The New Gita

“It’s the new Gita!”

A friend of mine from college visited the studio not long ago, the first time we had seen each other in more than thirty years. We passed the time with the usual reminiscences, and as much catching up as we could squeeze into a brief half hour: Me, the doctor-turned-artist, her, the Wall Street financier-turned-mom. After an exciting career in big-city financial markets, she eventually settled on the west coast, dumping the nine-to-five to spend more time with the kids, and teach yoga. We had a nice chat, and suddenly she was on her way again – but not before picking up a copy of my book to read on the plane ride home.

It was only a matter of weeks before we connected again. “I read your book on the plane, the whole entire book, and I loved it!” she was kind enough to say. “I showed it to my yoga instructor, too, and she agreed – it’s the new Gita!”

I blinked, twice, and asked for clarification. Did she mean the Bhagavad Gita, the epic 700-verse scriptural dialogue between prince Arjuna the Hindu god-king Krishna?

Yes, she did. “It’s your story,” she insisted.

No great student of ancient heroic epics, Sanskrit or otherwise, I was still pretty sure that my little book of short stories did not make the cut, not even for purposes of comparison.

“As I recall,” I recalled, “Arjuna tried to walk away from his destiny, to stop doing the thing he was bone-tired of doing (which mostly consisted of killing people in large numbers on the battlefield), and Krishna convinced him to keep at it. That’s really different from what happens in my story. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“It’s all about the Dharma,” she insisted. “We each have to identify what our purpose is in life, and set about doing it.” According to her telling, I had been an artist all along, and was only temporarily distracted by my interest in medicine. Never mind that it had been a twenty-year diversion. I had recognized the error and corrected it. “The important part is that you are now doing what you were meant to do.”

I really couldn't argue with her logic, or her conclusion. Neither could I find fault with the idea that she would encourage her students to buy my book.

“It’s the new Gita!”

Accurate or not, it makes one heck of a sales pitch.

Namaste.

PMHx Update: The Critics, Part 1

We are getting very close to submitting the final version of Past Medical History to the printer. 

The long wait has produced a few new, positive developments, including the addition of a handful of drawings to illustrate each section of the book, and the layout and design process has revealed a few telltale typos that needed to be buffed away.

And we’re still receiving some helpful comments from a select group of previewers. 

I may have mentioned this before, but it is remarkable how differently MDs and Non-MDs have responded to the manuscript, and the results, however unscientific, are holding true to form:

Non-medical readers really seem to like the hodgepodge of stories in this anthology, and appreciate the sometimes dramatically different writing styles and story lengths that vary from piece to piece.

Docs are proving to be more technically critical of the changing formats within the collection, and have suggested various ways of homogenizing the text, such as eliminating the shorter sections altogether and expanding the larger stories, or coalescing them all into a single narrative. One suggested that I hire a ghostwriter to turn my story into a novel. (All good, constructive input, certainly - just not in line with how this project has developed, and not the way the author cares to present the material.)

The majority of the physicians who have perused the manuscript also agree that I am perhaps a bit oversensitive in recalling my medical training, suggesting that I have used the occasion of these memoirs to somehow ‘justify’ my decision to leave medicine by unnecessarily bashing the longstanding traditions of medical education.

Ironically, non-medical reviewers have taken the opposite approach, wondering how I could (how, in fact, anyone could) endure five years and more of the impersonal treatment that constitutes a modern medical education without exiting, stage right, at the first sign of trouble.

I fully expect after publishing Past Medical History to hear again the familiar litany of objections that have been leveled at me for nearly thirty years: Why did you waste this rare opportunity? Why didn't you shift to a different specialty? Why did you dare to take the place of another qualified candidate if you knew you were just going to leave?

How different might it be to consider that I didn't make a mistake at all by going through the whole process? In fact, if I had it to do all over again, I would likely follow the same path as before, and jump off the train at precisely the same moment – the moment when I realized I could not live under the conditions presented either to me or to my patients, and that there was no way, in the short or long term, that I could make a meaningful change in the way medicine was being taught or practiced.

Fortunately, medical school and a good strong taste of surgical residency were the perfect cure for my lifelong desire to become a doctor, and the perfect training for creating my own brand of multi-layered artwork. This rocky path was in fact the ideal preparation for exactly what I am doing right now, and for that I am grateful. 

There’s another story layered somewhere deep in that realization, I'm sure, the details of which will have to wait for a later blog entry – or another book.

Keeping in Touch

Peel, stick.

Peel, stick.

An Apple A Day

The last time we sent out a pile of postcards, about this time last year, we had to address and stamp 2900 of them. That's a lot of cards. I know there are mailing companies who will do this for us,

Peel, stick.

and one day we will be obliged to use them.

Peel, stick.

I say that because sticking labels and stamps on 2900 postcards takes lots of time, something the Missus says we could use doing other things, and she's right. After a while the job will also give you a pain in the neck.

Peel, stick.

Peel, stick.

But there is something personal about doing this myself, the feeling that it's me communicating with my customers, and not some nameless company with a computer and a jet printer spitting out names from a mailing list.

Peel, stick.

Peel, sticky-stick, unstick, stick.

I just noticed that this year the list has grown to 3600. That means we're doing something right - but it's still a lot of cards. When I'm in the groove, it takes about three seconds to peel a label, stick it on a card, and make room for the next one. Same with the stamps.

Peel, stick.

Peel, stick.

That's 21,600 seconds, if all goes smoothly. 360 Minutes. SIx full hours of stamping. You could do it in a day, if the mistakes didn't start to pile up on you. If your neck would stop bothering you.

Peel, stick.

An hour a day, and it's done in a week. Easy, peasy. Unless you have something else that needs doing. Which we usually do.

