Okay, remember, it’s way, way early here. But I’ve had “Do Over!” on sale for almost two weeks, and thought I’d give my thoughts and observations about epublishing as it stands today.

For my newish readers, I’ve been in the epublishing game for a long, long time. About a dozen years ago I co-founded a website called “Free ePress” that published original works on the honor system—we gave the books away for free and asked people to pay us what they thought the story was worth (an idea that came to me after watching a festival of street performers here in Denver, writing as busking).

Since then, I’ve been published on eReader, Fictionwise and other smallish, pre-Kindle ebook sites. I’ve watched the ebook industry mature from an outlandish “why would anyone read a book on their Palm Pilot?” goofball idea to now the almost certain future of publishing as brick and mortar stores close and disappear.

“Do Over!” is my first book to be published on Amazon (and, oddly, Barnes & Noble, considering they bought Fictionwise, which already carries it). It’s a novella rather than a full-length novel, so I priced it accordingly at 99 cents, even though that puts me outside Amazon’s 70% royalty range.

So how has it done in two weeks? The first week, I sold 14 copies, netting me a total of $4.90 in royaties. The second week that firehose tapered off, and I sold 4 copies for a $1.40. So in the first two weeks, I’ve taken in $6.30. The upside is that’s not enough to declare to the IRS, so that whole $6.30 is tax-free, baby. Sales rank is #81,546 in all paid books available on Amazon. Eat that, #81,547!

Ahem.

Oh, and on Barnes & Noble? Zero copies. You disappointment me, nookers.

Over the weekend, I changed the description marketing copy on Amazon to give a bit more detail.

Before:

Richie Preston is a loser, in every sense of the word. He never moved out of his parents’ house, still works a dead end job and lost out on the love of his life.

But when the fates give him a second chance, he has the opportunity to live his senior year of high school all over again, only this time remembering where he went wrong. All he has to do is make sure he doesn’t interfere in the lives of others, and he can start over.

If you had the chance, would you make the choice?

After:

Richie Preston is 27 years old and still lives in his parents’ house, still works at a dead end job, lost his great love, still hasn’t really begun his life.

One day the fates smile on him and give him the opportunity to start over, to go back to being 17 and about to start his senior year of high school, only this time with all the memories of what he did wrong the first time. All he has to do is not interfere with anyone else’s life. It sounds like a great deal, but living up to his end of the bargain turns out to be harder than Richie ever imagined.

If you had the chance, would you make the choice?

I also changed the genre to YA (or “Juvenile Fiction” in Amazon parlance), given that the main character is in his senior year of high school. No idea if this will help, but at least I’m trying something.

I know I probably shouldn’t be, but I’m underwhelmed. I’m in need of some serious whelming. I know a 16,000 word novella is a tough sell even at 99 cents, and I know I’m not exactly a household name. But Joe Konrath makes this sound so easy (maybe I should quit taking writing advice from guys named Joe). Evidently, selling ebooks is a self-reinforcing system. Once you reach a certain critical mass of sales, they just keep building (see Konrath, Amanda Hocking, etc.). But getting to that point in the first place is a bit trickier.

The trick, it seems, is volume. Right now I’m seeing the level of success you’d expect from someone with only one book, and that a novella, in the store. Hocking has nine. Konrath has over a dozen (accounting gets tricky as he has several collaborations that aren’t just him). So maybe when I get the first Unification Chronicles trilogy done and posted they’ll feed each other. What I have learned is that one book squeaking plaintively in the Amazon isn’t going to get noticed much.

(squeak.)

And still. That’s 19 (I sold another one over the weekend) people I’ve entertained that I hadn’t a month ago. 19 people I maybe gave something to think about.

That’s something.

I recently saw a very cool version of the Ramayana–the story of Rama and Sita in Hindu myth. It was called Sita Sings the Blues, by an artist called Nina Paley. It’s a short animated movie, and it is interspersed with the events, one must assume, of the artist’s own life when she was dumped by her boyfriend. And she cleverly weaves them in with the unfortunate journey of Sita, Rama’s wife, identifying obviously with Sita.

So here is the gist of the story, which stayed with me long into the night after I saw it:

Rama is a beloved son of the King of Ayodhya, one of the many kingdoms on the Indian Peninsula long ago. One of the king’s wives hates Rama and Sita and forces the king to banish his son on the night he was supposed to be crowning him king, for 14 years. Rama, the dutiful son, says nothing in complaint, only accedes to his father’s wishes, and goes into the dark demon-infested forest. With him goes his faithful wife Sita, one of the most beautiful women in India, who is believed to be the incarnation of Lakshmi, another goddess, as Rama is supposed to be the incarnation of Vishnu. Into the forest they go. And Rama gains the reputation as a fierce demon-killer.

