My Very Short Journey Into Publishing

Neuroses are a bit like stains on white shirts. When you see the spot, you say, "Aw, shit." You try to rub it out with water. You run for baking soda. You seek cornstarch. Then you give up. You're not throwing the shirt away, so you try to cleverly hide it, with your arms, with a scarf. "No one's going to see it beneath this jacket." And then you forget. Until someone notices. And when someone notices, you notice; and every day of anger you would have had, had you not ignored the stain, visits you in this one moment.

We hope to live lives apart from our neuroses. And yet there they lurk, waiting to be discovered.

So it was with me.

I'm vaguely aware there is a cottage industry in telling people how to get things published. I'm not doing that here. I'm actually very bad at it, but I sometimes like to be bad at things. No, this write-up is something a bit different.

I'm always lost as to when I wanted to be a writer. It may have started with the summer of 2011, when I read William Faulker's "As I Lay Dying". Or William Gass's "Temple of Texts", in 2010. Or it was always in the purview. Nevertheless, in the very winter of 2011, I wrote, in the back of my high school's literary club, a few passages. I thought, These are neat, I like their vibe.

This was the start of "Orpheus".

Over the course of the next few months, up to May - and I swear to God I don't know how I did this - "Orpheus" developed into a novella (~20,000 words). 1) It was crap, but 2) it had two shockingly strong sections that, even as an adult, I think were pretty good. I said, Hey, I'm a writer! I should continue writing.

And so, "Orpheus" started everything. Somehow. I don't know how it came into my mind, I don't know how I actually completed it, much less in so many words - I had never completed anything ever in my life up to that point, it would've been nice if I, y'know, completed a video game or some science project instead - but here it was. I would spend the next four years through college writing somewhere around 600,000 words.

Which. Were. All. Crap.

Fast-forward to 2018. I am horribly depressed. I reflect on what I had accomplished in my life - i.e. nothing - and thought on my writing, which, despite being all crap, I was proud of. I liked their "vibes". I said, Hey, how about I actually rewrite "Orpheus" so that I can stop calling it crap, using all the things I learned over the last few years?

And so here I am, 7 years later, with "Orpheus". When I began, I thought I would be done by age 30. A few years into it, I thought I would be done by 36. It is now done, at the age of 31. Clearly, I can tell the future, and should buy lottery tickets. I thought it would be a novel, and not a poem. I am here, nevertheless.

Now, another story intrudes.

In 2020 the second season of the hit anime "Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World" debuts. I watch it, by an urging of a friend, despite not having watched season one. It is godawful. I am so mad that I write some 10,000 words lampooning "Re:Zero" and its completely, utterly, totally ineffectual main character and the anime's supposed drama. This was the height of the Pandemic, so I had time. The resulting treatment was also godawful and not funny, but, hey, at least it was honest. I shelved it and, for some reason, I turned it over in my head multiple times, trying to figure out how to make it work.

It appears all of my writing projects start with me writing crap.

In any case, here I am, 4 years later. It's the end of November, and I have finished "That Time I Was Reincarnated As Myself" (because I also hated "That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime"). I finished "That Time ..." less for an audience, and more for me, for I have entered a existential crisis lightened only by my laughter over boner jokes. The subsequent embarassment of using prose to write something so stupid as "That Time ..." leads me to re-think my approach to "Orpheus".

And, another story intrudes. Don't worry, this time it's a short one.

I've been unemployed for over a year, and my despair over my life has never been higher. I think my career is truly dead and I have hit a wall.

And now I have two novels, both arguably distractions from my career, neither of which anyone would want to read.

I peer down, upon my white shirt. There is an orangish-reddish spot on the place where my belly is concealed. I have not seen it in years. I now realize everyone in the world, but me, has seen it.

"Oh, neurosis. I thought we would continue this game of hide-and-seek a little longer."

William Gass devotes a section of "Temple of Texts" to William Gaddis. He wrote this beautiful passage that I remember to this day:

William Gaddis, aka Gibson, aka Green, aka Gass, did none of these customary career-enhancing things, remaining, as the politicians' escape phrase always conveniently claims, "out of the loop." Out of the network. Not in the swim. Nor did he write a new book every fortnight just to prove how easy it is, for we all know how easy it is, and how desirable, for that way you can continue to feed your few friends what they are used to, and there are publisher's parties to go to, and more and more nice notices, even raves, since now aren't we all old pals? We must remember that the same hacks who condemn, for a price praise.

Following soon with a thought on Gaddis's "JR",

But do not put down what you have to go to JR yet, even if it is almost as musicial as Finnegans Wake, a torrent of talk and Tower of Babble, a slumgullion of broken phrases and incomplete - let's call them - thoughts; because there is plenty to listen to here; because we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master's hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen, we hear, hear ourselves, singing the saying, and moving the tune along the lines, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and crying out, Hallelujah, there is something good in this gosh-awful, god-empty world.

