I’ve Published a Chapbook. Now What? Developing Expectations (Part 1)

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chapbook, fiction, literature, Marketing, monkey puzzle press, poetry, publishing

It’s published! It’s out! It’s like some fantastic language rollercoaster in the fact that I want to do it over and over again. In the Desert is available in print and as an ebook and can be purchased on Monkey Puzzle Press’s website or on Amazon. Read a bit of it, here.

As an writer, it’s easy to become overly excited, to dream too far between the lines. It’s impossible to forget, however, that there is still an incredible amount of work to be done.

There is the marketing end of things, an end that I have never reached or even come close to reaching. Marketing success is based on a self-satisfying equation of money + effort. In this case, the effort will need to be greater than the money.

To realize success, I need to first define success by establishing expectations:

1. A chapbook will never, ever make money. Ever. It will never become a bestseller. My chapbook will not make money. It will not become a bestseller. 

It’s true. This isn’t so much a book in the grand scheme of things as it is a business card. I will buy many copies of my own text (it’s true) to send to agents, colleagues, and publishers along with chapters of the novel I’m working on and hope that this something real and tangible in the world catches their eye. It’s a text that I have loved and poured over, that I have invested so much of myself and my imagination within. But what it is is a beginning, a very small beginning that serves a very large purpose: taking my language, my vision, and putting it out into the world.

It will not make money. Most books and most writers never do. That cannot be a goal. And I cannot define my success by it. I could write about a dollar, maybe take a bit of the pressure off…But this chapbook? The goal isn’t financial security and independence. It isn’t a bestseller. It won’t be a twitter sensation. What it is is a beginning.

2. Don’t view publication as an accomplishment. This is merely one step towards a greater dream and vision. Enjoy it, celebrate it, but don’t fall into the trap of believing that this elevates your self-worth.

This needs little explanation. Don’t view it as an accomplishment. Don’t celebrate it. Don’t revel in it. It is just a step, a point on a map moving endlessly towards new stories, new audiences, new discoveries. Don’t stop walking. Don’t stop writing. Keep the chaos moving forward.

3. You’re talented and can craft a good story. But so are millions of other people. You aren’t talented. You got lucky. Be grateful.

It’s true. I’m lucky. I’m lucky that this publisher got started. I’m lucky that I wrote this text and that this editor happened to be in just the right mood and in just the right frame of mind. I’m lucky that he read it sometime after midnight after one too many bottles of wine and that he saw something between the lines. It’s hard to get published. It’s not about talent. It’s not about skill. It’s about the luck of the draw, finding that moment when all things align. Be happy. Be satisfied.

4. Your journey is just beginning.

It’s time for the marketing machine to begin. Marketing, not for the sake of making any financial gain, but marketing so that this book becomes something in the world – a strange science that depends entirely upon its readers. A book is something that only happens if it is read and most importantly, remembered.

Regardless of my hopes, dreams and desires, all things depend upon and are constructed for my reader. There is nothing else, no one else that matters within the context of this equation except you. It’s taken many years to realize this very basic truth about the art of writing and the art of publishing  (two very separate realities). Writing is selfish, is ego-centric. Writing depends only upon me and the the breadth of my memory. Publishing depends upon you, revolves around you, centers on you and yours. There is no publication without you, without your presence, your force, your imagination. I write for myself. I publish for you for without you, this all means nothing. 

My greatest expectation: to be read by one person of no relation and to be touched by that reading.

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In the Desert

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Art, chapbook, desert, fiction, literature, moab, monkey puzzle press, poetry, poetry theory, published, Writing

It’s been a frantic month or so caught between the valleys and ridges of the Elk Mountains.

I’ve come to love the chaos of a vertical world. The sky stained with ink, the endless blue fields and shadows. There are glaciers that move in the black, the land shifts into glass and shatters, its jagged edges smoothed and masked in wild flowers mascarading as light.

The snow comes and then, fades.

And then? The desert becons.

Canyonlands

I’ve been to the desert once before. While dating the soon to be husband and soul mate, I was working towards my final year of graduate school. In poetry. A masters. From a school proudly dubbed: the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

The name implies and embodies all that the school is. The image of a James Dean character. White shirt, tight jeans, fast hands, a slow walk, and brilliant blue eyes. Imagine Whiskey wednesdays, nights spent aimlessly wandering the back alleys of a small street in Boulder, mumbling poetic nothings, catching phrases and etching them onto my arms with pens. Imagine the smoking garden, a classroom with no chairs, just a single folding table with one broken leg. Imagine the 48 hour write-a-thon, the sexual tension, the sweat, the incoherent ramblings of 8 poets crammed into a 200 square foot apartment living room who have run out of paper and instead, are carving their words into the walls.

I wrote an essay on quantum physics and tried within it to poet-ize string theory. I drank too much. I ran too far. We drove ourselves for hours, wandered into the dark lit corners of our imaginations, and when those failed us, we scattered into the night, punch drunk and hopeless romantics, searching for a muse in the form of a random stranger caught at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This was my day to day existence. Drunk and scribbling, high on the promise of endless nights bathed in ink and absent murmurs.

My then boyfriend was the exact opposite. Rational and subtle, quiet and yet, determined. He was calculating and powerful in a precise and nearly silent way. He  moved through the air without casting a ripple and yet, an eye turned to catch him, recognized him. It was impossible not too.

He was a man of calculated risk and forecasted possibility. I adored him for being everything that I could not. For thinking of our future while I squandered my present in a ceaseless quest for inspiration and language.

And as a man of calculated risk and numbers, we went on a plane to Arizona to a hotel in the desert. A man there offered us chocolate chip cookies as we walked through the courtyard searching for our room.

We were there for a conference, for stock traders. There, he would learn the secrets of their risk, calculate his presence, realize his numbered potential, and we would be set.

By set, he meant rich, he meant endowed with numbers. These frantic images on a screen that I could barely read, charts in neon green and pink, darting through metered windows and scales. Buy or sell? He asked me. Buy or sell?

I lay by the pool and read Cixous and wrote a chapbook while he and the men played with their numbers. I kept my own numbers, running in the morning to a park in the desert and rolling in the sand.

The chapbook is no longer caught between the pages of a threaded journal but is in the process of becoming just that – a chapbook, that is, something in the world beyond my imaginings. In the Desert will be published at some point this summer under the watchful, big brother lens of Monkey Puzzle Press. *end ceaseless promotional*

But now? How a few years can change things. From a hotel in Arizona and the calculations of risk and numbers, to the vast empty skies of Moab to camp for a week under the stars and against the orange rocks.

There is something frantic, something desperate. There is something powerful in these yet to be memories. I will sit in the desert and write.

Why can’t you just be normal, the husband asks in the heat of not packing but rummaging through various boxes and packs.

I imagine the dust and the sand, the heat of it radiating through the shadow. The water will be glass, a sheer, reflective surface masked in light. I will melt into the rock, absorb the ink of the sky and imagine that I am a writer, that I am lost, that I am satisfied.