writing

What the hell is a book launch?

What the hell is a jigowatt?!?

By the time I “launched” my book, The Cinema of Survival, it was essentially out of print, or within a couple dozen copies of same. Thank the pandemic for that: the Kickstarter was over, the rewards had been mailed out, the surprise second-edition run had been bought by an American cinema book e-tailer, and that had been mailed out. By the time you get to May 2022 and consistently-open movie theatres, showing Mad Max: Fury Road in a cinema and talking about it felt more like a victory lap than the start of anything.

I don’t remember much about that night other than that it was loud. (The print, not the adulation.) I hadn’t seen the film in a while and it was on 35 goddamn millimetre and they cranked that son of a bitch up. I know I said some stuff beforehand because there’s a picture of me doing so and whatever it I said was written down so I wouldn’t forget to say it. I also suspect I signed some copies of the book in the lounge after because there’s pictures of me doing that too, but woof, if you were one of those people, I apologize profoundly for having no idea you were there. It’s all kind of a blur.

(Ironically, the signing came just prior to me changing my name; I can imagine an alt version of that signing where I deface a hell of a lot of books. If you are one of nine people who knows about The Cinema of Survival: Mad Max Fury Road but doesn’t have a copy and want one of the dwindling volumes in my overflow stock, I promise to correct the name most spectacularly.)

Anyway. All this came up because my pal Becca is about to do her book launch which she’s mostly organized herself, and we were sitting outdoors after the farmer’s market the other day and opining on the fact that neither of us has any real idea what to do at a book launch or how to run such a thing and boy, it would be nice if we did, less out of any real need to “do it right” than out of simple, mechanical curiosity about the expectations of same.

(Look: I’m sure if you’re a big author with big deals, someone does all this for you. If you’re self-published [me] or small-print [her], the degree to which no one does all this for you is substantial.)

Becca also did a Zoom book launch for those who might be social-distance-conscious, and she had a couple of other writers with adjacent topic areas read from their work and she did some reading from her own work and I thought to myself, yes, this is a nice way to do a book launch, I wonder why I didn’t think of it.

Writing that, though, puts me in mind of the real reason I wanted my own book launch and, perhaps, the real reason anyone does one of these things on their own power. I just needed a “thing to mark the end of the thing.” So much of this work goes by without any milestone for self-congratulation or self-reflection. We do the work, we transmit the work, we get rejection letters back (bad milestone!), we keep thinking about the work, we keep changing the work until we can’t change it anymore and then (in a very small handful of lucky cases) maybe we hold a physical thing in our hand that says, yes, I did all of that.

Like a wedding or a bris there’s likely psychological value in coming upon a threshold past which you cannot go back. Making a summary argument on the thing (my case): I did this and here’s why. Gathering the community together to share and witness (Becca’s case): let’s midwife this thing into the world with a bit of family and love. Marking the occasion, anyhow. Lighting the beacons.

Addendum: Bex’s book launch happened last night and I’d be remiss in not mentioning, I had the full support of the event team at TIFF when I did mine, which made my experience super easy and user-friendly. This is not an easy thing to do on one’s own, beyond the simple conceptualization of what “it” is!

Blue milk

Y’all know me, I think a lot about Star Wars. I had some more thoughts about Star Wars and Disney and what’s going on with that brand (still haven’t seen the movie [cough], don’t think I will [cough cough]).

Well anyways instead of writing them thoughts all down like I’d normally do, I spoke them into a camera and spent days and days and days editing them, enjoy. This was all in and around an actual moment of joy in my toy collecting, which is: I finally bought the Starspeeder 1000, which is sick.