The Green Light

Don't lose sight of it, despite the people who tell you to go to law school

Biblioteca Juvenil Mayaguez

I love the Substack prompt. Start writing … it says on the blank template when you first open it up, to show you where the text goes. That’s it, all you need.

Start writing. Just do it.

When people find out I write fiction, I often get some variation on the following idea: “but how do you know where to start? There’s so much to think about: character, plot, time, theme, structure. Where to begin?” My response, like Substack, is — start writing. You don’t have to be Shakespeare or Edith Wharton. Tell your story, or tell any story. If it’s organic and authentic, it will resonate with people. It will contain all the elements and they will be united in a pleasing manner. Will it be high art? Probably not, but who really cares? Literary fiction meant for an audience of elite influencers is a construct of sensibility with a short history and an ever more constrained audience. All sorts of dirges have been sung for its demise, but one thing that is truer than ever is that despite the struggles of the great American novel and novelists, story as a living form lives on stronger and more relevant and accessible than at any time in our cultural history, especially in print and as text on various social media platforms, including here on Substack, where authors and raconteurs ply their art with varying degrees of literary polish, and in the self-publishing world of Amazon, Kindle, Apple books, Kobo, etc. There has never been a better time to get your story out there for any audience, and your lack of finesse does not need to hold you back. Your unpolished narrative approach can be a feature of your work rather than a bug.

Me, I started writing when I was just a wee lad with a toy typewriter I got for Christmas, I must have been about six or seven. I started typing up plays without a second thought, and I still remember the thrill of creation, looking wondrously at a sheet of paper with my words that translated into scenarios where puppets I pulled from a drawer went at it in climactic battles that usually ended in fisticuffs with the bad guy learning a lesson the hard way. It was thrilling and I had no doubt that it was what I was meant to do in life.

Cut to senior year in high school when I had the temerity to approach my AP English teacher with a short story I had written to ask for his opinion. I don’t remember much about the story except that it ended with a green light flashing for some reason, in a clear homage to the end of the Great Gatsby which we had read in his 10th grade class.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

“Do yourself a favor, Tony. Go to law school,” he said.

I was crushed, but I bounced back by the end of college. Writing seminars with John Hersey and Francine du Plessix Grey cemented my desire to follow a literary vocation, But the thing is, fame is fickle and fortune is probabilistic. The time of my burgeoning adulthood was not ripe for literary vocations. The publishing world has been under constant late capitalist competition for eyeballs that has determined an industrial approach to product marketing that freezes out attempts at authenticity and hand-hewn approaches to craft. I’m not interested in being an industrial artifact, no matter how polished. And I never was. So I will defend the self-publishing world: the rough and ready memoir of the alcoholic Canadian survivor of a military upbringing, the goth fantasy, co-splaying world of the Arizona lesbian who was adopted by her uncle after her parents commited suicide, the journals of the mountain climbing tech employee who loves Walmart ready meals.

Just do it. Don’t expect success, don’t desire approbation from the critics. Just to be a part of something, to be heard. When I self-published my first book, I thought if just one person read it and liked it and the words made an emotional impact, then I had done my job. That’s all, it’s just a job, all variations on a theme. Pointing the way for people in dark times, which can be the height of summer.

Here’s a review which just posted for my novel due out in November, Alias Tomorrow.

Alias Tomorrow" is a thought-provoking and deeply moving novel that masterfully blends intimate family drama with gripping science fiction. The parallel stories of William Morrow and his Martian protagonist, Antioch, offer a unique lens on identity, resistance, and the longing for connection in both familiar and futuristic worlds. The book’s exploration of fractured relationships and the struggle for personal meaning feels authentic and timely, while its vision of a controlled, interplanetary society is both chilling and compelling. A beautifully written, unforgettable read that lingers long after the final page.