Postscript: I'm Not Quitting!

Louis Armstrong’s trumpet at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Dear Readers and Friends:

This is a brief postscript to my somewhat melancholy post of two days ago, A Fond Farewell (For Now) from E’s Boutique! I want to update and correct something. I suggested there that I may have quit writing (“If I ever write another novel…”). This is not true.

To be clear, I do want to find a way to reach more readers. I don’t want to write novels forever if the audience proves resilient in its smallness (we haven’t given up on Zodiac Pets sales yet, but I’m a realist about the book market these days for indie titles). I know that many people say you should do art for yourself, or for its own sake. But communication is key for me. It's like quantum theory (warning: to achieve a metaphor, I’ll badly abuse quantum theory in the next sentence). You have this wave function, and it only collapses into reality once observed. Writing a book alone in a room and then finding no (or few) readers for it is like building a wave function that never collapses. Existence is thwarted.

But while I certainly don’t want to build a non-collapsing wave function, I just enjoy writing too much to quit. Do pickleball addicts struggle to justify playing more pickleball? I think not. They mount their e-bikes and ride them from the ER straight back to the pickleball court.

I am regrouping, reconsidering how to come at this, both artistically and from the perspective of finding that audience. Do I write short stories and get them published by others? That might reach more readers and make me more sellable to major publishers for the next novel. I have one or two ideas. The leading candidate, however, is a major tonal and moral challenge and might work better as a comic movie (“Managing Hitler”: a pacifist-inventor goes back in time to try to thwart the Holocaust but instead of killing Hitler he aims to manage Hitler’s art career to help him achieve renown that diverts him from politics—only to find that Hitler is very hard to work with and his art irretrievably lifeless and unsellable! This leads the protagonist to reconsider his values…and his approach to “managing” Hitler).

Or do I write a wacky comic sci-fi novel (the hard-luck hamlet of Pennacook, Massachusetts, in the year 3000)? A grown-up-novel series disguised as a kids’-book series—like the Moomins, one of my favorites? A dirty book? Songs?

Some combination of the above? I don’t know. For now—aside from finishing my promotional push for Zodiac Pets—I’d like to enjoy the freedom of that uncertainty so when I sit back down at the keyboard it will be with a new looseness and replenished spirits. After a brief vacation.

Yours,

Eric