If you’re a writer, you dream of publishing your work. Maybe an essay, hopefully a collection of stories, definitely a novel. If you’re a writer like me, you figure the putting the words in good order is the hardest part– get the book finished (dammit!) and *then* you’ll be on easy street. Traveling the road to publication though is…well, not necessarily fraught with potholes or full of dead ends; the book will still reach the shelves of readers. But when an author (say, Michael A. Ferro) steps up to the podium at his next reading to share an excerpt, he first may lean in close to the mic and whisper a warning.
Welcome Michael A. Ferro as he talks about the side effects of publishing. Tune in to the end and enter the giveaway for a chance to win a copy of his debut novel, TITLE 13.
My Eye Exploded
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love (or Cope) with Publishing
It was mid-May of 2017 and I could not have been more excited: I’d signed a contract a few months prior to have my debut novel, TITLE 13, published by the wonderful press, Harvard Square Editions. My dream had come true. (And thankfully it wasn’t that one recurring dream where I turn into a hot dog and get eaten by a kid at a minor league baseball game.) Since I’d signed the contract at the beginning of 2017, I was feverishly working on preparing for the big publication date nearly a year in the future on February 1, 2018. One of the biggest tasks to complete was working with my unbelievably talented editor to get the manuscript finalized for the first printing of advanced reading copies. As someone who also works a full-time job, I thought I’d prepared myself for the amount of work that would go into getting my novel published.
I was stupid, naïve, and wrong.
One day near the end of the editing process and in the midst of other book-related activities, I noticed that I suddenly couldn’t see out of my left eye. It happened without warning. Through my left eye, all I could see was a large black “burn” spot like the kind one gets after they’ve been starting at the sun for a while. I remember thinking: Hmm, this seems not right. I asked myself whether I had been staring at the sun that day like an idiot. No, I hadn’t. Plus, it was dark out and I’d been working at my computer. Had I accidentally poked my eye with a toothpick? I wondered. Nope. The ordeal puzzled me more so at first rather than terrified me. Perhaps I just needed to sleep. As many writers know, long hours in front of a computer screen spent well into the night can often produce some oddball oculary concerns. I went to bed and thought nothing else of it.
When I woke the next morning, I still couldn’t see out of my left eye. Concerned, I did what any rational person in my situation would do: I ran to Google. After a bit of searching I was convinced I had cancer of the eye (as well as a nasty case of Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever), so I finally decided to visit a doctor (but not before I did a quick Google search for affordable, unadorned coffins). After being sent to the emergency room and seeing ophthalmologists for hours of observation and tests, they claimed they had just a few more questions for me.
“So, Michael, tell me: are you under a lot of stress?” asked the doctor.
Being a manly man, I didn’t want to appear weak, so I sort of shrugged off the question.
“Eh, I’m okay. How are you?”
“Michael…” the doctor said, looking impatient as I wasted their valuable time.
“I suppose you could say that I am a complete and total wreck, riddled with uncontrollable anxiety and fear,” I surrendered.
“I see,” the doctor said. “And would you categorize yourself as a ‘worrier,’ or someone who can be obsessive about certain things?”
I was too busy rearranging the tongue depressors, cotton balls, and other medical equipment on the examination table to listen. The doctor seemed satisfied with his assessment and made a note on his paper. He said he’d finally diagnosed my problem: Central Serous Chorioretinopathy.
As I heard the news, I prepared to call my mother and ask that the family bury me in my inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex costume and that my house and all my belongings be placed in a trust for my faithful dog, Rube. Thankfully, the doctor informed me that I wasn’t going to die. Rather, he stated that CSR was, unfortunately, somewhat common in white males between 30-50 years of age who are not only highly stressed, but tend to be a bit obsessive compulsive and anxious by nature. Unfortunately, I could tick off all those boxes.
While there is no cure for CSR, I was told that my vision might return in time. As the doctor explained, some individuals release higher levels of cortisol (known as “the stress hormone”) than others, and that it can build up on the back of the eye, causing a rupture in the retina that allows fluid to pool under the central macula, effectively blinding the patient. The most important thing, the doctor emphasized, was that I needed to reduce my stress levels. He asked if this would be possible. I replied, “Probably not.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I have a book coming out next year and it’s quite an effort to do everything involved with that and also work a full-time job.”
“Oh, really?” said the doctor, noticeably interested now. “What do you write?”
“Literary fiction. The book is a novel.”
“Ah, what’s it about?” he asked.
