"You Can't Know Where You're Going"

After spending a good amount of my time at the Lillian Smith Center working on what should be my next book, You Can't Know Where You're Going (When There's Something in Your I), the first draft of the manuscript ended up about 94,000 words. The book is a multi-genre hybrid and contains some creative nonfiction, some literary journalism, some cultural criticism, some poems, an edited version of my "Patchwork" blog, a fictional dialogue, and some of what might be called memoir.

Even though I have spent these two weeks rounding out the writing of it, and even though I have spent significant amounts of time over the last few years working on the ideas and experiences that have become the content, I'm not sure about the fate of this work. With some of my more traditional books -- the artist biography I Just Make People Up and the academic biography The Life and Poetry of John Beecher -- I had a strong feeling of what kind of publisher would pick them up and who might buy them. Yet, hybrids are difficult to market in a bookselling world that is insistent on categorization. (Go on Amazon.com and look at how strictly categorized the items are.) However, I would need to go through a publisher with the book and I know better than to self-publish a book, for two reasons: all books need the attention of a professional editor before they are made available to the public, and I don't have the time right now to be the non-stop self-promoter that self-publishers have to be.

Because of the nature of the original project, which includes podcasts and YouTube videos, a new-media aspect to the publication is possible and even likely, especially if it doesn't turn out to be viable in a traditional way. The writing would still need an editorial eye cast on it; I know better than to think I can self-edit a body of writing, audio, video and images that I have been looking at this intensively and for this long. Another difficulty would be paying a web designer and other technical staff to produce the video, audio or web materials, and not being in the web industry I am not sure how the project would generate interest or revenue, if it could at all.

Since my Arts Teacher Fellowship I have been more and more interested in the possibilities of new media, uses beyond using Facebook and Twitter to plead with the world to Look at me! Look at me! I really am interested in how a project like I have could utilize media like video or podcasts. Even though I am telling people that I have finished "my next book," I wonder if this "book" will be a book at all.