“It’s not you. It’s not the book. It’s a moment in the culture.”

So spoke my longtime agent, attempting to console me after another round of dismal news. He’d seeded my latest novel manuscript at an exhaustive number of publishers, both large and small. There were no takers. A few nibbles, but many perfunctory rejections from editors who, I suspect, had not bothered to read the manuscript, as well as some outright ghosting.
I can be pretty stoic about the ups and downs of the writing life. Forty years of reviews will do that for you. I had fifteen published books of fiction, and up until now, enough success to parlay into the next book contract. What was happening?

Maybe it really was me, maybe it was my book, although I still believed in it, and thought it was as polished and readable as anything I’d written. But maybe I was wrong, big time wrong. Doubts pressed in. Should I have been a better, brighter, bolder author? Of course. Should have been savvier about social media platforms and influencers and the hectic, god-awful pursuit of “buzz”? Probably.

( I had a dream in which an author I knew had a book coming out, and for promotional purposes, the author was being portrayed by Tom Cruise. “I loved the ending!” I called out to Tom, as he galloped his horse past me and into the cheering stadium. But I don’t think he heard me.)

“A moment in the culture,” my agent had said. What kind of moment? I knew I wasn’t alone. Other writers were finding themselves confronted by closed doors that used to be open. Publishing behemoths were unwilling to look past the bottom line. As a trend, people aren’t reading the way they used to, and books don’t occupy as much of the national conversation. We are all creatures of screens, distracted at every turn. Our current febrile politics, and the hair-on-fire state of the nation, are no help. Newspapers shrink and with them book review sections. Book PR has migrated online and atomized there.

Major books by good authors still appear. As do books by new authors whose sales numbers have not yet disappointed. There are celebrity confections. Also, many and plentiful best sellers, the kind of books I don’t write and don’t wish to: YA romances, thrillers, speculative fiction, or some combination of these. There’s not much territory left for those of us who aspire to what we like to call literature.

Emphasis on aspire. It’s honorable labor, a life spent writing, but there are no guarantees. I was, as my agent put it diplomatically, a veteran author. That is, old. I was unlikely, at this late date, to be a breakout or a smash hit.

Also working against me: book publishers, bless them, were perhaps the last refuge for diversity and representation. (Will that now change? Should it? Questions for another time.) There were so many titles by exotically named authors who wrote tales of distant lands or the diaspora. Not much excitement in my drab Anglo-Saxon syllables and Mid-American provenance.

Tellingly, the closest my novel had come to an acceptance was an editor who wanted to make an offer but was overruled by the business office. “You didn’t make enough money” is an impossible argument to counter, except to say, “Sorry.” Over the years I’d made publishers, and myself, some money. I’d lost them more. I was not a good investment. My literary credit rating had been lowered.
But even now, box office poison that I was, I wasn’t ready to fold. I still got no end of a kick out of the writing itself, which is a bedrock necessity. I took stock. I repeated a couple of my useful mottos: People never need a reason to tell you no. And, The process of publishing, at any level, is one of grievance and humiliation.

The novel was shelved, waiting for a brighter day. I had a collection of short stories that hadn’t really circulated, short story collections being the most unregarded of literary productions. I’ve never understood that, well I do, since it’s hard to make movies out of them. Mass market magazines have almost entirely stopped publishing them. But I love the form, love writing them and reading them. If you got rid of short stories you’d lose all of Chekhov, all of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, most of Flannery O’Connor. Joyce’s “Dubliners”, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, much more. My list of absolutely necessary stories that goes on and on.

I asked my agent if he’d do a targeted submission of the collection, and he agreed, but not with much optimism. I’d written the stories a few years ago. I still thought they were solid. They were all set in a small Midwestern city that contained a large public university, not unlike the place I’ve lived for many years. They ranged among different characters, men, women, the prosperous and the not so, the young and the old. The title was “Hearts Afire”, reflecting my belief that even the most ordinary among us, the most Midwestern and prosaic, has secrets, and an inner life worth exploring. Maybe some quirky publisher would give it a good home, like one of those unadoptable dogs in shelters.

But before any submissions came about, I had an idea: I would start a Youtube channel and read the stories aloud.

I’ve always enjoyed reading to an audience. The pandemic put a halt to much of that. Book clubs, bookstores, interviews: authors were more and more accustomed to online appearances. I would go on camera to introduce the stories, and there would be some sort of visual component to entertain. The audio could be uploaded to make an instant podcast. Was there any money to be made from ads? Maybe a little. I didn’t know. I still don’t. I just wanted the stories to have a life outside of my computer. My friend Kris, computer guru and tech whiz, was available for the project. I could do this, or rather, with Kris as video editor, I could.

I liked the idea of trying a new form, new at least to me. I was always on the last train leaving the station when it came to any kind of innovation. I liked being the one in charge of the project, not dependent on anyone else’s approval or dictums. Most of all, I I liked the idea of doing something, anything, for my writing. Instead of the usual author’s lot, sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, or not ring. It’s true there was a whiff of the pathetic about it, like playing the flute on street corners for spare change. No! I would be more like that old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie, where the talented kids, spurned by Broadway, put on their own song and dance show, in the barn!

Why not just self-publish? Never say never, I guess. It’s worked for some people. Genre writers, mostly, and Virginia Woolf. But the short story form seemed so suited to online presentation. Who knows, it might catch on. Perhaps one could read an entire novel in serial form, just as Dickens published many of his books. Or perhaps I had just invented an exciting new narrative concept, which I would call the television series.

I should say, I wasn’t really trying to hasten the replacement of books as physical objects. More like, I was being dragged out to sea by a rip tide of what was already happening. Ever since I was a kid, I’d started my summers with a pile of books to read. Me-as-a-kid set up a lawn chair on the front porch, with my library books and a glass of Kool-Ade. When did I stop doing that? It made me happy. I should start again. Yes. We all should! “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight!” A poem I learned from the printed page, and which remains with me still.

Meanwhile, I got busy recording the stories. (And gaining new respect for voice actors.) There would be a total of eight videos, I decided, an initial four to launch the channel and four to come later. Kris and I came up with concepts and then specifics for the visuals. We edited and made corrections. My talented friend Maria made a great illustration for the channel’s banner. I got over a pretty severe camera phobia to record introductions to the stories, realizing that no matter what I did, I was unlikely to look much better. We conferred. We debated, decided. We were having fun.

It’s been like any other creative project, with its own energy, its own setbacks and breakthroughs. And just like any other work of imagination and craft, when it’s done you put your name on it and send it out into the world.