Saudade

I saw a post on Twitter today, where an author shared that a friend had reminded him that he didn’t talk about his upcoming book release enough. In the tweet, he vowed to mention it more, beginning with that tweet. It made me feel some kind of way, and I don’t mean jealous. And, look—good for him. He should talk about his book. A lot. All writers should talk about their books until they’re blue in the face.

The tweet reminded me of when I, too, had books in the pipeline and needed to talk about them, and line up marketing and PR for them, and, yes, tweet about them. That was in late 2017 and late 2019, respectively. I joined Twitter in November 2017, less than a month before the release of my story collection. I created a Facebook page for the book and an Instagram page for myself. I was focused. I was ready. I was going to reach all the readers.

I’d had professional photos taken, and I picked the one I liked best and used that for my profile pic. I was a Super Serious Writer and I needed to convey that. I put Writer in my bio, and I put the title of the book in, too. There was no way anyone could misunderstand that I was a Super Serious Writer and that my first book would be available soon.

I was ready.

I sought other writers on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, I followed publishers and agents and publications like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. I talked about my upcoming book every chance I could, and when it released, I announced that it was available to purchase and shared the link. I did nothing but talk about my book. I talked about my book until I bored myself about it. I joined as many of those threads on Twitter where authors share snippets from their books as I could find, even though response was clearly lacking. I figured it was because I didn’t have much of a following. It never occurred to me that I was the only person in those threads sharing snippets from a book that wasn’t sci-fi or fantasy or horror. I just wanted to get the word out about my book.

I sold a few here and there. I joked once that I hoped to sell at least a million copies and several people thought I meant it. I was confident, not delusional. And people weren’t familiar with my sense of humor then. I hadn’t been around long enough at that point. But the book did pay for itself, and that was doing free giveaways where I “sold” over two thousand copies and made it to the top spot in Amazon’s free ebooks for the LGBT Short Stories category. I remember thinking that was a really big deal, too. I even saved a screenshot so I could share it across all my socials. I wanted people to know that I, Mr. Super Serious Writer, was relevant.

I reached #3 in the Gay Fiction category, too.

Amazon calls them “Bestsellers” even when you haven’t sold anything, but it’s effective. You believe it. I certainly did. I thought I’d really achieved something. Like, if I could do this, just imagine what I could achieve with my next book, which was a novel.

My story collection released in December of 2017 and my novel released in October of 2019. In between, I sold more copies of the collection, gave more copies of it away, got asked to be a guest on a podcast, where I discussed my gift for writing believable dialogue. Just like a Super Serious Writer. I also worked on the novel and kept it pretty close to my chest. My editor suggested that I query it instead of self-publishing. I didn’t listen to her. My public was waiting, right? I had an obligation.

I prepared press releases, marketing, and PR for the novel. I hit up bookstores and libraries. They hadn’t wanted to stock the story collection, but I was undeterred. That was then. This time would be different. I was sure of it. I was coinciding the release with National Coming Out Day, too. And when it released, I had features in BookLife, Publishers Weekly, and The San Francisco Review Of Books shortly after. I was asked to do another podcast. A local reporter interviewed me. The editor of the local Jewish newspaper totally ghosted me after asking for the book to do a feature on it and me, but so what, right? Her loss, right? Right? Guys…?

That guy’s tweet reminded me of all this. I hope he has a better plan than I did. Or, rather, I guess I hope his plans works better than mine did. I hope he finds his audience. I think his book is horror, so he’ll be fine. There is a vast community of horror writers and readers on Twitter. I hope he keeps talking about his book until people tell him to shut the hell up about it (I got told this once), and then I hope he keeps talking about it anyway.

There is this quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’m a Star Trek nerd. Anyway, it’s a Picard quote.

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”

That’s the first part of the quote and it’s the part that has resounded in my head daily since March or so of 2018. I like to think I did everything right, but I don’t think I did. Not really. I don’t know what I would have done differently, mind you, but I don’t think I did everything right.

Here is the rest of the quote: “That is not a weakness; that is life.”

It’s supposed to be uplifting. You’re supposed to see it and think “Yeah. That’s just life. And life isn’t fair.” But, really, it isn’t all that inspirational when you’ve been through it and look back and know that if you did it all again, you would still fail and that you’d still be expected to lift your chin and accept that you did everything right, but it wasn’t right enough. Or maybe you didn’t do it right long enough, or at the right angle, or from the proper perspective. And eventually, the quote doesn’t even give you hope anymore and you wonder why the fuck it’s been knocking around inside your skull for the past five years and some change.

There’s this word. Saudade. It’s from the Portuguese and there is no English equivalent, although it is derived from the Latin word for solitude. It’s defined as a feeling of profound longing for a person or place that can’t be exactly explained. Like, it’s more about the emotion than it is the definition, and I get that.

Anyway, when I saw that tweet, the word saudade popped into my head immediately and I laughed, because I want to be 100% fucking clear: I do not long for the feeling of failure I experienced when I self-published my story collection or my novel. I don’t. And I’ve argued with myself all day about this.

Then I made a bowl of cheap, shitty ramen for dinner and realized that maybe—just maybe—what I longed for wasn’t the actual experience of self-publishing two books and yelling about them into the black hole of anti-intellectualism that is the world in the twenty-first century, but what I thought the experience would be. The way I saw it going when I created all those social media accounts and ramped up to the release of my first, then my second, book. The people I thought I’d connect with. The friends I thought I’d make. The networks I’d be welcomed into.

I hope, when his book releases later this year, that the guy who posted that tweet finds all of that. I really do.