And He Knows Not What It Means

Please check out this lovely review of my first published novel, The Mind Reels, which is available for purchase now at all manner of online retailers and (likely) at your local bookstore. You can also purchase audiobook or ebook versions. The book was a labor of love about an issue of great personal investment and knowledge on my part, representing a point of view that is almost entirely unseen in our cultural media. Please consider picking up a copy and spread the word.

I write the words and, I hope, people will read them.

My own experience tells me in the strongest possible terms that every piece of writing that’s worth anything has to begin as something the writer would want to read themselves, that you satisfy your own curiosities and sensibilities before you start worrying about what anyone else might think. I wrote my first book because, in the heart of my grad school era disillusionment with our education system, I went looking for a book just like that and couldn’t find one; I wrote my recent novel because I was all too aware that no one else would. I am sure that this is the only way to do it. There’s a basic dishonesty in trying to reverse-engineer an audience’s taste, after all. You end up with work that’s pandering, shallow, and self-conscious, the artistic equivalent of laughing at a joke you don’t find funny because you think you’re supposed to. But even beyond dishonesty, I just don’t think it works, or at least it would never work for me. You can’t predict the market or preemptively tailor yourself to what will “resonate,” because what resonates is authentic - someone clearly thinking, feeling, and shaping ideas according to their own compass, which is to say, in defiance and ignorance of that which their audience wants from them. And frankly I think part of the reason that many people are quietly but deeply dissatisfied with the pop culture available to them, in any genre or medium, is because in a digital world artists and creators are too aware of the desires of their fans.

The paradox of art meant to be shared is that the only way to make something that connects is to make something that doesn’t try to connect, not directly; it just is what it is, if you’ll forgive that empty cliche, an