A long time ago I read the introduction to a Dean Koontz collection called Strange Highways. In that introduction, he mentioned his editor sending back a draft of an unnamed novel-in-progress with instructions to increase the word count. My memory is fuzzy (I was a teenager at the time), but I recall the request called for an additional 100k words or so. The whole thing was written tongue-in-cheek, which won’t strike anyone as odd if they’re familiar with Dean’s quirky sense of humor, and forever impressed upon me the correlation between large books and doorstops.
So, every time I think of “appropriate novel length,” I think of writing a doorstop. A massive brick of paper strong enough to hold open a door.
When I printed THE LIMINAL MAN, I didn’t really think about its size. The first draft is single-spaced, after all. Last night, while taking these photos of the first draft (complete with Erica’s tabs and notes), I realized that when I finally double-space it to send off to the most amazing editor on the planet, it’s not only going to cost me an arm and a leg in shipping, but it will also take a full ream of paper.
I’d like to think that, in some way, I’ve made Dean Koontz proud.
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In other news, the Kickstarter project for ALT 2.0 is now over 80%. We’ve got a little over 3 weeks left to go, so if you’re thinking about pledging, now is the time. Who knows? There may even be some incentive for you to help put us over the 100% mark (not-so-subtle hint). Watch this space in the coming days.
TK
Happy Saturday, folks. I have some things to cover, but I’ll get the updates out of the way first.
Updates
- The latest Word Machines feature is now live, featuring author and independent advocate Henry Baum. It’s a great interview, and his novel THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD is very good. I recommend you read both.
- The Kickstarter Project to fund ALT 2.0 stands at $1135 in pledges with 34 days left to go. I think we’re doing great. So far I’ve posted 6 updates detailing the “story behind the story,” along with some scans of my journal notes, and even an “extended” cut of my story THEY WOULD JUDGE HIS TRESPASSES which was published over at 365tomorrows. If you’ve pledged, I thank you, and ask that you please spread the word. If you haven’t, all it takes is $5, and you’ll get access to these posts along with a digital copy of the book. And hey, if you’re not interested, pay it forward and pass along the link. Thanks!
- I signed up to become an affiliate of {indie}pendent books. There’s a link over on the sidebar. The folks who run the site are hardworking people, they love books, and they think independently published works have value. Follow the link there on the side, take a look at what they have, and get yourself something. When you do, this site will get a few pennies in return. Those pennies will go toward paying for hosting costs. So, to recap: Click link, buy book, keep both sites alive. Repeat. You might even see ALT there one day. Who knows?
ALT 2.0
Between some awesome feedback and a not-so-awesome two-star Amazon review suggesting the book be 100 pages longer (not happening), I decided to take a much closer look to the manuscript as we cruise closer to the Kickstarter ending date. One of the criticisms the book has received is that the first edition draft begins much to slow, but that, once it gets going, it really gets going well. Problem is, I wrote that first chapter to serve as an establishing shot. Most important characters are introduced right there.
So . . . I started brainstorming. I decided that the book’s pacing might improve if things are incorporated much sooner. But, as I’ve been told to take a couple of weeks away from anything ALT or TLM related (per the direction of friends and my wife and my editor), I’m left to my own devices, and so I turn to you folks. If you’ve read ALT, and I suspect some of you have, what would you change? What would you do differently? I know a lot of you are writers, too. Give me your opinions. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings or anything. Let’s be honest here. Let me know in the comments.
A Funny Thing Happened
I was going to write about this much sooner, but I was in the midst of pushing the project and finishing TLM’s first draft, so I didn’t have much time to do so. I also wanted to let some dust settle lest the eye of Sauron still be upon me.
As you know, my relationship with a certain POD printer sort of fell through at the worst possible time. In the aftermath of an article I wrote about it, said POD printer contacted me wanting to discuss it, and hoping to do damage control. And I, being one to vent my grievances, decided to indulge them. I went through a play-by-play of what was wrong with it, and asked if they have any sort of quality control whatsoever, because what I received never should have left their printer. I should also mention that, when they reached out to me, they misspelled my name, despite my name being a huge part of my email address (and yes, they used my contact email here from the site).
