Legends, Dead Ones, and the Ones We Need to Kill

This is likely to be a wide-ranging blog post, and it will likely turn into a rant, but bear with me.

It rained heavily this morning, a hard driving rain under dark skies, and while it’s let up a little, from where I sit, I have to wonder about things. Normally, I like this kind of weather, not from some Emo need, though I’m surprised I’ve not been called that. I have been charged with being a Goth—perhaps I am, but then I’m a lot of things.

The most difficult thing you can do to yourself is try to be all things to all people. It is the pitfall for so many people: politicians (whom I take dark-humored delight in seeing them do flips and twists), but also any public figure. You want to “appeal,” but that’s not right.

“I don’t appeal to the masses, and they don’t appeal to me.” — Graham Parker

I met Mr. Parker once, nearly 20 years ago at XM. Nicest man, not at all what he sounds like on record. He was also a huge influence on my songwriting and music.

My point being: I had a discussion with my webmistress, Ella, and we discussed the foray into TikTok…she is going to try to help me navigate that bizarre landscape, that craven, slobbering, self-centered, self-adoring world. But I must be fair—it has changed.

Instagram is picture-oriented, Ella pointed out, but TikTok is more visual, video-oriented. It has also moved off the 15-second spot to about 60. The problem is, I see the same things over and over again. It is hard for me to justify spending a long time to build a 60-second video, blast people with a lot of information and noise, and then hope they remember enough of it to buy your book, your music, whatever.

It is true, the audience is there, as are my fellow authors. I’m seeing a lot of them, and that’s good. You might think, but doesn’t that mean competition? Yes, it does—but I’m not an author to become the next Stephen King, the next James Patterson, or the next Sylvia Plath. The sales don’t happen for 99.9% of us. Our books don’t get made into movies, usually until long after we’re dead. We become dead legends, resurrected because someone found an old book and liked it enough to turn it into a movie. Even better, when dead, no one might hold the copyright anymore, so they don’t have to pay anyone for the rights. They can just buy or secure them.

I could be wrong about a lot of that. I have been proven wrong a lot.

I’ll try some of Ella’s ideas, and she did give me a good template, but the sales of books are never online. They are elsewhere.

My new book, “The Legend of the Black Swan,” dropped on Tuesday, and it’s my 8th. I’m really proud of this one, I like this one, and I can feel sure readers will enjoy it. Not all things to everyone, but my fiction style takes us to a foreign land, a love of that land, and music, plus the questions that all people must answer, the fears they deal with, it’s all at this link.

Now I just hope my copies arrive in time for the first event!

I can secure some if need be, but yes, these things are weird. That said, I’m in Selinsgrove, PA, on Saturday, the 11th, for the Selinsgrove Gelnett Book Festival, an all-day event. I’ll see old friends, make some new ones, and I hope to find new readers for my work and all the others. Selinsgrove is a lovely town, home to a university where an old friend of mine once taught, and I think something will happen there.

I need to keep the hype train running, but it is exhausting, and it feels painful. I joke about shameless plugging all the time, but it’s not always funny. I don’t like whoring myself. Ella says my personality needs to come out.

But which one?

I have talked and written in the past about killing off the old gods, and in these times, I think we need to relearn, but also rethink. Our lives, our health, our allegiances. I worry about these times, and yet, I still feel we will rise above it. Not in a spiritual way, but in a humanistic way that will take time to develop, but we all develop and change, despite the best efforts of some to destroy that.

I am greatly disappointed in the human race. I am daily disappointed in the idea that we can say one thing and do the other, and be completely unaware or unwilling to be aware of what and who we are.

A discussion I had about a subject related to this became the stepping-off point for the other person to give me their view, which had valid points but was not an answer. None of us has the answer. None of us wants an answer, I fear.

How tiring it is to keep forcing ourselves into things when we know it will do no good, and yet we have to. As someone once wrote, “There are no gods, and precious few heroes.” Someone in the Battlefield Band wrote the song. Dick Gaughan did it beautifully. It was about Scotland, but could be about any country.

I’m reading Nathaniel(?) Boggs’ bio of James Baldwin, and while ostensibly about his love life and relationships, it is also a deep dive into his life, his writing, and that feeling of never having a sense of place. He didn’t fit into the Black nature that some Blacks thought he should be. He was accused of trying to be in with the Whites. He was gay, yes, and that triggered too many people, but I think he also said more that he was bisexual, but make of that whatever you want.

We are changing; people are coming out, despite the states’ efforts to erase human beings from the map. They can’t kill all of us. They can try, but they’ll fail.

All empires fall. All emperors die; if they’re lucky, they die in office, but their carcass will be revered by some and ripped to shreds by others. So be it. I have no interest in being anyone or the other.

My point, which I said in an interview just recently: I don’t measure success in sales numbers, awards, whether my books are made into movies, and whatnot. I measure by the fact that I produce them. I finish them, and I have a publisher that thinks enough of me to put them out.

My payoff is looking at my new book, or the mini-shelf of my books, and knowing that I did the work. I worked on those, slaved over them, lived and died with them, talked with the characters, became friends with them, and brought them out to tell a good story, I hope.

I hope you’ll agree, even just a little bit.

Peace, Out.