Fruition, etc.

About five years ago in a cabin in Maine, the thought popped into my head, “I’m gonna write a book,” and I sat down and started writing one. Now I see the end of it in my sights. Maybe it’s distant, I don’t know how distant, but I see it. All my scribbling and staring into space and digging through old stuff for five years is coming to fruition. I have in my hands a literary journal with a chapter from my book in it. The way it makes me feel, to have editors find my writing compelling and, through the process of editing excerpts for publication, to see that they get what I’m doing, that they feel some sympathy with it—it is, to say the least gratifying. It feels like a big step, a turning point.

Why have I so many times in my life just decided to do something I didn’t know how to do but had some notion that by doing it I would learn how? First there’s a story I want to tell and I guess it suggests or draws me to the medium that I think will work best to tell it. The feeling that I am not only telling a story but inventing the wheel is what really feels like making art to me, making something true and honest. And I’ve always just kind of wanted to do everything.

The other side of throwing myself into a new medium is of course at some point having to learn how an unfamiliar field, an industry, works. I’ve put aside thoughts of agents and publishers and readers and the business while I’m writing. I knew eventually I’d have to deal with all that, but I know from experience that those thoughts are needy, they have sharp elbows and an inflated sense of their own importance, attention makes them grow. They take over. They eat the work and grow bigger to fill the space the work left. But they know you’ll need them eventually.

Which is to say: If you know a literary agent or a publisher or editor you think might be intrigued by a book about three homosexual men, whose lives span the 20th century in America, looking for love, give me a shout.