And so it begins...

My first book, The Pleasure of Memory, is the first volume in an epic fantasy trilogy, The Blood Caeyl Memories. And by epic, I mean it took an epically long time to write. Years. Decades. Countless revisions. A nearly obsessive ritual of throw-in-trash, dig-from-trash, rinse and repeat. My second book, Henry's Re-entry, is by contrast a modern pulp fiction novel about a man fleeing his demons, and the assortment of bizarre characters he meets along the road to finding himself. It took me a week to write. At least, to write the heart of the novel. Admittedly, there were some revisions, but it was nothing at all like the life-plus-fifty process the first was. What was the difference between the two processes, you might ask? At first pass, I might be inclined to say practice. I might be inclined to say skill. I might be inclined to say inspiration. I might even go so far as to say blossoming talent. But I would be lying through my teeth. In truth, the difference was self-imposed confidence. With the second, I forced myself to do what I most dreaded, to let people read my work. The irony of my love for writing was that I was loathe to let anyone read it. Not that I was afraid of critical reviews. I wasn't. I was loathe to let anyone read it for the same reason I won't tell anyone about the worst thing I've ever done as a human: I don't know those people out there from Adam, and it just feels too damned personal. Fortunately for me, I have a few friends. Not a lot, but a few. But the few I have are larger than life, and they are dauntless in their courage. A couple of them eventually persuaded me to let them read it. They persuaded me that digging a hole just for the sake of digging a hole simply leaves you standing in a really deep hole. Without a purpose, a hole is just a place where the dirt is missing. They convinced me that having people read your works completes the cycle. Without a reader, you're forever writing. Without a reader, a book is just a hole. Yes, there is absolutely a world of self-satisfaction in the process. I don't want to minimize that. But until it's read, it's still just a hole, a work in progress. The reading of the book completes the cycle. And so, here I am. Published. Exposed. At risk for deep and public humiliation. Not famous, but also no longer invisible. I've taken the leap, and there's no turning back, and I'm more afraid than I've ever been in my life. But at least I'm no longer standing in a hole. Instead, I'm standing in an excavation, standing in the plot upon which I will eventually build my own personal library. And for better or worse, whether commercially successful or just personally contented, it's a whole lot more satisfying that to just be digging. And so, I say to all you authors out there, all of you scribes hiding in your dark rooms, hunched over your worn keyboards with your face alit in the backlight of that monitor, I say to you: Come out into the light! Brave the terrifying world of authorship and anonymous readers. Publish your work! Or at least let someone you know read it. You will never regret it.