Which is almost the whole point of what we do.

The top three things my father wanted me to be: programmer, accountant, doctor. I had always gone to technical schools. I made friends - maybe acquaintances - they're friends no longer, certainly - who thought creative writing was a joke. There was never any money in it, and money is, after all, how those beautiful people on the TV and in the movies looked so beautiful and happy, and how one reaches that glorious and noble destination, of being "normal".

And so I said, Let's put writing in the closet. And I thought it would stay there forever.

I thought I would have a normal programming career, probably get married, have kids, and keep the novels on the DL. Maybe they would be published, maybe I'd just have them sit around, maybe I'd only vanity-publish, and then, when I died, my kids would dust them off and say, Look at that!

I'm instead picking up the pieces of my life and my self, wondering just how I got here, what paths I could have taken, what choices I shouldn't have made, and, almost mocking me, I now have two books that are God's little way of saying, "Congratulations, you wasted your life.

"If it was one book, fine, incidents happen. But the act of writing two is a deliberation and a description of you.

"You could've spent your 20s networking. You could've spent your 20s writing popular GitHub packages. You could've spent your 20s on any other fucking hobby rather than writing niche prose. And now you have nothing to rely on to dig you out of this hole you dug yourself into."

In the madness that comes out of depression, I thought that if I tried to get these books published, the matrix my brain was uploaded into would crash - you know, because I wasn't supposed to do stuff like this, I'm supposed to suffer - and then I would just be dead.

And so here I go.

And there I left the realm of traditional publishing.

My understanding is that the entry to traditional publishing relies pretty much exclusively on agents, with smaller presses only accepting cold submissions. You ideally query agents who have represented authors who themselves have written books like yours.

Well, one, "Orpheus" is a long-form epic poem. So, no cigar, unless Derek Walcott is still alive (he isn't). Also, who the hell will buy a long poem?

Two, "That Time ..." is plain stupid. And who reads satire anymore, in this political climate?

Three, what agent would accept both?

Four, while I have a realistic viewpoint, I dislike this kind of gatekeeping. Even if both books were to pass initial inspection, what if I wanted to write a really fucked-up book later, because that's what literature should be, it should act as Kafka's axe on the icy surface? Getting through the gate is a hindrance to what is actually important, the writing itself.

Five, what would Thoreau, Whitman, Stevens, Gaddis do, they who wrote books which landed like huge duds on their publication? Wouldn't they consider self-publishing? For example, "Walden" and "Leaves of Grass" were essentially self-published (Thoreau paid out-of-pocket, Whitman I think printed it while sneaking out of his office job). Isn't there something American about self-publishing, that I'm less interested in finding an audience and more in affirming myself?

And so my very brief two-day exploration into traditional publishing ended, and I have moved onto self-publishing. I don't know how to market a book. Maybe they'll just sit around. Maybe this will all come to naught.

But, here's the interesting thing about despair: despair despairs of doing anything, because any action taken will always result in failure. However, undertaking the action would result, of course, in the action. Despair fears the ghost of action, and yet it is so easily dispelled by simply taking action.

Neurosis so blanches at the very same thing. Neuroses are hard to triage because they describe how their victims think, such that we are scarcely able to believe that they are victims. This is essentially why diagnoses are usually meant for extreme cases ex. the woman who literally cannot be removed from cleaning because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder. But to do shatters that system of thought, that belief that Y is consequent of X or that X must imply Y.

"Must", "shall", "always", "forever", perhaps, are evil words. They are shackles, they do not consider, they do not bend; they describe what can be described and what cannot be; if the victim wants to express themselves outside of the shackles, they will find they cut their wrists and ankles trying to depart from them. And these wounds cut deep into the soul.

In its own way, we do live in the matrix. We live in the matrix of our own making, we live by the mechanisms we suppose are true, we feel must be true, or else the whole world doesn't work, and we delude ourselves, often, by supposing that our changing our minds means we are more free, when in reality we transfer to different digital realities.

So... I don't know. I don't know where this story actually ends. Essays usually have neat, trim little endings so that the reader can turn the page over and be done with them. The ending of this essay is, I am doing. Maybe I'm correct, and at the end of doing I will die. But as I say a million times in both of my books, we are constantly dying and reliving life again. There is no hope that at the end of doing there will be something redemptive, but there is hope that doing anything is graceful in itself. And so here I go, making mistakes again, probably falling short of myself, but going all the same. Maybe we are only beautiful in execution and never in conclusion. (Maybe I am closer to understanding "On I Go".)

And if you actually got to the end of this, well, thanks for accompanying me on this weird journey.