The Path of the Bookseller

I just realized that, while I had posted about this to my site’s main page and to thebookofvoices.com, I hadn’t blogged it. So here it goes (in somewhat more detail than the brief notices at the other places).

The Book of Voices will be published this coming November by Apocryphile Press. I was very pleased with the press’s publication of Shekhinah: the Presence and The Rounds, and approached Apocryphile again when The Book of Voices was complete.

This means that I have a lot of work to do between now and then. I’m working toward a multifaceted release, with a lot of use of web media. This includes

• a complete revamping of thebookofvoices.com (possibly using the Drupal software) with “commentary track” pages and conversation threads for each story
• an audiobook podcast of many of the stories in the book
• an afterword to be included in the book, as well as a possible book group readers’ guide
• collaborating on the cover design and book trailer video.

It’s a daunting process, especially since I’m pretty much working in a vacuum here in Ohio, with most of my collaborators and advisers hundreds or thousands of miles away. The trickiest aspect right now seems to be figuring out in which order to do things.

What I want most, even more than whatever tiny financial gain there might be from the project, is for people to read the book. Only a handful of people have read the whole thing so far, in various stages of completion. I’ve made a PDF file of the most recent draft available (email me if you want to see it), but at this point (until effective eReaders hit, probably within the next year), few people want to read a 400 page book on a screen.

I would love to see the book go viral in the best, classic sense: I dream of people, having read it, recommending it to other people, in their circles of friends, book groups, congregations, and similar karasses and even granfalloons. The current traditional book industry being what it is (looking on its better days like a festering sinkhole), odds of getting it into major stores are slim at best. So it’s going to need a sort of underground indie approach. (But doesn’t everything nowadays…)

I want to communicate that this book is more than just a bunch of stories (though most of the stories can be read on their own that way). On the one hand, it’s a hopefully-coherent collection, with plot threads running throughout the book. I’m influenced in this by the great science fiction future histories, such as Asimov’s Robot and Foundation saga, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow, as well as by collections such as the Spoon River Anthology.

On the other, there are emotional and moral issues that keep recurring through the book (some of which even surprised me when I read it end to end for the first time). Characters continually wrestle with questions of compassion, forgiveness, and understanding, as well as the role of music and listening in our lives, and the difficult relationship between God (as imagined in the book) and humankind.

Since most of the people who read the pieces as they were initially written were quite familiar with the Biblical texts and stories on which they were based, I’ve focused in later drafts on making the book more accessible to those who didn’t know the texts. (And I was surprised at how many people don’t know the stories that I had been taking for granted as at the core of our culture.) Curiously, opinions among the few early readers on how certain aspects of the book work seem to follow closely the divide between those who do and don’t already know the stories, even in areas where I didn’t think they would be a factor. I’ll be eager to see how that conversation continues.

So… I’m eager for any comments, suggestions, advice, connections, and the like that folks might offer. I’m more excited about this project than I have been about anything I’ve done in the past couple of decades (!), so let’s see what we can get to happen!

Things have been both insanely busy and quiet here in frigid Cleveland.

I’ve moved into a beautiful, relatively tiny new apartment, a few blocks from the Cedar-Lee Theater and from Phoenix Coffee on Lee. It’s a one bedroom space on the third floor of… um… what would be called a duplex if there weren’t a third floor, but I’ve never heard one called a triplex. It’s big enough for one person — except that I still have a basement crammed with CDs and books in California and a garage full of books in New Jersey.

I’m still at the bookstore, and now a supervisor there. I’d avoided getting promoted for as long as I could, but our staff had gotten cut back so far that the current supervisors couldn’t take lunch breaks, since we always need to have at least one supervisor or manager on the floor.

So I took the position. I’m learning to fit in. It’s interesting to see how much of what I encounter boils down to moral quandaries, balancing what’s best for the customers against what’s best for the company, and deciding what to do when a bookseller and a customer have very different views of what just happened in a transaction.

The pay is still terrible, but I’ve managed to trim down to a fairly frugal lifestyle. Part of it hinges around what might seem to be an extravagance: I’ve gotten an iPhone.

