Next topic:

Writing is weird.  I just noticed that five of my novels are available on Audible.com.  You’d think I’d be up-to-speed on this sort of thing, but I’m not very good at keeping track of it.  So I listened to samples of the books, and if there’s anything weirder than getting paid to make up stories, it’s hearing someone get paid to read the stories you make up. 

I’ll admit that I still get confused by this sometimes.  I am a professional writer, a novelologist.  When I sit down at my computer and write a scene where a robot detective punches a mutant in the face, I’m doing my job.  It’s how I pay my bills.   It’s what makes me semi-sorta-almost-famous-ish.  And it’s doubtful you would be reading this right now if I wasn’t a writer who managed to catch a lot of lucky breaks.

At times, it’s like being the guy who tastes ice cream for a living.  I’m sure it’s not always a great job.  I’m sure there are times he just doesn’t feel like tasting ice cream.  And, like any job, if you’re going to be good at it, you have to take it seriously.  But in a world where so many people have jobs because they NEED them, not because they WANT them, even a lousy day of tasting ice cream beats the hell out of most anything else.

Thanks for letting me be the ice cream guy, gang.

Next topic:

If there are two things I love in this universe, it’s robots and tentacle monsters.  My wife even bought me a T-shirt with a robot fighting a tentacle monster on it.  And it is awesome.

This is how I can tell how much I disliked the last Transformers film.  Because the new one might have a dinobot in it, and yet, I don’t care.  Yes, the live action Transformers film has done the impossible.  It’s made me apathetic about dinobots.  And that’s quite an accomplishment.

Speaking of robots fighting robots, have you seen the trailer for the new Hugh Jackman film Real Steel?  I have no idea what the plot is about.  All I know is that it’s something about giant boxing robots.  So that’s really all I need to know.

Of all my books, the one I’d most likely write a sequel to, given my druthers, would be The Automatic Detective.  I like the world, the characters, and, of course, our robotic protagonist Mack Megaton himself.  Not that I plan on writing a sequel to that anytime soon.  And when I do finally write a sequel to something, it’d probably be with something with Orbit.

Oh, yeah.  Just in case you haven’t heard, Divine Misfortune is out in mass market paperback.  If you were waiting for that, you should buy it.  And my new novel Chasing the Moon comes out at the end of May.  It’ll be hardcover, but if you don’t have the patience to wait for mass market, you should buy it.  You’ll be glad you did.

What’s Moon about?  It’s complicated.  The basic premise is that Diana ends up with an apartment of monster roommates.  Reality is an illusion.  Everything we believe is wrong, and that a vast and uncaring universe doesn’t make sense to anyone.  Not even monsters from beyond.

It’s a fun read.  Really.  I promise.  Odds are good that if you’ve read one or two of my previous books, you like what I write.  So I feel confident in saying you’ll probably like this one too.  It does have a tentacle monster eating the moon, and as previously established, tentacle monsters are wicked cool.

It’s also my eighth book.  And that’s weird.  Is it too soon to have a retrospective of my career at this point?  It still feels strange to even use the term career.  Yet novelology is my career, and it’s doing good by me so far.  I don’t know where I’ll be in five years.  Maybe I’ll still be plugging along in my obscure little corner of tentacle monsters and giant fightin’ robots.  Or maybe I’ll be an international sensation, beloved by millions, flying across the world in my private jet with my solid gold robot butlers.  Who knows?

All I can say is that I’m glad to be here.  And when you can say that, you’re ahead in the game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s late, and I need to go to bed.  Catch you later, gang.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Hi.  Been a while.  Still working on finishing my current manuscript, but I can’t stay away.  It’s not fair to you, my adoring public.  You guys are my bread and butter, so I’m setting aside the manuscript for a second and posting something because I know how much you look forward to me enriching your lives with my wit, humor, and dinobot references.  Although in this post, I will endeavor to keep dinobot references to a minimum because “Me, Grimlock, love challenge!”

Damn.  So close.

Oh, well, onward and upward.  As a professional novelologist, I have a tendency not to talk about my work directly.  I feel a good book should stand on its own, and if I have to explain it to you, then I’ve failed.  And the first rule of Novelology Club is you do not talk about Novelology Club.  The second rule of Novelology Club is you do not talk about Novelology Club.  Oh, wait.  The second rule of Novelology Club is don’t use semi-colons.  Why?

We don’t talk about that.

