Ken Brosky is the author of the books The King of Blades, The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachman (and other stories), and, most recently, Desolation: Stories, and his work has appeared in multiple literary journals of note. You can get the Kindle version of Michele Bachman on Amazon for 99 cents for the next two weeks, so head on over. I first learned about Brosky and his work through his blog, in which he details the process of self-publishing and promoting his Michele Bachman short story collection. Brosky agreed to let me interview him via email to learn more about his experience as a self-published author.

      The stories in your book have been published separately in literary journals, and “I Can’t Just Turn It Off” was a finalist in a Glimmer Train Contest. I have no doubt that you could have published the collection through a small press. What led you to the decision to self-publish?

I just didn’t want to go through the long, long wait for this project. First, you gotta find an agent. Then, you gotta find the publisher. Please wait 6-8 months before sending the manuscript out to another agent/publisher. Then once you find someone, you wait another year or two for it to come out. I just don’t have that kind of time! It’s bad enough the dog needs to go out twice a day … on top of that I’m sending out so many new short stories to magazines that I’m getting like, a rejection a day.

There was another more serious reason, too: I really, really wanted to publish a Kindle version for an affordable price. I think $2.99 is a good price for 100-or-so pages of short stories, no? I’m not a big fan of buying a 150-page short story collection in hardcover for $20. That’s just too much. It’s not a good business model, and I have no idea why New York publishers are so obsessed with keeping this going in an age where the newest generation of readers are used to getting everything—music, magazine articles, news—for free. And where is the cost coming from? Paper and whatever the heck hard covers are made out of.

So I put this out on my own, with the help of a lot of great people. And I think I’d like to keep it going. I think Brew City Press could help a couple published authors a year and we’d do the exact same thing: put together a collection of published stories or poems. We’d format for the Kindle, design a cover, set up the account, and then let the writer have it. Writing all this down, it sounds expensive. This would definitely be a vanity project.

      Several things about the book strike me as very innovative, the introductory notes about each story and the intermissions, for example. I can’t imagine coming across these elements in a short story collection published by a small press. Do you feel self-publishing gave you more freedom than you would have had if you had published through a small press?

Oh sure. You get to do whatever you want with your book. Neil Gaiman did a little set of introductory notes for one of his short story collections, so I guess there’s some history for it. I really liked it, though. I enjoyed hearing him talk about the stories and give a little behind-the-scenes for each one.

It’s not for everyone, though. Some people don’t like it, and they can skip it. That’s OK. But I’ve always enjoyed getting inside a writer’s head and hearing the story behind the story.  

      Have you come across any drawbacks of self-publishing?

      Well, for starters you’re not taken too seriously. That’s not surprising, though, given how much complete crap ends up being self-published. That isn’t to say it’s all crap, but there’s plenty of it. So I’m trying to earn some respect here. It’s a slow process. I still can’t convince my hometown newspaper—The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel—to review my book. It’s “tainted” because it’s self-published. But all the stories were previously published, I argue. Sometimes that works. I contacted Madison’s Cap Times on a whim and they were amazing to me. Interview and everything. Great write-up. A lot of fun. Really supportive of the local arts. When I realized the article was in the printed paper, too, I went to the local supermarket and grabbed like, 20 copies or something. I got a few strange looks from shoppers.

Reviews help, for sure.

      Of course, you need to find reviewers. No publicist here. So I’ve been going out and slogging through dozens and dozens of book blogs and Web sites with some success and some failure and then I blog about it for fun. The big reviewers are so inundated that they almost never take review copies anymore unless they come from the publisher. The Book Slut definitely won’t. I more or less begged without success.

The trick is to find reviewers who might actually like to read your kind of book. My book is a collection of short stories. A web site that reviews only Half-Naked-Scottish-Vampire-Man-Beast books probably isn’t a good fit. There’s a lot of those types of books, by the way. If you’re going to search for book reviewers, expect to end up on lots of sites featuring book covers with half-naked men. Depending on your sexual preference, I suppose this could be an enjoyable process.

      Then of course there are the web sites who charge a small fee for a review. It’s a business and sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Kirkus will review self-published books, but for a hefty price. Some other smaller review sites will do it for a much more affordable price, like the Self-Publishing Review.

      What really gets tricky are the sites that are clearly taking advantage of writers. Outskirts Press is a great example. For just $299 (holy crap!) they’ll submit your book to 10 reviewers. Wow! That’s an amazing deal, Outskirts Press! Thank you so much!

