Tag Archives: Writing

“Your Story Made Me Cry”: The Impact of Fiction on Readers

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Some years ago, I used to do performance literature, which is where you take a piece of your writing and you perform (interpret) it. One piece I was performing was a story of a doctor who had to pull the breathing tube on a newborn in an operating room during triage. While a lot of stories of this type of narrative focus on the emotions of the doctor, or something equally tragic, this story focused on the fact that the baby, who was too small to survive, was going to die, but no matter what else was going on in the chaos of that operating room, the baby wouldn’t die. So everyone in the operating room had to keep working through their other dramas as this infant was fighting its last moments of life. The linking line from each scene was “and the baby was still breathing….” I interwove this narrative with a story I had written about a man who shows up for work one day in a job where everyone lives a mundane life where nothing changes, and on this one day, a co-worker goes nuts, killing everyone all because he was that one guy in the office that no one ever took seriously. To describe the experience of those two stories linked together, it was like riding a rollercoaster, going from humor to tragedy to horror to shock and back to humor again. All linked with “and the baby was still breathing….”

Anyway, it was one of those pieces that received a lot of positive praise at the time, but years later, I completely forgot about it. I was serving as an assistant debate coach a decade later and at a speech tournament when this person I didn’t recognize walked up to me and said: “Holy crap! It’s you! You made me cry one day!” I looked at this guy, who was rather large and intimidating, and to be honest, I couldn’t imagine ever being able to make this guy cry, unless I had hit him with a crowbar, right before running the other direction because it would not have done any damage. But then he started describing the story I described earlier and said that he remembered walking out of that room and crying for a long time because of the impact of that story. He said he’s never forgotten it.

And I believed him because it had been over ten years, and there was no way anyone could have remembered a simple story for ten years and then remember who told it to him unless it made some sort of an impact.

And that’s when I realized the true impact of being a writer. Over the years, I’ve written a lot of stories, some funny, some tragic and some heart-breaking. Each story has been a struggle in taking a journey that I’ve never taken before, and while I’ve always believed that I’m seeking out some way of moving myself through a narrative, the simple point is that we really want to touch other people, to remind people of why they’re living in the first place, and provide either some meaning, or something further to think about. I think this is what has bothered me so much about a lot of the fiction I come across; it’s almost like the only reason it exists is because someone just felt the need to fill up space on a blank piece of paper.

Writers have the ability to influence people, but even more important, at least to me, is that they have the ability to make people stop and think. And sometimes, that requires the writer to put himself/herself outside of a personal comfort zone. One of my strongest narratives in my writing career is probably one of the few pieces that received the most attention, having won a number of national awards. It has actually been performed a few times by people from different sections of the country, who each seem to find a new way of interpreting something that was written with multiple layers of perspective. When I wrote it, I had this idea to tackle the problems of gay bashing in this country. Having come across a lot of attempts of this type of story, I used to criticize the fact that either someone was too linked to the subject matter (experienced it before) to distance oneself well enough, or someone had no connection to the gay lifestyle, so it ended up being one of those stories where someone was trying to make an impact by touching a controversial subject only because it was controversial (but really had no nuance to breathe any life into the narrative). I was afraid I was going to suffer from the latter problem because honestly I’ve never been involved in a gay bashing before (never having bashed someone, nor was I gay or someone who was a victim of such an incident). When I started this project, I was convinced I was tackling a subject that wasn’t mine to do so, and it would be recognized instantly once it was completed.

So what I did was try to analyze a gay bashing from every perspective of the incident itself. I went into the mind of the victim, the basher, an innocent bystander who witnessed the event but did nothing, and the lover of the victim itself. What I did was write the story from the perspective of a survivor who has lost his memory of the event and is in the hospital recovering, remembering the incident from each perspective before finally realizing he was the lover of the victim, and as a result, the final victim as well. For me, the story was extremely hard to write because I had to explore the story from a perspective that was completely uncomfortable for me, but I had to do it sincerely and not try to fill the details with cliches or common expectations. The final crescendo between the main character and the basher, and the realization that anger and hate were the only two things separating them (where he loses his battle with anger and is left with “hate” as the last step towards becoming everything he feared the most) was the critical scene in the whole story and it was probably rewritten twenty times before I got it right.