While they sojourn in the forst, a rival king, Ravana, spies Sita and decides he must have her as his wife. He is part demon himself and gifted by Brahma with extreme intelligence and many other gifts, some of which, according to the story include many arms and heads, like they do in myths. Rama goes to chase a beautiful deer that is set free in the forest by Ravana to distract Rama, and while he is gone, the demons kidnap Sita and bring her to Ravana’s palace. Rama is away from her for months. But Sita refuses Ravana for all this time to uphold her virtue and love for Rama who she knows will come and rescue her. When Rama finally comes and defeats the rival king with his army of monkey deities, he doubts her virtue in remaining chaste from Ravana, and forces her to go through a trial by fire to prove her purity before he will take her back.

She survives the test unharmed. He takes her back, and is then accepted into the palace, his banishment over. Shortly afterwards, Sita announces to Rama that she is pregnant with their child. But his subjects talk about Sita and how Rama took back a woman who had slept in the home of another man. So Rama, swayed by the local gossip, banishes Sita and has her dumped far away where no one will see her. Apparently, he never saw any after-school specials about peer pressure. Poor Sita gives birth in the woods to twins of Rama. They grow up in the woods, and still she is faithful to him and allows her sons to be taught songs in tribute to Rama’s greatness, by a sage she encounters in the woods.

One day Rama comes upon his sons singing in the woods and sees Sita. He agrees to take her back if she undergoes another trial to test her purity. How magnanimous of him. She says instead, “If I have always been faithful to you, let the earth mother take me back into her arms.” The earth mother arises and carries Sita away with her. And Rama is somehow astonished. Sita was held to be the icon of the perfect wife, and Rama as the icon of the perfect man.

After seeing this story, I was reminded of another tale of staggering cruelty and abuse that ended…rather differently.  It was the tale of Emain Macha, from the Irish Gaelic Celts of the Iron Age around 1000-500 BC. Macha was a woman of the Sidhe or the Tuatha de Danaan,  suspected to be older Bronze Age inhabitants of Eire.

She was married to the king of Ulster. He boasted about what a cool chick he had married to all of his friends and neighbors. He boasted so much, that one day, well into his cups of mead, he boasted that she could run so fast, she could outrun the deer and the other chieftain’s horses. Of course, being a bunch of drunk jocks by this time, they demanded that he put his money where his mouth was, and test her. Of course, he was king and so he ordered her to run, to save him from humiliation.

She was pregnant with his child at the time, nine months pregnant. Running was the last thing she wanted to do, and she begged him to reconsider. I’m not sure, being the magical creature she was, why she didn’t just flip him off right then and there, but she, like many women with assholitis, obliged him when he continued to demand that she run. So she ran. And what a surprise when she fell and went into labor.

As she screamed in agony, she cursed all the men of Ulster to fall down with labor pains for nine days, beginning in the hour of their greatest need for warriors to defend the kingdom, down to the ninth generation of men. And then she took the children and vanished into the forest.

This myth sets the stage for the later Red Branch cycle in which the Hound of Ulster, Cuchulain was forced to defend the Ford of the Pass against the army of Ireland by himself as the men of Ulster lay ill with the curse. He was half Sidhe and so free of the curse. The message of the cautionary tale, if it wasn’t obvious, was this: Never piss off a fairy woman, or you will pay and pay and pay. There are consequences for acting like a misogynistic jerk.

Knowing both of these stories, one might be led to compare the difference in the reactions of the women to their situations, and to read into the stories the differences in the political climate of their times, of their differences in culture, in the status and power of women, or at least male attitudes, which allowed these stories to surface and be interpreted as they were. And certainly one could make suppositions about the ideas of the authors, whoever they may have been. 

But no. My position is not to be an objective social scientist.  I had far more fun as I lay awake thinking about Rama and Sita, and imagined with glee the end of the Ramayana if Sita were to be replaced by Macha, and Rama fully realized the consequences of his appalling behavior.

The world that is emerging around me as I read the news and tackle increasingly challenging socioeconomic and political barriers is far from, and will never be again the world I grew up with or expected.  I grew up in a middle-class Jewish immigrant/refugee family that began emerging from poverty and European anti-Semitism when they moved here. One of my great-grandmothers ‘stole the border’ of Russia underneath a hay cart with her three children, and two child cousins, to escape the pogroms during the reign of the Czar. She was 16, and she had been rolled in the snow by soldiers when she was pregnant. Another great-grandmother, for whom my daughter Rosa is named, convinced her husband to ‘visit’ America for a couple weeks. When he was on the boat, she sold their house and possessions and bought tickets for her and her five children, and followed him. She was pregnant with their sixth child. She showed up in America, pregnant and homeless with her flummoxed husband. Shortly afterwards, Hitler came to power, and eventually, their country became an Axis power.

This is the backdrop against which I learned about America and about the world. I was shown photos of the Holocaust and the Six Day War in dayschool when I was seven years old, and almost every year after. And the message was clear about people losing power and taking it back. But for my generation, having grown up far from death camps and pogroms and viewing these terrible images from a comfortable assembly room while eating hummus and falafel, hope was not something new, and horror at what governments and corrupt people could do was far far away. Hope and optimism were part of who we were. We were the sum of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents hopes.

