Content warning: This essay contains discussion of rape.

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, after Tess tells her new husband that she is not a virgin and he rejects her, Thomas Hardy describes a scene in which the husband sleepwalks, carrying Tess through a field, over a river, to an abandoned stone coffin outside of a run down Abbey. He lays her in the coffin and falls to the ground asleep. Then Tess sits up in the coffin. This scene is one of Hardy's “moments of vision,” a moment that Virginia Woolf described as a passage in which both author and reader seem “to be suddenly and without their own consent lifted up and swept onwards.” It is perhaps vain to attempt to discern the meaning of this passage. Hardy himself, who stated in the explanatory note of the novel that “novels are impressions, not arguments,” might deplore such an effort — but I am the reader, and as Woolf also wrote about reading him, “it is for the reader, steeped in the impression, to supply the comment.” ¹

In order to probe the deeper meaning, it is first necessary to trace Hardy's steps as he carries Tess to that coffin. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a novel about a pure woman whose purity is abused and mocked by an unjust world until it tramples her for sport. Even at the beginning of the novel when she is still a young country girl with little experience, Tess is the moral center of her family. When she comes home and discovers that her father has gone to drink a few hours before he is to take a load of beehives on an overnight journey by horse, it is Tess who rebukes her mother for letting him go. Joan Durbeyfield, convicted by her daughter's rebuke, goes to fetch the father but ends up staying at the bar, and Tess is forced to fetch both parents and help carry her drunk father home. At this as in many later points in the story, Tess's purity is abused by society and “Nature's holy plan” — Her father is too drunk to wake, and Tess is forced to make the journey with her brother. They both fall asleep, the horse is killed in an accident, and Tess is pushed by her family and her own guilt to call on a wealthy family that has assumed the name of the Durbeyfields' long dead relatives, the D'Urbervilles. This is the inciting incident of the novel, and it is here the theme is introduced in earnest. Who is made to pay for the dissipation and pride of the family's father? It's purest member.

When Tess arrives at the D'Urberville estate she exclaims “I thought we were an old family, but this is all new!” In fact the D'Urbervilles that Tess is induced to claim kin with have falsely assumed the D'Urberville name. A rich merchant looking to settle down and blend in as a county man in the South of England had used his fortune to fabricate a family tree that connected him to the ancient family line. Here again we see that society values money and appearance more than true integrity. Tess, a true descendant of the D'Urbervilles by blood, reaps no benefit, while the sham descendants enjoy all the good standing and honor. It is at this point that we are introduced to Alec D'Urberville, most generously described as a well-to-do degenerate. Struck by Tess's “luxuriance of aspect” and innocent nature, he engineers her hiring and constantly stalks and teases her without her consent. He takes advantage of his position as a privileged man and her employer to coerce Tess, and one night when Tess is very tired and vulnerable, he rapes her.

This crucial event is not narrated in detail. Hardy is purposely vague. Whether or not this is because he had to satisfy a publisher's or an artist's prerogative is not relevant. There is more than enough to infer what happens: Hardy asks why her guardian angel is absent, why Alec is allowed to trace such a course pattern on Tess's skin, and reckons that this could have been a retribution for Tess's ancestors who may have “dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time.” In spite of this some readers may still be tempted to ask whether it was actually a rape. After all, Tess did not kick and scream or cry out. But all doubts can be extinguished with a single question: Did Tess consent to sex? No. She never even consented to a flirtatious word. The closest we get to the moment is an exchange with Alec in which Tess says, “I didn't understand your meaning until too late.” Alec replies that that's what every woman says, to which Tess answers, “Did it ever strike you that what every woman says some women may feel?” Through Alec, Hardy shows just how little society values the word of the woman compared to that of the man, and though I sit here typing this essay over a century later I am sad to say that scant progress has been made in this regard.

When she realizes she is pregnant Tess resolves to return home. Once again, Tess's purity is abused by society because she does not accept Alec's professions of love or offers of money. The pregnancy would compromise her position at the D'Urberville estate, and more importantly it would not be right. She does not love Alec and she never did. To accept his “love” now would be to lie, so she leaves to have the child. While she waits Tess takes long walks in the woods, and on these walks Hardy comments that “she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.” Nature recognizes Tess's purity, even if society does not.

After she has the baby Tess is able to feel something of the purity that Hardy sees in her. She takes a job threshing, and realizes that her lot as a mother is not so distressing; what makes it distressing is society's view of her. But then the baby falls ill, and here perhaps more than anywhere else, Tess's purity is made to burn through the pages against society's corruption. Tess's father refuses to send for the parson on account of the “smudge which Tess had set” upon his nobility. He locks the door, and Tess is left to pass the night with her dying infant. Tess is frantic not just for her child's life but for his soul. He has not been baptized, and the girl-mother's head runs wild with the tortures the baby might suffer in hell according to the doctrines taught in the church of her time — so she baptizes him.

In this scene Tess is transfigured into a saint. This is another moment of vision, one in which Hardy almost seems to forget that Tess is a fictional character and not a real human being. He describes the airy note which Tess's voice took on “when her heart was in her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.” Her face has a touch of dignity which is “almost regal”, and to her siblings, whom Tess awakens to witness and affirm the baptism with their little “Amens”, she does not look like “Sissy”, but “a being large, towering and awful, a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.” Yet in the morning the well-named infant Sorrow is dead, and Tess goes to ask the parson about his soul. She asks whether the baptism is just the same to God, and the parson says it is, but when asked if it would secure a Christian burial he cannot “for certain reasons.” Once again society refuses to recognize Tess's purity, and she is forced to bury her baby with criminals and drunkards. Only Hardy continues to gaze at Tess where society turns away: after the burial she erects a homemade cross and brings flowers in a marmalade jar.

Wanting to leave home and start a new life, Tess jumps at an offer to work on a dairy farm distant enough from home that no one would know of her past. It goes well, and Tess passes what is probably the happiest summer of her life. She makes friends with the other milkmaids, learns the trade well, and enjoys belonging to the community at Talbothay's dairy. She also falls in love with Angel Clare, a gentle and philosophical man who turns out to be as fulfilling as a sack of wet sandwiches. Tess vows not to love him, but she cannot prevent the attraction, and she is thwarted again and again in her attempts both to tell Angel about her past and to ward off his affection for her. Just after they are married, Angel tells Tess about his sexual encounter with an older woman of the world. Tess is almost happy to forgive him as she tells him about Alec, but the double standard strikes her again, and Angel does not forgive her. Like the rest of society he sees Tess only for what she is not, forgetting that “the defective can be more than the entire.”

