Overture

Some writers are sharp enough to write for the marketplace. They do their research, study what's trending on the bestseller lists — serial killers, WWII, voices from marginalized communities, anything that can have "Paris" shoehorned into the title — and produce work accordingly.

 

I am not one of them.

 

I can't follow trends. It takes me so long to actually complete a novel, whatever was fresh and trendy when I started is grizzled and wheezing by the time I'm ready to hit "Send."

 

Since the marketplace is a mystery to this girl (mysteries with "Girl" in the title, isn't that another trend?), I'm stuck writing for an audience of one — me. I imagine stories I want to read, and then I try to commit them to prose. It's a long-aborning process, but also a labor of love as I shape and chisel away. Marketing is the very last thing on my list of priorities, if it makes the list at all.

 

Miraculously, then, three of my novels have made it into print — ink! Paper! Binding! — with a fourth under consideration. But of all my completed manuscripts, published and otherwise, the one I love best — the one I consider most successful in tone, characterization, and plot (my usual nemesis); the one that was the most fun to write — has no chance of ever being published in the conventional way.

 

In 2001, my first novel, The Witch From the Sea, was published by the tiny, but intrepid independent publisher Beagle Bay Books. It's a swashbuckler whose heroine, Tory Lightfoot, a mixed-blood runaway orphan from the wilds of America, comes of age and meets her soulmate, Jack, in a crew of pirates off the coast of Cuba, ca 1823. (Weirdly, a German language edition of a previous draft had been published a couple of years before, sold by my then-agent, who was unable to make a domestic sale in a language I could read.)

 

But my plan had always been to write a trilogy, and I kept at it — even after Beagle Bay stopped publishing fiction, and my agent (who considered my second book, Runaways, more commercial than the first) discovered that no publisher was interested in publishing sequels in a series that originated with some other house. So I decided to post Runaways online, as a blog, one chapter a week (very Dickensian). And even after I moved on to write two more novels, unconnected to the Witch series, Alias Hook, and Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge —which, happily for me, were published — I kept polishing up the third Witch book, A Comedy of Marriage.

 

I just couldn't stop myself.

 

Fast-forward to now, when conventional publishing is no longer the only option. We live in a brave new social media world of instant connection between creators and their potential fan base. Artists post virtual gallery tours. Craftspeople open Etsy shops. Musicians perform on You Tube and rack up the Likes. In most of these scenarios, the objective is to sell your creation directly to the public, or snag the attention of an agent, label, influencer, or some other middleperson to sell it on your behalf. In the digital megaverse, this is referred to, with cold-blooded aplomb as, "monetizing."

 

And then there's me. The opportunity to monetize my little book has long since passed; the first volume was published 22 years ago, and the twelve people who read it outside of my personal friends and family have long since forgotten it. Yet I persist in believing my story has value, even if no one can make a profit on it. Does A Comedy of Marriage deserve to die in my computer, unread, just because it can't be sold?

 

I love this book — the setting, the characters, the repartee, the themes. Writing it was the most fun I've ever had at the keyboard. But an author's labor is only half the creative process; the rest depends on you, the reader. No matter how lovingly crafted, a book only comes fully to life in the reader's imagination.

 

So I'm giving Tory her ultimate freedom, liberating her and Jack and their diverse extended family of compañeros from the vault of my virtual desktop and unleashing them out into the world to fare as they may. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

 

—Lisa Jensen, Santa Cruz, 2023