Name Dropping or What I've Learned from My Mistakes About Writing

Curses!

Once again, before I forget (again! Seriously, I had to do a triple-check before I realized I'd left this out), here's a link to my book, this time over at Barnes & Noble. I'm going to try and cycle through the various places where my publishers have scattered the book, just to spread the love as far as I can. Sadly, only Amazon has physical copies of the book thus far, which is why I shared it first, and I'm a firm believer in the need for hardcopy even in this digital age, but I tend to have a fundamental distrust of capitalism and its sorcerous ways, so I'd rather avoid giving all the business to just one business.

The title for this week's mini-essay, and also the reason for the "d'oh!" mino picture (done by my sister-in-law for my birthday a few years back, by the way, as were all of these cute little minotaur images), is because of a series of mistakes that turned out all right because both of the participants in an online exchange turned out to be more mature than expected. All right, I wasn't expecting me to be even vaguely mature, but Jane Friedman (there's the first name dropped!) was very mature and polite from the start, and the encounter turned quite pleasant because of her kindness and understanding, leading to some interesting insights into the business of writing. After sharing the background anecdote to these insights, I intend to share them at the tail end of this week's posting, so if you'd like to skip down there and cut to the point of the essay, feel free.

What transpired was this: for some weeks, I had been dealing with various would-be authorial parasites, trying to contact me via the phone, email, and any other method at their disposal. "Helping" authors at each stage of the process of getting a book published is a not-insignificant market, as I've discovered multiple times to my cost - literal cost, I feel I need to add, since getting extricated from the grasping pseudopods of these quasi-professional entities can be quite expensive. Most recently I've been extricating myself from one of the many sub-branches of Anderson Publishing, but generally this list here can be relied upon. More-or-less, since Writer's Weekly themselves are trying to sell products to would-be authors, and so their credibility is also somewhat suspect.

(Sorry: I deal with the concept of credibility all the time as part of my work in academia, as well as in my religious studies, and I've found that, while it's possible to identify credibility and trustworthiness of a source to a pretty good degree of accuracy, eventually you can go deep diving down some very strange rabbit holes indeed as part of the quest for finding out what is real. And some of the rabbits down there are carnivorous!)

Back to my own experiences: as I was starting to get used to the assumption that I would just have to start blocking everybody, out of nowhere came an unsolicited email from someone named Jane Friedman. Me being me, the name didn't click right away, even though she provided her credentials as part of her signature lines at the bottom of the email. But she called me "Steven Johnson," and was asking me about the process of developing ideas in, if I recall correctly, the Python programming language. Assuming that she was likely another of the various potential parasites out there, I informed her that she'd misspelled my name and asked her who she was, probably quite a bit less kindly than I should have. Her response disarmed me, as she was quite polite, mature, and even sympathetic with my plight.

As it turned out, Jane Friedman hadn't misspelled my name at all: she meant to contact this Steven Johnson, the really smart and really famous one. Unfortunately, he only seems to have an active Twitter/X account, his website apparently defunct and his email rather difficult to locate because of that (as I just discovered while I was doing the research for this post). So instead of Steven Berlin Johnson, author, speaker, and overall brilliant guy - seriously, check out this author-produced summary of his most famous book, Where Good Ideas Come From, on YouTube - she got...well...me.

Thank goodness Jane Friedman is such a mature and kindly disposed individual! After we'd cleared up the confusion, she decided to ask me about my own trials in the process of getting published, since that's her specialty and she seemed to be genuinely interested in hearing my answers. Whether she was or not is (ha ha) academic, but in the process, I gained a few insights into the process of writing, the business of writing, and the requirements of writing.

For me, the process of writing itself is like walking through a field of wildflowers in some forgotten and sheltered vale. In this wild place, there are deep pools, dark and cool woods, and gulleys and crevasses leading into places and paths not seen before. But no, that's not quite right: there are always the little signs of those who have gone before, but they're almost always faint, aged, as forgotten in too many instances as the vale of inspiration itself.

Following the process of inspiration and discovery, as well as the sheer hard work that comes from getting the words out onto the page, comes the next stage of writing: editing. Where the initial writing is a vale of wildflowers, the hard work of the writing itself, and of the editing to come - which I tend to meld together into a single continuous and ongoing task in my head - is more akin to a field of thorns. A field of thorns is a fertile place, and it has ample secrets and immense potential, but to uncover and awaken that potential requires hard and sometimes perilous work. Think the thornfield at the climactic battle with Maleficent in Disney's Sleeping Beauty and I think you get the idea.

