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!

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.

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 ]

Enjoy!

(For some reason, this still frame looks maddeningly pixel-ly. But the video is somewhat better.)

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.)

One thing to which customers have responded surprisingly well is being told frankly how and why the CD sector has tanked. No, we don’t have the selection that we once did, but *nobody* who deals strictly in new CDs has that selection anymore. (I would love to know of exceptions.)

Everyone thinks that the issue is illegal downloads, but it’s more that the inefficiencies of the system have caught up with the market. Looking at it from any point of view but that of the customer, when you compare shipping a couple of copies of each CD to a thousand stores to shipping a lot of them to a few dozen warehouses (if that many) and fulfilling orders from there, it’s no contest. (And it especially pains me to say that, as a member of the flipping-through-acres-of-vinyl generation.)

And legal downloads are growing, especially for classical music (my focus area) where more and more companies are making avaiable extremely high-quality MP3s and lossless FLAC files.

A surprising number of customers do come back, utilizing us in the role that we must learn if we are to survive: we’re the folks who can find the stuff that they want based on their vague criteria, and can navigate the ordering systems for them.

But, inevitably, the historical moment (corresponding roughly to the 20th Century) in which music was made available to people by having them come to particular buildings to buy physical objects that contained recordings is ending. The only question that remains is how we cope with the change.

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.

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. Lots of things happening, including deciding on things that won’t happen. The biggest thing: I’m staying in Cleveland. This is good.

At the start of May, everything had fallen apart. My job had dwindled down to close to nothing, including two weeks in a row in which I had only six hours of work. I had informed my landlord that I would not be able to pay my rent, and that I would leave by the end of the month. I also told my managers that I would be leaving. My appplication for a position at a store in San Francisco was pending, and it looked like I had two possibilities: either I would get the job and somehow make the move, or I would end up back in my mother’s basement back in New Jersey.

I was completely surprised when, at my annual review, my boss asked whether I would stay if he could somehow create a full-time position for me. I told him that I probably would. Over the course of the next week, he pulled the necessary strings, and was able to offer me the full-time job, with benefits, and a guarantee of the appropriate number of hours of work each week. I accepted immediately.

Compounding the luck, when I got home, my IRS refund was in the mail. I immediately called my landlord, and told him that I would, indeed, pay the rent. He was pleased, and agreed that I could stay, continuing the month-to-month status.

Ironically, I got a call about 90 minutes later from the San Francisco store offering me full time work there. That would have been a great job: classical music specialist at a store that had the latest technology, was actually profitable, had really good management, and was eager for me to try new things. But I had to turn them down, with deep regrets. Even though friends had worked together to assure me a place to stay for the first few months while I got situated, there was just no way that I could make the move.

So I’m staying here. I’ll probably be moving into another apartment sometime during the summer. My current house is in a tricky financial situation, so moving out of it makes sense. I want to stay with the same landlord, since he’s a real mensch and he has a beautiful place coming open soon, in the neighborhood in which I initially wanted to live. I would be a couple of blocks from a thriving neighborhood, including my favorite coffeeshop, a great library, an indie cinema, and the like, and the walk to the bus (the same line that I ride now, which goes directly to work) is half as far. I would be paying the same rent as I do here, though the space is, more appropriately for a single person, about half as large. (I’m still paying only half the rent for the current place, even though my roommate bailed out months ago.)

While all my current stuff will fit there, though, there won’t be room for much more.

I’ve decided (and the decision has been much less difficult than I had thought) to sell off the bulk of my CD collection. It has been sitting in a friend’s basement in Berkeley for almost exactly a year now, and I’ve found that I don’t really miss it.

It consists of several thousand discs, with a lot of avant-garde music of different genres as well as a lot of more popular music. It’s all neatly boxed up, and I systematically created a visual catalog of it as I sorted and boxed it. I may post the photos here.

My dream would be for it to be bought up by some sort of institution and become its audio library, though I doubt that that could happen. I don’t have a price in mind for it.

I’m open to and eager for suggestions as to how to handle this.

I also have a lot of books there, but I do want to bring the books to Cleveland, once I get the new place. Creating effective space for books in cramped quarters seems easier than CDs. It seems counter intuitive, since CDs are smaller, but with the smaller spines, one has to get much closer to CDs to see what’s actually on the shelf. Or at least one with my aging eyes and progressive trifocals does.

I’m continuing work on various projects. I thought I had finished The Book of Voices, but I haven’t. Putting it together, I realized that I needed more continuity. I’m adding more interludes with Elisheva at several points in the book, particularly where the stories took jumps in history. Looking more closely at her, I realized that I had unanswered questions, particularly why her memory had disappeared and was returning, and why she was left alone in the stone room with the angel. Answering these is opening more questions about her order of prophets. And this is leading to at least one more Biblical monologue, from the voice of Sarah (which I hope to post within a week).

The more I’m working on it, the more I realize that, although it isn’t strictly a work of science fiction, it draws very much on the traditions of the genre. Its structure is what John Cowan and I used to refer to as a “cobble.” (I think he made up the term, but I’m not sure.) Independent stories that work on their own are organized in a timeline resembling a novel, with connecting material both within and between the stories. This reaches back to classics such as Heinlein’s Future History series, Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Niven’s Known Space, and Asimov’s Robot stories and Foundation novels (later retconned into a single stream (to which there are couple of subtle references in The Book of Voices)). And even though the technologies in it are related to magic, the workings of angels, the nature of souls, the operations of entities unbounded by time, and the like, I find that I need to track them and to try to keep them as rigorous and consistent (within the parameters of the various characters’ understanding) as I would with any conventional science in traditional science fiction.

So that’s where things are now. No doubt there will be major changes in the future, but for now, I’m just trying to catch up with myself and breathe.

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.

I have told my landlord that I will be leaving at the end of May (not that I have much of a choice, since I can’t pay the May rent). If all goes as planned, I have where to live in Berkeley from the beginning of June through early August, either staying with or housesitting for friends or, for most of it, staying in a small cottage on another friend’s property.

I will be filing the paperwork in the morning to transfer to a store within our chain back in San Francisco. I’m told by people there that I should have no problem getting the transfer. (Of course, I’ve been told that before: while my first attempt to transfer to a store out here from my first store seemed to work out immediately, it fell apart in the ensuing weeks.) I don’t know how many hours per week I’ll be working, but I hope to get more than I’ve been getting here, since that store is on a somewhat sturdier financial footing.

I’ve been talking to a friend in San Francisco, who will be away for the summer, about our finding a place together starting in August.

A lot of issues are undetermined, to say the least. I don’t know how I will be getting to San Francisco, or how I will transport my stuff and keep it somewhere until I have a place for it.

I can easily give away what little furniture I have. I think the only item that I’d miss would be my office chair, and I could probably replace it more economically than I could transport it (though it looks like it costs about twice as much at Ikea as when I first bought it). The rest of my stuff consists mostly of books, media, manuscripts, electronic gear, a small amount of kitchen stuff, and clothes.

I’m looking at various options such as a U-Haul, driveaways, movers, and the like. I’ll be able to send the books, manuscripts, and other media by media mail, which, as I’ve said in the past is an incredible deal. But schlepping the rest will be a challenge.

Thanks to all who have offered help and advice. I’ll keep everyone posted as things progress.