While maintaining a iPhone might seem expensive, it’s balanced by other savings. I have chosen to have neither a landline phone nor a Net connection, other than the iPhone, at home. I’ve also curtailed my hanging out in WiFi cafés (a habit that was proving both expensive and caloric). My previous phone had died just as my AT&T contract was up for renewal, so when I spotted a refurbished 8GB iPhone 3G at att.com, the die was cast. I’ll probably post more about the phone later; suffice it to say that using it is giving me repeated jolts of “Holy frak –I’m in THE FUTURE!”

On the creative front: I’ve promised myself that I’m going to finish writing The Book of Voices by the end of the year. I had thought that it was finished last spring, then decided that it needed bridging passages, telling more of Elisheva’s story, at key points along the way. Then I decided that it didn’t need them. Then I decided that I couldn’t decide. Then I realized that the worst case would be to leave the bridging sections unfinished, so I’ve decided to finish them. Then I’ll get into the messy business of trying to find a agent, publisher, and all that, unless something better comes along.

I’ve decided to publish 19th Nervous Breakdown (aka The Book of the Blog) myself. In doing so, though, I’m wondering if the subtitle could be better. Right now, it is “Adventures on the Path of the Bookseller.” I’ve realized, though, that the overwhelming majority of the pieces in the book deal with selling music, rather than books. I’ve thought of expanding the subtitle to “Adventures on the Path of the Book and Music Seller,” but have been told that it is both cumbersome and “lacking in zip.”

So I’m opening the question to the Group Mind; What might a better subtitle be?

And now off to sleep, in preparation for another day of work. (Ah, December retail… as much fun as a barrel of tiny rabid pandas. Only colder.)

[Sent from my iPhone ]

Image via Wikipedia

From a Fortune article on happiness and success at work:

Yup. I first grokked this watching people respond to the 9/11 attacks. People will do amazing things if they think that what they’re doing matters. If they feel that they’re out of the loop, given unclear or implausible goals, or going to find their efforts negated by the next decree from above… not so much.

Workers will bust our butts if we can tell — not just from metrics but from interaction and experience — that grateful customers are happier because of what we do, or if we are recognized and rewarded by management for our efforts. (And the reward needs to be more upbeat than “Congratulations! We’re not firing you today!”)

I have and have had managers who will, in passing, note things that we have done well, and thank us for doing so. When done sincerely, that is strikingly effective in getting us to keep working hard and well.

Anyone interested in encouraging flawless execution of projects needs to take this into account.

(Thanks to Judy Rosen on Facebook for the original link.)

Well, I thought the book was complete. But in going through it again, strengthening some threads of plot, etc, I discovered some bits that had to be present, for dramatic and structural reasons.

The first of these is a new entry for Sarah.

This one may seem a bit more enigmatic than most, since it mostly sets things up to work out further on in the book. But I hope it works in at least some ways on its own.

The next will probably be from the period of the wandering in the desert, sometime between the giving of the Torah and the death of Miriam. But I don’t quite know what the story is yet or who the viewpoint character will be. I hope to post it in the next couple of weeks.

And the story of Elisheva is being expanded and spread out into nine segments distributed through the book. Writing those actually triggered the writing of the other new segments: I had to figure out why she was left by herself with everyone else gone. This suggested that the school in which she lived was ending… which led to the question of why it was ending, and thus why, how, and when it began… which led to the question of how events there corresponded to the outside world… and so on. I may not end up overtly answering all these questions in this book, but I had to figure them out for myself to stay consistent. (As I’ve said, though this is religious fantasy, I’m approaching it as if it were rigorous science fiction.)

And this means that enough ideas are piling up for another book. But since I get annoyed when books are stretched into series for little apparent reason, I’ll only write it if the need to do so becomes urgent enough, I still have to finish this one first, and go through the painful slog toward getting it published. Whee.

I’ve finished writing the opening and closing segments of The Book of Voices.

Each is from the point of view of a non-Biblical character, Elisheva. I hope that they tie together threads from the stories between them. The opening is quite short. The closing is, admittedly, very long (about 6500 words).

I will, no doubt, be incorporating edits and rewrites as I prepare the book for eventual publication, however that may happen. (Does anyone have connections to an appropriate agent or publisher?) I already have heavily marked up a hardcopy of most of the book. But the website will stand as the first-draft versions, at least for now.

So go and read! I welcome any comments.