      Guess what? I contacted those very same reviewers and sent each one of them a copy of my book. It took two hours. The cost: $20 for printing and shipping.

      So it’s been a lot of work. I’d be lying if I said maintaining the blog and checking the book sales hasn’t been fun, though. I’m learning a lot and I hope others can learn from my mistakes, too.

      After my book was accepted for publication through a small press, I spent the next several months revising according to feedback from the press’s fiction editor. What was the process of preparing your book for publication like? How did you make up for not being able to work with an editor?

      I never would have done this if I hadn’t already received feedback. Since 10 of the 11 short stories are previously published, they were already looked at by editors. Feedback was accepted and implemented.

      Still, it needed a good look-through. So I gave a few copies away to former classmates in my MFA program to see what they could spot. They found a few things, mostly grammar and the such. It passed muster, though.

      But this is one of the downsides of self-publishing. Worst of all, a lot of writers don’t bother getting editing help or, worse, they find an editor and pay way, way too much. I run an editing business on the side and I’m amazed by the number of writers who come to me after having spent 2 or 3 thousand dollars(!) for editing help, only to be greatly disappointed by the service. They’re disappointed enough that they want to spend more money getting more editorial help.

Getting free editing help is one of the cool things about finding an actual publisher. Man, to have an editor who actually likes your work enough to stick with you? That’s the dream right there.

I wouldn’t know. The first book I sold was dropped before it was published by Harbor House Books, so clearly that publisher didn’t believe in me. I don’t even think I had an assigned editor. My blog rants against the Bush administration probably didn’t endear me to the good ol’ boys running the press, though. I remember their editor-in-chief once wrote a book about slaves fighting for the South during the Civil War. That’s how ridiculous he was. That should have been a red flag.

Live and learn, I guess … oh look: they’re out of business. Well, maybe there’s some justice in this world after all.

      You initially put the book out as an e-book, which sells on Amazon for only $2.99. A month later, you put the book out in hard copy form. Was your plan always to make the book available in both formats? How have the sales of the e-book compared to the hard copy?

      I only added a print version because my friend and classmate, Chris Smith, designed such an amazing cover for it. Like, seriously, it’s beautiful. It looks better than most of the stuff you see at Barnes and Noble. The moment I saw it, I said (to the dog, ironically) “This needs to be in a book store.” The dog looked at me curiously, but I think she understood too.

So now the book is in stores. It’s available in two bookstores in Madison and one bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I’m happy to ship a few copies anywhere else, too. I’ll try and get it in a couple more stores. I might try and leave one in a Barnes and Noble and then try and buy it and then go: “Oh, it doesn’t scan? That’s weird. This guy’s getting pretty popular.” It might make for a good blog entry.

      Sure, the price is a little higher. But, again, that’s just the cost of printing.

      These days, publishers rarely spend very much money marketing their books, so from a marketing perspective, self-publishing isn’t much different from publishing with a press. What have you done to get the word out about your book? Have there been specific things that have worked especially well?

      Besides reviews? I’m up for anything. The blog has gotten pretty popular, which is cool. Maybe I could sell copies of the book at Madison’s farmer’s market. We have a pretty unpopular governor so maybe I could stop by the protests and sell some copies. Cold selling would take a lot of guts. I could barely work up the courage to walk into the local bookstore and ask them to sell my book.

      There are a couple little sites that let you post a blurb. It’s a neat idea that lets interested readers get a feel for the story. Other than that, you just gotta be creative. I’ve found what works best is desperation and a little self-flagellation. Brainstorm an idea, then procrastinate until you’re in a cold sweat. Then stand in front of the mirror and berate yourself until you finally put on your coat, go out and give it a shot.

      There’s always standing on a corner asking people to buy your book.

      I had one other idea that I might try: what if I just sat in a Barnes and Noble all day and tried to sell 50 books? It sounds doable, especially if I brought some kind of snack to lure people in. If it’s a failure, it’ll make for a great blog entry.

      Then again, you could always do nothing. I put my fantasy novel, The King of Blades, on Kindle, too. That was the novel that was going to be published by Harbor House before they changed their minds after two years of foot-dragging. That freaking book is outselling the short story collection by a mile. What the heck? I mean, I like the book and all, but it’s still a little depressing. I’m really, really working my butt off promoting this short story collection. I have an intense desire to see its Amazon ranking climb a bit.