(She's my favoritest ever villain, by the way. ^.^ Seriously, she's got style, she's got class, and she's over the top in all the best ways!)

All the same, these are both enjoyable activities, each in their own way, though of course the means to enjoy them both is quite different. Exploration and inspiration are a joy in themselves, and most people of my acquaintance seldom go far beyond the most shallow considerations of these lovely places that lie within the soul. Just based on a simple Google search for how many people worldwide have PhDs, a degree of education that requires a significant amount of the productive sort of exploration and inspiration, coupled heavily with the hard work of getting the words out and then getting them just so, only about 1% of people worldwide have one. The next level of education down, the Master's Degree, is only held by about 14% of the world population, adjusting for the differences between the sexes. Of course, these are both the results of a simple Google search, and sure to change regularly, but they serve their purpose in the here and now.

The process of writing itself, however, is a process of self-discovery and, much more importantly, a process of self-change. The author is seeking enlightenment through their process of writing. If you are doing writing right, you will be changed forever, remade into something new. This is a terrifying prospect, as terrifying as the self-annihilation of the caterpillar entering the cocoon. Worse, you never know until the cocoon opens if you're going to be a butterfly, a moth, a wasp, a housefly, or an alien!

Which then leads to the last part of writing, namely the bit where you have to treat it like a business, sell yourself to agents and publishers, deal with publicists if you're going with the self-publishing route, and generally try to make the professional transformation from the world of dreams to the world of being a successful writing professional, where you can actually make a living from your work. For me, this is the transition from the valley of flowers and the field of thorns to the minefield of crass capitalistic cruelty.

Still, even through all of the ongoing irritations I'm enduring, I see it as a learning process, though in this case it's the process of making the internal changes that I've been making during the course of writing The Man from Rock Bottom into external ones, visible and tangible evidences of how I've actually changed as a person living life in the real world.

Whatever, and wherever, the heck that is.

In the end, I concluded that there were three elements of publicist work that you, as an author, have to figure out on your own. Elements that I, as an author, had to learn, and am still learning, as this website's ongoing development demonstrates. These are items that many people will eagerly try to sell you, but if you can't do them on your own, you're probably going to be cheated. Once you've got them together, then you don't need to worry as much, since you've gotten the really hard bits out of the way, and can focus on finding publicists who can help you connect more directly with people, rather than on establishing your base of functionality:

1) Have a finished product. This should go without saying, but there it is. There are loads of really good editors out there who can help you work through making your book into something of professional quality. To find them, I strongly suggest that you go looking at the folks in the English Department at your closest university. Heather Pickert is a name that comes immediately to mind, though, mostly because she was kind enough to review my book on GoodReads.com - and she was so kind about it, too. ^.^

2) Develop a social media presence. Me, I've got a Facebook page where I'm reasonably active, but the students in the classes I teach tell me that's where their grandparents go. Ah well, and so it goes. I've also got a YouTube channel where I put stuff, though I've been a bit busy recently working out this website and haven't updated in a while, though I've got lots of videos that just need some editing work before I put them up. As far as I can tell, and Jane Friedman didn't contradict my assumption here, where exactly you're active on social media, the platform or whatever isn't as important as being active, at having a presence online where you can be accessed and reached. At demonstrating that you're a real person and giving your potential fans a point of potential connection if and when they want it. Most won't, but that's okay: the point is to have the contact points clear and available.

3) Build your own website. This was daunting for me, and the continuing rough edges of this site surely demonstrate that it's hardly a perfect process, but there are plenty of sites for building sites, like WordPress and Wix, to name a few with which I've had some pleasant success, though I'm sure there are better ones out there, if only you can find them. A hard reality, though, is that you need a website of your own, not just a social media presence, before any sort of connections with publicists or other publicity work can be begun. I got that from the head guy at Rize and React Media, a group with whom I'm working on establishing some publicity work now, and it makes sense from a philosophical perspective: the process of building a website is a natural extension of the process of writing, a way of changing yourself, presenting yourself, being yourself in a public sphere. If you can put a website together yourself, then you have demonstrated that you can take control of some of how others will perceive you, and you can recreate yourself as you wish.

Remember this final takeaway, if nothing else: the process of writing, done correctly, is a transformative act. You are re-writing yourself at the same time that you are writing your book, editing yourself even as you edit the work, and changing how others perceive you even as you present yourself to the greater world at large. Done deliberately, with purpose, these can all be acts of empowerment and of growth, in spite of all trials. Because of all trials.