Dreams

One of my good friends is a theater major, and we talked for awhile about doing a video promotion for Corruption. I've been thinking about that quite a bit lately, about what I would want to showcase the book.

Of course, the first thing that comes to anyone's mind would be something like a Hollywood movie preview. Quick bits of information, flashes of characters, funny lines, explosions, and then the title and release date. Good for an hour to two-hour experience, crunched into thirty seconds. But I couldn't do something like that for Corruption. There is too much depth for a few shots of the action scenes, a shot of the sex scenes, a few quirky lines and a hyped-up version of the plot. It would do it a severe injustice. Most of the time I feel the summary I typed up for queries to be an injustice.

So movie preview is out. What to put in its place? Especially since we'd be on a budget of very little, and the resources of almost nonexistent. Just a camera on me talking about the book is certainly not what I want. For one thing, I don't like being on camera, or having photos taken of me, unless I'm in costume. Weird, isn't it? But showcasing costumes that we've spent hours making is not really photos of me--it's of the work. Who's going to be looking at me in this when there are so many details of the outfits to take in? And anyway, I'm sure it wouldn't be interesting to watch me in a chair toot my own horn.

What I've been thinking of is letting Israel speak. The book is shown a lot through his perspective, so why not let him speak? Making the Corruption uniform wouldn't be too difficult, and I could get one of my male friends to take him on for a time. Let him talk about the world he lives in, and the changes about to come. It would certainly be more powerful than anything I could say myself.

There is one problem with that, too. Letting someone else become my character, even for thirty seconds, is a little nerve-wracking. It's the same worry that I get when someone else reads my book for the first time. Will they understand how I want him to be? What I'm trying to get across? What if they think he's selfish, or stereotypical, or anything that I didn't mean for him to be? What if the actor portrays that and I don't know how to tell him to fix it?

More than that, what if the actor gets it right? What if it's perfect, and the video comes out wonderful, and then no one watches it? Certainly not the end of the world--I haven't gotten a lot of sales off of Corruption, but I don't have a lot of advertising outlets, either. That's alright, I know this book wasn't going to let me quit my two jobs and let me live off the sales. But I do hate for all of our work to go unnoticed, the same as any artist, I expect.

All of this is really in the very early stages, and a part of me wonders why I'm even contemplating it. I have so many other things I should be working on. I'm trying to buy a second car so my roommate and I can get to our four jobs easier. I'm writing for NaNoWriMo this month. I'm editing All the Good Gods Are Dead. We have crafting and costuming projects to work on.

The long and short answer is that dreams are important, especially for writers, and really for all artists. Even when you can't focus on your art because of life, because of money, because of time, you never stop dreaming. In the shower, you think about what comes next in your book, on your drawing, in your play. When you lay in bed about to fall asleep, you dream of what your characters may dream, of what steps you will take in that next dance, of what colors to add to your painting. Big or small, you dream constantly. It's our prerogative as artists to dream.

Be glad of that. Not everyone is able to do so freely. Don't pity them for it--let them dream through your art, instead.