A Good Year for Imagination

Yup, end of one wild year and time to start off again.

I just totaled up my Kindle sales, including free promos, and as far as I can tell, some 5877 copies of Chicago Stories: West of Western (known around here as WOW) have gone to good homes. At least, I hope they're good and have given the readers something. I don't know yet about Along the Ravenswood, too soon for figures to come in.

A good year for me. I published WOW, my debut novel, in mid-January, having no sense of what to expect, and started fumbling around learning how to promote a book. Joined Twitter and Facebook, spent far too much time doing the things folks used to do--notifying alumni magazines, that sort of thing. I did some things right, too, like spending a lot of time finding good Facebook friends (thanks here to Sisters in Crime) and Twitter connections and telling everyone I knew about the book.

And I finished my second book, Along the Ravenswood (ATR), published in mid-December.

There has never been a year when I learned so much so fast. I originally intended to write a straightforward mystery novel, well-crafted but not so different from many others. A good plot, interesting characters, a nice two or three hour read on a rainy afternoon,maybe. Somehow other things slipped into the stories as I stumbled along, and I ended up revealing far more of myself than I'd intended. Maybe that's partly because WOW is sited in my old neighborhood and some of the events in the book were taken from events in my life.  Maybe it's because Seraphy's named after my great-grandmother, Seraphy Temperance Taylor.

Someone on some Sunday morning TV show several years ago was talking about gangs and commented that the real problem was a failure of the imagination. I don't remember the name of the show, or the commentator, but what he said burned itself into my thoughts and sits there today. My friends and I lived by our imaginations, although I hadn't thought of it that way before. When  I was a potter, my studio partners had a bad spell (no sales, no $$ to live on) and asked me what to do. Without thinking, I said "re-design," and that's what they did. That's what we did.

Gangbangers may be the way they are because that's the only way they can imagine themselves. I sometimes wonder what might happen if we all started thinking about that, and what could be done to change that . . . I know many have tried before, but maybe not quite the right way?

When something's not working, come up with a new idea. This isn't true for most folks who have jobs, because having a job means someone else has thought up the whole job. Thinking a project, product, business up from scratch is very different. For those who do that, whether we're Steve Jobs or the guy in his garage with a mousetrap, for us imagination is the basis of survival. We really are different from others.

We tend not to have absolutes because we know reality is only an idea.

I'm going to stop now before it gets any deeper.