The Fly in the Ointment--er, Soup

The subject of self-publishing rises forth from time to time like the lone piece of meat in a truck-stop bowl of stew. You have one acquaintance who has enhanced a teaching career by its use, yet another has made a tidy sum with a unique project, and a good many other self-published authors are after you for the same reason they would be after anyone with a weekly review column.

Thus the subject of reviewing enters the landscape, perhaps even upstaging the self-published book. Consider this: you are considering self-publishing some of your reviews, the ones you think of as Golden Oldies since they are titles published some time back, often as far as before you were born. Your rubric for the venture goes beyond Golden Oldies into that no-person's land of Guilt Literature, the books you feel guilty about not having read and the books from the past that are taken by many to be classics and which you either do not like for significant reasons or don't get for significant other reasons.

With few exceptions, you can spot a self-published book from a great distance. Something about the cover art gets to you immediately, affecting you like the sight of an overcoat-wearing older man standing outside a grammar or junior high school. You know. Odd. Even sleazy. The art on the cover, whether photograph, drawing, etching, acrylic, oil, tempera, or whatever is usually found on investigation to have been provided by a relative. The type face is just plain wrong and the subtitle is overlong. Things get worse inside: the text is inexpertly rendered into an inappropriate type face, one that reminds you of a newsletter from an animal rights organization; the layout usually is too open or too cramped. Illustrations, if any, give the impression of having been set in place with library paste. To say that the text wants editing is to understate. The content editing is often too lenient, leaving cliches, solecisms, archaic usage, and numerous lines of dialog such as "Oh," she said, or perhaps even, "I see." and "Okay." The copyediting is the pistol held to the side of the head. Consistency of usage is non-existent, punctuation is a particular jungle, and as if exclamation marks were not enough to let the reader know the characters and/or the writer meant business, entire words and sentences rendered in all-capitals emerge like soup stains on an accountant's necktie.

You first became aware of self-publication at about the time you evolved into your first editor in chief position, feeling the intense pride of a well-made book, wanting those who bought your books to have the best content and physical product possible, wanting your authors to have the proper showcase for their work. Accordingly, your budget for designer and copyeditor fees was so tilted that you had, at times to delay publication of one or more titles because there would have not been enough to pay the essentials such as paper, printing, and binding.

At the time of your early awareness, self-publishing was infra dig, a prima facie admission that no respectable publisher would take on the work. Times have changed on many levels. Some small publishers have emerged, fueled by special interests, their finished product blurring the line between the self-published work of the dedicated amateur and the conventional publisher. Sometimes it is difficult to tell and, alas and alack, you even supplied a blurb for one such title which, the author assured you, was subjected to editorial eye. It later turned out that the editorial eye was someone who taught high school grammar and had an abiding love of books.

Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?

Hmm. Looks like it's doing the backstroke, sir.

This has all come about because of, you guessed it, the arrival of a self-published book, eager for some recognition beyond the author's immediate circle of friends, all of whom, you have been told, think highly of it.

Who Was That Writer I Saw You With?

Part of the attraction of the alternate universe meme is the happenstance in which, for good or ill, you meet yourself in a former incarnation, which is to say you find or are reminded of previous work you have not thought about for some time. The immediate good accrues when, after a gulp or two, you recognize how far you've progressed since them. But the ill part comes when the other shoes is dropped, the other shoe being the question, Have you come far enough since then?

Then, depending on when it was in relationship to the now you inhabit so loftily, may have carried no urgency with it except the urgency to get some ink, to see yourself in print, to attract a complementary or nasty letter to the editor. Were this the case, you for your part engaged in writing to appeal to people, wanting an audience. Were indeed this the case, your subtext could well have been: What do they want already, I'm writing as entertainingly as possible?

If Then were not all that long ago and the project never did find its way to an audience, the subtext could easily have been: I still like it, or Well, onward to the next one. Thus will it become clear to you that you already had the audience you wanted; you were writing to yourself and can see now as you saw when you wrote the piece whether it keeps you interested, caring, moving over the page with concern as opposed to the kind of dull-eyed lapse you fall into when watching a friend's videotapes of his or her summer vacation.

Should you ever find yourself on the receiving end of good notices, complements addressed to something specific you have sent forth to make its way out into the world, it becomes worthwhile to see if you can capture the self or selves responsible for that work, then send them a message: Nice going, but things are going to be different from now on. The goal is to get beyond liking yourself so much that your goal is to play to that audience instead of playing to the audience of the gallery of ideas, landing spots, and spontaneous wonders hiding in your toolkit, step forth in some hastily contrived vehicle from which you launch yourself afresh at the world.

The world of commerce is a lovely scatter of venues and perspectives wherein sometimes the most innocent thing flung against the barn wall sticks and the purely original thing fails to leave any trace of its existence. Believers in free market as we are, we also have to believe that the purely original thing can find a home in the market without any visible reason.

No wonder so many of us are considered mad men and mad women; no wonder so many exquisitely realized and written things are equated to poetry because, after all, poetry is madness in meter or cadence or image.

The real goal then is to strive for the dance of madness instead of the lock step of safety. When we talk about revision, it is wise to consider revisiting a project in light of what we have learned from having lived it and executed it, but it is no less wise to search through the work for lingering traces of sanity, then draw the most wonderful of all proofreader's marks through them--the places where things make logical sense, where grammar and syntax trump heart beats and the syncopated pit-a-pat of risk.

The Passenger in the Next Seat

Much has been written about the potential dangers of fellow passengers on a trip, dangers of a more personal and insidious nature. Cell phones, for instance. Or loud chewing. Loud talking. A rude curiosity as in, Hey, what are you watching? Or even more intrusive, So, you working on a novel there--or is it a memoir?

So fearful of such potential intrusions is Brian Fagan that directly he finds his seat, he fires up his Mac, plugs in his Bose earphones and is out to everyone but the steward serving dinner.

We all have a morbid fear of the fellow passenger, a sense of repugnance W. Somerset Maugham exploited so deftly in his memorable short story, "Mr. Know-It-All." Neil Simon plays on the psychology of our apparent willingness to confide the most intimate details to strangers we meet while at travel, using this impressive sense of confidence to hook the viewer/reader. The estimable Mr. Simon maintains that having a character say to another, "I've never told anyone this before, but--" is the quintessential narrative grabber.

Writers, and by extension musicians, artists, should not only apply this approach but deliver it. The reader, the viewer, the listener, the audience--whether they snap their chewing gum, burp loudly, ask impertinent or irrelevant questions--is best served when it believes it is receiving information not told before.

There are times, of course, when we want the comfort of hearing the same old thing, told in the same old way, and what better way to get that effect than by listening to a politician?

As we turn to our role models in the arts and crafts of words, images, and performance, we are looking for the confidence not uttered before, the confession of some previous misdeed, some inactivity when activity would have been more appropriate, some control when abandon ran amok in the streets, some inner conscience that bade us stop before we'd stepped over a line.

Often when we travel, when we steal a few moments away to write or study, we sit with a sense of purpose so strong that it borders on entitlement. Thus do we become protective of not only our privacy but our purpose. We are here to write, damnit, or to photograph, or to entertain, and to protect that sense of privilege, we insulate ourselves from our travel mate and, by a simple extension, from our reader.

True enough, some of the things I have been told, either in confidence or the intimacy of someone's guard having been lubricated, are not things that will matter to me. Moby-Dick really does tell me more about whales than I want to know, but hearing or seeing the secrets of another is my first shot at a vision of the persons of my time and place on earth, and if I miss that, I am letting self-importance make me forget about audience, who those people are, and how I am able to reach out to them with an observation.