Angel's subconscious is not so easily duped, and after the two go to sleep he wakes and carries Tess from her bed into the night. He calls her his darling, laments her death, and kisses her before he lays her in the coffin. Whether or not Hardy intended it, this moment of vision is a metaphor for the entire novel. Hardy, lamenting Tess's fate, nevertheless carries her tenderly throughout the pages of the book, showering her with affection and attention even as society casts her off, so that after she is dead in the coffin she sits up in the mind of the reader and lives on. Perhaps Hardy himself, like Angel, did it in a state of unconscious compassion. Either way the effect is achieved unmistakably.

I first read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in High School for an AP Literature class. It was my first experience with Thomas Hardy and I forgot nearly every detail of the plot, but I never forgot Tess herself. Hardy left her impression on my memory, so much so that when I saw a copy at a used book sale over five years later I decided to buy it, and years after that I suggested to my wife that she should read it because “I remember kind of liking it.” Now, having re-read it as an older man without the joy-killing obligation of having to read for class, I have realized that my memory is proof of my thesis. Hardy killed Tess in the novel, but she sat up in the coffin and lived on in my mind.

In the novel society abuses and tries to pretend Tess does not exist, but I never forgot her. Her far reaching personality imbues the pages with a “burning sensibility.” I can see her, cheeks red with cold as she trudges over the snow to a miserable job, smiling ironically with Marion and blowing a kiss to her feckless husband in the direction she imagines him to be; or wandering among “lonely hills and dales,” “her flexuous figure” mingling with nature as she ponders her lot; or milking dexterously with the other maids as flies buzz and the cow's chew and slap their tails. To borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf, she has taken on a “more than mortal size” in my memory. Hardy, in carrying Tess to her doom, has drawn an inverted relationship between Tess's standing in society and her standing with the reader. As society crushes her lower and lower, her memory rises higher and higher, so that she is soon as high as the black flag of the tower that announces her death. And so carried in the reader's mind, after she is dead and the book is closed, she then sits up.

¹ Both quotes are from an essay Virginia Woolf published shortly after Thomas Hardy's death, titled The Novels of Thomas Hardy.

#essay #nonfiction #thomashardy #virginiawoolf #tessofthedurbervilles

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, I greatly regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hands, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world.

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“She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle.” — To the Lighthouse (84)

On page 84 of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes how Lily Briscoe, squeezed by social pressure during dinner at the Ramsey's house, remembers “all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure,” that she can improve her painting by “moving the tree to the middle.” She then picks up a salt shaker and puts it down “so as to remind herself to move the tree.”

These are two rather mundane sentences. They do not evoke strong emotion and they do not have particular significance in the immediate context. But Virginia Woolf weaves them into the text, using the movement of the salt shaker to remind both Briscoe and the reader twenty pages later that to “move the tree to the middle,” does not simply mean improving one's painting; it also means finding purpose and value outside of society's expectations (for Lily it is to marry). Then, when Lily comes back to the Ramsey's many years and pages later, after Mrs. Ramsey's death, the reader and Lily are taken back to that flash of inspiration at dinner with a simple phrase: “Move the tree to the middle, she had said (102).”

For those who have not tried to write compelling prose, this example may seem underwhelming. But as with many masterstrokes, “moving the tree to the middle” can be appreciated by imagining what you might have done instead. Even if you had lit on the idea of moving the tree to symbolize Lily's commitment to her art, would you have been brave and innovative enough to recall it twenty pages later, not with simple exposition that a reader cannot miss, but with a glance “at the salt cellar on the pattern”? This use of the word “salt” enhances the tree idiom. It is a word you can taste. It draws the reader into Lily Briscoe's mind and lived experience. This is immersion. This is how Virginia Woolf rewards the reader for journeying into the human soul with her.

This is just one example of the many recurring motifs in To the Lighthouse that Woolf weaves together as she tosses the reader on the waves of her characters' lives. There is Cam and James' “fight against tyranny (163, 184),” Tansley's refrain in Lily Briscoe's mind that women “can't paint, can't write (86, 158),” “Heaven (153, 171),” and many more. They illuminate the pages like the steady turning of the lighthouse itself, stroked both with subtlety and boldness in the way that only a master who knows when to break the rules can. She mixes metaphors. Her punctuation breaks convention. She puts an entire chapter in parentheses, and reduces another to a single sentence. This is a book published in 1927 that is bolder and yet more restrained than 99% of modern literature in its form and subject. Virginia Woolf is not only an important female writer, she is a master wordsmith of the English language.

Poe once wrote that originality “demands... negation.” In Virginia Woolf's prose there is a great energy and fierceness, but also great precision. Conversations at dinner can whirl into sailors fighting a gale so as not to fall to “the floor of the sea (84)”, “Heaven [can] never be sufficiently praised (153)!” for an awkward conversation saved by “the blessed island of good boots,” and an adolescent son at tension with his father vows to take a knife and strike him “to the heart (184).” In isolation these excerpts are melodramatic, but they are so well-timed amid the deep exploration of her characters' thoughts, that Woolf succeeds in painting the giddy heights and abyssal lows of the human experience. Rather than overwhelm the reader with her extreme metaphors, Woolf exercises restraint and drops them at just the right time like the final blow of a hammer. It is hard reading that demands much from the reader, but it is also some of the most rewarding that I have encountered. The experience is best described by Woolf herself in an essay about the love of reading:

“It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that.

For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.”

