Control: Empty Spaces
I, Dalton Lewis, am filled with empty spaces — a husk, a shell, an emptiness that needs to be filled. I feel this hollow because no one reviewed my most recent book, The Dark Gods. I wrote a sprawling, 277-page novel about a war about slavery — a retelling of the American Civil War in a fantasy setting — with elves and orcs and fae. It has been out for three weeks and no reviews or ratings. No one noticed. I did blog entries to promote it, released ads, and wrote fan fiction to get the word out. Nothing. No one gave it a chance or read the damned thing. This is terrible and frustrating.
I worked at least a hundred hours at this novel. My mom and I thought that this one would be a big hit — my previous retelling of a war was my biggest hit, a story about a space battle over a planet with a precious starport. Also my novels with research tend to sell more and get better reviews than my novels that I just make up. This had everything going for it. The themes were devastating and emotional — slavery is a big bad, something terrible that happened and happens and needs to be stopped. The novel had it all. It’s getting frustrating to write novels and have no one comment or care. I gave it my everything. It’s the longest novel that I’ve ever written. No one seemed to notice.
I’m trying something new for the new one. I’m trying to plot out a new story, planning everything out. I outlined forty chapters and developed ideas and characters and themes about each character. I want the plan to work and represent something, an actual intelligent idea for a genre novel. I’m following a formula, a plan formulated by one of those novel-writing guidebooks that you can find at every bookstore. I’m halfway paying attention to creating a story with the structure suggested by the book. I think that it’s helping.
The whole story? I want to write something that is a work of art, and I am stuck with pulp. Everything I write turns out to be pulp and not art. I work like crazy at something and fail. I work and work and it doesn’t matter.
I watched a movie the other night. It was supposed to be a high-and-mighty work of art, a cerebral movie which makes you think. I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the characters. They were all unlikable. They didn’t have any positive character arcs. They did horrible things for stupid reasons, and I didn’t root for them to succeed at all. It was art so it didn’t have likable characters fighting to accomplish a definable, nice objective. Instead it had bad characters descend into madness and evil. I don’t want that kind of art, art which shows how bad people can get.
Is that what I want? To make something for a small audience? A schlocky work of art with sex and violence galore that pretends to have some meaning above what is conventionally said?
Yes.
I do.
I want to write a work of art. I want to say something about life and death, reality and fiction. I want to move the reader, show them something wonderful and amazing and larger than life.
I want to create art, and I am stuck creating pulp.
I wrote a novel, and so far, no one has noticed.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
