Imagine you’re lucky enough to win front-row seats to a Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift concert, but you, my friend, are not Courteney Cox. Halfway through the show, when you’re absolutely losing your mind with fan-tastic glee, the singer suddenly reaches forward to pull you up on stage to sing along into the mic. What thoughts and feelings might rush through your head? Now, I can carry a tune so long as it isn’t fighting me and we don’t have miles to go, but even so, I can promise you one of my immediate reactions would be panic. Not for one nanosecond do I believe my musical talents are enormous enough to merit the kind of stadium-sized audiences such artists attract. But Taylor Swift can stride into arena after arena, singing music and lyrics she wrote about her own life, wearing basically a swimsuit and five pounds of makeup and wig and make that three-hour extravaganza look easy. It isn’t. A concert is very hard work.
I do think I’m a pretty good actor, with at least a hundred stage and movie credits over the decades to support that conclusion, but even so, the first time I spoke to a big-time movie director my knees were literally knocking. I thought that was something that only happened in Stephen King novels, but suddenly I was perched on two maracas. I was anxious my first time on a movie set, and I was only there as an unpaid extra. In live-theater contexts, I usually don’t feel stage fright, but if I have to sing or, God help us, dance, that goes right out the window.
I’m not an extremely attractive person, but I’m aware of that so I’ve learned how to tell a joke and narrate a story instead. I guess that’s the only reason I’ve been fortunate enough to date some pretty good-looking people over the years. When I asked them out, did I do so casually like it was a foregone conclusion they’d say yes? No, of course not. I broached the topic like I was defusing a bomb, because I did not consider a positive response an inevitability and I always felt as if I were leaping off a cliff in Acapulco, probably a few hundred yards from the coastline, possibly into a grocery store parking lot.
Over the course of my life I’ve met people who seemed to feel no such self-doubt. My father-in-law had a sometimes disarming, sometimes annoying habit of declaring something to be true he had only just made up. It sounded good to him, though, so how could it not be true? I have a friend who used to (and for all I know, still does) throw house parties at which, an hour or two in, she’d doff all her clothes and work the room naked. To my knowledge no one ever complained. I suppose it goes without saying she had an exemplary physique, but maybe you do too and if so, could you pull that off with such charismatic aplomb? I was reminded of that friend when I watched a documentary about Lady Gaga, who went tanning with her friends and immediately stripped down to nothing. Her friends did not. It should go without saying Lady Gaga knew damn well she was being recorded on video for all the world to see. I’m not judging either Gaga or my friend; it’s their bodies and they can do what they want with them. I’m just wondering what convinced them that was something they should do.
My point is some people have what I’ve started calling irrational self-confidence. It’s the unquestioning belief in oneself, often in public, sometimes even in front of a multitude of people, in the absence of verifiable reasons for certainty. And if you’re going to be an international singing sensation, or an actor with an agent from CAA, or a clearly unqualified U.S. president, or for that matter the hostess of a college-town house party, it’s worth millions. And I for one have never had that form of magnetic narcissism for even one second.
Look, I have no outstanding reason to feel confident in my abilities as an author of fiction, either. I’ve had plenty of creative jobs and make a decent living writing and editing for the state of Washington now, but a novel is a whole other bucket of chicken. My previous novels were far from international bestsellers. On those rare occasions when I go back and read something I penned and published years ago, I’m seldom displeased, but I also compare myself to authors I’ve followed over the years and wonder where Jennifer Egan gets her way with a sentence or how Stephen King conceives of a thousand-page novel every time he goes in for a haircut. They’re better writers than I am and I’m all too aware of that. But that attitude doesn’t sell any books, now, does it? And maybe that’s been part of my problem all along.
So I’m trying something new this time around: I’m faking it till I make it. I’m going to promote these books until some of you are sick of it. If you’re a right-thinking American who plans to download Astrojuggernaut this Saturday and then buy all three paperback volumes of ROCK STARS this spring, I have two things to say to you. First, a blessing upon you and all your household. May your favorite rock band tour through an arena convenient to you, may your edibles kick in at exactly the right moment, and may all your Star Trek movies be even-numbered ones. Second, feel free to ignore all this shameless self-promotion and just enjoy the damn books already. But as for the rest of you, I’m about to wear you the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out.
Because y’know what? Even with my actual, innate humility bordering on self-directed hostility, I still think these books are a whole lot of fun. No, they won’t be for everyone, but I can’t think of anything that is. I wrote them for the 12-year-old version of myself, who, if he’d seen a mass market paperback with a spaceship shaped like an electric guitar on its cover, would’ve immediately picked that novel up, read the blurb on the back and started saving his pennies. And whatever age you are, maybe you’re that precocious goofball on some level, too. If so, welcome aboard, friend. I look forward to jamming with you for the next million light-years as we cruise future spaceways at Warp Factor Eleven. The secret of your interpersonal bravado will always be safe with me.
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