“How One Should Read a Book” by Virginia Woolf

When I consider that she received no formal higher education, that she suffered from manic depression, that she developed a love of reading and writing from her family's library, I cannot help but see Lily Briscoe's struggle as Woolf's own. How many men in Woolf's life whispered to her that women “can't paint, can't write?” How many times, sitting with the pen in her hand, did she struggle to hold onto her vision as “the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child (19)?” This is not to romanticize the tortured artist, it is to empathize. Writing serious art is hard enough without external resistance. I can only imagine what Woolf faced, and my heart breaks for the premature loss of her life and the unfinished works she left behind. It is not because of an artist's afflictions that great art is made, it is in spite of them. And it is in spite of the Charles Tansleys, in spite of the demons and the dreadful passages through the dark, in spite of her critics and her own exacting standards, in spite of “the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually (161)”, that Virginia Woolf has had her vision and succeeds in painting it by “moving the tree to the middle.” To read To the Lighthouse is to be immersed in a magnificent portrait of “daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark (161).”

I read this book shortly after graduating from college, and I am glad I did. Had I read it younger, I am not sure I could have appreciated it, because it is challenging reading for even serious readers. I have since read The Waves, and Mrs. Dalloway, and some of her essays, and I have never been disappointed. Her prose puts me in a rapture. Before I read To the Lighthouse I had not thought this type of writing even possible. It shocked me, like jumping into a cold ocean, but once I acclimated I found that the currents, though strong and forceful, were also gentle and purposeful. They never took me farther than was necessary or let me linger still for too long. This careful refinement of pace and passion is present in all the work that I have read by Woolf, and it is perhaps at its most perfect in To the Lighthouse.

If creating art is an expression of love, then a writer could be a lover, and “there might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed and compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays (192).”

Virginia Woolf was such a lover.

#nonfiction #essay #virginiawoolf #tothelighthouse

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. NY, NY, Harcourt Inc, 1981.

Woolf, Virginia. “Virginia Woolf: ‘How Should One Read a Book?’” The Yale Review, The Yale Review, 1 Sept. 1926, yalereview.org/article/virginia-woolf-essay-how-should-read-book.

—

Thank you for reading! My name is Hunter Dansin. I am a writer, musician, and coder living with and loving my growing family. My first book, Dawn Must Follow Night, is the first book in an original fantasy series that confronts darkness within and without.

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— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

My hometown has had an emotional controversy about retiring an Indian mascot. It is a controversy that Twitter says should not exist in 2022, and I feel the same sense of embarrassed denial while writing about it that a man must feel when he gets into a public altercation. This cannot be happening to me, can it?

But it is, and I have the luxury of seeing it from a distance. I no longer live in the town where I spent most of my childhood. I have been to China and lived in different states for five years. One might think this distance would also grant me the luxury of a clear perspective from which I might do what a writer from the Washington Post claims to do: “distill observations of family, politics and culture into moments of clarity and insight.”

Whether or not she can, I cannot. Because even if my home only exists in my memory, it still exists in the same way that a part of me will always be walking on those cracked sidewalks long after they have been paved. This new Cambridge is one that I hear about from family and the Washington Post, and it disorients me. The racist baggage is something that I think I always knew was there, but like Neil Gifford, the CCSD board member, I agree that it's “not who we are.”

In fact most people I knew and now know in Cambridge are not racists or bigots. Whether or not that is because, like me before college, they never had the opportunity to be, I do not know. I thought I was colorblind until I left home, and had to confront diversity without a screen between me and the people that did not look like me. It hurt because I had to wrestle with those gut reactions implanted by years of unchallenged microaggressions. I had to pick apart my identity and discard the rotten parts, some of which were very close to my core. This is what Cambridge seems to be going through, and the school mascot is for many close to the core of the town.

I cannot understand this because I was never proud to be “an Indian.” I was proud to play sports for Cambridge, but I knew that a mascot was just a superficial symbol. The mascot itself was consumed by the significance of what it represented, which to me at the time was the school and the people on my team. My memories are evidence for why the Indian mascot is a failure.

Supporters say that the mascot honors Native Americans and prevents erasure of indigenous peoples from history, but it does the opposite. The mascot has no place in my memory because I cared more about what it represented than what it was supposed to represent. It prevented me from thinking below the surface of the history of Indigenous Peoples in Cambridge, and I believe it has done the same for the whole town. I was not taught a single thing about Indigenous Peoples beyond what was on the New York State Regents. There were no ceremonies. There was no unit in Social Studies about the families in Cambridge. There was no monument or plaque prominent enough for me to remember. I cannot tell you the indigenous name for the land under Cambridge, NY and this shames me.

It might have been different in the past that the supporters remember, but in the present the mascot is a failure. It failed because wearing a stock photo on a grass stained jersey is not real honor. It is an excuse that allows us to forget. A mascot freezes the image of the American Indian in time and makes them a caricature that existed right around John Wayne and died right around Andrew Jackson and makes invisible the Indigenous Peoples who trace their heritage back, not to find one twenty-fourth of a symbol for their imagined 'connection to the land,' but to find “signs that a man could love his fate, that winter in the blood is one sad thing.”*

Tom Wolfe was right, but he did not realize that memory is more than a closet. Memory makes us who we are. Memory convinces us to strive for more. Memory protects us and sometimes betrays us, but we can no more repudiate it than we can a parent. Cambridge to me is winning a game ball coated with that sweet dark red American dust-sand of the baseball field, and riding over quiet hills billowed by manure-sweet wind, and imagining myself the commander of Gondor's armies in my friend's backyard next to the library, and climbing the iron artillery cannon wishing that I could jump in the barrel and fire myself up into the sky.

That is the town I remember, but I have seen the PROTECT THE PRIDE EDUCATION RESPECT TRADITION signs and they embarrass me, but a sign cannot describe a town just as Myers and Briggs cannot fully describe a person. A person is full of dissenting and often ugly emotions that can rage out when their buttons are pushed — but it is not the whole of them. I wish I could condemn “the keepers” and feel that clean happiness that comes with believing one's ideology is standing on the righteous side of the picket line, but I cannot because I remember my town in more colors than black and orange.

It is a shame that I am only now attempting to fill in my memories of Cambridge with the history of the Indigenous Peoples who were there before because the school could have started me earlier. It would be an even greater shame if the adults forgot about the kids and continued to bicker over what to put on a T-Shirt, because the kids are more important. Their memories will be stained, and so will the memory of the people as old as the land whose tongue we refused to learn and whose memories we refused to listen to. In this country that careens toward the future like an alcoholic to the next bottle with no regard for the wake of broken people and glass in her wake, replacing the mascot should not be rejected as an infringement. It should be welcomed as an opportunity to remember lives instead of totems.

