Casting off Lines on a Book Launch

This morning there is a ‘waxing gibbous moon’ with a hint of chill out on The Patio. You know the drill.

It was early enough for the collision of those Salts still coming in from overnight activities and those who had collapsed early and were ready to start the morning with energy and verve. The two factions of energy have a relation not dissimilar from the publishing game we play. Two streams of incompatible energy were joined in the uneasy turmoil of the production meeting.

With first coffee or last night libation we were still grumbling about helicopter crashes in Iran. Those who had been awake in the hours of darkness had updates from overseas. Those just awakening marveled that the government we had once served had expressed condolences to the memory of an Iranian President who was responsible for rocket attacks on an old ally. He had inadvertently lost his life in the recent helicopter crash. Or had it taken.

This morning’s discussion was about the helicopter- what model it had actually been, where it had actually been built and who was flying it. And the more important component of the information stream: this means a new successor to spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will have to be found. Will he- we are pretty sure of that part, anyway-be as hard line as was the now deceased President Raisi? Or harder?

Softer does not seem to be part of that equation, So, there was that means of distraction from the confusion here and the internal conflict at Socotra House. It is the usual sort of tension that pits the creative independent contractors of the Writers Section against the Legal, Marketing and Management departments. It gets worse.

A strangely-clad individual in cargo-shorts and thick spectacles was roaming the space between the bunk-room and the working spaces. He claimed to be an expert on digital composition and publishing was replacing some of the lap tops theoretically linked together. And more than linked around the headquarters complex, but with a team who speaks a version of English a little unfamiliar to us here by the Big River in Washington. More precise, though it sounds scripted and unspontaneous.

They have been contracted by Meat, our Marketing Manager, to actually lift the ready-for-publication new book and launch the damn thing. The publication team is conveniently located some 8,500 (air) miles away in suburban Bangalore. It would be a 17-hour flight, should we be inclined to speak in person and actually understand each other. There are details that need to be communicated.

We thought the book had completed the round trip from our laptops to lay-out in Arizona, then across the Pacific, through the cables under the Strait of Malacca currently unmolested by the Chinese. That could change, of course. Then the digits were supposed to fly back under the waves and across the continent to the mass printing facility on the parkway a couple miles from the Amazon distribution center in New Jersey for further transport to sit in splendid isolation in the bookcase across the table in the Socotra House Conference Room.

Or yours.

We had intended to provide the official launch information this morning, but the distance to India and back combined with the imprecision of our semi-shared tongues made it a more complex matter combined with the IT geek attempting to move vast weightless digits from one box to share with others strewn around the working spaces. Considering we have inverted values for “AM” and “PM” between continents, you can understand where some of the confusion starts, since they are starting a Bangalore business day as we are concluding one of chaos here across the River from Foggy Bottom.

So, we intended to have instructions on how to order the book from Amazon, Barnes & Nobel or IngramSpark. We would have apologized for the expense, which is higher for smaller companies like the Chairman’s, and pointed out that we had engineered a free work-around for digital downloads direct from India. While the Chinese cooperate, anyway.

Instead, we turned that end of the project over to Meat in Marketing, and told him to have something flashy and inviting to publish tomorrow, if Indian’s AM and PM sort themselves out later today.

All we have to show you now is one of the images that may actually appear in what gets published. It is from Africa, where it was drawn by one of the Salts some 45 years ago:

(In the book, you will meet some of these characters from East Africa, if we can get it back from India to print in New Jersey and have it shipped conveniently to your door by ICE or electric truck on America’s outstanding Interstate highway system. You have to ensure the package is not stolen from the porch).

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com