The Major 2024 Book Energies

I’m quite proud of the six books I assembled this year; I feel I’ve psychically moved forward with these projects and other unpublished work. But I’m also somewhat dazed to find myself at a stopping point. It feels strange, as if I might even … relax! And I wonder: what’s the next step after this?

I’ve already posted about the major projects this year, so there’s no need to go into further detail about them. But here’s an overview.

The 2024 Work

February: Man Against the Horses! Four Theater of the Absurd Novelettes published on lulu.com as paperback, and as eBook on Smashwords
March: Supreme Commander Laurie published on Amazon as paperback and eBook, and as eBook on Books2Read
April: The Soul Institute 2024 updated and republished on Amazon as paperback and eBook, as eBook on Smashwords, and as paperback on lulu.com
June: The University of Mars published on Amazon as paperback and eBook, as eBook on Books2Read, and as paperback on lulu.com
July: Zarreich Draft 2 set up on lulu.com as a private access paperback, i.e., not for sale, to have a copy either as archival text or as a proofing tool. I’d essentially been thinking of Draft 2 as a restored print of an old black-and-white film (the fascinating but flawed 1981 Draft 1) and would have left it there. But holding the mass-market-size paperback stimulated further work on this novel and its eventual publication.
September: The University of Mars Draft 1 PDF Project. In the light of rebooting this work in May and June, I wanted to revisit the original jumbled and eventually abandoned 1980-81 version, so I sheet-fed the old typescript with its alternate versions through my scanner. This was simple to execute and took maybe an hour. But Draft 1 is going nowhere except as a PDF to peruse at some point.
November: Sortmind Draft One set up on lulu.com as a private access paperback. This work was about four times longer than The University of Mars, but I quickly scanned it and then OCR’d it through Google Docs; clean-up edits to the original text took much longer, but they were fun in their own crossword-puzzle way. Sortmind Draft One was a wonderful project, never intended to be published or conflict with the final Sortmind. As an object it seems perfect; no title on the cover, no blurb on the back, and rather hefty. My big Russian novel.
December: Zarreich published on Amazon as paperback and eBook; as paperback on lulu.com; and as eBook on Books2Read

A Long and Forceful Era of Looking Backward

Looking backward seems to have come to a halt with Zarreich. I think I’m up to date now. There are no further novels to karmically resurrect from the past: student novels Nova Scotia and The Fifty-First State of Consciousness are out of the question; 1985’s Parts I & II was used in part for 2022’s Asylum and Mirage; any other rough drafts and autobiographical experiments are already digitized and certainly don’t need to be sent into the world.

I worked through all the past writing to integrate and understand it. Investigating 1981 writings this year brought out raw energies and returned me to the unresolved issues of the 1981 rough draft Zarreich. By the way, as I look at either the trade or mass market Zarreich, I’m struck by how well it reads; even as I published it I’d been slightly worried that the book might just be past tripping after all. But now I’m certain it’s not.

Bracketing the year with the blog posts Writing Biographies VI and VII also felt like an appropriate dealing with past energies. It felt good to bring the Biography reasonably up-to-date:

1/8/24: “A Writing Biography, Part VI: Failures, Successes, Rhythms and Swerves, 1983-1994”
12/19/24: “A Writing Biography, Part VII: Organization, Lost Energies, New Novels, Publishing, 1994-2011”

Both those periods needed to be written out. This blog post category takes a lot of time to ruminate on and structure, usually beginning with much longer essays filed with detail only I would care about; then I condense them into shorter posts intended for as much clarity to the reader as possible. It’s telling that I always prefer the shortened post to the essay version.

Unsure What to Do with Myself After All This Exertion

2024 also leaves me with detailed notes for the beginning of a second Supreme Commander Laurie novel. I’m feeling good about it, but also leery of starting it now just to keep busy. I definitely need to anchor a title for it and think it through to a middle and an ending–at least a rough draft concept of them.