Creating, Publishing, and Promoting Literary Fiction Calls for Juggling Three Hats
My debut novel, Egos Eclipsed, shines a search beacon into the later 2020s. To succeed would require equal parts tunnel vision, intuition, and self-discovery. What I thought it was about morphed as it grew, which caused problems and opportunities.
The energy high of writing creatively ebbed with time. I am no longer overcome with the urge to blurt out, “Look at me! I made this.” Instead, I suggest, “Look at this story and see if it helps you untangle your relationship with the world as it hosts the emergence of endless, unprecedented “inflection points.”
What would Dad think?
As I wrote Egos Eclipsed, I didn’t think about my father any more or less than usual. He died over five years before I started thinking about it. None of the characters have any obvious resemblance to him. But, with the book published, I wondered what he would have made of the MAGA debacle and my attempts to satirize it. I don’t remember my mother or father ever revealing how they had voted. A couple of times, Mom said, “Our votes probably canceled each other out.” Did she know how he had voted? Dad would have certainly hated Trump’s racial bigotry and unscrupulous business practices. However, he might have figured that Trump would know how to manage the domestic economy and keep us out of unnecessary foreign wars.
Dad was a lifelong Republican, a World War II vet, and a real estate broker. As a young man, he repeatedly put his life on the line for democracy from the inside of bomb-laden B-29s. His generation upheld their end of the bargain — at personal cost. He earned the right to keep his thoughts private.
I was born nine weeks before a B-29 flown out of Tinian dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. Strictly speaking, I fall into the Silent Generation. Still, my guilt by association gets worse and worse. That the Boomers let the Greatest Generation down is now a cliche. Did American society rot overnight? Was it rotten all along? Or, does society provide more individuals than ever opportunities to be themselves? Answers may vary.
Alternative political parties
While I know little about politics, I have a fair idea of what life was like in Seattle, Washington, when Dwight Eisenhower was our 34th President. Polarization was not a thing. Contemporary political polarization might not abate until one side destroys the other. Alternatives intervening from the middle seem more like a prayer than a prediction. But, collaborative forces could finally prevail. A revitalized two-or-three-party system could honor the Constitution. These future parties would be better at listening to people in general. They would be more transparent and quicker to deal with internal corruption. They would explain how they raise money and what they do with it. They won’t allow big tech to run roughshod over everybody’s privacy rights with hardly a peep. As a minimum, they will banish big money from politics. Since the Supreme Court is also part of the problem, future legislation should provide additional guardrails.
The tricky part will be limiting hyper-big businesses without stifling innovation and focusing regulations on abuses so that companies are improved rather than destroyed. We might always need two strong political parties. But that doesn’t mean we need the kind we have now. They are good at collecting donations. They lack intellectual honesty and coherent, effective policies.
Saving democracy
Some people enjoy incessantly debating who contributed the most to our polarization. Such a path offers no opportunities for reconciliation. Getting beyond polarization will require much of all parties. The biggest question is whether it will be sufficient for the Grand Old Party to self-destruct, or will the Democrats have to blow up their equally problematic coalition as well?
Will supporters of democracy unite and defeat the autocrats? It happens in movies. In the real world, democracy requires prerequisites. It is an open question whether or not we citizens still have what it takes to fulfill the minimum conditions. This is too important to be left to the activists or lobbyists. Everybody with a stake in the game needs to ante up.
I can juggle four hats. I am prepared to dig deeper. I am building my brand as authentically as I know how. It is continually stress-tested. I still want to become all I can be.