      In the second intermission to the book, you list ten things you learned while writing the book. I couldn’t help but relate to number five: “Nobody wants to publish my atheism-tinged novel.” If I were to make a list of ten things I learned while writing the stories in my book, I would say the same exact thing. Any plans for the atheism-tinged novel? Are you shopping it around? Do you think you might self-publish it?

      I would kill to publish that book. It’s funny. It’s smart. It’s got the most colorful characters I’ve ever come up with. In the first ten pages, an English professor shouts at students legally crossing the street and I can’t stop laughing every time I read it. I’ve sent it out from time to time, but no dice. Isn’t there some kind of anti-press out there? Like, who’s publishing the antithesis of Eat, Pray Love? My whole book is about evolution and the fact that Creationism is idiotic. It’s gold, subjectively speaking. It could be complete crap too, I suppose.

      You get to a point, sometimes, where you just want the story out there, and I think that’s when self-publishing is at its best. Especially if you have a network of writer-friends who can help you with the process. I have another book written that I worked on for my MFA degree. It’s called The Occupation of Emerald City and it’s about three people living in a city that’s being occupied by a foreign country. The entire book is based on research of occupations, especially Iraq. It’s two years old now but I still think it’s pretty special. Couldn’t find a publisher for it, though, so now it just sits on my computer. Every month, I go back to it and I read through part of it and the temptation to just put it out there is just getting stronger and stronger. 

       What are you working on now? Is the next book in the works yet?

I’m writing the second draft of a book that I think is probably one of the best things I’ve written yet. I’m using first-person narration, just the natural voice that I’ve been so successful with in my published short stories. I’ve never tried that in novel form before, and I have no idea why. I’ve always written in third-person even though that’s not my strong suit. It’s like I had a choice between chocolate cake and carrots, and for some reason I kept picking the carrots.

The story’s about a psychologist treating schizophrenics and it’s based on true events. I actually met someone involved in the original project at a local Starbucks and I would pick his brain every time I bumped into him. Lots of research. Lots of good things happening there. Big Pharma’s not gonna like it, so I suspect they’ll probably kill me soon.

Sometimes, a story really sucks. I’ll go back to it after I’ve finished it and I’ll delude myself into thinking it’s OK so I’ll keep working on it and then I’ll send it out and get a bunch of rejections. Then I’ll look at it again, and I’ll fight the urge to vomit on my keyboard. “What are you thinking?” I’ll ask myself. “Seriously? A story about pirates who find unusual gems filled with the souls of other pirates? That doesn’t make a lick of sense!” Delete.

Sometimes, a story just tingles. I had that with “I Can’t Just Turn It Off,” which is in the book. That story … I sent out the first draft to Glimmer Train and it won a Finalist award. Everything came out almost perfect. Except the ending. The ending needed work. I was lucky enough to find an editor, Richard Peabody, who believed in the story and let me re-submit it three times before it was finally accepted. That’s unprecedented in the world of literary journals. It’s the coolest experience I’ve had so far with a publisher.

So yeah, what I’m trying to say is … this new book? This new book has a tingle.

The countdown to AWP is upon us. We’re heading off first thing Wednesday morning and will be in Chicago until next Sunday. I’m excited, though for different reasons than last year. Last year was my first ever AWP—just the idea of going, of being in the same place at the same time as all those other writers, of having so many interesting events to attend, was thrilling.

This year is going to be a very different experience. For one thing, I’ve got baby in tow and don’t know how many events I’ll actually be able to attend, or how many I’ll have to leave early because Ama’s getting bored and talkative. When I originally registered, my main intent was to spend some time wandering around the book fair—by far my favorite thing about AWP last year (well, not counting reconnecting with old friends). After I’d already registered, I found out that the book fair is free and open to the public on the last day of the conference—doh! I could have just gone, kicked around Chicago with Amalie, and then checked out the book fair for free on Saturday. Ah well.

Since I did register, though, I do plan on at least trying to attend some events. I’ve been reading The Blind Assassin this past week (and falling in love, hard, with Margaret Atwood) and would really like to attend Atwood’s keynote address. There are also some panel discussions whose topics sound really interesting.

But I know, with a five-and-a-half-month-old in my charge and daddy Damien working the New Ohio Review table for half the day, every day, I’ll be at the whims of Amalie’s moods (and feeding and napping schedule—if you can call it a schedule . . .). And that’s fine. Because AWP feels different for me this year not just because I’ll have a baby this time. It’s different, too, because I’ve been through it once before, and while I had a ton of fun, the magic has sort of gone out of it already.  

