Selling Books or Selling Out?
Most people who don’t write books think the most important part of the process is the actually writing of the book. Fools! The truth is that anyone can write a book if they just commit. It may not be a good book, sure, but, the actual accomplishment is within the reach of almost everyone. The really important part of writing a book that is getting people to read it and, sadly, the truth is that that part of the process is almost tangentially related to the writing itself. It’s all about the selling and in this age where branding is everything, the selling is al about not shrinking that fractional segment of a increasingly shrinking percentage of the population actually capable of and desiring to read:
“the future of this country is all about patriotic, unity-inducing language. Post-Racial. Trans–Jim Crow. Epi-Traumatic. Alt-Reparational. Omni-Restitutional. Jingoistic Body-Positive. Sociocultural-Transcendental. Indigenous-Ripostic. Treaty of Fort Laramie–Perpendicular. Meta-Exculpatory. Pan-Political. Uber-Intermutual. MLK-Adjacent. Demi-Arcadian Bucolic. That is the vernacular of the inclusive, hyphenated, beau-American destiny we’re manifesting here! You and me! Book by book we’re making it happen!”
Blackness: The Color
The color of blackness is made prevalent throughout the narrative by way of imagery. The Kid nicknamed Soot is initially introduced with poetic metaphorical imagery describing the blackness of his skin. Multiple examples abound, including an unlikely utilization that makes a connection between a peacock and kinesthetic appreciation of jazz:
“I watch as the onyx peacock walks back and forth beside the pond. Its inky plumage scintillates in the afternoon sun, refracting the light through the lens of darkness and shooting out something more beautiful than I’ve ever seen before. It looks the way jazz might if it had a form that you could see that wasn’t that Miles Davis.”
Blackness: The Social Condition
Black is more than something that may or may not be a color, of course. It is a term that is all-encompassing in its description of a part of society and what it means to belong to that part of society. And the imagery expresses how blackness in that sense is so much more than the absence of white people:
“No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.”
Books Ain’t What They Used to Be
There was a time when writing a book really meant just one thing: printing the words onto sheets of paper collected between two hard covers. And then along came paperbacks. And the world of writing changed a pretty good deal, but remained essentially the same for a long time. And then, suddenly, writing a book suddenly meant almost everything but printing the words on pages collected two hard covers:
“Maybe you’ve heard of me and maybe you haven’t, but you’ve probably heard of my book. It seems to be selling pretty well…It’s in brick & mortar stores. It’s online. It’s been Kindled and Kobo’d, iPadded and Audible’d. It’s been optioned so that it can be movie’d—Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Donald Glover are both said to be interested. We’re even in talks to have it comic book’d. My publisher is happy. My editor is happy. The company I pay my student loans to is happy. My agent and publicist is . . . well . . . she’s involved, and I think that’s as close to happy as publicists get.”