#essay #opinion #nonfiction #news

References

Cohen, Kate. “Opinion | a New York School District Confronts Hatred in Its Yearbook — If Not Its Mascot Name.” Washington Post, 16 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/16/cambridge-ny-yearbook-mascot-racism/.

*Welch, James. Riding the Earthboy 40. The World Publishing Company, 1971, p. 17. “In My Lifetime.”

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley; in Search of America, Steinbeck Centennial Edition. Penguin Group, 2002 (1962). p. 157.

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, I greatly regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hands, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world. If you subscribe I promise I will not gum up your inbox.

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It's a sad tale, it's a tragedy

It's a sad song

But we sing it anyway“

— Road to Hell (Reprise)

Hermes stands over a defeated Orpheus. The boy watches his lover sink back into the Underworld. He was only a few steps away from life but he doubted and looked back, breaking his contract with Hades. Eurydice must now remain in hell, and Orpheus can never go back. It's a sad song that turns out the same every time, so why sing it?

Hadestown is a musical written by Anaïs Mitchell in 2006. She recorded a concept album and the show eventually made it to Broadway in 2019. It is based on the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I love it.

I am not a connoisseur of musical theater. Not until Hamilton did I really start to appreciate the medium, and it was only because of my wife that I discovered Hadestown (she teaches Latin). At first I thought it was interesting, not quite as smart or complex as Hamilton, but still good. Yet as I listened repeatedly (mainly because the music is phenomenal) the story started to sink its hooks in me.

There are a lot of worthy themes in Hadestown: faith, trust, love, fear... But the one I want to talk about, the one that is stuck in my mind, is hope that sings in the face of failure.

Orpheus the Naive?

“And this poor boy, he wore his heart out on his sleeve

You might say he was naive to the ways of the world.“

— Anyway the Wind Blows

Orpheus is a bit of a sap, and he is often played for laughs. Hades comes back for Persephone early, plunging the world into a dark winter. Then Orpheus comes along singing about bringing the world “back into tune.” His hope sticks out like an unwelcome gust of fresh air in a world where the wind is always foul.

This outlook is contrasted with the outlook of Eurydice, his lover, who as Hermes says “was no stranger to the world.” She is a “hungry young girl” who drifts from town to town when the wind changes. She runs from everywhere and everyone she's ever met because her experience has taught her that “everybody is a fair weather friend.” She, and everyone else in the world of men, can't imagine a better world because this dark one is the only one they've ever known.

In “Wedding Song”, Eurydice tests Orpheus not on his love for her but his ability to provide. She asks about the wedding bands, the table and the bed. It is only after Orpheus sings his song and grows a flower with it, thereby providing proof that he can do what he says he can, that she starts to accept him.

Hermes summarizes it this way:

“When she fell she fell in spite of herself In love with Orpheus“

— All I've Ever Known

It is difficult to judge either Eurydice or Orpheus. His naivety about the world leads him to neglect her by focusing on his song, and her worldliness leads her to betray him by accepting Hades's offer. Perhaps they were destined for a tragedy.

The Failure

Orpheus finishes his song, but by the time he does Eurydice is already dead. Hermes gives him a hard time, but when it is clear that Orpheus will go “to the end of time” to get Eurydice back, Hermes explains that there is another way to get to Hades without a ticket.

Orpheus makes an impossible journey into the Underworld. He crosses the river Styx and sings his song to make the stones of Hades' wall weep and let him in. He arrives in Hadestown and finds Eurydice, but he also finds the King of the Underworld.

Hades is not at all pleased that a poor boy with a lyre was able to cross his borders, but he is also bemused. He invites Orpheus to sing him a song before banishing him to the graveyard. Orpheus steps to the microphone and sings. He sings about Hades and his love for Persephone. He sings about the love that turns the seasons, and he sings to Hades the melody that the King used to woo Persephone.

Against all odds the song works. Hades's heart is softened and Orpheus is given a chance to leave the Underworld, but there is a test. Eurydice must walk behind Orpheus, and if he looks back she remains in the Underworld forever.

But Orpheus fails.

Why?

Hadestown could have addressed or rewrote Orpheus's failure and made it easier to swallow. The myth is ambiguous and Mitchell was already taking liberties with it, but she chose to dwell on the moment. The audience is forced to sit with the tragedy as Eurydice sinks back down, but why?

There was plenty of room for re-writing. In some versions of the myth Orpheus dies at the hands of Maenads. The musical could have continued, seeing Orpheus reuniting with Eurydice in the Underworld. There are echoes of this in the closing moments, where we hear Eurydice's voice and the coming of spring, but Orpheus's failure is the end of the plot. We are reminded throughout the last song that “It's a sad song,” and lest we forget that, Hermes reminds us that we are not here to “correct” the myth:

“Don't ask why, brother, don't ask how

He could have come so close

The song was written long ago

And that it is how it goes“

— Road to Hell (Reprise)

So why are we here? Hermes does not provide a direct answer, instead referencing the hope that Orpheus had for changing the world “in spite of the way that it is.” He asks us if we can see it, hear it and feel that hope “like a train.”

There are hints that Orpheus, in spite of losing Eurydice, was able to make spring come again and “bring the world back into tune.” But he does not get his love, and the last line of the musical brings us back to the beginning “We're gonna sing it again.”

A better place to find the reason that Hadestown dwells on tragedy is in the epilogue, which is usually sung by Persephone and company after the audience is done clapping and getting ready to leave. She asks us to “raise a cup” for Orpheus, and goes on to explain why they are singing.

“Some birds sing when the sun shines bright

Our praise is not for them

But the ones who sing in the dead of night

We raise our cups to them

...

Some flowers bloom where the green grass grows

Our praise is not for them

But the ones who bloom in the bitter snow

We raise our cups to them

...

To Orpheus and all of us

Goodnight, brothers, goodnight“

— We Raise Our Cups

Failure and tragedy are inevitable. They strike whether we expect them or want them to. Hadestown, rather than shy from tragedy or try to correct it, uses the myth to dive into the mixed feelings of loss, pain, guilt and shattered hope that swirl when tragedy strikes. And it ends with a celebration of the human spirit that keeps singing anyway.

