FISH SELL... was originally published earlier this year by the wonderful Washington Independent Review of Books...but I've been thinking a lot these hot summer days of my Pop and of his unorthodox real-world advice so I'm reprinting and sharing it here...
Beyond the Book
���Fish Sell���On seeing the
trade paperback of my book for the first timeBy Caroline Bock 
The cover of Before My
Eyes hasn���t changed, but the feel of it has. Grittier. I expect it to smell
like cigarettes.  
It doesn���t.  
I flip to the back first, as if the ending may somehow have
changed.  
It hasn���t.  
On the last page is an advertisement for another novel, LIE,
and I see that I wrote that, too. 
I actually never forgot that I wrote LIE, my first novel.
Though sometimes it feels like I never published anything (except that poem I wrote
in third grade) ��� that someone else wrote all those words over all those years. 
I can still remember that first poem. My father stared at it
and its ���tall, towering trees��� published in the school���s mimeographed newspaper.
 
���Toots, we got a writer in the family,��� he said with his
kind of praise, expansive and vague. It took me a minute to know that he was imagining
me older, not 8 years old. Until that moment, I hadn���t particularly wanted to be
a writer.  
If my father were looking over Before My Eyes, he���d ask the sale price first ($9.99), and then how
many I expected to sell (a lot, maybe). And then he might ask: ���Why don���t I
bring the book down to Thunderbird?��� He���d sell a few for me at his flea-market table
in Florida where he sold souvenir T-shirts to Canadian tourists.  
���I can���t promise you how many books I���d move, toots. I���m the
guy known for the fish T-shirts, not books. Did you ever think of slapping a
picture of a shark on any of your novels? Fish sell, toots.���
 
You���ll notice that there is always a mother, damaged or dead,
in my novels. I���m working on writing a mother into my next book, but I may have
to kill her off. My father raised me, and I have trouble with mothers.  
I have never seen a shark or written about one. Before My Eyes is about paranoid
schizophrenia, gun violence, and the teen psyche at the end of a long, hot
summer. It is largely set at the beach, but there aren���t any fish.
Some people glance at Before
My Eyes and ask, ���What age is this for?��� because it is marketed as a YA
novel. I wrote it with teen characters surrounded by adults who don���t see what
is happening before their eyes. I think adults should read it first. 
If you read Before My
Eyes, you���ll immediately glean that it starts near the end and moves
backward. The world is different if you think you know the answers, but you
don���t.
I see the world moving forward and backward at the same
time, roots overlapping one another, the trees from my first poem. I see myself
writing in notebooks at 8 years old and today. My father is gone, dead now, but
here with me, looking over my shoulder, talking about fish.  
���Fish sell, toots.��� 
The
trade-paperback version of Caroline Bock���s Before My Eyes is now available wherever books are sold.
For more about the author go to www.carolinebock.com .