The Path of the Bookseller

Well, the Book of Voices is done, or at least at a point where I can feel comfortable submitting it around. I did write the eight interludes, which pull things together more effectively, and make points in the 49 stories reinforce one another.

This also entailed a bit of rewriting of the stories themselves, which also allowed for some debugging. Father Richard had pointed out, for example, that while I had Adam discover language upon leaving Eden, Genesis has him naming the animals while still in the Garden. That was a relatively easy fix.

The themes that have developed in the book seem clearer now, though I wasn’t as aware of how they were evolving over the period (almost exactly three years) during which I’d been writing it. In a standing-on-one-foot phrasing, it appears to focus on the magical force of storytelling on history, and on the power of compassion. But others, no doubt, will see things in the book that I didn’t realize were there. (My ultimate ego-dream: to see someone do a dissertation on my work.)

The next move is to start submitting it to agents and publishers. That looks trickier that it had looked earlier. While I had two agents in mind, one has apparently stopped handling fiction, and the other won’t look at unsolicited queries. It looks like the game of connections has slid down one level, so getting the proverbial foot in the door still seems to require already knowing the right people. Of course, it may be that I already know the right people but don’t realize it; while I’m good at hooking other people up with resources, I’m not especially strong at finding them for myself.

(If any of you are interested in seeing the manuscript, let me know, and I’ll send you a link to a PDF file.)

With that done, the next project that has popped to the top of my priority stack is the programming and formatting to create a print version of a friend’s 2009 blog. This is the third year in which I’m doing this, and it would seem to be a straightforward task — except that the blog host changes the storage formats every year, so I have to recode the Perl scripts each time. But I’m complsive about documenting my code, so the recoding gets progressively easier.

After that, I want to look at doing some more music, creating a podcast series of The Book of Voices (for which I’ll be looking for readers/actors), and completing an abstract video project (for which I’ll need some audio processing help).

And in the midst of all that, there’s the ongoing struggle to make ends meet, tied into the accelerating madness at work (where those of us who are dedicated to running a bookstore well are challenged by higher-ups who, while we have to hope that they have the best interests of the company at heart, still appear to be in the early stages of discovering that customers have a distinctly different type of engagement with books than they do with, say, staplers and bananas). And I remain exiled in the isolation of the Cleveland tundra, with its frozen suburban nothingscapes and utter lack of any visible grassroots activity in community and the arts. My sole connection to people seems to be through the store. Other than that, my social life consists of such things as having pretty much the identical conversation with the same waitress each week when the local pub has its Monday $5 Burger ‘n’ Beer (and I cherish that moment each week).

But now to sleep, then to wake and to see how the chulent I’m cooking overnight turns out. I’ve found out, by the way, that the leftovers make excellent burritos.