I received a lot of letters from people about that particular story, from practically every walk of life and particular backgrounds that I had never expected. I even received comments from people who were big Elvis fans (the linking tie between all of the narratives was an old Elvis song that had been playing on the jukebox where the bashing took place), and felt that the song would never sound the same to them again after having experienced the story.

Unfortunatey, not all of our stories can achieve this level of narrative, but when they do, that’s when we’re reminded of why a lot of us became writers in the first place. And it wasn’t just be called a writer or to put words on paper, but to move the audience to think and experience something they hadn’t expected to feel before beginning the journey.

Chicago, Moving, and the Process of Reinventing Writing

Books, Memoirs, Relationships, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , ,

Not much going on, so I thought I would do another recap of what might actually be going on. So, here goes:

1. Took a trip to Chicago this weekend.

I have to admit that I’ve never really given Chicago a fair shake. One of my friends, Kevin, is from Chicago and always talked up the place in a positive way. Having been there a few times, I never really found myself enamored with the place. So, I went there specifically to meet up with someone, and while I had a good time meeting her, the place itself met the expectations I had going into it. I found the place to be mostly dirty, kind of like you’d expect from any large downtown city. I was in the Chinatown area of the city (or at least one of them), so the people were generally friendly, but there wasn’t really that much more to say about it.

Getting to Chicago kind of sucked, and it wasn’t really the fault of Chicago itself. It was the fault of Indiana. And then Chicago. At one point, I went through what seemed like an endless series of toll booths. I’m not kidding. I drove less than a half a mile after a toll booth, and I was driving up to another one. It’s like the government workers had their hands out nonstop while traveling through their mecca. And the first toll booth person I dealt with was one of the more rude ones you come across. She was hostile, scowling, and she held her hand so far back in her booth (to provide change for the bills I gave her) that I had to open my car door and practically walk over to her to get her to give me my money back. I noticed that she didn’t have a problem taking my money; she just wasn’t all that excited about having to stretch her hand out to give any back. That’s HORRIBLE customer service, and obviously she doesn’t care, which means her bosses don’t care, and thus, neither does its government. I started to immediately hate Chicago, and I wasn’t even ten feet into the city.

Leaving Chicago was a lot easier. And a relief. Did I mention I don’t really like Chicago? I guess you have to have been born there, or really like big cities with rude people in them. I guess a New Yorker would love Chicago. A San Franciscan? Not so much.

2. School is back in swing.

I’m starting the third week of school, and everything seems to be going well. I’m kind of apprehensive about continuing this job in the future (after this semester) as I really feel like I’m being taken advantage of. The place they have me teaching is in Lowell, which is pretty far away (another city), and the main point they made is they don’t pick up mileage for having to drive my car twice a week twenty minutes to half an hour. You’d think if they really wanted someone to fill this type of position, they’d be somewhat responsive to the fact that it’s costing me money to actually make it to this place twice a week. This school has a tendency to be pretty cheap when it comes to covering certain things, and sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth it. I mean, the pay isn’t stellar, and it does take a great deal of chunk of time out of my normal schedule. Again, this is one of those cases where a teacher is kind of left with a thought of how much do I really want to teach versus how much I’m willing to sacrifice with getting very little in return. I’m already at a loss from a simple economic perspective as my text book for one of my classes went missing after the very first day (when I know I had it in class with me); that never makes one feel really good about things.

3. Moving.

I’ve been trying to find a larger place for myself within my own housing complex, and I’ve been disappointed at the experience. On Friday, I spoke with the woman at Wyndham Hill, and she told me that a two bedroom apartment (pretty close to where I wanted to move to) would be available at the end of October, but that the people were still in the apartment, so I couldn’t lay any claim to it until they vacated. Today, I called to verify the time frame, and she told me that the apartment was already given to someone else over the weekend. Which, if you think about it, means that someone else came along and picked up the apartment, EVEN THOUGH she told me that there was no way to ask for it until the other family vacated, which they have not. In other words, I got screwed, and there was no way I could have done anything about it. One of the problems with the place where I live is that no matter what I try to ask for, something always seems to prevent me from getting it. A garage opened up closer to my apartment (I’ve seen it open and empty) but when I asked if I could switch to it, I was told no garage was available. It’s still empty. I kept asking for a den apartment, but was told it was a hard commodity to get, so I asked to be put on the waiting list for when it became available. Each time it became available, it turned into a first come, first serve situation where no one let me know it was available, and obviously there was no list or line. I just got ignored yet again.

