When I got home from work today I found 25 copies of Darkwood on my doorstep. I felt at once, What will I ever do with so many? And, I want more! This wanting more is an interesting part of publishing your first book. More what, exactly, is the question, and for me the answer seems to be news. Emails, letters, telegraphs, even the scroll of a carrier pigeon, just send me some news. Seeing all those books stacked neatly in their box I had an impulse to eat them like a bunch of Fig Newtons. (In The Faerie Queene, the monster Errour vomits books in her death throes. She ought not to have eaten those!) So then I think, you don’t want news, you want newspaper. You want filler! You want to fill the doubt abyss! Which means I don’t want more at all, but less. A lot less of doubt and uncertainty, a small reduction in dread.
But this leads me to two more thoughts: the first relates to an interview I read with a couple who had been married for ten or fifteen years and were raising three sons together. One of the things they kept saying was that you can’t admit doubt into your relationship or you damage it. Shortly after I read that interview I heard something about doubt on the radio. Just a snippet, I don’t know who was talking or what about, but here’s what he said: Doubt is the forge of faith. I think I’m with anonymous radio man and not the happy couple. How do you learn to trust anything except by doubting your way through it and coming up wrong?
And finally, I found out last night that the comic book character Daredevil is blind. Old news for many people, I’m sure, but it made a big impression on me. Daredevil is also known as The Man Without Fear. His other senses are exceptionally acute, ok, but how can you be without fear if you’re blind? When you don’t know what’s ahead of you? But Daredevil isn’t fearless in spite of being blind; he’s fearless because he’s blind. Well, right on. We’re all blind when it comes to the future. I have no idea what will happen with my book. But I’d rather plunge ahead and let whatever is coming come than cringe my way through this business. I’d rather treat that box of books like a box full of week old kittens (and no, not eat them like Clem on Buffy), but take them out carefully and look them over head to tail and wonder what sorts of lives they’ll have.
Now here’s the Spenser, lest we end on too kittenish a note:
Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw
A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,
Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,
Which stunck so vildly, that if forst him slacke
His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:
Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,
With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,
And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:
Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has.
(Canto I, Stanza 20)
