Having signed a contract with Dzanc Publishing a few months ago, things have now moved along. By this June three ebook versions of The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea and This Mobius Strip of Ifs will be published as ebooks, whatever that really is. I am still unclear of many features of this process but I am going along with it. However, I Truly Lament — Working Through the Holocaust, a collection of short fiction, will be published in paperback by Dzanc and that book will not come out until 2015, or so, which is disheartening for I may well as be dead by that time. So, as I look back over 2012, given a painful illness and a sober diagnosis for another malady, it has been a good year in terms of my finally being accepted for publication by a reputable and well-known press. At age 72. Give me a break!
I have spent several days of this past week collecting reviews of all three books, interviews, one podcast and filling out extensive responses to questions for the marketing aspect of this venture. As I went through all the reviews, it felt good to feel the resonances so many of my books brought about in reviewers. It is always pleasurable, is it not? to hear good things about one’s creative efforts. The publisher urged me to be expansive and not stingy with all the biographical and literary data I could supply, the more the better. I gladly acquiesced. And when it was all done, it felt good to email it back to Dzanc. There was enough for the media marketeers to choke on.
While all this was going on somewhere in my mind another and almost omnipresent thought made itself known. Before I say ta ta to this world, I would like to have written five books. Why five? I don’t know why. Just five. So, in fantasy, a reader could reach up to his bookshelf and grab all five with both hands and bring down my collected works. I have a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of essays and another book of short fiction to come. And so I am thinking and thinking about what will be next. Believing in the idea that the next book is essentially written in the unconscious,I am waiting to be notified about it by just feeling its pressure. And for some hours last night as I lay restless and sleepless, I think it crept into my mind. In fact, the title came to me — Opaque. I really like it because it is both specific and general and not a little mysterious as well as symbolic.
And it also came to me that the last word would be opaque as well. So there is the new work, I have only to fill in the pages between. Oh, Yeah!
In fact I generally try to get the opening sentence in mind which I enjoy to do; I have many opening sentences for books I will never write. In The i Tetralogy, after much careful revision, it became: “I am rectum.” And then I try to get the last line of the book as well. It was: “Amen!” And so the writing process, without being rigid, and with constant revision, I try to go from the first sentence to the last with a minimum of wavering — it is as if I shoot an arrow into the air and follow its trajectory until it hits its desired target. It works for me. None of my books or short stories were ever plotted. I just evolve with the characters. I resist a straight line. And since I go my own way and I am not driven by market pressures, I write for myself. It is delicious to be free of the marketplace.
I know the content of this new effort and what I will try to do is torturous, painful and personally heartbreaking for me. It will be a fiction based upon fact, and most if not all the facts are known to me in crude form, for it is about a family member. The additional approach has been chosen by my unconscious as well; it will be in first person so that immediacy will be obtained. It will be in your face. The task is daunting and I may ultimately do away with the story , mostly out of fear, out of what it might cost me in terms of feelings, like a deer having its antlers captured in briar.
In a few days when my unconscious calls out now I will sit down and compose what comes. What I have now is a swarm of gnats beating themselves against the screen door of my mind. I’ll swoop my hand into this buzzing mentation and see if I shag, to mix my metaphoras, some flies.
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