So I may just move out completely. I hate moving over stupid shit, but what can you do? I’m currently looking at a series of apartments near 28th Street, which would put me in walking distance to shops and a potential social night life. Where I live now is conducive to feeding ducks, and that’s about it.

4. Writing

I haven’t been doing much writing lately, mainly because I’ve been completely discouraged by the whole writing industry. I had an agent at one point who just kind of disappeared, had another agent after her who sort of just, well, disappeared, and getting a new one after him has been a continuous series of failures. And no, they didn’t disappear because of anything I did. Honestly. I have an alibi. Really.

Part of the problem for me is that I have such grandiose projects I’m working on with my writing that no longer consist of “Get an idea, tell a story and then revamp it.” Instead, I’m focused on analyzing a genre, trying to turn it on its head completely and do something that seems almost impossible for me to do, and every writing project has felt that way, until I finish it, and then I feel as if I’ve learned a whole new chapter in my writing, so I have to go out and break new ground for the next one. I’m not sure anyone understands what I’m saying here because most people when I tell them I’m a writer, still think that I’m referring to sitting down and writing a cute story. I’ve even stopped telling people what I’m writing because they tend to stare at me blank-faced and, if I’m lucky, they’ll ask, “Okay, but what’s the story about?” In other words, there’s a miscommunication thing going on, and a lot of it is due to my impatience with explaining the process of writing something from a completely different perspective of normal literature. I’d say that someday people will understand what I’ve been trying to do (as they analyze it in post-modern literature analysis courses), but part of me (a large part of me) suspects that most people will never hear of me because I’m doomed to writing for myself, having given up on the publishing world already as too sporadic and celebrity centered for someone like me to ever make it. Yeah, I know there’s the cynic out there thinking, “Or maybe you just suck, Duane.” And the part of me that’s most concerned is the part that thinks that cynic may be right, and I’ve been wasting my time and energy when I could have been a lot more productive if I would have focused all of my energy on getting my mage to level 85 in World of Warcraft.

5. Dating.

What’s that?

That’s all for today. I keep plugging forward, thinking that Einstein’s theoretic is wrong, and that perhaps if you do continue to do the same stupid thing over and over again, you WILL get different, better results.

Exploring the Ipad 2 & the desire to own every new piece of technology

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I finally broke down and bought an Ipad 2. I had bought a Motorola Xoom some months ago, and I had been very disappointed in that product, mainly because it has turned into a glorified doorstop. I’m often the victim of techno hype, in that too many reviewers acted like it was the great alternative to the ipad, but then when I finally got it, I discovered it wasn’t ready, nor was it really as compatible as it should have been with the things that I wanted to use. I could never get any of my music to be recognized by its music reader (people told me to download a different music player than the one installed), the books really sucked, as google books was never the solution to the e-reader issue (people told me to download another book reader), the movie player didn’t play ANYTHING (people told me to find another video player, which I did, and I never did succeed at getting a decent enough one that really worked on the Xoom). Basically, everything I did on the Xoom was subpar and not up to speed. Great doorstop. Or great e-mail reader, if you have wi fi only.

So, I went to the Apple store and they finally had iPads in. I bought the AT&T 3G version, which so far is great, although I suspect the 3G aspect of it is massively overpriced no matter what model you buy. That’s one thing NONE of the cellular companies have figured out in the United States. It’s like we’re in the Middle Ages here, and no one will do anything to make it better.

But my problem is really that I tend to buy whatever new technology thing comes out as soon as it does, and I sometimes pay the consequence for doing so. I bought a Nook Color when they came out, and I was severely underwhelmed by it. They’ve made great innovations with their current ones, but because I bought the first rendition of the Nook Color, I’m left with yet another very expensive doorstop that people tell me is so much better in a later edition. One of my other failings is that when I’ve been screwed once, I don’t give the company a second chance. So I won’t be buying a new Nook. Sorry. Once bitten and all that.