I know I’m not going to meet an agent in an elevator, suddenly become charming and outgoing, pitch my novel to him/her, and land myself a book deal (I didn’t even have the guts to sign up for a scheduled pitch session with an agent last year). And I know that at my book signing, I’ll be lucky to sell any copies to people I don’t already know—and since the people I know have already bought their copies, I’ll be lucky to sell any at all this year. And I know that, while I like the idea of all these people with shared interests and goals congregating together and sharing this thing with each other, there’s something overwhelming about seeing 10,000 writers together all at once and realizing that they’re all competing for the same publications and the same jobs—it really hammers home your chances: slim, at best.

But like I said, I’m excited, nonetheless. I got some Christmas money that I have yet to spend, so I plan on really letting myself loose on the book fair this year. And I’m looking forward to a fun vacation with Amalie. And I’m going to see some old friends just like last year (I’m really excited about seeing fellow UAF MFAer Jenni Moody!). And I’m definitely looking forward to my off-site reading. I like doing readings, oddly enough (odd, because I’m shy and introverted, and because readings tend to be a sort of dismal affair, where hardly anyone shows up, and of those few, maybe one buys a copy of the book, if you’re lucky), and this reading should be especially good, since several people have already committed to attend.  

Oh AWP, for me, you’ve changed. But that’s okay. I still love you, all the same.

(Don’t forget to check back next week, when my March interview series kicks off with an interview with self-published author Ken Brosky.)

I’ve been busy, busy, busy this week trying to catch up on grading in preparation for AWP, at which, by the way, I’ll be doing an off-site reading (Friday, March 2^nd at 6:00 PM at The Hideout in Chicago) and will probably be doing a book signing at the book fair (date and time TBA). Maybe I’ll see you there?

Anyway, I’ve just got a quick post, then, this week, to drum up some anticipation (I hope) for the interview series I’ll be posting on my blog during the entire month of March. I’ve learned a lot about the publication game through these interviews, which detail four very different writers’ very different experiences publishing their books.

The schedule for this interview series is as follows:

Sunday, March 4^th: Ken Brosky, a self-published author who has implemented some interesting and successful strategies to market his short story collection, The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (and other stories).

Sunday, March 11^th: Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, whose memoir, My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself, was published through a small press (Press 53) and has been selling phenomenally well in the few months since it’s been out.

Sunday, March 18^th: Kathryn Nuernberger, author of the award winning poetry collection Rag & Bone, which was published through Elixir Press after winning the press’s Antivenom prize.

Sunday, March 25^th: J. T. Dutton, who published her two novels, Freaked and Stranded, through HarperTeen. Dutton, needless to say, secured an agent prior to signing contracts with such a major publishing house.

I hope you’ll check these interviews out, and please, if you know any fellow writers who might be interested, point them in my blog’s direction during the month of March.

I talked last week about how I’ve been easing my way back into the writing game these past few weeks. I’m doing things kind of differently, at least for now as I get used to integrating writing back into my life. I used to be a very goal-oriented writer, believing that goals are what keep us going in life. I still think this is somewhat true, and I know that I never would have written and polished two book-length manuscripts while I was in my MFA program (and published one of them shortly after graduating) if it weren’t for the goals I was setting for myself each month.

But for now I’m leaving the world of goals behind. I have to. My life is too unpredictable, too uncontrollable right now with a five-month-old baby. Some days, it’s hard just to keep up with my teaching duties; writing, unfortunately, has to be pushed to the back burner for a little while. Amalie and the overall sanity of my family unit come first, teaching, second (because it’s my job, after all). Writing, then, is a luxury that I long for but can only indulge in sometimes, on the rare occasion when Amalie doesn’t insist on napping on my lap. (Every now and again, I go ahead and write while she’s sleeping on me . . . as, in fact, I’m doing right at this moment writing this blog. But trust me, it’s very difficult to type with only one hand free, the other supporting the body of your heavier-every-day child. My mind works much, much faster than the fingers on only one hand can.)

In some ways, though, I think this experience has replenished some of the magic in writing that had been lost from years of training myself to write almost every day. For a while, writing was like eating, or like personal hygiene: just one of the things you do almost automatically. And that was nice. But. When something is as automatic to you as brushing your teeth, it can sometimes lose some of its power, some of its ability to bring pleasure.

