Or whatever it is I need to tell myself to get me through this reality: rain, robots, books, and publishing
(I’m currently prioritising publishing to Substack, so my site is getting these posts a little late.)
It seems we’re in for a proper Cape Town winter this season. I hope so. Newbies to the Mother City—and by newbies, I mean anyone who only arrived here post 2014 and anyone born after the 2000s—don’t seem to know that it’s called the Cape of Storms for a reason. It goes grey for a day and rains for an hour and suddenly there’s a collective upwelling of panic that it might rain more in winter or relief that the dams are miraculously and suddenly full.
No my friends.
Winters used to look like days of grey skies and rain, coming down in sheets, sometimes as hail, interrupted by a day or two of crisp air and sparkling sunshine. And then more rain. Rain and wind and storm surges, rockfalls and flooding and a wild, thunderous ocean—and then ice in the air as the snow covered the distant mountains. Preparing the cherries, I like to think.
Last year, the Cape was damp sometimes, but toothless. The year before was good. The year before that not so much. At least it’s not 2017 though, right? Tom and I got married in the drought. The rain never came that year; our union blessed nothing but ourselves.
I didn’t think I would spend so much of my adulthood wondering each year whether the rain will fail. I think sometimes how primitive it is that we still stand around the little holes we’ve dug into the ground and look up at the sky and hope some water will fall out of it and into the holes.
You’d think we’d be smarter about our primal resource by now.
But we’re just teenagers. Trusting the mother to provide while scorning her.
I don’t like humans as a species.
I’ve just finished reading Wuthering Heights, which I always called ‘withering heights’ and frankly I think I was very intuitive because, man, what a fucking bummer.
I’m not one for gritty ‘real-world-problem’ fiction as it is. I get bored, I get frustrated. You are lame and horrible and damaged and I don’t like hanging out with you, is mostly what I think of such stories and the author who writes them.
Go. To. The.Ra.Py.
It’s like those marriage movies everyone loves so much where couples just fight. Yuck.
But Wuthering Heights was extremely well-written (I do love that I can offer my opinion on a classic as if it matters at all), and I found Heathcliff and Cathy less insufferable than Eyre and Rochester (they are surname characters to me; I say Rodion, everyone else says Raskolnikov. Have you no soul in your body man?!)
Anyway.
The copy I read was physically a mess. I was reading a very bad paperback, a compendium-type thing, and I’d torn the Wuthering Heights bit from the Jane Eyre and the Agnes Grey bits (has anyone actually managed to read Agnes Grey through to the end?), but despite hating the story itself quite a lot, I will buy a better copy and do a close reading. Because the storytelling itself is quite incredible. The whole business revolves around two—or four, really—characters, and you never hear from them directly, not once. Everything is told through the observations of two outsiders. Brilliant.
Also I will understand what Joseph is saying.
I’m finally onto some David Mitchell.
I’ve had an idea bustling around my head for a while and I reckon Cloud Atlas would be a good place to start for a technique I think he’s used that I can use and I want to see how he’s done it. But then I went into Kalk Bay Books and Audrey suggested I start with Ghostwritten and I really trust her recommendations, and so I’ve started it and I’m loving it. Not so for the original owner.
It’s a second-hand copy and I know the original owner gave up on it because not only is it in pristine, non spine-cracked condition, they also dog-ear their books and I’ve just passed their last dog-ear.
It occurs to me that, as a reader, I might be a reader only of authors informed by pre-2010s culture. Everything after feels too self-aware. Too trendy. Too author-before-story. Too voicy. Just tell me the fucking story please. I don’t know if that makes sense. I didn’t study literature and it shows and I’m sure there’s a much smarter way of saying this.
Last week, a friend of mine who works in HR told me that there is currently a serious discussion about automatons versus cyborgs and how the latter was about bringing the human—or at least keeping the human—in the workplace. And I thought, holy shit, we are so utterly fucked. How is this the conversation we’re having? We don’t need to be having this conversation.
How are we so eager to write ourselves out of our own story? Everyone bustling to be the best little futurist, everyone trying hard to out-imagine the next person on how utterly we can shaft ourselves.
Sometimes people are so desperate to be ahead of the curve that they don’t stop to think: are we even on the right road?
And then finally.
(And let me just warn you: I’m not ending on a high here, friends. I’m in A Mood. This is something that should be a journal entry, but I’m all about Getting Real sometimes so why not. I blame my Scorpio sun, Sag moon. What can I say.)
I am so desperately close to calling it a day with this whole public I Am a Author of Books malarkey. I can’t begin to express how utterly devoid of joy and hope and confidence I am when it comes to the publishing part of writing stories.
I am so completely and totally overwhelmed by the authory self-promotion that litters my Instagram timeline, and when this intersects with the utter VOID and SILENCE into which my books disappear*, I cannot bring myself to market them or try to ‘promote’ myself.
BUILD A COMMUNITY. BE VISIBLE. MAKE CONTENT. CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT. MAKE CUTE LITTLE REELS! HAVE EVENTS! BUILD A BRAND.
Jesus.
Last week, I posted an extract of The Witch of Benbar’s Cross and actually lost subscribers.
I didn’t think one could experience actual negative growth … or whatever the Black Hole version of growth is … when it came to publishing books, but it seems this is an experience that I am having.
I do not like it.
My astrologer tells me that I am in ‘my becoming’ and that my shining Venus years are due any minute now (about 1,576,800 of them). But I think the only thing I will have to ‘become’ is lot more conscientious about how I publish next time and I think that might be to not publish at all, or to publish a few copies and just keep it in the family, you know?
Not try to be a ‘thing’; not try to compete for the reader’s attention or the lifestyle TBR lists … not try to get reviews, not try to drum up some interest or some energy around whatever I produce.
Just write for me, my friends and family and be done with it. I know this is the only thing that matters so why do I keep expecting more?
Because fuck me, this void of nothingness after launching a book sucks arse.
And not it a good way.
Ha ha.
That joke never fails to amuse me.
There, see? Tried for some levity. Hope you appreciate it.
Anyway. It’s been real.
Real kak.
Hope you’re having better time of your ‘passion project that needs other people to be fully completed’ than I am.
(Also I feel way better now, thanks.)
Yours in Do Not Publish** Books If You Are Not The Right Demographic,
Tanya
*Thanks to my friends and the two strangers who left nice reviews and star ratings on Goodreads. Much appreciated.
** This originally said ‘write’. This is a mistake. Being able to write stories is a miracle. Do it whenever and however you can. I meant PUBLISH. Fuck that shit.
Photo by Anandu Vinod on Unsplash
TANYA MEESON 