#nonfiction #essay #Hadestown #failure

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, it is a great regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world. I promise I will not gum up your inbox.

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So God said to Jonah, “Are you really so very angry about the little plant?” And he said, “I am as angry as I could possibly be!” The Lord said, “You were upset about this little plant, something for which you did not work, nor did you do anything to make it grow. It grew up overnight and died the next day.”

— Jonah 4:9-10 NET

“I hate politics.”

“Politics are more polarized than ever.”

“America is divided.”

“I hate elections.”

“The government is corrupt.”

I have heard these ideas expressed every election year. It is true that 2020 is exceptional, but in reality every election is exceptional. Who can calculate all the factors and people that swirl in our country for four years? The United States government has endured civil war, depressions and even pandemics, and its people have endured far more.

Most Americans I know are simply trying to live, but a few I know are so concerned about the shade of the government that they are angry enough to die. True, despair is easier to slip into and dwell in now. We can surround ourselves with bad news that we will never be able to do anything about. We have the ability to ignore all who disagree and let the facts be interpreted for us.

It is tempting, isn't it? I can create a world where my assumptions are never challenged and my opinions are always right. It pleases my pride to overwhelm myself with evidence that the other side is wrong. I have access to the truly true secret knowledge that “they” REALLY don't want you to know. All I have to do is tap some shiny glass, but the other side of the glass isn't real.

What do you believe in? Where is your hope? How much does the president mean to you? How much does he really effect you? When do you interact with the government? Do you really think that electing one person can solve all your problems? Can you be distilled into a binary choice? How many lives are you willing to sacrifice to be proven right? What have you done to make this country and this government? What do you owe it? What does it owe you? What is the government responsible for? What should it be responsible for?

These questions have been stewing since 2016. The only one I can answer definitively is the first one, but Jonah and his plant have helped clarify how I value politics:

I believe that America's system of checks and balances is a brilliant idea. I think it is about as good as we can do on earth. I am thankful to live in the United States, but I did not plant it or make it grow. I did not help write the Constitution or sign the Declaration of Independence. All I have done is live here. American government and its relative stability has been a shade over my head, and like Jonah I was once very delighted with it.

The shade seemed to wither in 2016 (though for others it might have seemed to strengthen), but now on the eve of an election I am reminded that my hope is eternal and that this world will pass away. I voted and I care very much who wins, but I do not care about it more than you or my family or Jesus. I want to devote myself to good policies over parties and to people over politics because the people of America are far more influential than the president.

#nonfiction #essay #uspol #Jesus

It would be very easy for me to say that publishing is an industry, and that the reason I don't make enough money to even think about telling people I am an author when they ask the ubiquitously depressing get-to-know-you question is because I haven't invested in marketing or my platform, but I won't say that even though I just did.

Truthfully, I have no idea why my book doesn't sell. I could make some guesses: Its my first published work, I have no preexisting platform, I didn't spend any money on a campaign, it's self published, maybe it's just not very good. I could tell myself that I never really set out to sell a bunch of copies, but if I'm honest being a full time author is my dream job, and that is impossible without book sales.

I want to be the exception, the unicorn, but I know the chances of that are worse than scratch-offs. “You have to think about it like a business”, “You've gotta compartmentalize”, “View it like work” — all things I tell myself about marketing. Sometimes it works, but it feels dishonest to me. To market effectively you have to act like your book is the next Lord of the Rings, but I know it's not. I think Dawn Must Follow Night is pretty unique and worth your time, but I wrote it, and I see more and more of its flaws as time passes. I have relinquished the false assumption that sales equals quality, but I don't want to sell my book because I persuade you into it. I want the weight of the words to carry it. If I can only become a better writer by spending time writing, then time spent marketing is a waste.

Yet I know that marketing is not evil. As with most activities it can be carried to harmful extremes, but it is not intrinsically bad or good, but that doesn't change that it feels slimy to me. I have tried to read recently traditionally published novels that are best sellers and the next big deal and am consistently underwhelmed and sometimes revolted. Fifty Shades was not one of the ones I tried to read, but it proved that drivel can sell. Great novels are rare for a reason, but the industry rolls forward and publishes not terrible but not great writing as if it were.

Maybe that's the problem. Great novels have a reputation for changing lives. Book blogs publish “100 must read books”, but the reality is that no book is a “must read.” Do I love reading? Of course. It teaches, convicts, encourages, and engages my mind daily — but with the exception of a collection of documents passed down through thousands of years of history about a carpenter's son from Nazareth, I hesitate to call any book “must read.” They are all written by people, and like people they are imperfect and gloriously opinionated. Perhaps this industry is so streamlined now that we have forgotten that books are not products. They are a vehicle for thoughts and ideas and stories.

Steinbeck writes about the sterilization of language in Travel's with Charley in Search of America:

“Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”

Is that what is happening? Are we becoming such a product of television that uniform blandness has invaded not only our speech but our books as well? I could not tell you without reading more popular fiction, and I love classics too much to do that.

Perhaps marketing bothers me so much not because it is evil, but because it is bland. It seeks to appeal to the largest audience possible, and because of that it must be appealing to all. We who enjoy strong flavors and acquire a taste for the unique and often strange treasures of thought are put off. In popular fantasy and science fiction especially, success seems to be measured by whether or not you get a screen adaption, but writing as a medium is capable of so much more than a vehicle for plot and character. What is stopping prose from being as much a part of the experience as world building and character? What is stopping a fantasy novel from taking full advantage of the medium? Well, it takes a lot of practice to write like Hemingway, but the industry does not encourage fantasy authors who want to make a decent living to practice writing like that. The most popular ones are lauded for their ability to craft a plot and magic system, but rarely for prose or narrative technique. “Good” prose in the mainstream of the genre is “clear”, “descriptive”, maybe even “poetic” if it has some flavor.

Nobody looks for great masters of the written word in fantasy. They look for story tellers, dreamers, plot weavers. Perhaps I am crazy, and perhaps I should just go and try to write Literature, but I love my imagination too much to do that. If there is any genre where playing with perception and mixing the abstract with the concrete can be utilized to its full potential, it is in one called fantasy.

