A New Project

When someone finds out I've written a book, they're usually complimentary. "Wow!" they'll say, "That's so cool!"

When they find out I've written ten, they want to know how. And sometimes... why.

As I tell them about Amazon's self-publishing platform and alternatives like IngramSpark and Smashwords, and the decade-long journey it took me to churn out titles in multiple formats and genres, I can see the ideas they have about how hard it is to "break into" the literary world fall away. Something in their synapses starts to crumble as they realize, if someone can write and publish ten books, there is no breaking in anymore.

Now, to be fair, there are significant challenges to visibility in an increasingly saturated market, but the obstacles of process and access have effectively been eliminated. People with something to say don't need an Ivy League degree or a television station to have a platform. In 2024, if you have a computer and internet connection, you can not only learn how to publish a book or host a show - once you've learned how, you can actually do it. As Thomas Friedman put it in his book Thank You for Being Late, "Anyone with a smartphone can be the author of their own narrative to a global audience."

So why write a book? Or host a podcast, or start a YouTube Channel? Why create any kind of art? Why, immortality, of course. If you don't have (or can't have or don't trust yourself to be able to safely raise) children, it's the easiest way to leave something of yourself behind. Because, let's face it, no one gets out of here alive. The only thing worse than death? Being forgotten.

I think that artists digitize ourselves in an attempt to outsmart the analog nature of death, to replicate our unique experience ad infinitum. We paint or photograph a landscape or person to document how we saw them. We sing a song to capture an emotion - take a snapshot of grief or joy or anger, and trap it, like a firefly in a bottle. It is a skill I repeat a dozen times in a single day, as if I'm transcribing my life into quantum diaries - the taste of a strawberry tart perfected, a note hastily jotted to remember a character's quirk - each piece a slice of myself, frozen in amber. There are a hundred thousand Aprils in the Post-its and apron stains that surround me, each one an attempt to say I was here.

When a friend of mine who speaks all over the world, inspiring and empowering women to be their own health advocates, questioned why she would even want to write a book (as if it was just another piece of marketing material!), I explained that a book is so much more than a press release. It's a piece of you that someone can take with them. A book is a way of enabling your audience to listen to your voice at their leisure, in their time of need, long after they've experienced you live at a conference, I said. When an artist expresses themselves in a work, the work is like a piece of them that's been extracted and made tangible, in another place, to live on separately and (ideally?) indefinitely.

Ozymandian considerations aside, an artist creates by pulling something out of themselves and housing it elsewhere for others to experience. This is what writers, painters, sculptors and even engineers do. They effect a kind of permanence through replicating a piece of themselves - a curated piece, but still - a piece that lives outside of them.

My next technological project - a Custom GPT (because, who isn't creating one these days?), will be an attempt to house what I've learned in something even more exciting than a book or painting or recipe: a chatbot.

Stay tuned!