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DoorsOctober 28, 2007 As soon as I started moving in the general direction of self-publishing The Mud of the Place, in part because I couldn't think of anywhere else to send a proposal, more publisher alternatives appeared out of nowhere. Not a lot of alternatives, mind you, and they're all long shots, but still, they didn't reveal themselves till I began to focus on the Next Step. This has happened before. First I gave up on the search for an agent -- I started researching and making a list of possible publishers -- then a few more agent prospects turned up. (None of them panned out, needless to say; the point is that I thought the cupboard was bare, but it wasn't, quite.) It seems I can't finish up one stage till I know what the next stage is. I'm closing in on a big brick wall that stretches up to the sky and to the horizon in both directions. I'm walking more and more slowly because when I get to the wall I'll be fresh out of options, shit out of luck, and I'll have to give up. Then the wall turns out to be not quite so solid: there are chinks I can see through, cracks that might be widened enough for a body to slip through, maybe even an opening that's been used before. Once I can see what's on the far side of the wall, I start imagining ways to get through it. Once I start imagining ways to get through it, my pace picks up. Looking back, I can see that this sort of thing happens a lot, only I'm not aware of it till later. Once upon a time I couldn't imagine having a dog. I've always loved dogs, but having my own dog was a serious commitment. What if something went wrong that I couldn't handle? Didn't you have to be a veterinarian, or at least a vet tech, and maybe an experienced dog trainer in order to have a dog? (Once upon a slightly earlier time, I thought you had to be a qualified mechanic in order to own a car. This is one reason I didn't buy my first motor vehicle till I was 37.) The wall was long, tall, and solid. Then the chinks and cracks started appearing: I hung out with other people's dogs, I even looked after other people's dogs. Among these dogs were the Malamute-Samoyed-Border Collie offspring of Bear and Nanu. Nanu got pregnant again. There must have been a moment at which I decided I'm going to get a dog, but it flashed by so fast that I don't remember it. Before that moment having a dog was a remote possibility. After, it was how am I going to pull this off? I can't help noticing that this is sort of part of what Mud of the Place is about. The opening paragraph, after all, goes like this:
If that sounds a tad tongue-in-cheeky, it's meant to. These amateur sages, the ones who go around saying stuff like "When one door closes, another one opens" or "God never gives us more than we can handle," piss me off. It's not that the platitudes don't contain a fair amount of truth (OK, you can take "God" out of there and insert "The universe"), it's that they leave out the stories. The universe, wrote Muriel Rukeyser, is made of stories, not atoms. Distill the stories down to a couple of platitudes and you've lost the life-force. The lesson here, though, is "be careful what you argue with, because it will change you," because The Mud of the Place is (among other things) a bunch of interwoven stories about how doors open, or don't open, and how sometimes they slam shut but other times you just look around and notice that Hey, that door isn't open any more. Sometimes it turns out that they've been open all along: usually your friends notice this long before you do. Not to get existential or anything, but I think this is what No Exit is about. The door may be open, but you don't see that it's open till you've walked toward it long enough to imagine walking through it. Even the doors that open because you walk toward them don't really open because you're walking toward them, or not just because you're walking toward them. My front door won't open for me even when I'm carrying five grocery bags, three six-packs, or two canvas bags full of laundry. So Mud is about how doors open, but the how isn't some clever mechanism that stops when the power goes out; how mostly involves other people acting consciously or half-consciously, intentionally or coincidentally. So I'm walking in the general direction of this self-publishing thing, even though I'd really, really, really prefer to have a publisher. A publisher would save me money, and energy, and time, but the biggest reason I want a publisher is that it would prove that someone else on the planet thinks publishing Mud of the Place is worth the effort. As long as I'm the only one, the possibility exists that I'm massively self-deluded. But I've passed Should I self-publish? and am well into How am I going to pull this off? territory. What I've learned from the truck and the dog and the horse -- hell, what I learned from writing the damn novel -- is that the journey will teach me what I need to know, and that pretty soon I won't remember why the prospect ever seemed so daunting.
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