The Fiction Garage (5): Busy, Busy, Busy...!

[The title which appeared at the bottom of this engraving when it was first published (uncredited) in the July 18, 1874, issue of the London Illustrated News was, “The Flying Man’s Parachute.” The accompanying story recounted the fatal misadventure of one Vincent de Groof, who fell to his death from a height of several hundred feet when his contraption failed to, well, fly.]

I’ve been a baaaaad Substacker for a couple-three weeks — especially since I encourage? offer? subscriptions to Running After My Hat. (For what it’s worth, though, I’ve even slacked on my Substack reading.) My only excuse: with the Webster, Unabridged collection of stories all but wrapped up, I’ve turned my daily attention to a companion volume, to be released concurrently with the Webster book. This one contains a dozen stories, almost entirely unconnected with one another: different plots, different main characters, different genres, voices, and tones…

As you’ve probably guessed, the title of this collection is Left-Handed Inventions.

First, yes, I myself am left-handed. But the adjective isn’t meant to suggest handedness per se; rather, it connotes the, uh, the off-centeredness of it all. Not that I fancy myself a trend-setter, an artiste, a breaker of bourgeois fictional conventions or anything. But regarded as a whole, I think the stories in the anthology are odd, more than they are normal.

I don’t know what to make of the oddness. In light of it, too, maybe I shouldn’t confess that I’ve enjoyed re-reading them all — enjoyed the experience a lot, in fact. And while I’ve said many times, including recently here, that I can’t tell a story for sh!t, I think maybe the 18 stories in Webster, Unabridged and Left-Handed Inventions maaaaaybe might suggest otherwise, even to people with no particular vested interest in my success as a writer.

On the other hand…

I’m not a different person as a result of working on these books. I still feel weird even talking about myself as a “writer.” I feel even weirder that someone out there — some stranger, but maybe not: some person who knows me really well — will think, y’know, “Oooooh. Putting on airs, is he? He’s getting a bit ahead of himself, isn’t he?”

So to say that I’m going to “market” these books because I know how good they are — yeah, not that. Not That At All.

Here’s my general marketing plan, haha.

1. Finish with the editing, formatting, all that baloney, and put the finished products up on Amazon. (This is a complicated decision, because they’ll be available exclusively on Amazon — and there, only as eBooks, for a few months.)

2. Complete the necessary steps to make the books available from Amazon as printed books. I’ve never done this before; I’m told that it’s no big deal — sort of a “click a series of buttons in a very specific sequence” kinda thing. But who knows.

3. Investigate the options for making the eBooks available in other forms, from other booksellers, particularly for readers who lack Amazon access (by choice or circumstances, they amount to the same thing). So far, this seems to be a matter of “just” my paying for the privilege: getting the book properly registered and identified in various official ways, and formatting the eBooks for non-Kindle devices.

4. Having the physical books printed for sale by someone other than Amazon looks right now to be kind of A Big Deal (including $$$-wise). I’ve got a lot more to learn about this before dipping a toe (let alone diving) into it.

5. At each step of the way, I’ll let family and friends know how things stand at the moment. Whenever and however possible, they’ll be available to this core group at as low a cost as Amazon will allow. (I think I’ll be able to do this on a “Free for the next three days!” basis, and thereafter bouncing back to the stated purchase price.)

6. I have no plans for follow-up marketing — not even “marketing,” in quotes. None. Zero. Not saying that I won’t in fact do some; just not intending, let alone planning, anything.

(It really just boils down to: I’m going to make them available, as widely as I can on a very limited budget, but I expect I’ll pretty much ignore what happens to them thereafter.)

Some things I’ve been reading

On another front, I’m taking great pleasure in some books recently dispatched to my “Done Reading” list. Some of these I may write more about later, but for now: thumbs up on these titles:

• The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer: feminist, post-apocalyptic fiction from 1960s Germany.

• The Slow Horses series, by Mick Herron: espionage fiction with a twist — what if Britain’s MI5 counter-intelligence force had established a separate division in which to dump unproductive or mistake-prone failures of its recruiting process? Still making my way through the whole lot of these titles: I’ve been spacing them out so as not to gulp them down. Dragging out the enjoyment, yes? (Aside: I have not see the TV series based on the books. But I’m looking forward to it!)

• Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out, by Shannon Reed: it’s pretty much all there in the title, except without the author’s winning humor. (E.g., in a short chapter called “CALMED-DOWN CLASSICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE FOR THE ANXIETY-RIDDEN”: The Good-Enough Gatsby; To Mildly Startle a Mockingbird; and The Grapes of Poor, but Ultimately Fixable, Life Choices.)

A game I’ve been playing…

I’m not a hardcore gamer. I’m especially not into twitchy first-person shooters, melee-combat-style games, and so on. In the past, I enjoyed absorbing but essentially inactive games like the SimCity series. No, my preference has always been for “puzzle adventures” — figure-out-the-mystery sorts of things. (An old point-and-click detective game series referred to as the Tex Murphy games comes to mind.) And then there are the vast epic fantasy games requiring the suspension of disbelief in wizards, elves, and the like, especially ones in which you get to sort of create a “you” to scour a large countryside in search of adventure, righting wrongs, and so on.

(My introduction to that genre was all the way back in the 1990s, on America OnLine of all venues — something called Neverwinter Nights, which evolved quite a bit beyond the AOL boundaries in succeeding decades. I still return to it from time to time.)

Currently, I’m playing something on my iPad called Divinity: Original Sin 2. I’d never played DOS (as it’s called) in its #1 version, so came to this brand-new; I’d just recently been gifted an iPad Pro, and never having used an i-anything, I poked about online to see if there were any really good¹ games available for it. (In short: duh.) DOS2 is pretty much what I was hoping for. Here’s a screen capture of “me” and the members of my current adventuring party:

All indications about playing time in the game are that it will require me, especially at my beginner’s level, to invest hundreds of hours in it to bring to a conclusion. And whatever path my guy takes, to whatever, will be only one from among probably dozens — even hundreds — of others.

Hope you’ve all been finding things to enjoy about 2024!

1. By my standards, such as they are.