tagged "self-publishing"
The Self-Publishing Adventure
Every time I watch TV - actual old-fashioned programming with advertising - I see commercials for the marvels of Pharmaceutical World. There are people out in the world with diseases, disabilities, discomforts. Sorted out by labels, they take prescription medication, and once they do, they become members of special happy clubs. They frequently feature dancing. Also water. (For some reason, as a percentage of the population, people in these Pharma Clubs, do a lot more swimming, canoeing, boating, and beaching than the gen pop.) Also eating.
There are enough diseases that everyone can have one.
Once they have one, they can take a drug. Join an imaginary happy club.
Actually, it works, in part, the opposite way.
Once there's a drug, a disease, even multiple diseases, are found to fit what it does. To give it a reason to be sold. This became particularly evident with psychotropic meds. Like Prozac.
The process became more pernicious with opioid based pain meds. Anybody in the medical profession, in public health - in normal everyday life and politics - knew there were immense problems with opioids. They knew that opium, morphine, heroin, the alternate versions of them, caused severe addiction problems. It happened in the 2nd half of the 19th Century, it happened after WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. It happened in New York in the 1950's & 60s. (That's what wiped out the West Side Story type of fighting gangs. An odd historical fn.)
But there was money to be made. Careers to be built. So pharmaceutical companies - and doctors - and doctor associations - essentially rewrote reality so that all sorts of routine pain could be treated with opioids and they all could pretend that they there were no addiction problems.
Then, of course there were the kids, as young as pre-schoolers who were being put on Ritalin and Adderall and such. My wife, as an artist-in-residence at the local community college, taught some kids who had been put on such drugs early. What they described was years lost to them, a kind of mental numbness, zombification if you will.
That's the short version of how I came to the idea for Zombie Pharm.
It combines the Prozac kind of thinking - with our new drugs everybody can be improved - with the corporate accounting that as long as the cost of harm is less than the profits on the way, the harm is just a cost of doing business - with the urge to make everyone a customer - with the mentality of people who believe that since they're doing good, no matter how much harm they do, it can't be bad.
I took that and put it into a version of the classic zombie story, pretty much defined by Dawn of the Dead. It takes place in an isolated area. The zombie threat grows larger and larger. Our main non-zombie characters have found shelter right in the middle. Now their characters come into play. There's the betrayer, the foolish collaborator, the potential hero, the innocents who don't deserve such fate.
It's dramatic. It's fast-paced. It has some real content (not enough to slow things down). It's very funny in places.
My agent at the time was sure he was going to be very successful with it.
Then he didn't sell it.
I accepted that. Though I truly didn't understand it. The agent either didn't understand it either or didn't think it was worth the effort to tell me.
So it sat there. In a virtual drawer. For several years. Then I just felt it was too good a book, too much fun, to leave it there.
So the self-publishing venture began.
There are enough diseases that everyone can have one.
Once they have one, they can take a drug. Join an imaginary happy club.
Actually, it works, in part, the opposite way.
Once there's a drug, a disease, even multiple diseases, are found to fit what it does. To give it a reason to be sold. This became particularly evident with psychotropic meds. Like Prozac.
The process became more pernicious with opioid based pain meds. Anybody in the medical profession, in public health - in normal everyday life and politics - knew there were immense problems with opioids. They knew that opium, morphine, heroin, the alternate versions of them, caused severe addiction problems. It happened in the 2nd half of the 19th Century, it happened after WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. It happened in New York in the 1950's & 60s. (That's what wiped out the West Side Story type of fighting gangs. An odd historical fn.)
But there was money to be made. Careers to be built. So pharmaceutical companies - and doctors - and doctor associations - essentially rewrote reality so that all sorts of routine pain could be treated with opioids and they all could pretend that they there were no addiction problems.
Then, of course there were the kids, as young as pre-schoolers who were being put on Ritalin and Adderall and such. My wife, as an artist-in-residence at the local community college, taught some kids who had been put on such drugs early. What they described was years lost to them, a kind of mental numbness, zombification if you will.
That's the short version of how I came to the idea for Zombie Pharm.
It combines the Prozac kind of thinking - with our new drugs everybody can be improved - with the corporate accounting that as long as the cost of harm is less than the profits on the way, the harm is just a cost of doing business - with the urge to make everyone a customer - with the mentality of people who believe that since they're doing good, no matter how much harm they do, it can't be bad.
I took that and put it into a version of the classic zombie story, pretty much defined by Dawn of the Dead. It takes place in an isolated area. The zombie threat grows larger and larger. Our main non-zombie characters have found shelter right in the middle. Now their characters come into play. There's the betrayer, the foolish collaborator, the potential hero, the innocents who don't deserve such fate.
It's dramatic. It's fast-paced. It has some real content (not enough to slow things down). It's very funny in places.
My agent at the time was sure he was going to be very successful with it.
Then he didn't sell it.
I accepted that. Though I truly didn't understand it. The agent either didn't understand it either or didn't think it was worth the effort to tell me.
So it sat there. In a virtual drawer. For several years. Then I just felt it was too good a book, too much fun, to leave it there.
So the self-publishing venture began.
