Evermore Anniversary Date

One year ago today I self-published Evermore, my first novel, and became a published author for the first time. The book had a different cover back then. I began this novel (my very first book) in early January 2002 and finished it on March 30, 2002. Yep, it only took me three months to write my first book.

Then, for the next two years, I peddled it to 45 of the Great and Powerful Publishing Wizards of America, most of them located in Big Apple City, and to 47 of the Literary Agent Gnomes of America who serve them. But, being an unknown author and an independent author to boot, the big bad Wizards and their pet Gnomes were just chewing me up and spitting me out without even tasting me.

It took me two years to finally realize that Americans hate indie authors more than anybody else in the whole wide world because indie authors don't guest star on talk shows or sign books on C-Span and you can't find their mass market paperbacks at Walmart. So, if it's not on TV, no one in America knows anything about it and they don't want to know anything about it. In America, if it's not on TV, it's not real.

While I hawked my first science fiction thriller, I wrote two more, undeterred by American shortsightedness. By May 2003 I'd completed The Evermore Trilogy and was unsuccessfully hawking the entire trilogy to traditional publishing houses for the next year or so.

Would I do it all over again? You gotta be kiddin'. I know when to stop beating a dead horse. Besides, I'd rather be vivisected by extraterrestrials than subject myself to the galling snobbery of my fellow Americans, half of which are "upscale" snobs and half of which are "rube couch potatoes" who get all their information and entertainment from TV.

So, why didn't I try to get published outside the USA? I did. But after mailing two or three queries to Canadian and British publishers who then threw out or else stole my material along with the Self Addresses Stamped Envelope (SASE) and who used for their own purposes the International Reply Coupon (an international stamp called an IRC that I had to purchase and include in the query) I decided that's it's better to be snubbed by your own countrymen than to be robbed by foreigners.

Bricks and Mortar

People have asked me where I get the ideas for my novels and I tell them that my material comes from basically two places. My imagination, for one thing, which is more than just active. It's seemingly boundless, a fictional treasure trove for which I am eternally grateful. The other source is a lot less mysterious and it has a big price tag attached to it. And that would be my own observations of life as I live it.

I've always lived a marginal existence, even when I appeared to be knee-deep in the muck and mire of typical human struggles for the same things everyone else was fighting for. Except that I was always standing outside looking in as I continued to work the inside like everyone else, doing it all but never really fitting in. Watching, making mental notes, dissecting, categorizing all the human and inhuman activity while I participated as best I could at the same time, wearing the performer hat and the audience hat and the critic hat and finding that none of them really fit very well.

Then I picked up the hat of the novelist at age fifty and liked the way it looked and felt. And now, what I have seen and suspected all along, I pass along to my readers.