"Doing My Best" (Sunday Assembly of Silicon Valley, Jan. 12, 2020)

Imagine you’ve always wanted to build a battleship.  You go online and order a do-it-yourself kit.  The next day the vans pull up and fill your (large!) back yard with 50,000 parts, plus tools and instructions.  “Call us when the battleship’s ready,” says the driver as she pulls away.  What do you do now?

Or you’ve always wanted to paint murals.  Now your backyard is filled with 50,000 gallons of paint and a five-year supply of brushes. 

Okay—I made that all up. But remember the image.

Imagine you’re seven years old, and your parents start playing you Broadway soundtracks.  At nine you’re hearing Bible stories and Greek legends, and seeing all the movies based on them.

In junior high you’re stuck on a military base in Japan with nothing to listen to but Armed Forces Radio – which is pretty educational.  You learn about Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, and Eugene O’Neill.

By high school you’re writing song lyrics and dedicating sonnets to the girls in your English classes.  You toss off a Greek-style tragedy.  Then half-way through college you think, “Hot-durn I’m ready; I’m writing that novel.”

Forward twenty years.  Remember the battleships?  Why are parts left over, paint left over?  How do you fit those 50,000 words together?

Then someone mentions an eight-week informal writing circle.  You notice a Mercury News announcement for something called the California Writers Club.

Forward twenty more years.  You’ve now written eight novels.  How do you publish and promote them?  You know they’re kind of “edgy.”  You’re portraying the misfits of society:  People from different backgrounds, religions, spiritualities (or not!), sexual orientations, genders, relationship orientations.  How do you balance these different characters; the personal, the social, the political, the mundane, the visionary?

Will anyone buy these novels?  Maybe the misfits; but who will publish the books for these outcasts? 

Turns out you can publish them yourself, at essentially no expense.  No expense.  There’s a Learning Curve, but it isn’t really that bad.  I have learned to balance all this, and in November and December I published both the paperback and the eBook version of my novel Soul Flight.  And if any of you—or Sunday Assembly of Silicon Valley—want to publish something important to you, I can provide helpful hints. 

I think now I’m doing my best.  Thank you.