I am not claiming to be better than popular fantasy authors, but perhaps my goals are different. Once you've read an author like Hemingway or Woolf or Joyce or Steinbeck it is hard not to be disappointed by everything else. My pompous author pipe dream represented by an imaginary review for one of my books is this: “If Hemingway wrote fantasy.”

Clearly, I have a long way to go.

#nonfiction #essay #publishing #writing

First, thank you for reading! To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, it is a great regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world. I promise I will not gum up your inbox.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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The comparison of large tech companies and corporations to colonizing powers is not a new one. In this essay I examine the comparisons that have already been made and what can be contributed to the discussion.

“Digital Colonialism”

The most direct comparison that has already been made is the usage of colonial terms to refer to Facebook and other big tech organizations exercising influence over developing countries via free services. Specifically, Renata Aviala, a senior digital rights advisor to the World Wide Web Foundation, used the term “Digital Colonialism”. She says that it is: “the new deployment of a quasi-imperial power over a vast number of people, without their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems by a vastly dominant power.”

This comparison is made in the context of Facebook's substantial influence over local information ecosystems in many countries. Aviala gives an example from late 2017, when Facebook caused a sharp reduction in page views of publications and organizations by changing the news feed without warning. The effects were most severe in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia — because Facebook is a crucial platform for many news outlets in those countries (especially smaller ones). She uses the term “digital colonialism” as a metaphor to describe influence exercised by big tech (mostly American corporations) over smaller countries.

This term was also used when a number of developing countries refused to sign an “international declaration on data flows”. The reason for the refusal was rooted in the disparity between local users and the location of data centers. For example, India has the highest number of Facebook users worldwide, but only one of fifteen Facebook data centers is located in Asia (Singapore). The rest are located in North America and Europe.

The connection of the term “digital colonialism” with real world geography and events was also made in a paper by Michael Kwet of Yale University titled “Digital Colonialism: US empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South”. This paper is directly and indirectly referenced in the conversation about colonialism in the digital age.

“US empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South”

Because it is the most in depth exploration of what digital colonialism means, I will attempt a basic overview of Michael Kwet's paper. Kwet, at the time of writing, was a Sociology PhD candidate at Yale Law School.

Terms Kwet uses:

Global South: A term “employed in a post-national sense to address spaces and peoples negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization.”

Big Tech: A term commonly used to refer to major US tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Big Data: “An accumulation of data that is too large and complex for processing by traditional database management tools.”

The abstract states: “This paper proposes a theoretical and conceptual framework explaining how the United States is reinventing colonialism in the Global South through the domination of digital technology. Drawing on South Africa as a case example, it argues that US multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware, and network connectivity”. It then asserts that imperial control manifests itself in five “forms of domination”: economic domination, imperial control, global surveillance capitalism, imperial state surveillance, and tech hegemony. Lastly, the abstract presents People's Technology for People's Power as a provider of solutions to counter the “rapidly advancing frontier of digital empire” (Kwet 1).

The introduction contextualizes the paper as a case study of South Africa and outlines the main goals of its research:

“This paper proposes a theoretical and conceptual framework for assessing digital colonialism, drawing on South Africa as a case example. In doing so, it makes three contributions to scholarship: (1) it theorizes digital colonialism as rooted in control over the digital ecosystem, (2) it provides a conceptual framework for digital domination in the Global South, and (3) it recommends practical alternatives that societies can pursue” (Kwet 2).

The following sections define the five “forms of domination” and propose “a theory of a freedom-respecting digital ecosystem” via People's Technology for People's Power (People's Technology). I will summarize each one.

The 5 Features of Domination

1. Economic Domination: Kwet admits that the point of economic domination has not been empirically proven, however he points to early instances, namely the negative impact of Google ads and Uber on the economy, as examples of economic domination by Big Tech companies (Kwet 4). In each case, foreign entities extracted large amounts of revenue from, and exercised influence over, South Africa. Kwet submits this as evidence of corporations acting like the Dutch East India Company by undermining local development, dominating the market, and extracting revenues from the Global South (Kwet 5).

2. Imperial Control: Kwet asserts that Big Tech exercises control of the Global South by control of infrastructure. He compares this to the construction of infrastructure such as railways in South Africa for the benefit of colonial powers (Kwet 5-6). Through control of hardware, software, and network connectivity, Kwet states that US corporations can shape infrastructure that is profitable for them and detrimental to South Africa. He provides as examples the engineering of copyright technology such as DRM, throttling, and centralized storage of media through services such as Netflix and Spotify (Kwet 7). He also explains how Facebook's Free Basics service, which offers a gated internet experience for free, can indirectly and directly censor free speech (Kwet 8).

3. Global Surveillance Capitalism: Kwet gives an overview of “surveillance capitalism”, a term which he borrows from “several prominent scholars” writing in Monthly Review. Kwet asserts that Big Data is the “central component” of surveillance capitalism (Kwet 9). He uses Facebook/Twitter (social data), Amazon (e-commerce), and Google (search) as examples of a virtual monopoly on Big Data. Each of the tech corporations collects and processes data on its users, and that data is where their profits come from (Kwet 9) . Combined with whistle-blower reports that US tech corporations share that data with the NSA, Kwet asserts that Big Data enables “state surveillance” (Kwet 10).

4. Imperial State Surveillance: Kwet asserts that the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, in which partnerships between the NSA and tech corporations were outlined, provide evidence that that the US government leverages Big Data and surveillance to support its policies in the Global South (Kwet 11). He compares this to the surveillance of black miners at the end of the 19th century, as well as US contributions in support of apartheid in the 1960s and 70s (Kwet 10).

5. Tech Hegemony: Kwet compares ideologies adopted by colonial powers, such as eugenics and Social Darwinism advocated by Francis Galton in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, to the vision of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR) theorized by Klaus Schwab. Schwab's 4IR is similar to the vision pushed by Big Tech corporations (Kwet 13-14). According to Kwet, this “Manifest Destiny for the digital age” considers “Big Data, centralized clouds, proprietary systems, smart cities littered with surveillance, automation, predictive analytics, and similar inventions” as the future of computing and technological progress (Kwet 14). Kwet asserts that it is dangerous to “fast-track Big Tech products into the classroom” because it risks reinforcing Big Tech's hegemonic ideology and the dependency of South Africa on services provided by US corporations (Kwet 14, 15).

