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| Published August 4, 2018 |
I
often put on my decrepit Guns N’ Roses T and following what is clearly some
Pavlovian response as I walk to the subway station and also in the subway station, I start singing
verses from “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Which in turn almost tempts me to speculate
about nefarious subliminal messages embedded in 80s music videos that went
something like this: instead of “kill, kill, kill” it said, “sing, sing, sing.”
And then I remember I’m me and I don’t need much prompting to randomly burst
into song.
Or
maybe I just remember I can’t whistle and so I sing.
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| Published August 21, 2018 |
After spending almost ten consecutive years writing I
stopped. Well, mostly stopped, as I was still writing stuff — but no stories.
The ideas, the narrative and even the fleshed out characters were still playing
havoc in my head, but I stopped the follow through. I stopped the part where I
tooled snippets of all those fragmented pieces I’d written and threaded them
together to form a whole and made a story. It wasn’t the rejection letters
from literary agents — though I have plenty of those. It wasn’t the inability
to self-publish — back then even doing all the editing, formatting and proofing
myself still carried a price tag I couldn’t afford. I just stopped.
I spent the next three years reading — mostly not the kind of
narrative that would inspire me to pound the keyboard — which I often do.
Pressing harder than I’ve ever had a need to. I blame the muscle memory of
manual typewriters.
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| Published July 11, 2018 |
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| New Cover |
Years ago when I still believed I’d get a literary agent and
a real publisher I bought this book that was supposed to give me tips on those
kinds of things. I remember this question, though I can’t remember exactly how
it was posed. The gist of it was that I would be required to identify a target
audience. I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I wanted to say “human” — because
that’s often how I identify myself in questionnaires, before someone scratches
it off and checks off other. Which begs a question or many questions.
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| Published August 5, 2018 |
After I’d finished writing Equilibria I decided my target audience has to be the proverbial single
guys who live in their mom’s basement role-playing Rift — because that other
game is for another set of nerds. My nerds play Rift, or Vampire the
Masquerade. But I couldn’t reach my nerds or any nerds.
Then I co-authored, Bored
of Education, a satirical collection of vignettes and short stories aimed
for the Erma Bombeck aficionado. And discovered Erma Bombeck aficionado does not denote a target audience unless
there’s a spaghetti monster in the mix.
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| Published August 5, 2018 |
So
after a little fan fiction flexing (that I never posted anywhere) I went in an
almost other direction. I didn’t write a serious novel denoting why David
Copperfield couldn’t hold a candle to me. No, I wrote a novel in the scope of a
soap opera motif and gave it a title mostly in Spanish. WLCDRS presenta… Telenovela: Traiciones (Betrayal) is totally in
English. My target audience knows who Marlena is and watches telenovelas. I
couldn’t find them either.
Like
a demented battery powered rabbit I kept going. Three anthologies of short
stories, one of which featured only erotica, fifteen assorted novels and
novellas some rooted in the multiverse with some sprinkling of monsters and/or
mayhem some just plain sexual and two for teens, more fan fiction giving me a
grand total of six and eight prequels to Equilibria, each
one featuring a different central character from the book. Target audience:
still elusive.
Then I read Seth King’s Brave
and tried the self-publishing route one more time. I’m still wearing my ratty T
and bursting into song – target audience: human.
© Lillian Carrero
© Lillian Carrero
