Been away on holiday and am now back at it—working hard on the 2nd BALLARD book, THE REPUBLIC OF DOGS.

Wanted to take a moment to address two questions which have come in from several different readers of BALLARD motor court:

1) where does the name BALLARD come from? and

2) what is The Tower?

The first one is a bit easier to answer, so I’ll start there. J.G. Ballard was a British novelist and short story writer. Two of his books (Crash and Empire of the Sun) have been made into films (by David Cronenberg, and Steven Spielberg, respectively). He is commonly thought of as a science fiction writer, but, in his own words, ” … I was interested in the real future I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred.” In a preface to The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis wrote: “No one is, or was, remotely like him.”

The Complete Stories blew me away when I began reading it several years ago. Ballard’s methods are both rigorous and wildly imaginative. I began to see J.G. Ballard as a detective of the post-modern soul, a psychic investigator of what it meant to be alive in a century besotted with technology. I was hooked … not least by the dull and yet fateful sonority of the word ‘BALLARD.’ As it’s turned out, the sound of that word BALLARD—whispered & terrible—was a bell-toll that reawakened my need to tell stories, to make sense of what I thought it meant to be alive.

So, that’s why my character is named Ballard and why I refer to these as my BALLARD books. On to The Tower … which is also related to J.G. Ballard.

Years ago, I wrote a short story called “blakk,” about a skyscraper which serves as:

a) a type of cinema for hipster-types who like to gather and get off watching apocalyptic films of alien invasions, and

b) a venue for a wildly alcoholic happy-hour gathering of co-workers that over the course of an evening blossoms into a hallucinogenic search through the corridors of this building for the nature of reality.

Suffice to say, it was not very good. But, years later, as I read “The Concentration City” in Ballard’s Complete Stories (which is about a high-rise of planetary proportions), my little skyscraper from “blakk” came back to me and a new way to approach its themes began to work its way through my brain.

There is a “science” behind my idea of The Tower. (It has to do with Michael Talbot’s conception of The Holographic Universe, for any of you who may be interested.) But, for me, The Tower is about enormity and the uncanny ability for enormous things to stay, ultimately, outside the grasp of our conscious minds: these are things which are so large as to be unknowable, unless we dig a little deeper, go a little further out …

Some quick observations about the world of self e-publishing, now that I’m two weeks into this whirlwind adventure:

1) 45% of sales are from Amazon

2) 40% of sales are from iTunes (my understanding is that this near-even split between Amazon and Apple is atypical; usually the Amazon #’s are significantly higher than the Apple #’s)

3) 10% of sales are from Barnes & Noble

4) 5% of sales are from Smashwords (although, in fairness, Smashwords is #1 so far in terms of free downloads of the sample excerpt)

5) about 15% of my Facebook friends have “liked” the book’s Facebook page so far

6) about 20% of the 500 or so people I sent a broadcast email to have opened and clicked through on that email to check out the book

7) about 5% of my LinkedIn contacts have responded to my announcement of the book there

I have no idea how “typical” any of these numbers are, or what “benchmarks” might be emerging in this new arena.

One non-bullet-pointed anecdotal observation: while it’s been pretty fun logging in every morning to check my sales, I must admit that what’s been even more gratifying are the responses I’ve gotten from readers. I’m not sure how other people do it, but when I write I imagine a sort of “ideal reader,” someone who pays attention, and is passionate, enthusiastic, and honest in his/her appraisal of my work.

Readers like that mean everything to me and I’ve been blessed with many of them so far in these early days of BALLARD motor court.

The great jazz pianist Bill Evans once said that a common error he saw in students who came to him was a tendency to “approximate.” He said that many students insist on trying to get their arms around the entirety of a piece and that in so doing they take certain shortcuts which result in their “approximations.”

This makes their playing less interesting, and less real. His advice to them was always to  focus on a smaller part, if necessary, but to attack that part in a way that was “very clear” and “very real” and “entirely true.” In other words, it’s better to be super-focused on something a bit smaller in scope than it is to be vague on something larger.

I thought about this a lot as I wrote BALLARD; in fact, I think about it a lot, period. Evans’ advice brings to mind some lines from Bob Dylan that I have recently decided will represent the rest of my life’s work:

“And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal // pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul // from me to you // tangled up in blue”

So, how do you be “very clear” and “very real” and make sure that every single one of your words “ring true” and that they glow like “burning coal”?

I think you have to start small and do the work. It’s drudgery, but you put it together, piece by piece. The pieces that work you keep; the ones that don’t you throw out. You build a foundation. And as the structure grows larger, it gathers momentum … and eventually the entirety WILL come to you and you’ll be ready to attack it, get your arms around it, master something large in a way that is real and true.

With BALLARD motor court, I started with the supernatural event that thwarted the attempt on Ballard’s life in the convenience store. It’s one of the briefest scenes in the entire novella, but it was absolutely critical. I rewrote it dozens of times, but eventually I got it right (I think!) and then the rest of the book began to fall into place, forward and backward.

I’m sure there are LOTS of other ways to work … but this is the way that make sense to me, and seems to offer the surest path to creating things that will make you stop and take notice.