On March 8^th I stand at my living room window to admire the year’s first 7pm sunset, a dramatic one with all the colors. When I look up past the rooflines around me I am astonished at the beauty of the clouds traveling east overhead. A long almost identical series of pink curlicues, each festooned with coral-like growths of magenta and melting mauve, they remind me of seahorses; I reflect on the hit it must have made in Coney Island before this procession reached me. At last another far more massy form slides into view, like a parade float—except on and on it comes, bigger, rounder, thickening. A leg, I realize: this is the leg of the woman of International Women’s Day, appearing in the form of some kind of sea goddess. Soon I can identify her knee, and as the thigh spreads upward, the darkness of a womb. I see a baby lion take shape inside it.

There is never a good time to write or post anything, I’ve realized. Wars, sick friends, mass protests, school shootings, wildfires: every day and night brings some more important event that makes it feel icky and even offensive to sit down and say to other people, “Me.” To some degree, being so into self as to go in for public self-expression feels like a moral defect and an offense compounded by the frank intention to sidetrack other attention spans from things of more vital concern. I get offended myself, at times, reading other writers’ piffle during hours of heightened crisis. Who thought this worth reading, I wonder? Most times it’s someone with a book to sell, part of a campaign.

How many people keep quiet and stop writing for reasons like these? Just not wanting to sound like a real asshole gradually chokes off their work completely. Good writers, good people, sitting it out; for it’s like the situation in politics, or arts administration: the ones who push to the front and seek election are generally less savory and deserving than the norm.

It’s my squeamishness over giving offense that’s kept me so quiet about my novel Lament: A Soviet Woman and Her True Story, with its central setting of wartime Ukraine; I think I’ve written a fine and valuable novel that has proven to be very timely, and I barely tell anyone. And it barely sells. Ditto Not Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, about the end of the world then and now, my most recent effort to produce a book other people might want. And who (besides me) reads Famepunk, my historical fantasy series of women’s tennis novels? They always make me laugh, too! I still believe in all my books, want audiences for them all; but I hesitate to intrude at this permanent difficult time. I hate to think I look like I’m trying to intrude, really. Like I’m out ringing doorbells during a televised state funeral.

But now I reach the point of asking: So what? So what if I am? So what if yes, I’m a loser working for myself, with unproven wares to sell. A bona fide struggling small business owner with the tax records to match, I’m one of millions. And so what if no one has time for me and my strange books full of women’s stories in great variety? If people feel pestered, someone they complain to about me might wind up curious.

Maybe follow a link to a sample.