"… maybe next week will turn into being all about doing for a change."

Friday arrives again, time to look back over the past week to see what might be derived from the last seven days of PureSchmaltz' GlancingKnows. It was a tumultuous week for me, for this week my writing finally found an identity, an If-ification. I'd persisted in producing—going on ten manuscripts over the prior two and a half years—without possessing a crisp response to the apparently fundamental question: "What sort of books do you write?" I'd tried a string of cute, generally self-effacing responses, but to little benefit and perhaps inflicting some harm, but a precise classification had eluded me. Those who know would innocently ask what my works were similar to, an impossible question for any author to answer. I only manage to read three books per week, so my bibliography seems pretty thin. I do not have access to the population of potential comparable works.

Part of my difficulty seemed rooted in the great variety of classes from which to choose, which the existence of most I remain unaware. I was perfectly free to choose from an unknown variety of If-ifications. The Library of Congress Catalogue, the most complete book classification schema in the world, centers around twenty-one general classes ranging from Class A, General Works, to Class Z, Biography and Library Science. The founder of the publisher of my best-selling Blind Men and the Elephant insisted that I could not possibly create a publishable work or even find an agent without classifying my work, so in frustration, I dredged into my community, remembering that I have a professor of library science within the circle. I wrote, asking him if he could be so kind as to read a representative manuscript and attempt to classify it. I missed his response in my ever-baffling email queue until almost two months after he'd replied. He listed two likely and very flattering, comparables which, when I referenced how they had been If-ified, discovered a previously unimagined If-ification for my work, the wholly unlikely, slightly paradoxical Historical-Autobiographical Philosophical Fiction. I'm still in the early stages of wrapping my head around that label.

I can almost hear you wondering, "So what? What does this If-ification have to do with the last week's essays?" Last week's pieces produced seven hundred and one unique views, a fifteen percent increase over the prior week, a statistic that I'm confident means little. I'd derived the prior week's theme as Preparation, Preparation, Preparation perhaps because The Muse and I had been running up to Thanksgiving in the background. Presumably prepared then, I found myself enqueued within what I characterized as the waiting season in Weighting; heavy stuff. While waiting, I went on to write about making DoubleStock, which might have been more about double-taking than making double stock. Next, I returned to a common philosophical theme throughout my writing history, generous (or less-than-generous) interpreting, in Snidely, which seems upon reflection to address point of contact presence. An ounce of preparation and a ton of weighting can be easily undermined with a less than mindful interaction. I next wrote about how none of my work should be taken too awfully Literally…, with particular emphasis upon the awful results overly literal interpretations elicit. I went on to write about a Dawning notion that I needn't serve as slave to outmoded creation myths. I could create my own if I could get over the notion that I already know better. And I ended the writing week sort of whining about editing my own manuscript in SchlockyEditing, an ultimately self-liberating piece which, after finishing, encouraged me to finish the final round of updating and re-exporting that almost year-old manuscript. As seems so often the case, a little self-deprecating whining lubricated rusty gears.

Had I been aware enough, I might have derived the If-ification Historical-Autobiographical Philosophical Fiction to summarize the week ending December 6, 2019. Each piece drew from personal history, spouted some philosophy, and distills to something closer to the opposite of non-fiction than to the non-fiction If-ification, not intended, as I cautioned mid-week, to be taken too awfully literally. I appear to have found my niche because I seem to have recognized myself in it. This is already a week that was. Next week, I have another unSchlockyEdited manuscript to format and print and get to crawling through with my beleaguered blue pencil. Preparation's over, Weighting's through, maybe next week will turn into being all about doing for a change.

Thanks again for following along!

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz