ABOUT THE COVER: The background image is a photograph by Ian Coulling, creator of the website Images of Venice, and used with his kind permission. Read more here about his project. Cover design and typography by Nostalgistudio; excerpt from “Not Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.”
Stay, still, O days of joy—days when eye spoke to eye, and human voices, sweeter than the breeze music of the pine branches or the river’s gentle murmur, answered mine—stay, O days replete with beatitude, days of loved society, days unutterably dear to me, me forlorn!—pass, O pass before me. Remembering you makes me forget what I am. Behold how my streaming eyes blot this senseless paper—behold my features convulsed by agonizing throes at your mere recollection, now that, alone, my tears flow, my lips quiver, my cries fill the air, unseen, unmarked, unheard! Yet, O yet, days of delight! Let me dwell on your dawdling hours!
MARCH 2025 / Relaunch
JANUARY 2025 / A short account of travails before triumph
When I started serializing my line-by-line rewrite of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man on WordPress, back in May 2021, I already had it in mind that I’d end up with a new book to publish and sell.
Not only that, I believed it had promise from a sales angle. Popular interest in Mary Shelley and her work is a given; so is the existence of a built-in audience of semi-motivated readers who’ve found themselves lost in the slogs of The Last Man she gave them in 1826. And here was I, a fellow novelist, helping solve that problem, doing work of potentially wide appeal. A little success, a little recognition for the result might attract more readers to my other books: this thought was never distant from my mind. It helped inspire me. For the sake of a writing career, at last, I’d attached myself to a VIP, a big one, and brought my labors to her orbit. I confess it: as a nobody—even worse, as a self-publisher—I was crafting a set of Mary Shelley-branded coattails to ride into the light.
One of the characters in my previous unrecognized novel offers the Yiddish proverb thus: Woman plans, God laughs.
Subsequent to much more editing, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man—as I’d decided to call the new book—was to be a late summer 2024 release. I had 100 postcards printed to feature the cover, then another 100 of another postcard I made to promote it twice as much. In the end, I struggled with the files and the whole uploading process more than usual, but finally got it all done so I could move to the next step and order proof copies. Then something called a Catalogue Integrity notice arrived in my inbox, stating that my book could be printed, and I was free to order copies; but it would not be listed or distributed by IngramSpark to retailers because it. . .well, it was flagged by an AI bot is what happened, because of the title and how I’d had to fill in the metadata when I uploaded it. Is the book by me? Or Mary Shelley? Whose and what is it? The uncertainty reads as violation to the disembodied mind.
Rigamarole ensued. I was especially eager to move past this obstacle because I wanted IngramSpark to create the ebook for me, a paid service I was eager to pay for, in order to spare myself more work with files. But every defense I wrote of my work’s originality despite its title, ran up against a wall that signed itself “Gayle” and offered no phone number, no email, and no recourse.
I kept telling myself, in a repetitive pep talk: These are interesting problems to have. Which is true. Questions about authorship, posterity, and appropriation; the nature of the futuristic; the meaning of public domain: all of this plays into the project I undertook; the problems only reflect the eventual book’s nature. In that I’ve created something difficult to classify, they’re even encouraging. Very timely, as well, given AI’s obvious centrality to my travails, though the timeliness might be another problem all its own. AI as peril, as menace: so timely it’s dull—and I want what I write to be interesting, all of it, even what I write about AI.
Possibly attempting the impossible.
Finally I began to resign myself to having created a book that could only be procured by direct mail from the publisher (me, going to the post office a lot). It would be a sort of ironic exercise in nostalgia. Thankfully, my friend Rags came up with a better idea.
Not Mary Shelley’s The Last Man proved a go all the way; Catalog Integrity undisturbed. I ordered the ebook conversion with a feeling of indescribable happiness, really an adult life highlight. I knew weeks would have to pass, and so they did. Weeks more, before I managed to get the Kindle version to appear for sale on Amazon.
Meanwhile, I bought a Nook, Barnes & Noble’s e-reader. They’re too expensive (so are Kindles, the basic models should cost half what they do, as an encouragement to reading) but Not Mary Shelley’s The Last Man can be bought for Nook, only $9.99. Not one penny of which enriches Amazon or its ownership in any way, should that thought appeal. The free sample includes the whole introduction and the first few chapters, a nice plus. I think the e-book looks great.
