Today is December 1, which means that THE METROPOLIS CASE (buy it here, of course, or not, whatever!) is going to be sent out to the wide world in exactly 27 days.
Today I talked to the publicist, who said that the final books are going to be ready on Monday, which after many months of feeling like the publication is kind of an ‘afterthought’ has renewed my excitement. It’s hard to tell where and if it’s going to get reviewed, much less how it’s going to sell, but I think it’ll probably fall somewhere between that guy on the subway who made photocopies of his novel at Kinko’s (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and say, Stephen King (whose aversion to adverbs btw kind of grosses me out because I think it’s rooted in latent homophobia).
In a way, the length of the “publishing cycle” in combination with my age (which is not exactly young by any measure) has been good to the extent that my expectations have been “adjusted”; it’s not that I don’t want the book to “do well” (however you define that), but lately I’m feeling more capable of just “enjoying the process,” of anticipating the thrill (and perhaps slight melancholy, such is the way of the world, or at least my world) of holding the book in my hands and knowing that no matter what else happens, I’ll always be able to look back and say “well, at least I did it,” which come to think of it is pretty much how I think of running the New York Marathon, and that too was a pretty great experience, even though I obviously didn’t win the race.
