On becoming a real author

When my book “iceberg tea” first came out, people would look at me like I was an angel who had recently descended from heaven. “You’re published,” they would say, with awe in the voices. I’d look back askance and say, “I’ve been published for 30 years. All that’s changed is the packaging.”

There is a mystique about publishing a book and all the stuff that I’d published in newspapers and magazines, including all of the stories in “iceberg tea” which were originally published as columns, didn’t seem to matter. You’re not a real author until you have a book.

To be honest, I’ve bought into that mystique myself. Why else would I have been wanting to publish a book for nearly as long as I’ve been writing? To be really honest, I’ve always had an inferiority complex as a writer because I hadn’t published a book.

It never made any sense.

The process is the same whether you’re writing a book or a magazine article: you sit in front of a computer in a room by yourself and either laugh manically or weep uncontrollably as you pound out the words; or you sit in front of the computer and wonder why you’re such an idiot because you can’t think of a single word to write. And just because something is published in a book doesn’t make it good—in fact some magazine articles are better crafted and more interesting than many books. They can also have bigger readerships.

None of that matters to the critic that remains camped out in a shady corner of my mind no matter how many years I’ve tried to get rid of him. He would often go to sleep, but when somebody would say raise an eyebrow when I identified myself as a magazine writer he would wake up and hiss “you are nothing unless you have a book.”

Now that I have a book, I have to admit to certain elation when I see the piles of  my own books in the book store.  There is a lightness in my step and I feel a little more real a bit more three-dimensional than I did before.

Bit at the same time as the world (and myself) finally sees me as a legitimate writer, I am spending less time writing, and more time being an author—promoting myself and my book. At least so far. I find myself asking: “isn’t writing what the whole thing was supposed to be about in the first place?”

It’s all very strange.