Thoughts While Waiting for the Book to Be Released

My book is about to be released by eLectio Publishers. This leaves me feeling both anxious and excited. I wonder what is going to happen just around the next corner. At the same time, life seems to be going on. My family still has needs, cars need repairing, and work beckons each of us every day. Wars haven’t ceased. The poor still need to be helped. And I am trying to do all that I can to get ready for my book's release, including letting people know about it—and what it is about.

I’ve been thinking about some of the things in it. I’ve regretted one or two scenes that are going to be there when the book is published. But by and large, I am happy with it.

One idea that might catch on with some readers is the idea of what TV does to people and to messages. One of the themes in a book titled Apocalypse TV is, obviously, TV. One of the characters in my novel has his life upset and unbalanced by appearing on a TV reality show. His marriage is imperiled. Of course, he gets some fame, but what is that? On TV, we objectify human beings. We turn them into symbols of our own instabilities. We make them tell our stories of our woes, our fears, our own insecurities. We don’t like people who are too successful. We like to have people to look down on. TV pretty much is just a magnifier. If you want to be known on a pretty superficial level by millions of people, go on TV.

It is perhaps pretty much the same with messages. We turn them into our top forty slogans and street signs. What happens when people with an important message go on TV? For example, the general claims Christians make (“The truth will set you free,” “Seek and you will find,” “He who believes in me, though he were dead, yet he shall live”) amazingly can miss the target. When people hear these, they stop listening because the statements are not tied to anything concrete. The same is not true where individual acts of charity are concerned, when people do things that can break in on awareness. 

This suggests to me that the messages on TV are pretty much flat ones. They cling to us like a form of neon lint, but they just sort of add to the noise and dust of our setting, clogging up some of our thinking. 

My main character, as he is interviewing for a position on a reality show, says something about the desires people have about going on TV, and about being famous. He notes that most people see it as their big chance. Of course, he ends up trying it himself.

I wonder if we think we will have the greatest influence with a big Twitter feed, with a TV or radio show, or with a big church. The truth may be simply the effect I have as a person on others.

At the end of the day, it may not be ratings or reviews but relationships that matter the most and that have the greatest influence on others around us. St. Paul said as much when he referred to the believers he was writing to as letters. You are letters from God, he said.