{"id":8429,"date":"2023-06-12T05:50:48","date_gmt":"2023-06-12T12:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=8429"},"modified":"2023-06-12T05:50:48","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T12:50:48","slug":"what-ive-learned-writing-and-publishing-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/what-ive-learned-writing-and-publishing-books\/","title":{"rendered":"What I’ve Learned Writing and Publishing Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Thomas Wolfe wrote in You Can’t Go Home Again<\/em>, \u201cA man learns a great deal from writing and publishing a book.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came across this line while reading Wolfe’s novel for the first time in 35 years. I remember nothing from the previous reading. It’s a sprawling, self indulgent, bizarre, often brilliant, prescient, pontificating mess of a novel that contains some of the strangest and lengthiest digressions I’ve ever read in literature. But I am going to finish it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the aforementioned sentence that I will take away from this reading, because it essentially explains the entire plot of the novel: a writer’s book comes out, and then things began happening to the writer related to the publishing of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read that line and then set the novel down and began to recall all the things I’ve learned after writing and publishing books. This is different from what I learned about gigging the books, although there is some overlap because I had to gig my books relentlessly to readers or otherwise nothing would have ever been learned because no one would would have ever read them and then responded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In no particular order of importance, what I’ve learned:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might meet the best people in the world who will enrich your life, or in my particular case, save your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will realize that most of your friends and family will never read your books, or even women you are dating who were around when you were writing a certain book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might a meet dipshit therapist who believes going to expensive therapy is a much better way to solve a person’s problem rather than the free introspection required to write a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will meet some seriously bizarre people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will engender jealousy and bitterness from other writers because you finished something and they could not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will be asked the secret of your success and offer only three words: Ass to chair<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will find your best readers because you wrote about something you both care a lot about, like the homeless, a free rock festival, dogs, public beaches, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will thank yourself time and time again that you didn’t choose the professor\/academic route because these are the most cocooned, petty and neurotic professional people you have ever met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will always find inspiration that other writers chose the same unconventional route, like Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You like the fact that you staged a raucous and unique literary event down by a creek that was attended by homeless people because they were the subject of your book and they all read it with gusto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Wolfe wrote in You Can’t Go Home Again, \u201cA man learns a great deal from writing and publishing a book.\u201d I came across this line while reading Wolfe’s novel for the first time in 35 years. I remember nothing from the previous reading. It’s a sprawling, self indulgent, bizarre, often brilliant, prescient, pontificating mess […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8430,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-writing","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8431,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8429\/revisions\/8431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}