Tuesday, October 24, 2017

A Personal Note On Publishing Inner Demons



Eighteen years after deciding to pursue serious writing - that is, writing not just intended to entertain, but also to express some ideas of deeper importance - I find myself in a quandary, the nature of which is somewhat surprising to me. When I first set out to write, I wasn't at all sure I was capable of doing it. It was an act of faith. So, surprisingly to me, it isn't failure at that rather audacious ambition that poses me with the quandary, as I thought it might.

With the publication of my third book, Inner Demons and other essays, I can fairly say that I haven't failed myself as a writer. Inner Demons, for all its faults, lives up to my expectations, at least in content if not in polish. If successful, I think I can write more on the subjects involved, and more that I think is worthwhile. Where I've failed however - miserably - has been in finding an audience for those ideas.


I frankly don't understand the age we live in now. It's common knowledge the world's in desperate need of regeneration. Yet when people attempt to present new ideas it seems there's often very little interest in them. And yet...

One thing I know. If humanity is to emerge from the next century it will do so with practically every moral and intellectual value we currently hold upon the conduct of modern life discredited. The world is not veering toward the precipice of its own inertia, it's doing so because of us, and the essential failure of our fundamental outlook on life, and its meaning.

Inner Demons attempts to open a serious debate on the validity of those views, and to point toward possible new directions. Yet I know that to spend a great deal of life developing some of these ideas, and then to have them largely ignored, would be enough to make almost anyone just succumb to the strange current of torpor that seems to grip America today. Have we run out of ideas, or just the courage to confront our own inner demons?

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2008 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com