Kwet's Solution: People's Technology for People's Power

“People's Technology for People's Power” is a reference to the People's Education for People's Power movement that anti-apartheid activists launched during the 1980s “in support of direct democracy in education” (Kwet 15). His solution to counter digital colonialism is a “People's Technology” movement that embraces Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and internet decentralization (Kwet 12-13).

Kwet cites Richard Stallman and the Free Software Movement, which itself was founded to combat proprietary software and the dominance of big tech companies like Microsoft. The movement defines four freedoms that, when followed, keep power in the user's hands and not the developer's. Kwet asserts that the freedom to use, study, share, and improve software are essential for South African's digital independence (Kwet 12). He also asserts that in addition to FOSS, citizens need “Free Hardware without digital locks”, and a neutral internet. He cites Columbia law professor Eben Moglen, who states that “the trio of Free Software, Free Hardware, and Free Spectrum (internet connectivity) form the foundation for a Free Culture...” (Kwet 12).

The other piece to the People's Technology movement that Kwet presents is internet decentralization. He gives an outline of the currently centralized architecture of what is a large part of the internet for the majority of users. Specifically, he states that “a small number of corporations” own the servers that billions of users access, which “facilitates colonial dispossession” (Kwet 13). He then presents efforts such as FreedomBox, GNU Social and Mastodon, which allow users to host their own servers and control their own data, as potential alternatives. He asserts that the use of Big Data is not the problem; it is the collection. For Kwet, colonial history will be repeated through digital means unless there are structural changes (Kwet 15).

Further Study

Digital colonialism treats internet technologies developed and controlled by large US Corporations as a method of real world colonization. Upon further research, it does not appear that Renata Aviala and Michael Kwet directly agreed on the meaning of the term, but in practice they use it the same way. While one may criticize the term as sensationalist and extreme, the examples provided by Avialia, Kwet, and other activists who decry digital colonialism are too compelling to ignore. Kwet's paper, despite having a bias against Big Tech, successfully shows that US tech corporations have an unhealthy and shocking amount of influence on the Global South. He also suggests practical ways to oppose the infrastructure that keeps user's locked into centralized tech products.

This review has helped clarify the difference between “digital colonialism” and “colonization of the internet”. Digital colonialism refers to the use of digital technologies as a new form of colonialism in real world countries. Colonization of the internet refers to the internet as the space that was colonized. Some questions that can further explore this distinction are:

1. What metaphorical “places” were colonized in the internet? (E.g, e-commerce, communication/social interaction, media consumption, data storage and analysis).
2. How were they colonized?
3. What are some ways that “colonial powers” exercise and maintain control?
4. What are the positive and negative effects of this control?
5. What are some ways to positively counter this control?

#nonfiction #essay #research #ColonizationOfTheInternet

Sources

Odrozek, Kasia. “Resisting Digital Colonialism.” Internet Health Report, Mozilla, 8 Apr. 2018, internethealthreport.org/2018/resisting-digital-colonialism/.

Cellan-Jones, Rory. “Facebook's News Feed Experiment Panics Publishers.” BBC News, BBC, 24 Oct. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/technology-41733119.

Kwet, Michael, Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South (August 15, 2018). For final version, see: Race & Class Volume 60, No. 4 (April 2019) ; DOI: 10.1177/0306396818823172. Available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=3232297 or dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3232297

Hicks, Jacqueline. “‘Digital colonialism’: why some countries want to take control of their people’s data from Big Tech.” The Conversation, University of Nottingham, 26 Sept. 2019, theconversation.com/digital-colonialism-why-some-countries-want-to-take-control-of-their-peoples-data-from-big-tech-123048

“Facebook: Company Profile, Data Center Locations.” Datacenters.com, 2020, www.datacenters.com/providers/facebook

About Me

I think and I write essays, fiction, and code. If you appreciate my work a shout out on Mastodon or Twitter can go a long way. I also have a novel, which you can read chapter by chapter on Tapas, or purchase as an e-book by clicking here. If you want to leave me a tip I have a Ko-Fi and a Liberapay. Thanks for reading!

Contact Me

This guide is what I wish I had when I started, and I'm putting it together in case anyone else is curious or wants to use free and open source software to write and publish their novel.

• Disclaimer: I am no expert, but this is what worked for me. Feel free to ask questions/reply with suggestions.

Step 1. Markdown

Markdown is a markup language with the goal of being natural to read and use. If you are familiar with HTML, it should be a quick start.

You don't really need to install anything to start using it, however I would suggest a dedicated markdown editor such as my personal favorite, Ghostwriter, to make the experience more streamlined. It's fairly minimal, but that's kind of the point. Writing requires focus, and Markdown does a great job of being practical and flexible while getting out of the way of the words.

Honestly, markdown is so streamlined you can use pretty much any program you want to write fiction in it. Here's a quick example:

Markdown:

# Part I


## Chapter 1
 

Once upon a time, there was a writer who wanted to write *in italics.* He felt, however, that the sentence was not strong enough *in italics,* so he wrote it **in bold**. Satisfied, he moved on to the next part by making a horizontal line.


---


*__Then he wrote the most important sentence he had ever written. So he bolded and italicized it.__*

>Then when it came time to write a memoir about it, he put it in a block quote.

# The End

Result:

Part I

Chapter 1

Once upon a time, there was a writer who wanted to write in italics. He felt, however, that the sentence was not strong enough in italics, so he wrote it in bold. Satisfied, he moved on to the next part by making a horizontal line.

---

Then he wrote the most important sentence he had ever written, so he bolded and italicized it.

Then when it came time to write a memoir about it, he put it in a block quote.

The End

You can refer to a guide for more detailed information, but as you can see, it's fairly easy to get the hang of – especially since fiction writing does not require complex formatting. In addition, Markdown let me use a cool digital typewriter to do most of my drafting. Sometimes you have to go to extreme measures to avoid distractions.

Step 2. Pandoc

Markdown would not be that useful for authors if Pandoc did not exist. Pandoc allows you to convert your glorious manuscript.md into pretty much any file format under the face of the sun. Follow the installation instructions for your OS/distro and let's roll.

