The worst thing about writing a book is that one day you’ll be done

A few sentences of dialogue from a 1968 sci-fi book changed the way I look at writing.

The book is called Tales of Pirx the Pilot and written by someone who’d become my favourite author – Stanisław Lem.

Lem was a masterful literary world builder, and Pirx stories were no exception. The opening paragraphs weren’t wasted on clunky exposition or establishing shots. No, you were thrown straight into Pirx’s universe, without an onramp and without a warning. The explanations would come in due time, in between the lines, or never at all.

On page 64, in the middle of a third Pirx story, I encountered a few words of dialogue: “Calling Albatross 4 Aresluna.” Simple enough – a starship with a complex name trying to reach another one. But then, later on the same page, there was this: “Dasher 2 Aresluna.” And a page later: “Titan Aresterra to Albatross 4.”

Those extra words meant things. Ares is Greek for Mars, Luna is the Moon, and Terra stands for Earth. (This part you were supposed to know.) The portmanteaus suggested shuttle flights. The pilots’ familiarity with this convention suggested much more. Through this jargon used casually by ships flying between the solar system’s celestial bodies, Lem established not only that interplanetary travel exists, but also that it’s common enough – and by extension boring, mundane, and routine.

And he did it with a few throwaway words.

There was tons more stuff like that, in Pirx and elsewhere. And it became absolutely mindblowing and positively inspiring to me as a kid and a wannabe writer – that you could put together an entire world through dozens of little details like these.

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The title of this post is intentionally cheeky. “Nobody wants to write a book,” an old saying goes, “but everybody fantasizes about having written one.” People take forever to start writing. Once they do, however, they can’t wait for the book to be done, right? 

But if the process can be torture, the release holds no sweet promises either. 

Your artifact is now out there, open to be inspected, ridiculed, oversimplified, ignored, or – perhaps worst of them all – misunderstood. If you poured yourself into your writing, it wasn’t the parts of you made out of reinforced concrete. No, you likely contributed the rawness, the wounds, and the insecurities.

There’s the post-performance comedown, too; a general feeling of emptiness as there is nothing to do now. You’d think, for me, this would be better than dealing with slipcase manufacturer slipping on the deadlines, or shipping damage woes. But a crisis can feel great in some ways. It can offer clarity and purpose, a particular problem in need of a particular solution, a to-do item waiting for its checkmark. For a moment, at least, paroxysm can feel better than calmness.

Critical feedback and absence of new things to do? Those two parts I knew about and anticipated. But what’s surprising me today is how much I am dreading walking away from the little universe I created in the last eight years.

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My book is not Pirx’s beletrystyka (the beautiful Polish word for fiction, borrowed from the French belles-lettres). Shift Happens is meant to reflect reality rather than create one. But without actively attempting to do so, I ended up making a small universe around the book anyway. 

It was a gradual process. I did it through this very newsletter, which in some ways – please don’t tell anyone! – I am more proud of than of the book itself.

I did it through the booklets.

I did it through the website with its myriad of little games, the 3D book visualization, the typewriter simulator (I just received a wonderful email from a student in Argentina who credited it with his newfound love of writing), and the book companion.

And through years of prototypes, now lined on a shelf like an exhausted progress bar.

And through Twitter threads sharing the process, giving access to secret docs, and putting volume 3 together as a sort of “DVD with extras.”

And through talks where I practiced certain material before writing it, or expanded on after. And the collection of Return/Enter keys in the book, and the collection of the keyboards in my apartment, and the collection of more than 400 uploads to the Internet Archive.

And through various experiments, unsuccessful games, and educational posts.

And through extending the visual language of the book as far as possible: taking photos of the keys for the index alone to match the slipcase and the chapter openers, designing stickers to go on the shipping boxes, and spending extra time even on things like invoices.

Some of those were for me and me alone. Some were for others. 

Most of them didn’t actually have to happen.

All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for the word “paroxysm.”

Here’s something I should confess, but also something you all probably already know: I live for diminishing returns. I love staying somewhere long after everyone else left, fiddling with minutiae to never be noticed (although sometimes I will try to make people notice), finding pleasure in superfine tuning that comes after fine tuning. I love connecting things and pouring myself into the cracks of a project that few others notice. I want to create moments like what Aresluna was to me.

I love imagining someone could realize the font used to typeset page numbers is the same font shown on keycaps throughout the book without knowing about that in advance. Or that they could notice that the Broadway Avenue address on an ad on page 132 is the same Broadway Avenue they already learned about in a previous chapter. Or that the illustration on page 985 picks up right where page 239 left off. And so on, and so on. It feels like it could make reading my book so much richer.

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As long as I’m confessing: Reading your own book is a peculiar experience.

You would assume boredom, going through words you know so intimately for the thousandth time – less like a joyride, more like a commute. But the writing was by now years ago, and sometimes reading the pages feels like an experience of a recovering amnesiac. Would you expect to learn something new from something you yourself wrote? Because that happened to me a few times by now.

On the other hand, there is an almost ultimate familiarity with more recent moments around writing, a painful awareness of all the battles fought in getting the words and visuals to look and feel correct. Every other spread has a story, it seems: a photo that took years to chase, a once-awful paragraph saved by editing and proofreading, a shade of colour that took two hours at the printer’s to get just right.

The whole artifact carries secrets shadows of hard decisions, too: the months of scheming to get each volume under the (arbitrary, but important) budget of 2 kilograms, the miraculous last-minute discovery of the right paper on the proper side of the ocean, the frustration of being asked to narrow the book by ⅛ of an inch much too late in the process.

And at the same time, confusingly, a sense of a miraculousness and finality of it all. The pages are in the right order, the photos are all accounted for, the sentences start and then they end. It’s strange, too. You have been there the whole time, tending to this garden, but it’s still a surprise it exists.

Wait. Does it exist?

Seeing the words in the book makes it feel final, but they felt final when reading the last prototype, and the one before it, too.

Self publishing means a book release party (and a possible matching New York Times bestseller list appearance) doesn’t happen by default, and being bad at party planning means there won’t be one at all. The staggered release makes picking the date tricky, anyway. The first person receiving the book feels too early to celebrate, and whenever the last person gets theirs some time in February, it will feel too late.

It’s entirely possible it is right now, after about half a thousand people received their packages, and exactly eight years after I thought “this seems like a thing I could turn into a book” during a Christmas break in 2015 – that one could say that this book has been published, and that I could finally claim, without any caveats, that I’m a book writer.

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And yet, I am not done. There’s at least a month before all the books will be delivered to everyone. There will be more careless post offices and strange delivery situations. For each 20 people who share (so far wonderful) photos and (so far positive) early impressions, there will be one unhappy customer. 

This will continue for a few months, and this doesn’t help in planning for the future. It all feels strange now, and I have no idea how it’ll feel then. 

For a year now I’ve kept saying “no” to a reprint and that’ll be the default answer until there is enough demand and enough energy on my side to consider one. In all honesty, I am so tired of Shift Happens this is not something I want to even think about right now.

But at the same time, every time I pick up the book and re-read parts of it, I take a note of how to make it better. I can’t help myself. A photo could be re-processed so it looks nicer. A turn of phrase needs unturning, or vice versa. Some extrasuperfine tuning. A new connection I’ve noticed. An opportunity for a new Aresluna moment. 

I have four screenfuls of such notes already.

Perhaps you throw people into a universe without an onramp and without a warning, but you walk away from one you created over the course of many months – if not years.

Or perhaps you never walk away.