Writing and Publishing Under An Invisibility Cloak

I've had a lot of nerve-racking times in my life: waiting to get my college acceptance letter, moving to another country, looking for my first job, waiting to get bailed out of jail , spending time with law enforcement officials. All of these have been dwarfed by the enormity of writing my first book and publishing it in the Kindle Store. For all of those things, I've had the support of family, friends, mentors, my parents. Writing this novel to me, is the equivalent of walking into the woods, by myself, in the middle of the night...naked.

It isn't that the people in my life wouldn't be supportive -- they would. They would absolutely. They would buy my book multiple times over, leave borderline ecstatic reviews, pay for ads, put up posters with me, the whole nine hundred yards. So, in the last couple of weeks, I've found myself wondering, why not just tell them? It would certainly make my life a hell of a lot easier. I'd have more than 11 followers on Twitter (three of which, I suspect, are troll accounts, unfortunately). I would have many, many five-star reviews on Goodreads and Amazon.

No one, not even my proofreader, knows my real name.

But there are two big reasons, I think, that I decided to publish anonymously. The first is artistic: I am a people pleaser, through and through (much like Helia, although she is by far a better person than I am). I will give you the shirt of my back if you ask. If I told all of my friends, family, everyone that I was writing a book and planning on self-publishing, the results would be horrible. I would write what my friends think is cool, what my parents would approve of, what my family would be impressed with, what my mentors would give acclaim to. I would probably end up writing Ideological Treatise on Contemporary Post-Modernist Literature As A Movement for Liberation. I may still write that, at a later time.

The second, unfortunately, is a little selfish. I'm terrified of failing. Rather, I should say, failing again. I've bitten the dust pretty hard recently. Before I took eight months off from my life to write, I had more or less reached rock bottom.  I took an enormous gamble with something very, very important and I lost. I lost hard. I nearly lost my mind. I had asked everyone to believe in me, believe that I could so something great and then I failed. I finally feel like I'm getting back on my feet, but I'm still to terrified to ask anyone to believe in me again, to invest in me.

Except of course, for strangers. Who I'm asking to pay 3.99 to read my work. Amazingly, they have. Incredibly, and unbelievable hundreds of people who I've never met, and who don't know anything  about me, read the blurb or sample, and thought, well I'm going to buy and read this book. Looking at my Amazon reports this Monday, just about brought tears to my eyes.

I don't know what the future holds for Linked. But if enough of you have taken a chance on an unknown nobody, then I'm tremendously hopeful. And indescribably grateful.

So! In that spirit! Linked is going to be just 99 cents for this week only! Tell your friends! Leave a review!

Keep exploring,

S.K.

Follow me on Twitter @NewtonLinked! 

In My Head

One of the things that most puzzles me, is the existence of human beings. Thinking about this for the first time, triggered an existential crisis when I was in the seventh grade. As a thoroughly devoted disciple of television documentaries, it bothered me that in my normal life -- at school, at home -- no one talked about space, and human evolution, and extraterrestrial beings, and all these other strange and bizarre things about the universe.

For the sake of keeping polite company, I learned to keep these thoughts to myself. But I never stopped wondering: How did we come to be here, on Earth? How did life, and even more mind-bogglingly, intelligent life arise on Earth? Are we alone? In the entire universe, could we be completely alone? What lies beyond the reaches of space we can't see? What about dark matter and dark energy? How is it that everything we see, in the unfathomably vast night sky, is just four percent of the total matter in the universe? These questions kept me up at night, and started to fill the very first sentences of what would become my first draft.

I never got to study astrophysics at any advanced level because of my most fatal limitation: I am absolutely terrible at mathematics. After my required university calculus class, I resigned myself to a life studying the utterly mundane. So any opinions expressed are not those of a scientist (I wish they were), but of a stubbornly curious individual, taking a hiatus from the daily rigors of the inconsequential.

The First Chapter

It took me four years to write Chapter One. Four years, three laptops, two cities, two universities, many libraries, immeasurable amounts of alcohol, bouts of religious fervor, rabid atheism, a return to religious contemplation, a couple of therapists, and a cigarette. Hopefully such long period of internal refinement paid off. Hopefully.

There were several alternate beginnings to Helia, Adlan and Soren's stories. At first, I thought of starting out with a big bang from sentence one. But before the world went to hell, I wanted to see their ordinary world (well, even then, not so ordinary). The things that mattered most to them.

For Helia, it's her family, specifically her dying father. The mystery of her father's illness is revealed near the very end of the book, but at the beginning, Helia is a deeply unhappy and lonely person.

Adlan, on the other hand, has no family. He has a surrogate one in the form of his best friend's mother and siblings, but he too is very much alone. Unlike Helia, he's had longer to cope to with his feelings. Cope is a generous word, actually. No, he drowns his feelings in drugs, work, but most of all girls (coming soon: Adlan's Girlfriends, a story of girls who loved to hate this very bad boy).

Soren, like Adlan, has no family either. But unlike him, she tolerates no vices. She is ambitious to the point of ruthlessness, focused, and disciplined. Soren, unlike Helia and Adlan, doesn't wallow about her feelings. She does something. And what she has done, had led her to keep a dark and very dangerous secret.

At the beginning of the story, our three heroes are quite miserable, really. In a way, perhaps, if the world were to remain the same, they would find themselves in truly dark places. Helia, in a mental pod, indefinitely sedated, watching a never ending loop of pulsars and quasars. Adlan, in the hallway of a ship orbiting Neptune, naked and unconscious with no memory of the previous weeks events. Soren, imprisoned in a dark metal cell, hurling abuse at robots and humanoids.

Some very dark places indeed.