What I face now as I try to explain to my daughter why people are blowing themselves and others up in a culture that is so similar to ours (Jewish), as I try to explain why we can’t voice anger about the government that we were free to voice a decade ago, as I try to explain to her how and why people are on the street with signs saying “Please help me” while everywhere around are displays of unimaginable wealth and power, I find that I cannot explain it to myself, let alone to a five year old. Her simple and elegant answer is “Well we should change that.” And my response is always, “It’s more complicated than that.” And then I run right into the seemingly immutable truth that we have lost the power we once believed we had, to change things. A slogan for hope and change on a bumper sticker that goes by as we have this conversation in the car, is not enough to keep people like me from drinking ourselves to death or becoming numb in frustration.

And then I remember the power of stories. I took a class in college called Media in Anthropology. It began with the folk tales everyone knows, and went through radio, television, and the internet. And its topic was not just the power of information, but the power of information told through imagination, stories of cultures and generations. The ability of the simple story to change a thought here and there, and through those changed thoughts, even subconscious, came changes in the thoughts of whole generations,  paradigm shifts.

An essayist from the LA Weekly many years ago named Michael Ventura, who was like last generation’s answer to Lewis Black, once said “serious people exhaust themselves in a sideline of commentary on how everything is not alright, not alright at all, and it gets sucked up into today’s media and spit back out in a format that says, ‘It’s alright.’ As the world news has gotten more disturbing, the trend in broadcast journalism has been to get more and more flim-flam, with the one message, ‘It’s all right,’ running right alongside the other message ‘We are being killed, we are killing, we are dying.’ You may measure how much our people know everything is ’not alright’ by how much they need to be ceaselessly told that it is. Millions of dollars were paid to a broadcaster with a calm authoritative air who just by his very presence assured people that ‘No matter what I’m telling you, everything is still alright.’ to resolve the schism between the media and its message.”

The beauty of stories is that they are sneaky. People and their thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes come out in their stories. However fantastic, they often contain a grain of truth. But they are removed in time and place, into a magical world that could be anywhere and happen to anyone. The stories that changed things sometimes didn’t even have to be ‘good’ or skillful or come from someone with money and power. They just had to be told.

I do not know where we are going in our culture, in our political climate, in our country as a people collectively called ‘Americans’, or what my life or my daughter’s life will look like when we get there. But while I rail against my own powerlessness at the polls, or as I pass homeless people who used to be doctors or social workers or teachers, I wonder if the ability to tell a story is the ability to retain hope, and the ability to change things under the noses of people who would keep them the same. In what feels daily like being tossed in a sea of my own insignificance, telling stories feels like the only way to share my thoughts and experiences, the only way to feel heard by someone somewhere, before I’m lost in the sea again.

I work in emergency preparedness. I spend my career preparing for the worst that could happen, and helping communities prepare. I have a smart wonderful precocious child and a husband who is a medical resident. In this context, I get to a point where life becomes about lists of things that need to get done: at work, in this or that community, at home. And experience becomes a series of crossing things off that list, or working to cross things off.

This is an untenable position for human beings to maintain for very long without breaking down or ending up on a bell tower, or simply dying as a very crotchety old person with a lifetime of regrets. Here in America, we maintain this pace because our culture has convinced us that this is ‘productive’ and hence, this is our definition of ‘success’. There is little place for imagination in all this, and certainly little time, unless there is the prospect for making money.

I was going at this breakneck pace and slowly turning into a mess, when I began having very strange dreams. My husband is Native American. He and his family believe in spirit helpers. My daughter sees ghosts or at least beings that are not visible to me. I truly believe she sees them because her details are too accurate to be pretend.  I see nothing. I am as psychically dead as a corpse, with a few exceptions.

So when I start having weird dreams, it gets my attention. One dream I had was crystal clear about its message. I will never forget that message, “You’re not listening,” they said to me. And I wasn’t. I wasn’t sleeping or eating, I was worrying all the time about everything, and I certainly wasn’t enjoying life. A day later, my daughter begged for a scary story having exhausted all the scary children’s books in the house and at the book store. So I made one up. It felt good. It felt so good, in fact, that I wrote down the story, and added to it. I felt better than I had in months. I wrote more. And I noticed something, that the more I wrote, the better and less desperate I felt.

I still feel ragged sometimes, and neurotic often. But something about the act of writing/storytelling, the use of imagination fulfills something irreplaceable and completes me as a human. It makes me listen and it makes me tell. It makes me share and interact with the world that I was speeding through without seeing or feeling.

I’ve been published a couple times, and hope someday to be good enough to get paid, because that seems to be the gold standard by which we measure our proficiency for writing. And I want to be published because stories need to be read and imagination shared. But I write to be whole.