Keep in mind Pandoc is a command-line program, which might be intimidating if you have never used a command line before, but their documentation is top-notch and with a little patience you'll be generating .epubs and .pdfs like a real hacker.

E-book

The .epub file type is the standard for e-books. Amazon has .mobi, but since you can upload to KDP with .epub it's not really worth it to generate with Pandoc unless you have a kindle that you want to export your manuscript to.

Generating .epubs is fairly simple with Pandoc, as the formatting requirements are not as strict as print-ready .pdfs, but it is not without its challenges. If you feel confident you can skip my guide and go right to Pandoc's guide for creating .epubs. Otherwise here's a basic step by step:

First, navigate to the directory where your manuscript is located, then open a terminal/shell. On the command line type:

pandoc yourmanuscript.md -o yourbookname.epub

Then press enter. Boom! You now have an .epub. Well done!

We're not done, however. Something useful to include is a table of contents, and fortunately, Pandoc can handle that. Simply add --toc after Pandoc.

Another option I used is --top-level-division=part. This will tell Pandoc to define the highest level heading in your manuscript as a part rather than a chapter. If you don't use parts, you can skip this because it is set to chapter by default. Altogether it will look something like this:

pandoc --toc --top-level-division=part yourmanuscript.md -o yourbookname.epub

Before you upload and become a self-published millionaire, make you sure you take care of your metadata. This is pretty easy with Pandoc. Just add a yaml metadata block to the top of your manuscript. It'll look something like this:

---
title:
- type: main
  text: My Awesome Title
creator:
- role: author
  text: My Awesome Name
publisher: My Awesome Publishing Company
identifier: 
- scheme: ISBN-13
  text: 978-0-57-855858-5
rights: © Year My Awesome Name
rights: All Rights Reserved
---

• Note: identifier: is only necessary if you actually have an ISBN. Even then, you don't need an ISBN to publish just an e-book.

With the yaml block at the top of your document, Pandoc will be able to read it and attribute it to the .epub. For more documentation click here.

Step 3. Latex

Here's where it gets juicy. Pandoc does a pretty decent job of outputting .pdfs by default, but figuring out how to format them for print on demand took me a lot longer than I thought it would.

Pandoc uses a default template to format the .pdfs, and while they look okay, they were not adequate for print on demand. I decided the easiest way to get the .pdfs I wanted was to modify the Pandoc Latex template and tell Pandoc to use that template. Fortunately, you don't have to sit through the long hours of tinkering it took me to get that working.

First, make sure you have latex installed. Latex is a .pdf engine that is capable of making beautiful print-ready documents. On most linux distributions, there is a handy “texlive-all” package you can install to get all the dependencies and extensions. On Windows and Mac, Pandoc recommends installing latex via MiKTeX.

Next, let's copy the default Pandoc template so we can modify it. The easiest way to do this is to tell Pandoc to output its default latex template into our custom template with:

pandoc -D latex > custombook.latex

Alternatively, you can go to the directory where Pandoc stores the templates, find “default.latex”, copy it, and rename it.

Next, open your custom template file and add these modifications after line 7:

% DEFINE DOCUMENT CLASS HD
\documentclass{book}


% DEFINE PHYSICAL DOCUMENT SETTINGS HD
% media settings
\usepackage[paperwidth=5.5in, paperheight=8.5in]{geometry}

% FORMAT CHAPS AND HEADER HD
\usepackage{titlesec} % make chapters start on a new page, and remove auto-generated chapter headings HD
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]
	{\normalfont\bfseries}{}{0pt}{\Large}

\usepackage{tocstyle} %make the TOC pretty HD
\usetocstyle{noonewithdot}


\usepackage{fancyhdr} % make the headers pretty HD
\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancypagestyle{plain}{%
	\fancyhead{}
	\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
	}
\fancyhead{}
\fancyhead[RO, LE]{\leftmark}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}

\makeatletter % remove header from chapter pages automatically HD
  \def\cleardoublepage{\clearpage\if@twoside \ifodd\c@page\else
  \hbox{}
  \vspace*{\fill}
  \vspace{\fill}
  \thispagestyle{empty}
  \newpage
  \if@twocolumn\hbox{}\newpage\fi\fi\fi}
\makeatother

• Some notes:
  • I am not an expert, but this is what worked for me. If you run into problems, check the forums and documentation.
  • Make sure to delete the other \documentclass{} definition before replacing it with \documentclass{book} .
  • Under %media settings make sure to input the dimensions you desire.
  • If you get errors, read them. They can be very useful in figuring out what went wrong. Sometimes it's as simple as a missing {.
  • Latex is very powerful, and I am sure there is a lot more you can do with it. Feel free to experiment and improve upon these modifications.
  • Documentation is your friend. Sometimes sitting down and reading it is a lot more efficient than searching the forums, plus you learn more.

After you modify the custom template, you have to tell Pandoc to use it with --template=custombook.latex. Make sure your template is in the same directory as Pandoc's defaults. If you don't know where those are you can search for the file “default.latex”.

Now we're ready to generate it. Here's what your final command should look like:

pandoc --toc --template=custombook.latex yourmanuscript.md -o yourbook.pdf

In order to format the table of contents satisfactorily I had to remove the numbers from my chapter headings in my manuscript because --toc numbers the sections and it looked odd. Your mileage may vary but if you figure out an easier way to do this, let me know.

Step 4. Publish

Congrats! Now you can upload your manuscript to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Ingram Spark, and just about anywhere you want. I won't bore you with a tutorial for those because if you got this far, you can figure out those web interfaces pretty easily.

For a cover, I used Canva and a vector drawing of the moon I did with Inkscape. I was able to use the same .png for all e-book platforms, but for print, I downloaded the .pdf templates for each one and used LibreOffice Draw to modify them. There are myriad cover tutorials out there if you need help, or you can hire a designer at a marketplace like Reedsy.

#nonfiction #howto #publishing

First, thank you for reading! I sincerely hope it helps. To echo a sentiment from Thomas Hardy, it is a great regret that I will never be able to meet many of you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands. It is a poor substitute, but it will have to do in this strange world. I promise I will not gum up your inbox.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Patreon | Ko-Fi | Podcast | Mastodon | Twitter | Github