I have always been in a hurry. I was born six weeks premature and I’ve been racing through this life ever since. I couldn’t grow up fast enough, and when I finally did, I wanted to fill my time meeting and speaking with whomever in the world I wanted to meet and doing what I wanted to do. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have done just that.
So, it wasn’t too surprising, after spending years trying to find a traditional publisher for my Buddhist investigator thriller series, what finally dawned on me. I’m too old to wait. That was the message, that came through, clear and direct. It wasn’t delivered by a loved one, or a clairvoyant reading cards, or even a pithy excerpt from a sacred Buddhist text. It came from a carefully worded prompt that was delivered into an AI system, which then outlined the business plan for an Indie Publishing operation I wanted to launch. Admittedly, it was a bit painful to hear it in such a way. I do know how old I am. Nonetheless, I didn’t expect it hear it so bluntly from an Artificial Intelligence system. Bu then, impermanence is inescapable.
I suspect I was first confronted by the increasing necessity to publish at an older age, when my mother, then 95, asked me to publish the first of her three novels on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I had previously published five volumes of her poetry, but I could hear her urgency, “I want them published before I die.” Over the next two years, I did as she requested, and also dutifully videoed the readings she gave of each book in succession, at Beyond Baroque, where she had attained the venerated status her talent and age had afforded her.
Now, I feel I’m that one who can no longer wait. For five years, my agent has diligently tried to find an appropriate home for my Buddhist Investigator series, without success. It certainly wasn’t her fault. Great rejection letters aside, I realized the first two books of this series were too niche for your traditional Mystery/Thriller publisher, no matter how well they were written.
Recognizing that I didn’t want what I considered my better mousetrap to die with me, I needed to act.
Recognizing that I didn’t want what I considered my better mousetrap to die with me, I needed to act. It no longer mattered that I had over 25 previous books traditionally published. It was simply getting too late to wait.
Over the years, I published about 15 books for my mother, Peggy Aylsworth and my step-father, Norm Levine through Amazon’s Kindle Direct. These books represented an extraordinary display of truly great writing, but, even though they were in print, they were languishing in the vast sea of the unread. I knew something had to be done to satisfy this family lineage of literary production. It deserved better. So, with the help of the midwife known as AI, I gave birth to the idea of Comingle Press.
With the help of a dear friend and colleague, who had attained master status on a variety of Artificial Intelligence platforms, we sat down began feeding business plan prompts into the awaiting AI field box. We asked it to create a business plan for an Indie Publishing project, focused on fiction, poetry and essays. Three publishing categories that conventionally rarely made any money for their authors. I immediately recalled a conversation I had with Dan Halpern, publisher of Ecco Press, on the floor of what was then the American Booksellers Association’s annual gathering, this one in New York City. I told Dan I had this concept to start a publishing company that only published first novels, because it was so difficult for authors to breakthrough with that first new work. Dan smiled, gave a short guffa, and slapped me on the back, saying, “You do that.” It was clearly a recipe for disaster.
30 years later, it’s still a noble and bad idea. What the AI platform revealed, reviewing over 700 documents before turning out a well-developed business plan, was that my new iteration of this concept, Comingle Press, had great potential. We then amended our prompt and asked what the downside might be for undertaking this effort. This time we included my age. The answer was still affirmative, but it acknowledged that I only had a limited amount of time in front of me. Ouch. But then, unexpectantly, it slightly altered my intended direction. Instead of the emphasis I had put forward on fiction, essays and poetry, the AI system decided/reasoned/calculated/whatever it is it does, that the focus of Comingle should be on my family’s rather significant book production. With that perspective, it, we, they, came up with: Comingle Press – A Family Literary Legacy. Reading that for the first time was one of those “life” moments. I knew the right concept had finally emerged.
I began sharing this idea with others, doing my best Tom Sawyer to enlist those with the expertise I needed to help me in my effort. This was something I had done since I was eight with my first paper route, for the Herald Tribune. I had gotten a number of the “little kids” in the neighborhood to help me rubber-band the newspapers I had to deliver from the bags hanging from my Schwinn bike. I was determined to get the transistor radio that came from collecting “fees” from the folks on my route who never requested this throwaway paper. “But I never ordered the delivery.” I would be told. “No, but I deliver it to you.” I replied confidently.
Once the radio was mine, I would hide it under my pillow at night and would listen to great Vin Sculley bring the Dodger game into my bedroom. That is, until my mother would come into my room and insist I turn it off. How did she know?
Now, all these years later, my early training as a project manager was paying off. I was once again assembling a team to realize this new opportunity, calling on other lifetimes of experience to help me do so. I started thinking about what was driving me to undertake this effort. Why I was choosing this late life-filling activity over a quiet retirement.
Now, there’s a word I never understood. Retirement.
Now, there’s a word I never understood. Retirement. I’m a writer. There is no retirement from writing. As far as I know, it’s a life sentence.
As I reflected deeper, I had to acknowledge the desire, the want, the uncontrolled longing I felt. However it was showing up, or how I described it, it all came down to the same thing. There was something unsatisfied, something missing from my life. It was a heart ache telling me “time was wasting.” It was being squandered on Sudokus and endless day dreaming, but what could possibly be missing? Hadn’t I met just about everyone I had ever wanted to meet, my early Music Man hero, Robert Preston, notwithstanding. Hadn’t I practiced Buddhism for over 30 years, so my heart would be open and filled with all the love blossoming all around me. I had known and know love, been surrounded by it, nurtured by it, and offered it freely without it being transactional. So, what? What was compelling me, when most men my age were seeking the comfort of the warm, sandy water’s edge? It wasn’t money. It was never money.
I thought of my two amazing daughters, much more a product of my wife’s influence than mine, and it came down to legacy. I remembered that extraordinary feeling I had when I held my first grandchild, Ilaria, in my arms. Suddenly, the vision of my lineage and its legacy stretched out before me and behind me and beyond me. Perhaps this was why. This was tangible evidence of what your family has done, the lineage you get to own and further in your own inimitable style, if you so desire. That, of course, would be the righteous reason, but I had a suspicion it was something else.
I had occasion to remember an incident during my Buddhist education. I was lying in a field and looking out across it at ground level. In front of me, was the tiniest flower I think I had ever seen. It’s stem was barely an inch long and it’s five white petals were stretched out, as if it were proclaiming, “Here I am. Ta Da! This is it. Proclaim it, with arms wide-stretched. This is it. Bathe in the sunlight and let it fill you, because. Just because, this is it.
And so now, I embark on this next new journey. I understood my mother’s desire to have her last three novels published before she died. It was incredibly important to her, after all she had accomplished in her decades on this earth, all the people she had touched, soothed, influenced, loved, given birth to, that her books she had invested with all her self and wisdom, radiated in the sunshine. I guess, it’s what I want, too. Here’s the legacy, a family literary legacy. It’s what we did and what we can do. Ta Da.