The main reason why books sell

Sunday 5/24/26

Correspondence from yesterday. Ought to be read. And read again. And then again.

***

Just a few odds and ends. I'm fighting it, trying to keep going, trying to use today--start of a new season, unofficially, but still--as a starting line. I have to try and create these starting lines. I have nothing to live for. No hope. It doesn't matter what I make. I rearrange deck chairs, starting line-wise. Then I get another day. Another weekend. Another spurt. Some work gets done. Untouchable work. Which doesn't matter. That's not what anything is about. There's a letter to my uncle below, which I include simply because of what it says about "Love, Your Mouse," which is true.

I wrote an op-ed on Miles Davis for his centennial on Tuesday which won't be published. I pitched an arts piece on it, too. No dice. So there's this co-music editor, right? I've pitched this woman for six years. She never wrote back once. You're just dealing with evil. None of these people care how good you are and the writing is. How much better you are at what you do. They just care about what you are to them. Personally. You're their buddy, you represent this thing that makes them feel good about their lackluster selves, etc.

This time she writes me back. First time ever. Classic publishing behavior. They love this technique. You know why she wrote me back this time? Because they already had a Miles Davis piece. If they didn't and could have used one, she wouldn't have. She sent me the link to it, because she also wanted the click. And it was kind of like petty revenge, too, for her knowing what I am and how good I am. A way to say, "Nanny nanny boo boo."

What was the piece they ran? Wasn't even a real piece. It was a bunch of jazz musicians who themselves have been favorably hooked up and owe their careers to that giving quotes about Davis in empty, stock terms that could have applied to anything. It's not writing. It isn't insight. No ideas. If I point out to her that this was the first time she responded in ten years, she'd react with hate and rage. That's how these people are. These simple, evil, childish people. Wherever you turn here. And this was better treatment than I usually get. 

Also had this for you: it's a BBC radio adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses from 2012. You can play it at the site or download it. 

https://archive.org/details/2_20210725

Stair effort has really been lacking lately. Monument should be open at 10 this morning for the first time this year so I'm looking to get over there and do a better job. 

I'm also committed to finish "You're Probably Just Tired" this weekend. I've worked on it for five hours or so each of the past three days. It's been unpleasant. To get things where I now demand of myself that they be is hard. I'm in the head of the reader. This person who doesn't even exist. But I'm incredibly conscious of what they might be like in this world, with what this world is, if they existed. I'm not like other writers who turn their back and write whatever. For me, the whole point is the person on the other side of the table. Getting through to them. At the same time, my art has to be everything it can be. I'm asking each clause I write to be all of these different things at once. I can do this. But it isn't like what anyone else is doing or how they'd ever think. So few so-called writers give a single thought to anything. It's just vanity for them. Being able to call themselves something and have things said to them by other people doing the same thing. You'll see the whole thing soon, barring any unforeseen setbacks, but this will give you a good idea the level we're talking here.  

Small mercies are like rain it’s hard to be sure is falling. You hold your palm out after seeing some drops in the headlights of a car that’s come to a stop near where you’re standing but you don’t feel anything. It’s as though the tippity-top part of your skin that’s in charge of touch was deep in its process of being replaced by the layer below and almost doesn’t count as you anymore. If the car hadn’t stopped where it did, you’re none the wiser. And it was because of the light that the driver braked and not you anyway.

Tired for wasted years, more tired looking for what’s hard to believe exists and investing in looking for it regardless. Saving up for the babysitter to embark on another date that’s bound to be bad and call for another round of repression. Please proceed to the center of the train. Remove your backpacks and place them at your feet. We can’t move until everyone is inside the yellow lines. I repeat, this train can’t move…

I half expect this girl who is nice and very put together and brings her AP homework and who has raised her rate twice in the last year to say, “That’s capitalism, I learned all about it in econ, and in America capitalism is king because no man is,” but in a reassuring voice like she’d expect me to do the same if our dynamic was reversed and she knows I’m the kind of person who wouldn’t want her to make less than her friends. 

I used to enjoy the snacks. Seemed too good to be true that they were free. Can I really make a frozen pizza and eat these cookies and oh my God you have the double-stuffed chocolate cream ones. It wasn’t hard not being tired then. Felt grown up and like I made a difference while getting to eat things we didn’t have but not so much of them in a single evening that I wasn’t already looking forward to receiving the call again soon as I got home and being credited as an adult for a few hours.

But I feel the energy draining from my body just thinking about sitting in a restaurant across from a man with a soft chin I could live with if he had anything of substance to say and it wasn’t a token hour-long game of twenty questions with someone I know won’t remember my name a week later.

People uninterested in anyone save themselves who aren’t themselves interesting but don’t want to be by themselves and that’s gonna go the way it’s gonna go no matter what it ends up being called.

The men who wouldn’t have any interest in what I say if it came from another guy but because I possess certain parts attempts are made up until a point which isn’t that far off from where they started because you can keep banging U-turns and still reach your destination when it doesn’t matter who’s riding shotgun only that someone is.

You want this to be a competition--or I do--but that's the least of what it is. I read this account today by an author--granted, he's terrible--saying how he got a $125,000 advance--which isn't a lot of money from a real world standpoint--for his book, which sold 763 copies, causing his publisher to drop him (and another to pick him up and give him a two-book deal, which is itself ridiculous). He was talking about what made him so nonviable commercially. He hadn't done anything previously, for instance. That doesn't mean anything, though. I've published, what, 10,000 things? What does that mean? 