I could let the misspelling slide. I’m no stranger to it. Keisling is a weird name, and people mess it up all the time. So I didn’t mention anything about it. “Just a typo,” I thought. I waited a few days to send my response because I wanted to let myself cool off. I was still rather pissed about the whole thing, and wanted to take a look at the email with a level head before hitting “send.” I did so, and the next day I received a response.
They misspelled my name again, claimed they have “active” quality control procedures in place, then went on to tell me that they would be refunding me the cost the proof, and had shipped me a mailer so that I could send back the copy. They wanted to “investigate.” Three things happened in that email that royally pissed me off. For starters, they misspelled my name again. I work in a business environment. The least someone can do is get a person’s name right. Not doing so shows a lack of professionalism. The second thing that got under my skin was the refund. You’re probably saying, “Why bitch about it? You’re getting your money back.” I acknowledge that. However, I did not ask for it, nor was the purpose of my emails, or the article, or even the project, to obtain a refund. It cost them to produce the proof. Fine. I paid them for their time and service. I understand why they felt the need to provide a refund for the sake of customer service, but doing so without my consent was rather annoying. And finally, expecting me to send it back to them without asking also irked me. I’d no intention of sending it to them. It’s the only proof of their mistake. I’m not about to send it back to them.
I should mention that, around the time of this email, I started receiving phone calls at my residence from them. They did not leave messages. It was rather creepy.
So I didn’t wait a day this time. I sent this email (and I’ve redacted revealing material–sorry):
Dear –
I appreciate the offer, but I do not wish for a refund. Please keep your money. I have no intention of returning the book, and will keep what I paid for. I will, however, provide you with the product ID on the inside of the book: [REDACTED]
Though I doubt someone at [REDACTED] is truly unable to remove the files, I will respect your claim and your company’s policies on the matter. However, I do wish for my account to be closed.
I should also point out that, for the last two days, someone from [REDACTED] has called my home without leaving a message. I would like this to stop.
Finally, while I’m sure you mean well, your inability to correctly spell my last name across two consecutive emails does not help your claim of quality control.
I will now consider this matter closed.
Kind regards,
Todd Keisling
Yeah. I was rather angry. I sent that and stewed on it for the rest of the day. The following morning, a funny thing happened. First I received a notice that I had a new Twitter follower. When I opened said notice, I discovered that the person with whom I’d been exchanging emails was now following me. I went to her account page, saw that she’d just opened it, and that I was the only person she followed. Not cool. At this point I was feeling rather creeped out by the whole thing. They were stalking me like an ex-girlfriend. Very weird.
A few minutes later I checked back and saw her account was closed. Fortunately I kept the Twitter email (with a “lol” label). And then, about an hour after all that, I got an email from the supposed “VP” of the company (research indicates that he was only a manager as of six months ago, which would make for a very fast climb of the corporate ladder), written in legalese and citing termination of the agreement I signed when opening my account with them.
This was all a few weeks ago. It made for an exciting week, alongside ALT 2.0 being the featured project on Kickstarter, and I wanted to tell you all, but there were other, more pressing matters at hand. I hope it provided you a good laugh. I’m still chuckling about it.
Next time I’ll post some shots of the TLM manuscript. For now I have errands to run. Enjoy your weekend, folks.
TK
You may have heard of Mr. Baum, if you’re in the right channels. I try to keep my ear as close to the ground of as I can when it comes to independent authors, and his name was one of the first to surface many months ago. It did so in the guise of Backword Books — a collective of self-published authors who work together to nurture readership, build sales, and exhibit a high level of professionalism under a unified banner. I’m going to be honest: This was the first time I’d come across an actual group effort to shake off the self-publishing stigma. That such a group even exists continues to amaze me, as my previous peeks into the “scene” revealed a less organized, self-destructive environment. Much to my surprise, things are changing for the better, and I suspect this group has something to do with it. I sent them an email inquiring about how one might join, and it was Henry who responded. (I never did send that copy of ALT like I intended – I’m sorry, Henry. Rain check?)