Still I spend a lot of time working on these books, and while I realize that not all of them can be as beloved as others, I still want people to like them.  Or at least, pay me some money for them.  So I’ve decided to take a moment and talk about one of my previous novels.  But because Orbit, my current publisher, doesn’t really gain much from that, I’m also going to go ahead and talk about DIVINE MISFORTUNE, due out next month.

But first, let’s take a look at the ancient past.  Waaaay, waaay back to 2008.  (By the way, am I the only one who still gets annoyed that 2008 is “the past” and yet, when I look back on that time, I don’t think about the time the Martians blew up the moon or the armies of the mole people rose from the underrealm?)

Let’s talk about TOO MANY CURSES.

Too Many Curses might be my least successful novel.  Although I think A NAMELESS WITCH might ultimately be the winner (hooray?) on that front.  I’ll go on record saying that I think WITCH is probably my most subtle novel.  I say this because it seems to get the most varied interpretations and some of the strongest responses (both negative and positive).  Although it gets its fair share of Meh, too.  I really like Witch, and while I could discuss it at length, I think it holds up pretty well.  It did win a feminist fiction recognition (of which I am very proud), and since I actually love hearing the many interpretations, I’d rather not get too into that right now.

CURSES, on the other hand, gets shortchanged a lot.  It’s not that people don’t like it.  It’s got a solid rating on Amazon, just not many reviews.  But that’s par for the course when you’re an obscure li’l writer like yours truly.  Still, stylistically, Curses is a departure on many levels from my previous novels, and it breaks a lot of rules of what readers are trained to expect.

There’s no romance in Curses.  None.

There’s no edge.  Our heroine is not a your typical empowered woman warrior or mage in training.  She’s a housekeeper.  And she remains a housekeeper, more or less, throughout the novel.  While she does evolve over the course of the story, she doesn’t radically shift.  And that was kind of the point for me.

It has almost no world-building.  Not a single scene takes place outside of the castle walls.  And even the castle itself is left ill-defined and nebulous.  While Nessy knows how to navigate its many halls, I deliberately didn’t include a map or even bother to create one.  I couldn’t care less about those things.  They are completely unimportant to the story for me.

I wrote Curses because I wanted to write something with a lot of weird monsters in it, and a castle full of weird monsters seemed the perfect place for that.  But like any story, it evolved into something more interesting.  Curses is a story about individuals trapped in a rotten situation and just trying to make the best of it.  Even the villain of the story, The Door at the End of the Hall, is really all about growing and evolving as a person, trying to become better than you are.  But lest you think I take myself too seriously, let’s not forget some other reasons I wrote this story:

THE MONSTER THAT SHOULD NOT BE.  The Monster Under the Bed.  The Very Hungry Carpet.  The Sword in the Cabbage.  The Drowned Woman.  Olivia the Alliterative Owl.  The Toad Prince.  The Ragdoll Princess.  Decapitated Dan.  Mr. Bones.  The Vampire King.  The Hellhound.  Gnick the Gnome.  The Hanged Man.  Echo the Bodiless Poet.  Sir Thedeus the Fearless Bat Hero.  Dodger the thieving weasel.  The Jabberwock.  Fortune the black cat.  Wow.  Just writing it now, I could go on and on, and I have to say I love all these characters.  Some don’t get much more than a few pages of story time, but that’s what I love about the castle.  It feels alive, like a real place brimming with characters and life.  A small world in itself.

Also, there’s a really cool scene where a bunch of enchanted armors for fantastic creatures fight a witch who can kill you with her touch.  And the scene where Tiama the Scarred confronts THE MONSTER THAT SHOULD NOT BE is just awesomeriffic.

So if you haven’t read Curses yet, you really should.  At least I think so, and if you can’t trust my opinion, what is this world coming to?

Onto DIVINE MISFORTUNE…

This is my new novel, out this March.  It is going to be my breakout novel.  I call it here and now.  It’s going to make me rich and powerful and able to control the weather with my mind.

Plus…Laser vision!

But what’s it about?  It’s about gods.  Lazy, dumb, petty, easily confused, down-on-their-luck deities who spend most of their time watching television, playing board games, and trying to do as little as possible while gaining the most glory for themselves.

So, yeah, they’re pretty much like the rest of us.

That’s how gods used to be, y’know, and while I have nothing against the modern conceptions of divinity, they don’t really allow one to tell a great story.  Heck, once you make your protagonist all-knowing and all-powerful, it’s hard to have much conflict.  But Zeus and his ilk were that wonderful combo of all-powerful and dim-witted that allowed pretty much anything.

