Normally, I do not take up space explaining my books or answering questions about them. They are meant to speak for themselves, or not at all. If there are jests or allusions to other authors in my work, these are spoilt if I need to amplify them.
And, frankly, my books are patterned after the kind of book I like to read: lighthearted escapist fare, full of action and fury, with relatively little pondering of deep issues with which anyone would take issue.
Of course, the weasel word there is ‘relatively.’ Try as I might to keep it light, a certain amount of ponderous philosophic profundity tends, entirely without my consent, to creep into my work from some hidden hemisphere of my brain. Here I can only throw myself on the blind hope that my beloved readers will be kind enough to tolerate the flaw.
However tolerant the readers are, it is possible that this unintentional profundity obscures the plain meaning of my books, and the inattentive reader might take away a meaning the opposite of my intent.
The fault in such cases is of course mine for being unclear. While it would be more dignified and noble, no doubt, merely to endure the opprobrium my unclarity has summoned up, I confess that a certain base commercial impulse, namely, the desire to sell books, requires that I make a token protest in those few cases where the inattentiveness assumes cyclopean proportions.
A reader, whose name for courtesy’s sake I withhold, put forward this opinion about my humble work THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA:
“Some of the early bits with the variant humans were interesting, but they turned out to be kind of stereotypical when they got more screen time. Also, apparently they were all innately evil because they didn’t adhere to monogamous Christian 1950s-small-town-America values.”
I think this is a misreading of the text.
Indeed, the very opposite is the meaning of the work, had only I been able to make the meaning clear enough.
I would like to think that this one reader is alone in his interpretation, and to assure any other readers that, if you read with eyes unclouded by hate, you will see what the point of the book actually is.
Unseemly as it is for an author to have to explain his point, I myself am sometimes curious as to what an author had in mind, and should there be a solitary reader out there curious about my work, I am happy to embarrass myself before all the rest of the incurious world to satisfy that solitary fellow.
So instead of describing where or how the misreading went wrong, let me explain something about my personal writing process, and give you a peek behind the curtain to show you how a professional writer makes his auctorial decisions. It is, of course, like watching sausage being made, so the delicate-souled reader is advised to keep his fond illusions intact, and read something else.
For the solitary reader who remains, I can tell you that the short answer is that mostly you steal your ideas.
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