Sometime later his name popped up again, this time associated with Self-Publishing Review. That’s when I learned he was behind both of these ventures. What can I say? The guy gets around. Henry has a few novels under his belt–THE GOLDEN CALF and NORTH OF SUNSET, alongside his latest, THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD–and has shorter work that’s appeared in anthologies with Another Sky Press and 3 AM Magazine, among several others. He’s also a musician–a fact I learned when I visited his site and saw he wrote, recorded and performed a song for each chapter of his latest novel. (For the curious, I’ve listened to it, and yes, it’s quite good.) He’s an award-winner, too. Just recently his novel took home the award for best fiction at the DIY Book Festival, and the IPPY award for Visionary Fiction.
After seeing all the buzz about this book of his, I had to check it out. I read the premise and was immediately intrigued. How could I not be? Check out what the back cover says:
Eugene Myers is working on a novel about the end of the world. Meanwhile, he discovers his daughter doing porn online and his marriage is coming to an end. When he begins dreaming about people who turn out to be real, he wonders if his novel is real as well. Which isn’t good news: the radical and demented President Winchell is bent on bringing about worldwide destruction. Eugene Myers may just be the one to stop the apocalypse.
This history of the future covers every conspiracy imaginable: UFOs, secret societies, and World War III, as well as theories on life after death and human evolution by a writer whose last novel was called by Dogmatika, “A page-turner and an example of an effective piece of storytelling that should be envied.”
Henry Baum is the author of North of Sunset and The Golden Calf – novels which explore the underbelly of America’s other religion: Hollywood. Now he turns his sights on mainstream American religion in a novel that’s part satire and part memoir/part amusing and part warning. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson, The American Book of the Dead explores the nature of reality and the human race’s potential to either disintegrate or evolve.
When I was a kid, I had a very morbid fascination with the apocalypse. It’s a fascination which I’ve come to realize is a side effect of my Southern Baptist upbringing. Growing up in the South, we took our weekly sermons with a healthy dose of fire and brimstone for good measure. Satan lurked around every corner and, according to my mother, one misplaced nuclear warhead dropped on Israel would doom us all, for surely that would bring about the end. I lived in fear of Jesus, for his return meant horrible things for 99% of mankind. In some ways, reading Henry’s novel reminded me of this childhood trauma. I know how this must sound, but bear with me here. It’s a good thing.
See, as I followed the plight of Eugene Meyers, I noticed Mr. Baum slowly peeling back the layers of an altogether different surface. Between Eugene’s narrative, and portions of the book which depict the actions of President Winchell (portions which are from Eugene’s own novel), there are hints of a deeper meaning. One of the ideas touched upon in the book is the notion that, for some semblance of utopia to exist, humanity must start over. It is this idea which brings a broad sweep of events into play, and I won’t spoil them for you here. Rather, I bring it up because of the idea itself–that we must end to begin.
When the novel begins, the world is not a good place. In fact, it’s a scary place–not because of untold horrors lurking in the shadows, but horrors running amok in plain sight. This is best exemplified in Meyer’s daughter, who he discovers is participating in online pornography. See, in the near future, porn is commonplace. It’s on nightly television, perpetuating nationwide apathy. As the tale moves along, it becomes apparent that things such as the dumbing-down of society have happened for a reason, and it all culminates in the perpetration of World War III.
Henry goes to great lengths to depict a future that is not just possible, but probable, building it up on a stage that’s meant to fall. The beauty of it is, by the time I got to the end, I wanted it to fall. I wanted the apocalypse to happen. Not because of President Winchell’s twisted dogma, but because of the implications of what might happen thereafter: That humanity, when facing the abyss, will awaken to a greater consciousness and progress, rather than destroy itself. The book gets a little weird toward the end, but given the context, it sort of makes sense in its own strange way. It’s a quirky pay-off to a very tense climb to the book’s climax.
If I had to sum up the book, and the experience of reading it, I would say Henry Baum made me want the apocalypse to happen, and quickly. However, I did not want the book to end. Which is a good thing, because I hear Henry’s hard at work on the sequel. I can’t wait.
THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD is available in print and in digital form. You can also read it for free on Scribd – but do Henry a favor and buy it.
I’ve rambled on enough. I’m going to turn this thing over to Henry and my insidious questions:
TK: Right. Since your bio seems so enigmatic, I’m going to cut right to the heart of the matter: Would you tell us a bit about yourself?