Peel, stick.

But there is something personal about doing this myself, the feeling that it's me communicating with my customers. I like that part.

Peel, stick.

We'll see how my attitude changes when we have 4500 addresses on the list.

My New Book

Past Medical History II

It’s time for an update.

2013 started off with every indication of being a banner year for art here at the DS Art Studio. In 2012 I was only able to scratch out 3 – count ’em, three – new drawings, and I wanted the New Year to be different. And so it was; by the end of February I had already doubled last year’s tally, polishing off six new medical pieces that would edge me closer to finishing a long-delayed picture book, and laying out two new larger designs that would be great money-makers for the winter holiday season.

Then I got tangled up in a bunch of short stories. An earlier post tells the gritty details. For now, let’s just say I have written enough stories to fill a book, and decided to try and get that book published.

Turns out, it’s not so easy. And after learning as much as I can about this confusing, capricious, multifaceted and multilayered industry, we’ve decided that if Past Medical History is going to get published at all, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

Past Medical History

We’ve been down this road before. 

Several years ago we crowd-sourced the funding for a coffee table book, a collection of drawings from my first twenty years in the studio. That project allowed us to take an idea that we pasted together from Word documents and Scotch tape, and turn it into a reality.

It also gave us the experience of trusting our art customers to support us in a risky undertaking – and that trust paid off. We were able to take our book to press, and our supporters received the first copies of what became a very successful commercial effort.

(Strangely enough, publishers and book dealers actually told us not to do it. They said we were wasting our time, and we would never sell enough of the books to cover our expenses. But we didn't listen – and when the picture book sold out, we reissued it last year in a new paperback edition.)

Well we’re not listening this time, either.  We figure if this process worked so well for a book of pictures, it will work for a book of stories, too – especially when the stories tell where the pictures came from. Only now, we’re not expecting our art customers to do all the heavy lifting. We’re going to tell everybody we know, and a whole bunch of people we never even met.

This time around, we’re planning to partner with Indiegogo to raise the money we’ll need to publish our book.

We’re not quite ready to pull the trigger on our fundraising campaign yet, but everything should come together in another week or two. 

Right now we’re putting the finishing touches on the video we will use to introduce the book project to potential donors. We've collected all the footage, gathered all the images, and even have a terrific musical soundtrack, courtesy of our friends from the band Stegosaurus.

Once the video is complete, we’ll kick off our crowdsourcing campaign, giving everyone the chance to get an advance, first-edition copy of the book – and even have their name included in the Acknowledgements.

For now, though, it’s back to the drawing board, er, editing room. Don't worry, I will start drawing pictures again one of these days. One day real soon. I’m sure of it.

Past Medical History

Once upon a time I wrote a book. Actually, I have been writing for years, usually during the slow art selling season around January and February, before art show activity picks up again in the springtime. Short stories, mostly, very much like the ones that get posted here. 

Owl

This year, though, I was talking to a friendly professional acquaintance who is a writer, a real one, a famous one, who also publishes a line of his own books. I asked him if his company would consider publishing my next coffee table book, a collection of medical drawings that I've been threatening to print for a really long time. (Just as soon as I finish the drawings, which have grown from twenty, to thirty, to now nearly sixty, and still only ten or fifteen to go.)

He politely said no - picture books are not the kind of thing they do - but he did express some interest in another project I had in mind, maybe in another year or two from now, when I could pull together enough short stories to make it work. I figured I would need around thirty of the short stories I'd been working on, sporadically,  to tell my story - the tale of a young doctor who up and quit the business one day, and somewhere along the way decided to become an artist. Seemed like a story worth telling, and I thought I had a good start, somewhere in a file folder on my computer.

So I looked for a file called "Medical Book", where I soon discovered there were nearly100 documents gathering virtual dust, some long, some short, the majority of them already finished, each waiting quietly and patiently for a final edit.

In no time I was able to pull together 45 of these short essays, arranged them in loose chronological order, and discovered that together they constituted the arc of a story. I had a book.

Past Medical History was  born. 

Nothing to do but try and get it published. 



My friend the writer is swamped with other projects. He and others in the industry (in fact, everyone I knew who was even remotely associated with the publishing biz) told me there was but one alternative: Pitch my book to an agent, who would then pitch my book to a real, mainstream publisher.

Such began a process of self-education that has now lasted a couple of months, an adventure that has been at least as complex and fraught with pitfalls as anything I ever encountered in medical school, involving the multiple and oft-counterexclusive paths of mainstream publishing, vanity publishing, self- and assisted self-publishing, e-publishing, POD and POD (yes, there are two, sometimes used interchangeably), and giving up entirely. Not to mention e-mails, Query Letters, Synopses, Biographies, Overviews and Hooks, each an essential part of the cryptic language that transcends common business communication in meaning, intensity and importance.

What's more, there is a formulaic family of documentary formats that must be scrupulously followed in applying to publishing representatives of all stripes, no matter what their submission guidelines may imply to the contrary, with the added challenge of subtle, agent-specific, custom modification requirements representing a maze of tripwires in a minefield of minutia that all but guarantees failure for the novice writer. 

And all this just to convince someone to agree to accept a manuscript for review.

It has been, and remains, a challenge. But we persevere, and by now a formal Book Proposal for Past Medical History has been crafted, meticulously formatted, and recently posted on Scribd, should any sympathetic book agents or editors find their way here to catch the link (and perhaps tell me which portions of the proposal must be double-spaced, as opposed to those pages that will cause the entire project to be scrapped if they are mistakenly made so). In the meantime, all are invited to follow along with me on Facebook to watch as this adventure continues to unfold.

Please bring coffee.