A New Kid on the Blog

I am definitely a new kid on the blog, this being my very first ever. I'm having to grit my teeth and tell myself very firmly: You DO have time to do this! You DO have time to do this!

It's hard to believe that I do have time for it. The last couple of months have been made up of twelve-hour workdays seven days a week to finish a book promised for "this fall."

It came about this way. This year it finally dawned on me that the millions who have read Ishmael tend to read that book and STOP. Only about ten percent of them go on to read any of the books that followed -- Providence, The Story of B, My Ishmael, Beyond Civilization -- each unique but all endowed with the same virtues that made Ishmael a book that has changed many lives. You would think that someone as reasonably smart as I am wouldn't have had to wait fifteen years to notice this, but there it is.

I'm not alone in this. Other writers have had the same experience with their "first" novels. For example, very few of the millions who read Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, and Forrest Gump ever read the later novels of William Golding, J.D. Salinger, or Winston Groom. I think that, in a sense, all these first books were literally TOO SPECIAL. People who read them felt like they didn't NEED another.

But I'm pretty sure that if my own "first" had been The Story of B instead of Ishmael, THAT book would have been the special one, and the others would have gone largely unread. (Believe it or not, those who have read it often insist that it's the more valuable of the two.)

In fact, Ishmael was not, strictly speaking, my "first." The Book of Nahash, a sort of novelization of the Genesis story of the Fall, was written about eight years before Ishmael; the tales of Adam, which appeared in that book, were published in 2005. One of my personal favorites, The Book of the Damned, was written and published just a decade before Ishmael was published; in that book I accomplished some things I was never able to match in any of my later books.