So when do you start on your book?
You have your excuses, I have mine. My thrift-store education combined with my sex and race, for one (three) don’t exactly knock down doors for me when it comes to trying to gather readership. I’ve been doing one version or another of online writing for probably five years now, and it seems that at best on any site I manage to attract five or ten admirers, while anything pandering to the tastes for pre-digested leftist boilerplate or self-help-motivational-thought-leaderism (as exciting to read as watching mud dry) goes right on and gets hundreds of likes from half-assed writers who have thousands of “followers.”
I actually hate the online writing game, because it is all about promoting one’s brand, rather than there even existing any sort of erudite readership capable of appreciating thoughtful and well-presented work.
Back when I used to write more original pieces, some of them I would absolutely agonize over from initial research to the final umpteen-squaredth proofreading. Then I would get like eight people to read it, and two or three comments from folks who acted as if they weren’t even talking about the same topic.
Online writing is a sport of approval-seeking, and as good a writer as I know full well I am, what I see good writing turned into is just fodder for social-media cheap-shottery, if it isn’t simplistic and group-thinky enough to draw the big numbers.
As for topics, one of the main lessons I learned from the literally thousands of hours of work I put in on the Violence Against Women Act and what an absolute calamity it is, is that no one cares about the details nor about the fact that they can be shown to support a thesis responsibly and authoritatively. And on the Statesville series, guilty as charged: the thing is dead in the water. I keep having this feeling that no matter how towering a work of speculative fiction I could turn out, the only readership it would get would be people looking for something to react to, one way or another.
See, here’s the thing: we were supposed to be married and turning into the world’s greatest male-female, Russian-American co-authors’ team. But that project seems to have stalled out too. So I just keep remodeling ladies’ bathrooms and paying my bills, and writing tacky little comments on Medium, me and my broken heart full of unrequited longing for the other half of my writing team to show up.
Meanwhile, once I work my way through a convoluted series of projects on the house and finally get the spot set up where the printer is eventually to go, maybe the impetus to be more serious about real writing, analog writing on real live paper, where it belongs, will return.
And that is the only way I am interested in reading your book when it finally comes out: on paper. And I guarantee you I will, cover to cover.
(When you finally get over here, we can go to a ball game, and I can explain to you how the only truly civilized sport works.)
