Making My Move...

Time to take my writing game up another notch

I have a bit of a confession to make. For more than five years, I have been sitting on a manuscript that my younger and more rash self would have self-published without hesitation. Between November 2016 and April 2023, I sent out 60 queries to lit agents and another 40 to indie publishers, international publishers, and academic publishers with commercial imprints. More than a dozen asked for my drafts (as of now, more than half ghosted me). As the emergency phase of the pandemic came to an end and as the Biden-Harris administration took hold in 2021 and 2022, interest in a book about the US and the West’s inevitable decline because of their systemic narcissism and racism waned.

So I waited. I waited to publish the manuscript myself. I would get work that paid well enough, take $10,000 or $15,000 of my own money, and put it out there for the world. That plan hasn’t quite worked out. As my fortunes as a writer have improved, my time in academia has been cut short. As of three weeks ago, I am no longer affiliated as a professor at any university. One (Loyola University Maryland) because of their dirty practices and because of my anti-genocide stances against Israel and the US. The other, because enrollment has dropped like a rock over the past four years (American didn’t even bother to contact me about not renewing my contract for four months, by the way).

So let me be plain. I began Fool’s Gold: Confessions From An Educated Fool two years ago to test out parts of my manuscript about racism and narcissism, and also to test out my other idea of writing about my varied experiences in the US workplace. It is obvious that many of you find some of these two ideas both intriguing enough to read and read again.

But I also knew that the most important aspect of my one manuscript was missing: the allegories within the nonfictional. Without them, my Substack has been about yet another writer declaiming on and on about how fucked up the US, the West, and the world is in the 2020s. And we need more that as readers. I need more than this as a writer. We all need at least one possible vision about the world succeeding against the evils of Western civilization anyway, and enduring the decline and likely apocalyptic collapse of the US despite what most racists think (they believe if they fall, the rest of the world will, too).

That is what Spinning Sage’s Gold: Allegories on the Western-Dominated Present and a Possible Post-Western Future is about: envisioning a world thriving absent of the West’s dominance, its racism and penchant for narcissism. That is the book I intend to self-publish in the coming weeks. We need a conversation about the path we are on now and the distance between it and the future we and our descendants all deserve. Especially those of us under the crushing weight of what the US and the West holds so dear.

I will continue to update you all as I get closer to a date of publication. Make no mistake. I do know what I am up against as a writer these days. I will share more along the way. I hope that you all will support me, now and when the time comes.