Don’t believe me? Try eating your favorite candy bar every day—hell, have two a day, maybe three. You’ll find very quickly that you stop enjoying it. It just becomes this thing you do. You might crave it, feel lousy if you don’t have one, but it doesn’t taste as good as it used to when it was a now-and-again, special kind of treat. (A side note: the same is probably true for you of soda, in reverse. Most people drink a lot of soda, so much that I think they cease to really taste it. I have some Sprite or Sierra Mist about once a year, and that once a year it tastes so, so good. If I make the mistake of trying it again a week later, it tastes less good. If I have another one, say, a week after that, I don’t like it at all. I can only have it about once a year if I want to experience that amazing, refreshing, delicious taste.)

Anyway, now that writing is this thing I badly want to do but can only do sometimes, I’m reminded how very, very much I love it. How good it feels when a story comes together. How exciting it is to read something I’ve slaved over and know that it is exactly as I want it to be.

In many ways, this is like taking several steps back in my progression as a writer. This is where I was, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago: writing only some of the time and being distracted with other things. But those “other things,” right now, are more important than my little scribbles. My baby is more important to me than anything I’ve ever written—there would be something seriously wrong with me if I didn’t feel that way. And I can’t help feeling like pausing a bit to rekindle my passion for writing is exactly what I should be doing now, anyway.

So. Instead of time goals, and, in fact, instead of keeping track of my writing time at all, for now, I’m just keeping track of the days. Which days I wrote, if even for only a few minutes, and which days I didn’t. I’m hoping that this will take away the guilt I feel when I add up the time I spent writing each month. The guilt is not helping. The guilt is not helping at all. I need writing to be associated with good feelings. The joy of getting lost in my own imagination. The thrill of learning about the world around me. I want to write because I want to write, not because I’ll get down on myself if I don’t.

For the past month, I’ve been slowly warming my writing muscles back up again. I had tried to push myself with an insanely easy goal during winter break, and then I promptly gave up after repeatedly not meeting the goal during the very first week of break. For the month of January, then, which was also my first month teaching two classes since having the baby (though they’re both still online), I decided to just sit back and see what would happen. I obviously wasn’t ready yet to set goals. I did, however, have things I wanted to be working on, and not just in that “I really ought to be writing” sort of way; in that more magical, exciting way, where story ideas and sentences to accompany them dance through your head when you’re doing even the most mundane tasks: washing the dishes, taking a shower, rocking your baby to sleep.

So without even making any effort to push myself back into it, I opened the writing file on my computer and started sifting through my drafts. I was pleasantly surprised to remember that I did, in fact, write several drafts of new stories last year. I have the tendency to feel like I’ve hardly written at all since my book came out, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t revised many drafts to the point of being ready to send around, but I actually did write quite a lot of new stuff last year. 

So I got back to work revising a few of those drafts. I had Damien read a couple of them, and some other people read a third (which Damien had already read). I’m now hungrily revising—and maybe, just maybe almost ready to start sending out—the most promising of the new stories I wrote last year. There are still others that I’ll probably get around to tinkering with later, and a few that I moved to my “Failed Attempts” file (what a strangely good feeling it is sometimes to definitively say, “I will not waste any more time on this story.”).

Up next, I want to get working on a new idea I had recently that I think might develop into a novel. Maybe it’ll just be a novella. I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. I do feel like I should be pushing myself to try working on longer pieces. I’m a bit hesitant about novel writing these days—my experience trying (and failing) to publish the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis left me both disappointed and feeling very shaky about my abilities as a novelist. I’ve read, then revised, then reread the damn thing who knows how many times. The fact that every time I read it, I think it’s publishable makes me wonder if the problem is, in fact, my own ability to recognize what a good novel should and should not be.  

I’ve had enough success publishing short stories that I sometimes wonder if I’m not just one of those writers—there are many, and many of them are very good—who just is and always will be a short story writer. Period. But sometimes I have these ideas, ideas that I don’t think could fit into the space of a short story. So even though I’m tentative and maybe a bit afraid, I’m going to start working on this new idea, and if it ends up developing into a full novel (gulp), well then. So be it.

A friend of mine out here in Ohio, Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, published her first book a few months ago: My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. Kelly has agreed to let me interview her regarding her experience publishing the book, which I plan to post sometime in March. (She also talks a little bit about the process at the end of the book, if you’re interested.) 