But so far, I love the ipad. I haven’t gone all crazy with it yet, but I’m slowly moving towards getting rid of my Washington Post subscription on the Kindle and choosing alternatives on the iPad. It’s so mucy nicer carrying that thing around (it’s a lot lighter and easier to carry than the Kindle). So far, I haven’t turned on my Kindle once since buying the Ipad. The only thing is: I have no intentions of buying books on the Ipad because their selection is horrid, and their prices, like most Apple offerings, are atrociously way too high. The only advantage I’ve seen so far with the Kindle offering of the Washington Post is that you download the whole thing at once and then don’t have to have a connection to read it. With the iPad, every time I read something, it seems to want to have a connection to the server in order to turn the page. Tried reading the Washington Post on it, and again was seriously underwhelmed. I’ve also noticed that with the Kindle I would read an entire article because you scrolled through them one by one. With the iPad, I scan articles and read very little, kind of like the old way I used to read a newspaper, and that’s definitely not something I like, and it’s a hard habit to break when met with the opportunity.

I’ll let you know further how I do with the Ipad. I’m trying to use the wifi more often than the cellular connection because after the third day, I checked my usage, and man, I was not impressed with how quickly I am using up my monthly amount. Again, while this is more a complaint against AT&T and Verizon, that’s something they need to fix, or they’re going to price themselves out of the cellular market. I think they believe they’ll continue to win because they’re the only game on the block, but what’s going to happen is that someone is going to invent something that circumvents the need for them, and people will jump ship really freaking fast, eliminating them overnight. It’s what normally happens with business and economics; they just don’t seem to believe it’s right around the corner, a lot like Comcast doesn’t realize it’s on its death bed because of how shitty it treated its customers over the years.

Anyway, haven’t posted much lately, mainly because I’ve had very little to say. My writing career has somewhat sucked, and as that was pretty much all I had in my corner, I find myself not very happy these days.

Further Misadventures in the e-Publishing World

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There’s a term that e-published authors have been using to describe the old way of doing business in the writing world: Legacy Publishing, meaning that it’s the old way of doing publishing. As one of those who got his start in the legacy publishing industry, where my first two novels were published as physical entities, I’ve slowly been trying to build a writing career by embracing the non-legacy model, i.e., publishing my work as e-books myself. In the process of doing that, something strange has started to happen that I never really anticipated. Let me explain.

When I started publishing some of my completed novels as e-books, I wasn’t really expecting to make a huge profit, or even to sell a whole lot of books. I hoped to sell a few and at least get a few readers interested in my work. Honestly, that’s what every writer tends to want to do. I’m really not that different. Not knowing the first thing about connecting to an audience that I don’t have, I’ve tried all sorts of different marketing, including Facebook ads, google ads, viral marketing, standing on the corner and yelling out loud, and all sorts of other antics that are capable of bringing on all sorts of restraining orders. As a result, a few people have started to read my books, and let’s just say that while I haven’t been extremely successful, it’s proving to be an interesting experiment.

However, a new development has occurred, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I mentioned that some of my earlier work was published by Legacy Publishers. So far, they have done absolutely nothing to sell my work other than orginally publish it. I’m an unknown to them, so why would they be interested in pursuing any marketing on my behalf? So far, there’s been no reason. However, because I’ve been doing a LOT of marketing myself recently, some of my work has actually started to sell. Most of it as e-books, but some of that marketing has actually caused potential readers to go to bookstores and buy physical copies of my novels. Great. This is leading to something, however, and what it’s leading to is the realization by the original Legacy Publishers that I’m capable of actually selling books. It never dawned on me that they’d ever be paying attention to the fact that my marketing would start to pay off. And it has. Which has led them to start paying a bit more attention to me, and that attention has proved to be quite eye-opening.

You see, when I was originally published by them, the whole e-book universe was not even on the radar. So they never bothered to negotiate those rights. Those rights are mine still. Well, they’re now realizing that, and they’re also realizing that because I am self-publishing the rest of my work, it’s pretty obvious that my work they originally published will net them absolutely no profit whatsoever when it comes to the e-book market. So, rather than just contact me and be honest about it, their contact has been the kind you expect from a Shakespearean villain. The kind that goes: “Did you know that people are selling their books as e-books, and they’re making millions? We’re willing to publish your book as an e-book if you’re willing to sign that right over to us.” They also forget to mention (and sometimes they do) that they would like to set up the generous terms that are similar to the ones that happened under the old contract, where they get about 90 percent and I get 10. In other words, rather than have me publish it myself where I get 70 percent and Amazon gets 30, they’d rather they take 90 percent of the 70 percent, leaving me with (doing the math….for every $1.00 a book makes, I get $0.07). So, for a book that normally sells for (if they put it up at the maximum they’re trying to get) $12.99, I’d get 90 cents. Now, if I sold that book for $4.99 by publishing it myself (or even at $2.99), I’d make $3.49 (or $2.09 at the $2.99 rate). In other words, even if my book sold at a massive discount (my pricing), I’d still make 2 to 3 times more than what a publishing company would give me for it. And keeping in mind that the publishing company has NEVER marketed one of my books EVER, I get absolutely no benefit from them being the ones publishing it. None.

