Why blog? Why, especially, about something so grueling, nonsensical, and potentially even humiliating as trying to sell a book you somehow decided was worth 14 years of your life?
Well, when’s the last time you were likened to a bighorn sheep, for starters?
Tremendous thanks for that one, Kay Murphy (see comment on Baby Steps, below), and to everyone who has taken the time here or on my website or my facebook page to send feedback and encouragement and suggestions about this blog and the future of The Book of Bunk. Your humble host-sheep has decided that these Void-Chatter response-posts will be a regular feature from here on out.
About your “American Idol” for writers idea, Kay: it actually has been done. Not on television, but online. Amazon and Penguin are running the 2009 version right now, and calling it the Breakthrough Novel Award. Basically, you post sections of a book. People vote. Every little while, low vote-count books are escorted off the website into the ether. Last novel standing gets a contract.
I’m all for it, in theory. That is, I’m for anything that gets any new writer a chance to have his or her work read, and maybe even published, at the moment.
Of course, this contest isn’t really for the writers any more than “Idol” is for the performers. It’s for Amazon and Penguin. One virtually foolproof way of ensuring that at least one novel they publish next year will have built-in buyers. And it seems likely to breed a certain crassness, a taste for the shill as opposed to an attention to and love of craft amongst writers. On the other hand, if you’re not up to the shilling (“Hey,” notes some clever reader of this post at this moment, “Isn’t this very blog kind of a…”), and you consider yourself above the crassness…well, I hope you and the rest of your private bighorn herd enjoy what you’ve done, because no one else is likely to see it.
Megan, the Stephanies, Craig, Kelly, Eric, Pete, Mom and Dad, David, Courtney, Jen, Jonas, Amanda, Gabe, Gregg, Monique, all of you who’ve taken the time to write me or to blog about this on your own pages or to tweet about something you’ve read here or to warn me against rash acts of publishing derring-do (or to egg me on), you have no idea how welcome your voices are, echoing off the rocky walls of the valley where I appear to have wandered.
Perhaps the most fascinating note I have received so far about this blog comes from a wonderfully articulate, thoughtful Serb who has written me several lovely and provocative notes over the years. This fellow is needlessly shy about his (excellent) English, and therefore reluctant to post publicly here. But in one recent e-mail, he had this to say about one of the not-intros to Bunk that I posted a month or so ago:
Maybe it’s the same all over the globe, but I hope you realize how eastern european this sounds like. During fifties and sixties we had writers in Yugoslavia who specialized in war literature, filmmakers who were sponsored by the state to produce uplifting, socialistic features about ‘common workers’ or ‘talented, but strayed individuals who put themselves in front of the rest of the nation and were somehow punished for that’, we had composers who calculatedly invoked ethnic pathos to their operas and symphonies, in order to ‘lessen the abstract component of the art and get it closer to the common man’. My mother and father lived their whole life in such a regime, and although it’s gone now, i can easily identify with it.
And here I thought I’d finally written a novel so hopelessly committed to its uniquely American solipsism that even Americans might want to read it.
In all seriousness, though, I’m thrilled to find echoes of some strain of Eastern European writing in my own, because certainly, the tragicomic, mesmerizing work of authors such as Tibor Dery, Danilo Kis, Jerzy Kosinski, Bohumil Hrabal, Geza Csath, Stefan Grabinski, and so many others have been a massive influence on me. That region has also provided me with the most fertile ground for literary discoveries on the planet (outside of Canada– go figure). I will be forever grateful to Ivan Sanders, the marvelously enthusiastic and kind professor at Columbia, who introduced me to this phantasmagoric, devastated, love-swept literary wonderland. And told me that I wasn’t the writer I needed to be in order to walk there, yet.
Keep the comments and notes and ideas coming, y’all. Feed the sheep. The chatter isn’t just reassuring. It’s inspiring.