In the meantime, I wanted to talk a little about how much I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s funny and poignant, sad at parts, but that plucky, you-can-get-through-this sort of sad. The book details Kelly’s exploits retracing the Ingalls family’s journey west, at the same time exploring Kelly’s relationship with a man she refers to as “My Manly” and her desire to figure out what it is she wants out of life.

Part of the reason I was so pleased that this book was so good was because I remember, a couple of years ago, talking to Kelly about the book while she was writing it. This was not long after I had met Kelly, not long after I found out that Kelly’s first fiction publication—that’s right, her very first—had appeared in no less than the Gettysburg Review. (That same story ended up being nominated for a Pushcart, and it got her noticed by an agent!)

I remember it very clearly: a small group of us were having lunch at Casa Nueva—a highly overrated restaurant in my town, which serves food that kind of, sort of, if you really squint your eyes and hold your nose, resembles Mexican food—and Kelly was talking about working on the book. She really should be home writing, she said, but she knew the second she got home she would probably just curl up on the couch with the cats and take a nap. She was joking around, of course, but the sentiment behind the joke rang true: sometimes she just didn’t feel like writing. She had to get this thing done, she told me, because she’d already lined up a publisher for it. Still, there were definitely days when she had to force herself to get to work.

Cut to a little over two years later: the book is out and it’s fabulous. The work she did definitely paid off, and based on the number of Amazon book reviews it’s already garnered (my book’s been out more than a year and only three people have reviewed it on Amazon), I think it’s selling pretty well. And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about that day at Casa, how she hadn’t felt like writing. She hadn’t felt like writing, and yet when she sat down and forced herself to do it anyway, this lovely book is what resulted.

I find it all very reassuring, don’t you? ALL writers have to force it sometimes, even the really, really good ones like Kelly. Nobody walks around in a constant state of inspiration. Some days we stare at the blank screen for what feels like hours, willing the words to come. Others, we have trouble even getting that far. But it’s the writers who sit in front of that computer anyway who eventually produce excellent books like My Life as Laura. We should all take a page out of Kelly’s book.

Sorry, kitty, no nap for me today. I’ve got work to do.

Over the past week or so I read two very, very good books—Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby and Room by Emma Donoghue. Nick Hornby is one of my favorite writers—I’ve read all of his novels and loved every one. This was the second book I’ve read by Emma Donoghue, although I didn’t realize that until the end, when I was looking at the list of other books by her. It turns out she wrote one of my favorite short story collections of all time, Kissing the Witch, which reimagines classic fairy tales through a modern feminist perspective.

Both Juliet, Naked and Room were absolutely riveting, and Room is the best book I’ve read in a looooooong time. One thing that really struck me about both books was the fact that I was so engaged with the characters and plots that the writing itself just faded completely into the background—I hardly noticed it at all. This is not to say that the writing wasn’t good, on a language level. Both authors have an excellent grasp of voice, and we learn so much about the characters by the way they see and think about the world. Especially impressive is the writing in Room, which takes as its narrator a five-year-old boy who doesn’t understand very much about the world (think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but even younger and even more confused). Sounds like a difficult, maybe even impossible perspective to get in to, but Donoghue totally pulls it off. It is, in fact, the voice of the narrator that gives Room its emotional resonance. He’s so innocent, so young and sweet. He deserves better than this awful, awful world.

But it wasn’t really the beautiful, flawless sentences in both books that made them so impossible to put down, or at least, it was more than that. It was the combination of everything together: the stories themselves, the characters, and the perfect writing. I had to know what was going to happen next. Would Annie end up sleeping with Tucker? Would Jack and Ma escape Old Nick and leave Room forever behind? I’ve talked in the past about how novels often have their slow patches, and how usually, when I finish reading a novel, I feel as though it should have been significantly trimmed. Not so with either of these books. I was right there with the characters on every single page, and that’s the sort of thing that can only be accomplished by compelling plot and characters, not beautiful writing alone.

On the one hand, there was something mildly depressing about the books, as a writer. Because I could never be that good. Because I’m the sort of writer who gets by on lyrical prose; plot is the biggest thing I struggle with, and it probably always will be. Still, reading these books was a valuable reminder of why I became a writer to begin with. It wasn’t the old “I could do that too” mentality that writers sometimes talk about. I became a writer—I’m sure many of us did—because of books like these. Books so perfect I wouldn’t change a thing. Books I could never have written myself. Books that make the world a better place just by their mere existence.