For those who’ve been enjoying the series Pluribus on Apple TV, like I have, you might also enjoy my first novel, Join.
I finished Join about ten years ago, and it was published in April 2016, so it seems fair to say this is something like its ten year anniversary. Like Pluribus, Join is a ‘hive mind’ story, and like Pluribus, it’s interested in questions of identity and meaning.
Join was a surprise for me. I’d written a novel in the late nineties, unpublished, and from the mid-eighties through the aughts had at times tried to write good poetry, a few short stories. Some good writers encouraged me. But things hadn’t come together, and little got published.
In about 2012, I gave myself permission to write fiction about whatever came to mind. My goal was to find a source of energy in my body. If the writing got me more interested, increased the energy, I would pursue it. If I flagged, I’d write something else. Since I hadn’t been successful publishing, I didn’t much care about whether the work would be published. But I did try to write things that other people might understand and appreciate.
The concept for Join was like a bolt of lightning. It was so simple and so deep, incredibly energizing. The most exciting part of it was that all of the work related to mind connections that I could find framed them as pathways for aggression, one being controlling another. But it seemed to me that in a joined mind there could be shared self-interest, rather than competition. Joining could be a union.
At that time, I wasn’t aware of work that deeply investigated that framing. The best known ‘hive mind’ was the Borg. Thinking about them, and the possibility of complete submergence and loss of identity, led me to look for a formulation of the concept in which all of the downsides would be balanced by upside. What if it wasn’t total submergence, total loss of identity, but a partial loss that resulted in a large gain? If only a small number of individuals joined, each individual’s experience and preferences would still be meaningful, but each pool of joined experience would be immeasurably larger than any individual’s potential. And what if the process of joining would only work if everyone involved wanted to join? What if it were impossible to force someone to join?
The writing was hard. I was working full time but I believed in the concept. I woke early for months and wrote 12-16 hours at a time on holidays and weekends, and managed a first draft that left me exhausted. I showed it to people I know, and a writer liked it and showed it to his agent, who offered to represent me.
That began a whole new period, and I learned a lot about being a writer and about the publishing industry of that time. Fortunately, I had a wonderful agent, David Forrer at Inkwell, and Join was bought by Mark Doten at SoHo Press, in many ways a dream publisher. They believed in the book and Mark in particular helped me develop it into something more than a serious amateur’s best desperate effort.
In January of 2016, SoHo arranged for Join and I to ‘debut’ at the American Library Association’s annual convention, in Boston that year. I didn’t understand at the time what a privilege that was, and I didn’t really know how to prepare. It worked out fine, and is a good memory.
We got generous blurbs, including one from Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love, a wonderful, landmark novel from the late 80s, and from Charles Yu, one of my all-time literary heroes. NPR.org gave it a positive review. Scientific American recommended it. Amazon selected it as an Editor’s Choice.
Despite all of that—incredible good fortune—what I remember most from that period is a sense of powerlessness and despair. In interviews, I attempted to manifest ‘writerliness,’ but the water was deep and I wasn’t alert to contemporary currents of conversation that were happening around the book’s themes. I felt every critical response keenly. Exposed nerves and ego fragility. Clearly the concept was good, but was I a proper vessel for its expression? I’ve since come to understand that this was a variation of a common experience for first time writers.
So that’s a bit of the background behind Join, and my experience with it. In the roughly ten years since its publication, I’ve learned to be grateful for all of what happened, for those parts of my life, and especially for all the individuals who read it, and thought and wrote about it. It’s an unusual novel, and I’m proud of it. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it.