So, you might see why many writers are turning away from the normal legacy publishers. It’s not profitable, and unless you’re already a marketable name that they’re willing to throw money behind, you get absolutely nothing out of the deal. Instead, you sign over all of the profit to an entity that doesn’t do anything to deserve it.

It would be different if they actually went out of their way to do something to benefit my name. But they don’t. Or they never have. Now, if I was to find a publisher that was willing to do something to help me sell books, then we’d be talking a completely different story. But the way this model works, they don’t want me until I can already do the job that they won’t do themselves. Once I have the name recognition and the ability to sell my own work, my need for them goes away completely. So, somebody please tell me how quid pro quo thing works here if one side is continuously leeching off the other.

Writing How To: The Overwhelming Desire to Make Fantasy Seem Fantastic

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Okay, here is the next in the series of commentaries on writing. Today, I thought I would talk about the genre of fantasy, because a lot of writers seem to be finding themselves falling into this one a lot. Therefore, it’s probably important to point out one of the failings that often separates a writer from anyone who might want to read any of that writer’s writings. Today, we’re going to focus on the desire to make fantasy overly fantastic.

Let me start by including a little scene I’m going to concoct for the nature of pointing this out. In this scene, the Princess C’lagrisha’nte is planning for her royal wedding to the prince of the Grishandens Empire. Let’s listen in:

Zvastran’cha, the Secondary Triumphant Parlour Midwife Maid, picked up a Hee’chanta vase and poured water onto the Bracklit plant before moving onto the array of Sxraxxan tapestries that were overlayed upon the Royal Foundry of Makkappala. Before she could reset the seal, Vleekorando Vrippzee approached her with his Lantee spear at a position of rest and tapped his Bryee visor twice, indicating his displeasure at the events that occurred over the Kalamaster Ceremonies of Trijent’a. It was obvious that a future gathering of the Proxilia Council was most likely to result in the Second Rigor of Nixtraxa. Which, of course, meant blah blah blah

What we have here, in the words of a great Southern prison warden is “a failure to communicate”. At one point, it’s really cool to add all of this visual scenery and fantastical elements that show we’re not in Kansas anymore, but at some point the amount of unknown verbage starts to become noise, and the reader turns off most of the visuals because they stop making sense. Add in numerous characters that all have really bizarre names, and you end up with a tale that becomes so easy to toss out the window, that the chances of you ever getting anyone to finish it are very limited. It doesn’t matter if the writing is stellar, and the story is great; at some point, the amount of confusion is going to overwhelm the reader, and the story ends before it ever gets told.

A solution to this problem is to introduce foreign elements into your world sporadically while including familiar sensations alongside the foreign ones. The little inclusion I used to explain this problem isn’t even that bad, to be honest. I’ve read some stories where I’ve gone entire paragraphs where I had no clue what the writer was talking about because EVERYTHING on the page was so foreign that at some point I gave up trying to figure out what a Hgjasfjsfjlijn was and just started thinking about a wonderful lunch I had the day before. If you fill your story with enough elements like that, causing your reader to abandon your story, you may have defeated your reason for writing in the first place, which should always be kept at the forefront of everything you write: You’re communicating, and as long as you can continue doing that, you’re on the right track to storytelling instead of just filling pages with gibberish that will eventually be ignored.

Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up

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The “Three Cups of Tea” author, Greg Mortenson, has been accused of making up stories in his book.  Accused by Jon Krakauer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Mortenson denies the falsehood claim and is not commenting further due to a medical condition he is suffering from recently. Unfortunately, with him out of commission and not on record to defend himself, the media frenzy will probably swarm him at this horrible time for him. Hopefully, he gets a chance to defend himself, and the truth is reached, regardless of what that truth might be.