I always find it hard to describe my novel to strangers. TITLE 13 is an eclectic mishmash of satire and emotional realism that follows the oft-absurd story of a young alcoholic named Heald Brown who lives in downtown Chicago and works for the federal government. And while there’s plenty of postmodern, Kafkaesque tragicomedy within the pages, much of the novel also centers around the brutal realities of addiction and the divisive nature that has consumed our society and poisoned our culture in a broken modern America.
“It’s a book about a stupid idiot,” I said to the doctor after a long pause. We looked blankly at one another.
“Ah, I see,” he said, his eyes returning to his clipboard. I was discharged shortly after.
Since then, I’ve been seeing an ophthalmologist monthly for regular checkups (not the same ophthalmologist—he’d had enough of me). My vision has improved somewhat and fluctuated from good to bad again, and odds are it will remain this way for the rest of my life I’m told. Still, all things considered, it could be much worse. I could be turned into a hot dog and eaten by a kid at a baseball game.
Plenty of writers, male and female, have similar dispositions: anxious, detail-oriented, and prone to high levels of stress. Whether it’s approaching deadlines, concerns over a career path or level of success, or just the arduous task of sitting down and actually writing something, it’s not an easy life to live. My experience in dealing with CSR while preparing for the publication of my first novel has taught me one important thing, though: if you’re lucky enough to find a publisher for your book, just take it one step at a time and don’t sweat the small stuff. Trust me—your eyes will thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born and bred in Detroit, Michael A. Ferro holds a degree in creative writing from Michigan State University. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award and won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction in 2008. TITLE 13 is his debut novel.
Michael’s fiction and essays have been featured in numerous online and print publications. Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan.
For more information on Michael’s writing and TITLE 13, check out his website, find him on Goodreads, explore his Amazon page, and read about him on his Poets & Writers profile. He’s been interviewed on Michigan Quarterly Review and Chicago Tribune Radio with Host Rick Kogan. He’s also keeping up his status on Facebook and Twitter.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A timely investigation into the heart of a despotic faction within the government, TITLE 13 deftly blends satirical comedy aimed at the hot-button issues of modern culture with the gut-wrenching reality of an intensely personal descent into addiction.
Young Heald Brown might be responsible for the loss of highly classified TITLE 13 government documents—and may have hopelessly lost himself as well. Since leaving his home in Detroit for Chicago during the recession, Heald teeters anxiously between despondency and bombastic sarcasm, striving to understand a country gone mad while clinging to his quixotic roots. Trying to deny the frightening course of his alcoholism, Heald struggles with his mounting paranoia, and his relationships with concerned family and his dying grandmother while juggling a budding office romance at the US government’s Chicago Regional Census Center. Attempting to combat the devastating effects of his addiction, Heald’s reality digresses into farcical absurdity, fevered isolation, and arcane psychological revelation, hilarious though redoubtable in nature. Meanwhile the TITLE 13 secrets remain at large, haunting each character and tangling the interwoven threads of Heald’s life, as the real question looms: Is it the TITLE 13 information that Heald has lost, or his sanity?
ABOUT THE GIVEAWAY
It’s easy to enter. CLICK HERE, watch for an email on Tuesday, March 13th.
The gamble. In one way or another, you are always playing the odds. As soon as the traffic light turns yellow, you quickly gauge your distance and press on. If you’re a writer, you send a story out a hundred times with the conviction that soon one acceptance will override all those rejections. Or, if you’re me in the late eighties and trying to procure the attentions of a handsome young man, you debate whether or not to pick up the phone by flipping a quarter. Heads you call, tails you don’t. And even while you lose with each flip, you don’t give up, the phone an object of incessant mockery. So you push at chance: 3 out of 5, 5 out of 7, 10 out of 15. Ignoring the loss, you call anyway, the flick of your thumb just an exercise in show.
Michael Shou-Yung Shum (MSS): One of my goals in writing the novel was to enchant the experience of gambling, a topic that is often disenchanted when it comes to fiction (think gritty tales of realism that describe down on their luck protagonists getting more and more in the hole…). I wanted to do the opposite with my novel, which is to invest aspects of real-life experience with, as you say, curiosity and mystery—to “enchant” those experiences, in other words. So yes, I did pull from real-life people I’ve come across—for example, the Countess is a very stylized and enchanted version of a “regular” who used to come to the casino where I worked every day, an old woman who sat at the poker table coughing up a lung and glaring at the other players. Her name was Barbara, by the way, so the character of Barbara was a kind of reimagining of this player when she was young, in the 1980s.