The Big Empty

Without a divine act of agent-intervention, the homepage will soon look like that.  Or simply a JPG of Exit.  Jenny's artwork is pretty, but after dragging manuscripts through Grammarly I've lost my remaining love for the earlier books.  

Each time I solicit representation I swear it will be the last time I go through the process.  I planned on skipping it altogether for Exit but went ahead anyway.  Writing Surfer On The Drift assured safety from future whoring of my wares since it's a sequel to Exit.  

At a certain point, I placed a 'selfie' on my website bio and I think even on Awesomegang.  To my delight, the photo is near-nowhere to be found.  Even Google-ing 'Brian Stillman' and 'Awesomegang' gives the following result:

  

I don't know what is wrong with me.  Fairly every other person on the planet enjoys putting pictures of their face up for view.  We are bedazzled by the easy magic of the self-image on the screen, an agreed upon portion of the self-promotion puzzle.  Selling a book is also selling the author.  If I were to go a further step in making potential readers love me (if not out-and-out 'lurv' me) and delve into a podcast or YouTube channel, I would still funnel energies into avoiding accurate self-representation.   

All facial hair removed, my wife tells me I look like Timothy McVeigh. Not good. Worse I've heard my voice on answering machines.  Upon waking in the dank and dark, it is the voice the kidnapped hear droning through a muck-encrusted basement door. No one needs to hear that.  I consider myself capable of masking my real voice best with a poor cousin to Bullwinkle's trademark nasal patter.  I don't know how long I could sustain it before going dry mouthed but even in a world of reaction videos would there really be anyone out there capable of withstanding such an auditory assault for more than fifteen seconds?  

Still, worse than acknowledging a measurable deficit of interest in my 'finished' works is feeling kicked loose from the usual stable ground.  I can't get back into the swing of productive assembly. The idea for some sort of quickie horror novel flared and fled.  Pen Pal. Seeded from the lyrics to 'Cactus', an old Pixies song (and more recent David Bowie cover), in particular the line '...and a letter in your writing doesn't mean you're not dead.'  

It would've been written in first-person.  Lucid and Exit are oodles better than The Lipless Gods because of that choice in authorial voice but the whole disintegrating narrator genre was perfected long, long ago, and the world will survive without one more story of some straight, nearly middle-class white man flailing to retain control of his middling kingdom.  

Last September the word churn came to a complete stop.  And then I cut loose early this year and beat out two books in quick succession. Until I can properly snap-to-it, I might just keep hanging my head here, sighing, about as bright and cheery as Eeyore mourning the absence of his tail.