With this accusation, the writing community appears to be undergoing yet another challenge, as it did when the whole James Frey controversy occurred with “A Million Little Pieces”, a book that featured numerous made-up events in a book claimed to be entirely non-fiction. Hopefully, the accusations will not continue to paint a dark light on the many works other writers have put out there, making it so that readers walk into every bookstore, expecting fiction in the non-fiction section and accepting each memoir produced as a “quasi-” real account.

I recently published my “Neo Revolutionary Messages” on Kindle and Nook, and I promise that it is entirely non-fiction, as it is an analysis of the August 1991 Coup d’etat in the Soviet Union (where Boris Yeltsin challenged the hardliners when they imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev). Yet, with stories like the one I linked here, there’s always the fear that a reader is going to think the author took liberties with the facts for the sake of trying to tell a better story.

DIY Publishing is a Lot of Work

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my self-publishing tasks. I can’t even begin to tell you how much work this has entailed. I know most people don’t really care, but as a writer, I’m finding myself with very little time to write because most of my time is spent preparing manuscripts, designing and redesigning covers, and trying to conduct social networking in order to somehow constitute a tiny bit of a writing career. I never realized how much work this would actually be.

Not surprisingly, a lot of DIY writers are learning this exact same thing themselves because the publishing industry has pretty much abandoned the average writer, mainly going after well known entities (who don’t really need the publishing industry because they’ve already made it) or celebrities who shouldn’t be writing books in the first place. The rest of us are struggling just to see if we can somehow make a connection that gets someone to read something we have to write.

Which, as I’ve hinted, makes it that much harder to sit down and write. Recently, I released Destiny on Kindle and the Nook. It’s an interesting book that I created a decade and a half ago, yet it started a series of stories that have been very much a part of my continuous writing career. While the book takes place around the Year 3000, the series of books and stories that follow it actually take place around the time of the Roman Empire, slowly moving their way to the Year 3000. It’s kind of an interesting arc that tells an epic adventure of the planet Reagul, where a transplanted group of Romans live out their future. It also tells the story of the sorceror Sarbonn, who you might realize, has been a part of my writing for a very long time now. That character sets the tone for the story that takes place on Reagul long after his death, as he spent most of his life fortelling the future events of the planet, including setting the stage for what would eventually happen in the novel Destiny.

I’ve probably published 20 short stories that are all about the land of Reagul, even though most of the editors at that time probably had no idea they were publishing something that was part of a series of related, connected adventures. So, it’s somewhat interesting and fascinating for me to be able to keep revisiting this world with future writings. Now, if I just had more time to sit down and write.

Anyway, not much more to report, but wanted to at least let you all know I’m still chugging along, trying to get the volumes of stuff out there. Why? Not sure. But seems like the right thing to do.

So far, my experience with Smashwords is a lot like pushing a big rock up a very big hill

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Dating her is a lot like trying to get your writing approved by Smashwords

I’ve recently been trying to put some of my novels onto e-readers and Amazon’s Kindle. One way that was recommended to me was Smashwords, a site that actually lets you upload your writing and then helps you format it into the various different types of readers. So far, after two weeks of working with Smashwords, with three different manuscripts, I haven’t made it out of the “pending approval” stage yet, as my work keeps getting returned to me, requiring new changes. I’ve gotten to the point where I am starting to believe that there is no stage beyond “pending approval”. It’s like one of those girlfriends who demands perfection, and no matter how hard you try, you never quite achieve it. But instead of dumping you, she always gives you “one more chance”. Yes, it’s a lot like that.

So, I’m still trying to get my e-reader work approved through them, and hopefully one day, before I turn 95, the first one will go into “you’ve almost been approved” status. Kind of like that girlfriend I was talking about. I mean, you’d dump her if she wasn’t so hot, and no matter how mean she is to you, you have to keep believing that one day you’ll achieve her standards.

I mean, the beatings have to stop one day, right?

An Unknown Writer’s Circle of Pseudo-Support

Memoirs, Writing, , , , , ,

Like most writers, I have this recurring fantasy. It involves a large library, thousands of books, a bowl of jello and Jessica Alba. Oh wait, that’s a different fantasy. The fantasy I’m talking about involves this vision of one day looking back on today as a seasoned, professional writer who has made it and wonders why the journey to get where I got was so hard, so long and so filled with obstacles. But one thing that keeps coming back to me, and to many writers like me, is remembering all of those friends who stuck by you through the struggle. And to be honest, I can count on one hand the close friends of mine who actually stuck by me. The rest, not so much.

To be honest, I think this is something most artists deal with on a constant basis. I have a friend of mine who is a struggling filmmaker. He’s actually pretty good at what he does, and I have a lot of respect for his work in that field. As a matter of fact, he finished his latest film just a short while ago, and when it came time for the premiere, of all of the friends at work, only two or three actually attended. The rest kept asking about it, wanting to know when it was going to happen, and then when it did, they all mysteriously had other things they had to do.

That’s what happens to a lot of us artists when we hit that point of trying to actually introduce one of our works into the public realm. When I published my first novel, people said, “oh, that’s great” and that was all they wanted to say about it. None of them were actually interested in reading it. Oh, they’d say nice things in pleasant circumstances, but they really weren’t interested in the fact that I was struggling to be a writer, and it was about the only thing that mattered in my life. They’d talk endlessly about their families, their dreams and aspirations, but when it actually came to picking up a copy of my book, Osama Bin Laden was more popular than I was.

I did a simple experiment a few weeks ago, which I repeated a few days ago, because I was actually interested in how far friends would actually go on this sort of thing. I have most of my normal friends, and former acquaintances, as Facebook friends. So, as I have a simple little comic strip called The Adventures of Stickman & the Unemployed Legospaceman, I thought it might be interesting to start up a Facebook page for that strip itself. Then I sent out a “like” request to all of my “friends”. That was several weeks ago. To this date, five people have “liked” it. One was me. Another was that filmmaker friend I talked about. That means three others appeared from practically everyone else I know. Three.

So, I repeated that experiment by putting one of my books out onto Facebook as well. Six people have liked it. That filmmaker friend of mine, and my friend Melanie from Germany. Including me, that means 3 people have added it, and none of them are any of my actual Facebook friends who have been friends for the years I’ve been on Facebook. Kind of tells you something, if you take the time to think about it. It’s kind of depressing as well.

Which leads me to realize that if most other artists are going through this sort of support from the people they know, it says something really crappy about the way social networks interact with our psyche. I’ve talked to a lot of professional writers over the years in their formulative years, when they were really struggling, and they’ve all said something similar, kind of pointing out that the art is a lonely art, but not just because you have to be alone to write. Quite often writers feel abandoned and write from that place, and once they actually make it, seek out new sources of friendships because it’s very hard to look back at the friends you had before when so few of those friends stood by you during the toughest times.

I’m finding it quite telling that some of my closer companions these days tend to come from people who have found me through my blog, or others who have contacted me through circles of writing, rather than through my normal, already established social networks. While it leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, it also leaves me wondering if the future is a series of connections yet to come rather than the ones that seem to be dislatching from behind.

It’s a lot like the feeling I’ve always had from my family when I first mentioned that I was going to be a writer. Instead of respect, awe or even interest, I received condemnation and ridicule, almost as if it wasn’t something to be taken seriously. When I received my first positive review on Amazon, rather than say, “that’s great, Duane!” I heard, “so did one of your friends write the review, or did you write it?” That was from my family. So, you can imagine how long the desire for success in this field has been burning for me.

That’s really all I have to say about that.

The Cover of My New Novel “LOSER”

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loser

This is the new cover of my latest novel I’m releasing called Loser. It is one of my earlier science fiction novels. The description is as follows:

After the final war, the Councils did what no previous government was able to do: Unify the world under one government. Like societies that victimize their lowest class, the invention of a device to determine someone’s usefulness to a community manages to make that effort even easier. Centuries later, the original intention of such a device loses its original purpose, allowing those on top to determine the survivability of those on the bottom, originally nicknamed “Losers” and with time the nickname becomes an actual designation.

Rem Schlock is a new Exterminator tasked with hunting and finding elusive Losers. During his search, he discovers the rumor of a mysterious “leader” of the Losers. Facing a future darkened by random death, decayed cities and hidden loyalties, Rem hunts this phantom criminal, discovering an underworld he never imagined yet once revealed can never be covered up again.

It should be up on Amazon very soon.