Is it me or is it the World?

Something happened last week. And I don’t know whether it was a final shoe being dropped to join a hundred other already fallen shoes, or a minor trauma in its own right.

Was what happened just one more instance of bemused humanity: people scrabbling for private advantage in a difficult world who do not deliberately cause harm to the human community.

Was it just business as usual–perhaps driven by the need to support a family in a world where it is not easy to find a way to accomplish that; so that people end up employed by a deceptive organization within an environment of lies and deceit, where customers are held captive (through their prior investments and their human tendency to remain loyal for too long to their dreams)?

And what was my role in it all? Was it my desire to secure some sort of legacy that made me vulnerable to a publishing company that offered to publish my fifth book, and to republish the earlier ones that had become unavailable, all for what seemed a reasonable cost? I even imagined that I was developing a relationship with the “project manager” (who somewhat strangely was the only person I could ever talk to, and represented editors, book cover designers and, in the final month, website designers).

My misgivings started at least a year ago, when the initial cost for publishing the books proved not to be the actual cost. Once the collaborative work of assembling the text and designing book covers (all done by real people with professional skills) was complete, I learned that the initial cost did not cover the assignment of ISBN numbers or copyright my books. And the cost to acquire those attributes—without which a book cannot really be published and made available to others—was hundreds of dollars for each title.

I should have then paused and really registered what that said about this publishing company. But enough time went by and my distraction index proved too high, that when I was made another offer, after declining it several times, I paid $10,000 for a marketing proposal that outlined a plan to provide things I had often dreamed about: book readings, distribution world-wide, contractors who had contacts with libraries and bookstores, a barrage of social media posts with video trailers and–at the hub of these marketing elements–a website that would describe the books and make them available for easy purchase.

Over the following months, we seemed to be working well as a team to create these elements. Then, like a cobra rising from the grass, I received a second, but not the final, request for further financial investment on my part.

The next request—to which I objected repeatedly—was for something mentioned in the Marketing Proposal, which I had thought impressive when it was included in the initial $10,000. I was told that there were already contractors standing by, who had committed to purchasing 7000 copies of my books for $10 each, which they would sell to libraries and bookstores. I was asked to provide the cost of printing those copies at $5 each, for about $35,000. When I said, “No way, let’s not do it then.”, I was told that the contractors had already been committed to; and they kept lowering my portion of the cost, with Prime supplying the remainder, until I agreed to pay $10,000 as a one third investor.

I certainly required an increasing measure of faith to believe that any of it was real—faith that I felt anchored in the palpable experience of creating physical books over many months, and my ongoing communication with the project manager whose main flaw seemed to be that he couldn’t just tell me up front what the project would cost.

The collaboration then shifted to the creation of a website devoted to describing and making available for purchase all five of my published/republished books. I was the one who wrote all the text, while Prime Publishing created a raft of videos presenting the books for social media posts. I was impressed that such videos could be created. They really managed to present aspects of what I have written. I think that seeing the professional quality that went into creating these videos helped reassure me that I was dealing with a reputable organization.

Then another shoe fell. This website, which the original marketing proposal had called “the hub” for all the other elements, was seemingly ready to go public, and I was thinking of sharing it here on my own website. But then—for the third time—I received a request for a further investment. This time it was for $2,000 to acquire a domain name for the new website and to have it hosted for ten years. That’s longer than I expect Gaia to host my aging body, I thought. But since I am familiar with the fact that my own website requires a few hundred dollars a year to keep active, I just registered my objection to this pattern of asking for money, only after I am invested in the project that cannot be fully implemented without that further investment. So, I paid to have the website go live into a future that I will probably not live to see.

Now, I thought, for whatever it’s worth, the end is near. But it was not an end I ever anticipated.

Straight on the heels of my paying to have the website hosted on a physical server, I received another request for money that came out of left field. This time it was to create an “escrow account” with a starting balance of $2,500. This, they said, would allow book purchases to go straight into this escrow account, without having to refer them out to a third-party book seller like Amazon or Barnes and Nobles. I can still scarcely believe that this would be considered a necessary component of a website designed to bring together information about my books and to provide a way to purchase them.

Along with saying “No” to this most recent request for money, I pointed out that it was a simple matter to leave the website as a source of information about the books, and keep its existing links to 3rd party book sellers for anyone who chooses to purchase a book.

Over the next few weeks, I received further requests for a deposit into the escrow account. None of those reiterated requests even acknowledged that I had proposed an alternative: to leave the website as it currently is. Now, I had finally reached my limit. I continued to politely but firmly decline to pay another penny, let alone additional thousands of dollars, for an unnecessary escrow account.

Then this week I received an e-mail that reveals how truly naked the emperor is. I was told that all further “deliverables” will remain on hold until I have paid the $2,500. I think that those “deliverables” include anything iterated in the original Marketing Proposal. And since the contractors were mentioned there, I expect that—if they ever actually existed—I will not hear anything further about the $10,000 I paid to send them off to libraries and book stores.

Something else comes to me now, which I hope I can manage to embody. Even if some semblance of my original dream had materialized, disappointment would have been there in a different form. Now my task is–as it would have been in any conceivable scenario–to say farewell to the delusions that always accompany any aspiration for a greater presence in this world. This is the time for me to finally accept that when I try to ignore disappointment, in any of its guises, however and whenever it shows up in my life, I am free to walk away from the delusions that lie beneath. Then the cords of attachment that have bound me to a make-believe world have a chance to slip off, one by one. Not all of them. For some of them, I will have to find a new home.