My gods are immortal.  Period.  They don’t die.  They can hurt each other physically (they are physical beings), but nothing leaves any permanent damage.  My gods aren’t powered by faith, which is far too nebulous a commodity.  They’re paid in tribute:  blood sacrifice, prayers, and ritual.  Or cash.  Yes, these guys take cash, too.  It’s a modern world.  The more tribute they collect, the more powerful they become.  The more powerful they become, the more tribute they collect.  Yes, even for gods, life is all a popularity contest.

The focus on the story isn’t on the celebrities of the divine, but on the working class gods.

First up, is Lucky, raccoon god of good fortune.  He’s a player, a schmoozer.  He’s not quite as charismatic as he thinks he is, but he gets by on equal parts charm, wit, and…well…luck.  That’s kind of his thing.

Then there’s Quick.  You know him better as Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered serpent god.  Quick is definitely down on his luck.  He turns his back for one second and the next thing y’know, a handful of conquistadors have ruined everything.  Ain’t that always the way?

Siph the goddess of heartbreak is a former goddess of love who…well, can’t ruin everything, can I?

And let’s not forget Gorgoz, the chaos god who sulks in an unlit basement, watching Leave It to Beaver reruns and drinking beer.  Even for a god of death and destruction, he’s a real asshole.

Intrigued?  You should be because, as we’ve already covered, if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I still can’t get over the position I find myself in.  People care what I have to say.  My thoughts and opinions, for better or worse, can have an effect on others.  I’ve been quoted, gang.  In a modern age where anyone with a computer and a blog likes to pretend that everyone in the world hangs on their every word, I have at least a few examples where some random thing I wrote in the middle of the night (like I’m doing right now) got someone’s attention.  Hopefully in a good way.

The irony is right now I’m blogging about blogging.  And you’re reading my blog about blogging.  Maybe for an extra level of weirdness, you could blog about my blog about blogging someday.

Is there a point to this thing beyond that?  I don’t know.  I guess it’s more of an observation about the strangeness of my position.  For lack of a better term, I am a (very) minor celebrity, a role-model to some, a devil-may-care rogue to others, a friend to children everywhere (or is that Gamera, the jet powered giant turtle?  I get us confused sometime), a curmudgeon with a heart of gold, a clown with a poet’s soul, a dinobot trapped in a human’s body, an outlaw hunting outlaws, a dude who could seriously write all the above and expect that more than a few people will actually read it.

Weird.

Stay in school, kids!

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

It did for me anyway, and part of me hates saying that because I feel like one of the problems we tend to make in American culture is waiting too late to start our lives, treating grown people like children, and generally acting as if we have all the time in the world.

But, for me at least, I have to say that if you were to judge my life by the first 30 years, you’d see a guy who wasn’t going anywhere with no prospects of going anywhere.  I wasn’t a loser.  I was just a guy with no girlfriend, no successes under my belt, and drifting without a plan.  Yes, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but that’s like knowing I want to be a dinobot.  Just because you know what you want out of life that doesn’t mean you’ll get it.

Have I mentioned that I didn’t lose my virginity until 27?  Or that, up to that point, I hadn’t even been on a single date.  And while I had a couple of jobs, I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire.

Look at me now.  I’m a professional novelologist with 6 books on the shelves, another on the way, and three movie options.  While I’m an obscure li’l writer, I’m significantly less obscure than I was only 6 years ago.  And, most importantly, I make a living doing this, and that’s pretty damn lucky.

(Also, I’ve dated several women, had one serious previous relationship, and am currently in another serious relationship.  That might be a normal achievement for most humans, but sometimes, that amazes me more than the writing stuff.)

I guess I’m just a late bloomer.

It’s not all great.  I suppose my biggest regret is that it’s only now that I’m in a position to seriously consider having kids.  But that’s a small complaint, and the fact that, as a guy, having kids past 30 is easier than if I was a woman.  (Not that many women haven’t managed to just that with relative easy.)

So I guess, if I consider myself a role model (and let’s just pretend that I am for the sake of argument), I’d like to think that it’s not just because I’m a professional writer (which is actually pretty cool, no matter how often I see that phrase), but also that if you’re a late bloomer, you aren’t out of the game yet.  That you’re reading this blog post alone should be proof enough.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee