Something I May Have in Common with Ho Chi Minh.

Last night as I was falling asleep I was thinking about the Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (as we all do from time to time) and that got me thinking about that golden age of comic books and pulp writing. I used to imagine that I would have been good at that life, constantly writing crappy detective novels and getting paid by the word. I think I would have been good at that sort of thing because I have always found that almost without fail the best writing is produced by actually writing and not - as many writers I know seem to think - by not writing. I’m not necessarily a quantity over quality kind of guy, but I think that good writing is often produced by accident while trying to do something else.

Then it occurred to me that I live in the 21st century and I goddamn COULD be writing that way! Why am I NOT constantly writing pulp novels and just e-publishing them? I could be making TENS OF DOLLARS if I did that!

Well there are two reasons why I have not been doing that and both of them are pretty stupid:

1. All of the professional type publishing people I have ever talked to (which is basically four people) all told me that that sort of independent publishing has not yet shed the stigma of the old vanity presses. One woman told me, “If your band puts out an album on its own or if you make an indie movie and distribute it online, that’s totally cool, but people don’t feel that way about self-publishing.” That being said, it is increasingly clear that no one in the legit publishing industry has any fucking clue what is going on in the legit publishing industry, so why do I ever listen to anyone? Listening to other people has never gotten me anywhere in life.
2. This reason is even dumber but also of practical concern, I am a terrible editor of my own work and I am an even worse line editor. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to put a novel out there into the world with spelling errors and tense shifts? It would be SO EMBARRASSING!

Now, all that being said, I could overcome those things. I want to say that I don’t have the time to do all of that right now (this semester really is kicking my ass), but there never seems to be time for these things, so one just has to DO them.

I probably would make a small concession to the legit publishing people though and e-publish under a pen name. Actually, let’s not think of it as a nom de plume and instead as a nom de guerre, like Leon Trotsky or Ho Chi Minh or Martin Sheen, that way I still have my own name (tarnished as it may be) if and when those fancy New York publishing houses come aknockin’,

It is fun to think about: what to write if no one knows you’re writing it. What would you do if you knew you’d get away with it?

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