Books

For the class Books & Publishing, we started off with an essay about our relationship with books.

Kinda cool class. I think once that teacher has done it for a while longer, she could actually become a pretty good teacher.


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(1st Draft)


CRW 321 - 001
January 13, 2009
Assignment #1
Personal Essay

The only time I've ever not liked books is when I'm lifting the 27^th milk crate full of hardbacks up three flights of stairs after having loaded 30 crates of them into the back of a U-Haul truck a few days before--and then it's only while I'm carrying them. By some perspectives, I could even suffer from that dreaded disease known as bibliophilia (eek! gasp!). But don't worry. It's not contagious. Unless, of course, you've already been exposed to it and have a predilection for such linguistic ailments. I think I contracted this disease as an early child--I would read whatever books I could reach on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves my parents had lining three rooms of the house, at age 5, this only included the lower two shelves; and many of those books were the over-sized art books that were far too heavy for me then. Except the dictionary. I could pick up the big American Heritage with small black letter tabs and wonder what letter Mc was. Whenever any of us three kids would use profanity, all three of us had to sit down with the dictionary and write out a list of at least ten other words which meant the same thing as the profanity someone had uttered. This gave me a certain attitude about language and writing (as well as movies where the screenwriter has seemingly never heard of a thesaurus), and a familiarity with dictionaries. I've never fallen out of love with books, and, since I've never become fully fluent in another language, I have a deep--and perhaps overly-protective--love of the English language, and will staunchly defend its abuse.

If nothing else is available, I will read whatever is present--glossy magazine, owner's manuals, cereal box ingredient list--but I prefer fiction or non-fiction of any of the numerous subjects in which I have a lasting or passing interest. As for genres, I tend to not read much of any single one, and try to avoid the past decade's trend of best-selling books containing narcissistic ranting of funny, yet irrelevant literati; some of which have taken some rather notable awards. I usually name my favorite fiction writers as Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Harry Crews and Larry Brown. The most perfect work of fiction I could cite is Nabokov's Lolita. But there are far more individual titles I enjoy more than an entire catalog from one author; Falling Angel, Deserted Cities of the Heart, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Egil's Saga; non-fiction like Sarajevo: A War Journal, The Oracle, The Hot Zone, and virtually anything involving eschatology.

It was reading A Clockwork Orange at the age of 12 that lead me to consciously say, "I want to create a world like this." At about the same time, PKD's Valis showed me that a novel could be so much more than a story. I had already been interested in writing, and had scrawled out an idea or three, but I didn't begin devoting any significant time to fictional prose until high school. And for years, I didn't make any attempt at all to publish what I had written, even after writing a novel when I was 21; a story which is still once of the clearest and most direct story ideas I've yet had. Most of my work is self-described as weird fiction, but since there's not a placard in bookstore for such, my stories could shift easily between Literature and Horror, being that most of them are about unsettling reality that usually comment on something more than being scared. The irony in this is that my published work is far more mainstream than any of that--a semi-autobiographical pastiche of Kerouac, and a short-short story that takes place during the Siege of Sarajevo (which took an award from Writer's Digest).

All of this lead me, of course, to find employment in bookstores. I've worked in the two biggest corporate giants, and three or four independents. I've been a buyer and seller of books for the past 15 years. If I had to relate only one thing I've learned from that, it would be that authors make very little money from the sale of books. The authors who have made a living from writing either: a) write a LOT (usually, but not always, of somewhat compromised literary quality); or, b) sell their books to Hollywood (usually, but not always, of somewhat compromised moral quality). I hope to be at a point to edgewalk either of those positions.

I am in a wonderful position right now to begin fulfilling my initial dreams as a professional writer. I have written more than a few dozen short stories--of which, a dozen-some are currently being shopped around--and three novels--having to come to the painful terms with one ever-expanding story, finally admitting it had become untenable to complete and must be abandoned. The third novel has been honed to the point where I have begun to shop it around to publishers and agents. This step of writing is a task involving far more effort than can be conceived by those who have yet to do so. As an artist, it is excruciating to do such; as a working writer, it is a necessary step in the process.

What I expect/hope to learn from this class is the processes involved in publishing a book once it is written. I have long been interested in book binding and the aesthetics of paper and fonts and typefaces (uneven, rough-cut pages on a trade paperback are exquisite, and my affect for vellum borders on the absurd). And, coming at this from being a writer, I think it will be a lot of fun to create a cover for my own work (which no author I know of has much say in) and have to present it as a package to the class. After wading for several semesters through the muck and brine of other classes, I feel with this one, I am closer to where I want to be with my academic education.


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