It feels wrong to promote my book right now
For the next week, 100% of my royalties are going to the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital
Kyiv, spring 2024. Photo credit Marina Boiko
“…it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don’t we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be unthought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.”
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
This was written in 1964. From a book set in California. Well out of the range of the “Russians and their rockets.”
It’s easy to say that the “Russians and the worries are not really real” from the safe and cosy confines of sunny California. And that they can be simply “unthought and made to vanish.”
If only. If only it were so easy for Ukraine to “unthink” the worries and make them “vanish.” russia isn’t going away so easily. It’s going to take far more than that (and ‘thoughts and prayers’ won’t do much good either).
On 10 October 2022 I woke up determined and in the mood to have a productive day of writing. But that was the day of a particularly ferocious attack on Kyiv, one which targeted Shevchenko Park in central Kyiv, destroying a playground. I wrote a different type of chapter that day (one of my Interludes sharing my thoughts on the war), questioning what kind of “monsters” would resort to wiping out playgrounds and targeting children.
My book is hardly going to do much to end this war, other than to maybe bring attention to what’s going on to a handful of readers (and it’s not a book about the war, per se). But in October 2022 it felt so wrong to write about the banal interactions between teachers and students in the classroom and today it feels so wrong to be promoting my book here and to critics and bookshops in Ukraine.
For the next week, 100% of my book royalties will go to the Ohmatdyt Children's Hospital, no matter where you get it from. In the grand scheme of things, it might not be much, but every little helps, as they say. It’s the least I can do from where I am.
Thanks.
Get the eBook directly from my site or at Amazon:
https://danielpuzzo.com/
Amazon
More on this story for those who might have missed it:
Rescue operations end at Kyiv children's hospital, at least 33 killed in capital overall