Slicing through the red tape with my rusty red scissors: An update on my novel's release date
Kindle's A.I. is closer to Artificial Idiocy than Intelligence. But my debut novel should still be available digitally in 2023. Physical copies won't be available until mid-Jan 2024 (at the earliest)
The manuscript has been uploaded. Now I just have to put the front cover onto the right part of the above template.
Then I have to figure out how to verticalize the spine PDF, but only the spine:
Then I just need to add the back cover, which I hope leaves ample room for the barcode and ISBN. If not, I will either erase some of the names below the photo, or just make the font much smaller, like 10 or even 9.
I mean, the entire novel is in 11-point Garamond, for fuck’s sake because Garamond is both more beautiful and more economical than Times New Roman (a font I am almost as sick of as I was Helvetica during American Apparel’s heyday). When the book was in Times New Roman, the manuscript was well over 900 pages.
Now, with Garamond, it’s exactly 798 pages, page 798 being one of those hideous but necessary ABOUT THE AUTHOR things. I made my bio as terse as possible. (I LOATHE author photos so I’m using a cool sketch my good friend Claudia did in about 45 seconds. She’s got talent like woah.)
Another problem is the sheer idiocy of Kindle’s anti-plagiarism A.I. program.
All three novellas, or “books,” in the novel have their own epigraph. Jacob’s epilogue has two. But Kindle’s A.I. thinks I am trying to pass this work off as my own, despite the fact that each quote is clearly attributed to its author.
Here’s Book I’s front plate:
Book II:
Book III:
Jacob’s Epilogue (the first epigraph is totally fake, and taken from a Construction Manual that doesn’t exist). But the second epigraph, amazingly, does exist. No wonder the world is mired in such a mixture of muck and shit and blood. “Do not hang out with losers” is something that the guy in the room who is most pointedly a loser would say. Am I wrong?
All epigraphs are credited to their original authors. I talked to a human at Kindle/Amazon a few days ago and was able to get the Book I, II and III drawing/quote’s resolved.
However, the Kindle/Amazon manuscript checker was still, sigh, “detecting plagiarism.”
I think this is mainly due to the fact that Book I is presented in the format of 3 weeks worth of LiveJournal posts during the 3 weeks in summer 2010 that the novel takes place (all three books cover the same time frame.)
Miles’ LiveJournal posts always begin with him stating his mood, what music he is currently listening to, and a “quote of the day” that he tries to use to sum up the evens of his past ten hours, which includes searching for a comic book (Captain Beyond #1…worth thousands of dollars to Jacob and worth thousands of sentimental sentiments to Miles).
Here is Miles’ first LiveJournal post:
Here is his third or fourth:
Problem is, the posts that Miles makes between June 22 and August 15 2010 are rife with quotes from sources as obvious as a Smashing Pumpkins song and as obscure as a quote from a book by a seventeenth century Christian Mystic monk.
But, like I said, all quotes are attributed (even the fictional ones).
In Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut masterpiece The Secret History, the gang’s laziest student (Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran) in their six-person Greek class is constantly referring to a made-up (but real in the world of the novel) text from the nineteenth century called Men of Thought and Deed. But even Bunny’s incoherent quotes from that hilariously titled tome give credit. I’ve done the same.
I have a SO many fake books in my book, stating with Captain Beyond, a fictive comic book superhero and the catalyst for the plot of Book I. There is an existential thriller called Larger Massachusetts, a 1982 academic paper titled “Measurable Differences in Phototropic Bioavailability and Solar Luminosity” by Earth scientist Werner Hoffschmidt; a sprawling treatise by Thomas Bernard (1712-1765), the eighteenth century Benedictine monk, titled And If Our Light Should Leave Us: An Inquest into the Properties and Nature of Sunshine; and an obscure speculative non-fiction textbook from 1979 called Havoc & Helios by futurist author Anne D. Parker (M.A. Princeton, PhD Harvard) in which the many potential fates of our sun are described in fanatical detail.
These last three are part of an investigation Miles delves into in 2006 when he starts getting nostalgic for his youth and believes the world didn’t just feel different when he was young. It looked different. It was different.
Here’s the relevant passage:
For years now I have suspected that the world is somehow growing dimmer, the days getting shorter, the brightness slipping from my life. I’m convinced that the sun looked different when I was a child, not just brighter but imbued with a greater allotment of presence…a deeper potency. A few years ago I initiated a project on the subject. I never finished it, of course, I never even properly began, but I accumulated enough info to prove that I’m far from the only human being who has ever felt this way.
Miles is convinced that the celestial light of his childhood looked different not because his nostalgia distorts his remembrance, but because there has been an actual change in the quality of sunlight itself. Solar flares. Reversed polarity. Something scientific.
Some days the sunlight is so weak it’s as if the sun itself is wearing sunglasses.
Sure thing, Miles. Anyway, now I am getting into the plot of the novel and I don’t want to go there with this post. I just wanted to explain why the novel may not be out in 2023 as promised. Not a huge deal but I already have a second novel 75% completed and I don’t want to release that book - which is an unabashed attempt to get published by a publisher that does suspense novels and crime thrillers - the same year as my oh-so-long-laboured-over debut.
So even if I get the Kindle version online on Dec 31 2023, I get to consider my debut a 2023 release.
The original back cover looked way too cluttered with the plot summary and derisive blurbs, so I’ve moved them both to the front, with the plot summary and blurbs on page 3, and the dedications and acknowledgements on page 4, like this:
I still have time to edit my current dedication page, so anyone who feels they should be on it should contact me at dannylindsay85@gmail.com and I’ll getcha on here.
So once I have sliced through the red tape of Kindle and Amazon, my novel will be available for order on both sites, as well as directly through me, as I plan on ordering 40-50 author copies to sell to friends and sell while busking. I doubt my sales will make me the Canadian James Patterson, but I’d be more than happy to be the Canadian Denis Johnson with lesser sales. Johnson is a writer I admire more and more and more since his passing in May 2017.
There is a line in his final collection of short stories, four stories, kinda connected, titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, where Johnson knew he had liver cancer and was dying, and wrote:
I won’t be dead by the time I finish writing this sentence. But I might be dead by the time you finish reading it.
That is writing, ladies and gentlemen and those who identify otherwise. Shot through with longing, with the will to live, with yearning. And involving his readers too, by including them in his own imminent death. Every writer has a first posthumous reader. And every writer will have a final reader too.
I once checked a book out from the Brampton library to see that the previus borrower, a Sean T. Barrington, had taken the book out on November 9 1928 and returned it five days later. If I hadn’t come along, would Barrington have been this author’s last reader? Or at least his last Canadian reader? Maybe. Weird to think about.
Why can’t the shittier writers croak or get hit by vans? James Patterson continues to publish a hardcover a month, albeit with some help. But Patterson has perfected the art of the one-man fiction assembly line. He’s not a bad writer. He’s a terrible one. And yet he’s outsold Stephen King by 25 million copies.
I’ll admit, once you hit the 400 million copies sold mark, you should stop counting. It just bugs me that Patteson’s sold 425 million. Te only thing that cheers me up about it is the fact that Dean Koonts has outsold Patterson, also by 25 million. Koontz has sold 450 million books in his life. I am shocked as you are, but Koontz has a certain market cornered. (He also fequently quotes from a fictive book of his own creation, called The Book of Counted Sorrows. It’s made up of poetry and whatever quote he chooses usually matches the action or story of the novel.)
And there’s no petty competition, Although King has dismissed most of Patterson’s work as “dopey thrillers,” he is a huge Koontz fan. Once asked by a journalist if he’d been influenced by Tolstoy, King grinned his All-American grin and replied “I haven’t read Tolstoy. I have, however, read everything Dead Koontz has written.”
Hah. I love it. I love Koontz too, even as I grow tired of the hyper-intelligent Labrodor dogs that show up in almost all of Koontz novels. Having said that, here’s my top 5 Koontz:
Mr Murder
The Voice of the Night
Icebound
Velocity
Hideaway
I’ve read at least ten more, and I have to say, Dark Rivers of the Heart and The Good Guy are particularly weak efforts. The five Johnson’s I read we’re all flawless.
And, alas, Johnson had so much more to give us. And though I’ve only read a quintent of his ouvere: His masterful debut Angels, his popular breakthrough Jesus’ Son, his campus novel The Name of the World, his hallucinatory trip through the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s, Train Dreams, and the above-mentioned Largesse, I feel a kinship with Johnson I never felt with Kerouac. I’ve always, always been drawn to stories and novels about people on the fringes of society.
That’s what life was. A series of things that didn’t work out. - James Sallis (Drive and many others)
Willy Vlautin’s debut The Motel Life was rich with poor characters, but his subsequent work got weaker. He admits that “the bottle has me pretty good,” so this is as good an explanation for his decline as any other.
Johnson was a published poet at a very young age (The Incognito Lounge), nineteen or twenty, and swiftly got to work “researching,” which is what we alcoholic writers call drinking to excess and doing all available drugs.
Johnson spent his twenties either drunk on booze or high on heroin. It wasn’t until he dried out in his early 30s that he produced the “minor masterpeice” (Philip Roth’s words, not mine) that is Angels. An kept on rolling from there. I can’t wait to read more of his stuff.
But I also can’t wait for my own novel to come out. So today I’m on the TTC when I whip out my mangled copy of The Secret History when the guy beside me proceeds to do the exact same. That is serious synchronicity. I wrote him a quick note giving him the url of this Substack and my Instagram and a little paragraph saying I had a book coming out. I hope maybe he reads it. Of course, the ball is in his court. He can do whatever he wants. Byt if he likes Tartt, and we briely rhapsodized about her, I think he will like All the Quiet Hours. Which is coming soon. How soon? I can’t say. It depends on how well these rusty shears cut red tape.
I still busk almost daily and I think bringing along 4 or 5 copies might be a good strategy. I don’t expect to sell 4 or 5 a day. I’ll be lucky to sell one copy per week. But I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in my neighbourhood who would be willing to buy it. I’m not sure how to get the price structure fixed, because I want the physical book sold for $19.99 CAN, which would be $14.70 USD, €13.61 Euros, $22.26 AUD (Australian dollars), ¥2,119 Yen.
With a little luck, All the Quiet Hours will be available digitally and for physical copy pre-orders by the end of 2023.
eek! I'm very excited for you! I can't wait to read your book too! Let me know if you want a fully rendered author portrait for book #2 😉