August 21, 2014
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Upon being called cultish by one of her old friends after she starts going to Catholic mass again, Katie retorts:
“And you think you guys aren”t slaves to a bunch of rules? … You push each other all the time to see who can be the most sexy, the most daring, the most stoned, the best dressed. My God, the pressure on all of you to have the right opinions, like the right music and movies, hang out with the right people. … The only thing you”re not allowed to do is say, “Hey, wait a minute, maybe this isn”t such a good idea.””
That outburst is the closest thing to a sermon Heavey feels comfortable writing; she prefers fables, and the text lets Katie discover herself organically, with the exception of a mild and charming supernatural plot element. The narrative rewards Katie for being true to herself by granting her an almost impossibly true, old-fashioned love”which may be cheesy, but that doesn”t change the fact that we want real love, or that fakery prevents even the most beautiful people from getting it.
The straightforward prose is filled with strong images of the verdant Underlake. Katie wants to be an artist, and one of the key moments in the romance plot is when her strange young man helps her understand how to make her pictures look alive instead of merely competent. Heavey says she made Katie a realist and not an abstract artist on purpose: she wants to add to the chorus of voices in the visual art world that are “decrying the current state of the industry and pushing for more traditional, skilled”rather than just “edgy””art.” Her prose reflects this: it’s confident rather than experimental, clear instead of byzantine.
Heavey’s relationship to marketing as a self-publisher, however, is a bit snarled. On one hand, she’s stubbornly enthused by the way Amazon treats writers who don”t have the backing of professional houses such as Hachette. By giving self-published books the same treatment in the buyer-seller interface as traditional books, “they allowed us self-published freaks direct access to their considerable customer base … until Amazon put their weight behind the independent authors they helped publish, I would never have been taken seriously.”
But how seriously is she taken? Interface isn”t everything, much less quality. To get sales in any number”which Heavey isn”t doing”an author needs to get people to her Amazon page in the first place, and having a paid cheering section is still the best way to make a name.
“Like so many indie authors,” Heavey says, “I have a day job and a family. What I don”t have is free time for marketing!” Creative people and advertising “creatives” are rarely the same kind of creature, never mind what the latter vainly call themselves. They could be symbiotic, but unfortunately for our intellectual future, the people who make marketing literature their business continue to go for certain, short-term returns on snake oil.
