Odysseus and the Sirens

As the New Year’s release date approaches for the second novel in the Newcomer Series (Alien Talk), I’ve been furiously re-reading it, which, as any author will tell you, means re-writing. It is not possible to read one’s own work without editing. I even ended up with two thousand more words, so now I need a new paperback cover to accommodate the increased page thickness.

I also began documenting my ongoing self-publishing experience. Now that my first psi-fi novel, Reluctant Android, has been out for a couple of months and garnered a few reviews, and has even sold a few copies, I feel I could say something about how the whole experience went. And it was an experience.

What I will do with this self-publishing How-to manuscript when it’s done, I don’t know. Self-publish it, I guess. Sometimes I write because it helps me sort things out. What was this self- publishing experience and why did I do it?  There is a certain lure to writing nonfiction and it’s different from the thrill of the creative impulse that dominates writing fiction. Nonfiction feels orderly and straightforward and offers its own pleasures.

As if that weren’t enough, I’ve also been writing a philosophical essay on The Structure of Nothingness. This may end up being a short book, perhaps 40K words, to complement my other philosophical nonfiction (Scientific Introspection bit.ly/scientific-introspection; The Three-In-One Mind bit.ly/3-in-1-mind; and The Purpose of the Body bit.ly/Purpose-Body). Why am I writing about nothing? I don’t know, exactly. It just feels like a story that should be told.

I swore off nonfiction years ago, in part because fiction takes up 110% of the available time, and also because I struggled mightily to break the lifelong habits of academic writing and thinking. Creative writing is a completely different beast. Now that I’m comfortable in my fictional shoes, I’m not afraid to revisit the other side of my brain from time to time, and the sirens draw me over there.

I know there’s a half-finished novel sitting on my disk calling out my name. If I could just get past the nonfiction sirens, I could answer that call.