A Hitch in Time - Would My Nightmare be a Bestseller?
It’s best to grimace like a tough guy nowadays, like when you ride on the New York subway especially in Brooklyn..”
I counted myself lucky that Hitch at Booknook.biz would even bother to communicate with me once she knew I was disinclined to spend a red cent on eBook design given the fact that I was the Greatest Author the World Will Ever or Never Know, and probably never because I was not about pay literary agents or bow down and beg legit publishers to approve and publish my work at their expense.
Of course I expected Hitch to recognize me for what I really was, and that was not one of the million or so fools every year whose vanity gives them cause to expect their ebook will rise to the top of some kind of best seller list after paying predators thousands of dollars for cover design and the like, not even in a category with only a hundred books to choose from, without suffering a large deficit for promotion.
Besides, I was not about to submit to humiliation! So I was surprised by this note from Hitch. She must have recognized my true worth from the enormous, mostly hostile traffic I got on my three posts in the KDP Amazon blog before the moderators shut them down.
“You told me you were not interested in prostituting yourself to the market. May I ask what your objective is then? You mentioned you wanted to be the greatest author the world would ever or never knew.”
“I endeavor to be a successful loser for the time being,” I responded.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It is better to be a successful loser than be wrecked by success. If you are absolutely good, that is, god, or greater than the greatest thing that can be thought, you will be crucified. “
“So you are afraid of success? Why waste time writing?”
“Because of a dream I had long ago. I dreamed that I had persuaded myself to further divide David Arthur Walters, a combination of the names of my ancestors, into multiple personalities, and to conjure up a compelling plot.”
“Tell me about it.”
“My trajectory resembled a rocket ship going to the moon. Arthur advised me to secure cooperation from Walter, which would be essentially problematic because Walter is a very willful person, already set in his ways. Arthur, on the other hand, is a stubborn being, a bearish bloke, disinclined to follow his lead. I, David, love myself so much they call me beloved because I sneaked into the enemy camp and slew a slew of them. I took my correspondence with Arthur and Walter very seriously, but all too seriously, and I started bickering with them. During my squabbling intercourse with them, I feared I would become a raving lunatic long before I reached the moon. You see, Walter wanted to abandon ship…”
“You keep referring to Walter. Don’t you mean ‘Walters,’ with an ‘s’, that being your last name?”
“The ‘s’ stands for son, ‘son of Walters,’ a surname for the clan. As I was saying, Walter wanted to deboard. The three of us started running madly about the ship. I could not tell which one I was, or even if I was I at all, until my son, Dr. Davidson, came aboard, strapped an electric belt around my head and shocked me until I merged with Walter and Arthur. I noticed that I was bald again like David Arthur Walters yet otherwise hairy as an Hyōsube.”
“Aha. We designed a book for an author critical of the Bleach series with its hyosube protagonist.”
“Well, I have been compared to Ichibei because of my smile and wordplay. My friends have advised me to stop grinning in public lest people think I am a psycho. It’s best to grimace like a tough guy nowadays, like when you ride on the New York subway especially in Brooklyn.”
“Yeah, been there done that, bud,”
“The nightmare continued. Dr. Davidson told me to never stop writing. He said I am a successful loser. I dreamed I had written a bestseller about something or the other, about what does not really matter because it is the style that sells, as Flaubert well knew.”
“Yep, Sartre wrote volumes about him,” she said, and I knew then and there I was communicating with not only one smart cookie in her business but a bona fide intellectual as well.
“I dreamed I self-published the book and purchased 3,000 copies myself under different names. The book was removed from the platform. I was trying to get a refund when I woke up.”
“David, I think you need to talk to somebody.”
“That is what I am doing,”
“Hey, write the book. We’re very busy here, can’t do anything for free, bud, but, look, I’ll see what I do by way of a discount. Crazy sells, but you have to spend some money or get nothing in return.”
xYx
Copyright 2025 David Arthur Walters
Tracey's Secret - Collectors Paperback