What matters is if people like you. And people of a certain type say your name but that's not because of anything related to the work itself, in the actual sentences, down on the actual page. They don't like you because your work is great. There aren't followings oriented around that idea of purely liking/loving the thing as the thing. If you're liked, it's because people think you're like them and they've been led to the water they think they should be drinking out especially with others doing it. (Both within publishing and out in the world.) You're achievable, too, to them.

That's what consumers are paying money for--those feelings that you give them. Which is about them. I don't mean everyone--I mean the majority that makes up for the bulk of sales. Great work tends to have the opposite effect. And they're pack creatures. If everyone is buying a bad romance and gushing about the cover then others want in on that so they can feel like they belong to something. This is at the most superficial level, but people mistake that for something more meaningful. They're usually delusional. Life isn't about reality for them but rather fantasy. What they want to be true rather than what is. He mentioned that he was a white male and that this gets you blackballed, proving, again, he's bad at what he does, because this isn't what the word "blackballed" means. It's not synonymous with "discriminated against," though one can be both.

What he was actually saying is that being a straight white male in publishing makes you niche of a niche of a niche and no one is going near that. Almost always. These people tend to be racists. The real kind. The kind where it's baked into them. They will look at skin color and see that person that skin belongs to as a vessel of and for skin color on which a buck might be made because that skin color is good as in in or trendy. They will use someone for their skin color. That's the only interest they have in that person. Skin color as a fish hook to catch some dumb trout for frying up later. You can't buy the straight white male's book on the basis of their skin color, which with someone else allows you to say to yourself--and anyone in ear shot or who follows your socials--that you're one of the good ones. That's what you paid the $25 for. Not to read the book and what you get out of reading it as what it is. 

I know I can't compare what I write to what this guy does. Or what anyone does. There isn't any artist like me. Let alone any writer. You have all of these dabblers, though, and that includes most of the people in the industry. People who don't think, who can't be honest with themselves. Books are bought for other reasons than the reading of them. They aren't about the experience of reading them, even when people do read them. And because people aren't serious here, and they don't think, it's like no one knows these basic truths. Humans in general can scarcely think. So then it's like no one can know these very true things. Which require some thinking, some consideration of the evidence, some awareness of trends, some Google searches (I mean, come on, it shouldn't be a mystery why Brad Morrow publishes anyone he does in Conjunctions, not that Conjunctions means anything, but no one here looks into anything at all it seems), putting two and two together. 

These are the things that should be being talked about and addressed. But who else is going to do that? And how would it be seen in a world where no one reads and no one wants to? You can't even fix the problem with amazing things worth reading. Even if those people would love them. Because they're shut off to this automatically. Minds are made up. Sealed off from so much as a "I'll take a look." 

When it's about what's actually on the page, to even a small degree--that is, when it's also more about all these other factors--it's about that work on the page being bad. Something that someone else could write. That the person reading it could do. Or at least doesn't suggest to them that it came from someone of greater intellect than themselves. No one ever read Roxane Gay and thought, "Wow, I could never do that." 

That's huge. Not giving someone cause to think that. A person secure in themselves, who admires something great and wants it to be a part of their life? Maybe needs it? Okay. But that's a very small percentage of people right now. You practically need a microscope to see them. You'll see "Mouse" when you see it. There isn't a word in the story that my six-year-old niece Amelia doesn't know and use. It is a children's story. It's also a Colin story, the furthest end of the mental spectrum, in other words, in that I could be eighty-five-years-old and living as a hermit in a cave and I could think about this story with the full power of my mind every day remaining to me of my life. You could read it to your child at bedtime. You could read it at fifty-four after your father dies. You could read it at your lowest when you're barely getting to tomorrow. You could read it with your family in front of the tree on Christmas Eve. You could read it on a day of great joy to feel that joy all the more. You can read it for light in the dark. Read it when you're homesick. You can read it and become a better person. To learn something--a great amount--about how. You can read it for just about everything. To feel safe again. To move on. To live. 

But at the same time, a five-year-old uses all of its words. Speaks in sentences the same length. A person reads it, though, and they know that the person who wrote this doesn't have the intellect that they do. That they're not similar. That they're not like them. They're likely to reject it on those grounds. It feels to them--and this becomes more and more true and prevalent as the world keeps going the way it does--like it's against them, almost. An enemy. When it's really love in its purest form. Love for that person, too. 

If it was bad, hamfisted, nothing special, doable by anyone, then it's no threat, no foul. No nothing, but people don't require something from something to partake of that thing. Because it's neutral. Blank whiteboard. They can project whatever they wish about themselves in comparison on that whiteboard. These "successful" things keep it very whiteboard-y. Whether that's a book, an Oscar-nominated film, a Netflix show everyone is "binging." It's because it's nothing, not because it's this real something. This great something. It isn't because of the thing itself and what it actually is that people are there. Or following, or hyping, or awarding, or "discussing."

Anyway. This wasn't supposed to be so long. I haven't even been able to muster the will to shower in two days, so I'm going to do that before I get some fruits and vegetables at Haymarket and then make my way to the Monument, in which I haven't run stairs since last Thursday. I'll keep try, I tell myself right now, this very minute--which doesn't mean I'll be able to tell myself the same in a couple hours--for no other reason save that I can do what you read in that except above.