The Infinite Grey

Seven years ago today, I had just begun my two month visit to Romania, meeting some incredible people along the way. Back then, The Infinite Library was little more than a short story published on Copious Magazine, and there were no plans to write out a hefty trilogy.

Seven years later, I have submitted the edited typescript for the third volume of the trilogy. It goes live this week, most likely. And it is somewhat difficult for me to entirely dissociate my own personal journey from that of the books I attempted to fashion along the way, a braiding of a plot-stream and narrative arc that tramps along the well-worn trope of "development." As a fan of Borges, there is no definitive line that separates fact from fiction as both seem to emerge out of the same diegetical reservoir, and converge in uncanny moments, one cutting transversally across the other like wild, tangential vectors.

Seven years ago, I was a bit of a devil-may-care PhD student living in a sketchy downtown apartment. Seven years later, I am a married prof living in an edge-of-town home abutting a forest with my cats and my books and my garden. The details are not important to any beyond my small circle, but it is the trilogy that is nested in me, just as much as I am somehow embedded and entwined with the trilogy itself.

Much ado is made of the "author being dead" a la Roland Barthes. And this is true, to a point. As an author - qua role as author - I lived as I wrote the books, and then ceased "to be" once the books were complete. That is when the author "dies" or otherwise reverts to just plain, ordinary self. As I wrote these books, I lived (in) them. This is not to say that I acted out everything the characters did, as if I tried on their lives for a while and then wrote a report. It is not that simplistic. I lived the books in an abstract way, experienced various events in an entirely conceptual sense. I hunkered down behind the eyes of the characters, playing the wire-puller in their fictional neural circuitry, a little like Kleist's marionettes. Now that the books are done, my authorial person is now the dead trace.

What now? - the kind of question that is between me and the horizon of future meaning that only I'm responsible for inscribing. Another trilogy? Maybe, maybe not. Something different? Most likely. The trilogy is the capstone of effort, but also the tombstone of the author function.

Someone asked me what plans I had in marketing the newest book. I replied I had no such plans. I stumble across so many discussions and posts on the "hot tips" for authors to market their books. A lot of it is retread, or otherwise some minor novelty in leveraging social media to lure potential readers/buyers to the book. There's something about taking on such a task that seems to disagree with me. I have no idea how to be my own PR flack, but that is just deficit of knowledge in that area; more importantly, I have no desire to do it. I see my "job" in simply trying to write the best books I possibly can. I just can't mix different purposes, and so I either attempt to write good books, or I attempt to make money from writing. Do I want people to buy my books? Well, sure. Will I gnash my teeth and tear at my beard if sales are weak? No. Will I spread the word to every writers' forum to announce my newest where everyone is doing the same thing? No. Will I try to entice friends and family to write nice things on review sites? No. Will I sign on to do whirlwind book signing tours? Will I sign up to Twitter to make 140 character plugs for my book? Will I set up a Facebook page so that I can get a whole gaggle of passive "likes"? No, no, and no.

I must be in bad faith when it comes to the whole marketing angle. Some people have the stomach or drive for it, but I am not one of them. I have been told that is the primary reason I will never become a "successful" writer. But I suppose it comes down to how we operationalize such terms as "success." Writing a book is not a victory or conquest: it is just an attempt to tell a story in a particular way. I am generally saddened when I see some of my writing colleagues drink the marketing kool-aid, and I can only imagine what it must be like to have that "will-to-market" haunting them most of the day, crouching inside them as they try to write, checking their sales data several times a day, cooking up new plots - not for stories - to drive sales. I couldn't endure that constant pressure.

I'm rambling, and not really addressing the purpose here which is to perform a dilute, half-measure at marketing by saying "the book is done and will be coming out this week." Well, I've done that. There will be no staged book launch, no author party, and perhaps nothing to mark the occasion. I will, however, show fidelity to not making sales my purpose to writing by making the prior two volumes free on Kindle this week. If people don't Kindle (I certainly don't), and if said people would be interested in getting a PDF, just message me and I'd be happy to oblige.

Ok, now that I've performed by due diligence in "marketing," I'm off now to do something far more fun and wholesome. I've got peppers and tomatoes to plant.