HB: Main thing to know about me, I think, is I grew up in Hollywood. Both my parents worked in the industry. I went to high school with Jack Nicholson’s kid, Cher’s kid, etc. I wasn’t a Less than Zero kid, my own upbringing was relatively modest. But the experience formed me. I was alienated as hell in high school, and at home. I felt like I was living a step apart from the reality most people experience. Hollywood’s in the business of manufacturing reality, and the world of celebrity itself is in some other ether.
I grew up in a non-religious home, but then realized fairly recently that I grew up very much in a religious home – it worshiped at the altar of Hollywood. And so that has gone very much into my first two novels – The Golden Calf is about a celebrity stalker, a guy venting all his anger at celebrity. North of Sunset is about a celebrity serial killer, a guy venting that he’s above the laws of average people. And now The American Book of the Dead, which is in part about a deranged President and fundamentalist religion. It’s not about Hollywood directly and it also…is.
TK: Let’s talk about the writing thing. Why do you do it?
HB: I want to change how people think. I have grand megalomaniacal plans – most of which won’t play out. But there’s a reason that I write about megalomaniacal people. And I’m not really interested in writing about the small moments between people. Our world is collapsing at a fairly alarming rate – the oil spill is both a metaphor and direct evidence. I don’t think there’s time to pontificate about another relationship story. Big stuff is coming down, and I want to do some small part to get people to pay attention.
TK: How about self-publishing? What got you started there?
HB: My first novel was released by Soft Skull Press. The novel I wrote after that took three years and was a pretty draining experience. I had an agent for that book and nothing happened – actually, had an agent for the Soft Skull Press novel, but I sent the book in to SSP myself, first proof that things get done when I do it myself. Wrote another novel, had another agent. Nothing happened. Finally discovered Lulu – and when I got the first copy of the novel (North of Sunset) it felt like getting published for real. There it was with words printed on pages. And I thought, why the hell did I take so long? Meanwhile my first novel came out in the U.K. and France with high-profile places – proof to me how rigidly difficult the American publishing scene can be.
With the latest novel, I didn’t even submit it to my agent and just totally became a self-publishing zealot. As you mention, the book’s a little weird. It’s not straight end of the world novel, and its take on fundamentalist Christianity would offend the Left Behind set. I didn’t have a lot of faith that traditional publishers would know what to do with it. So I self-released – better this time, with Lightning Source. I also believe deeply in self-publishing as an outlet, even if I’ve designed a much harder road for myself.
TK: How did the Backword Books collective come about?
HB: I’m not a person who is against traditional publishing. It’s great when done correctly. So while there’s a gatekeeper vibe to Backword Books in that it only has a select group of writers, there’s no problem with that if the books are selected because they’re good, not because they can make a lot of money. And the hardest thing about self-publishing is having to go it alone. So the idea behind Backword is strength in numbers – taking some of the “self” out of self-publishing. Which isn’t a slap in the face to self-publishing. It’s harder to sell a self-published book. It just is. Any help you can get is good.
TK: Have any advice for writers out there considering the life of an independent author and/or publisher?
HB: It depends on how much patience you have. Me – I ran out of patience. And I know I’m a decent writer and people will like what I write despite what an editor might say. So I’ve dropped out. BUT – if you’re 22 years old, or something, and you want to break in, keep on submitting to agents if it doesn’t make your skin crawl. Until it’s possible to get traditional bookstore distribution and/or everybody’s got an e-reader, self-publishing shouldn’t necessarily be a first resort.
TK: Shift gears for a moment. Where did your fascination with the end of the world find its start?
HB: As I write about in the novel, I was living in downtown New York on 9-11. My girlfriend happened to be arriving in Penn Station that morning after a month apart from each other. Confession: we were heroin addicts for a year prior to that and she left in order for us to both clean out and stop enabling each other. She was due to arrive at 9 am on September 11th. To say I was a little extra vulnerable that day is an understatement. I saw the plane wavering over the city and thought to myself – shit, that’s going to crash. BOOM. I had to leave for Penn Station, not knowing if that was going to be bombed as well.
We fled to North Carolina and in October found out she was pregnant. So I was now a nervous expectant father, wondering what kind of world my child was coming into. Meanwhile, I was having plane crash dreams, World War III dreams. I think it was a form of post-traumatic stress. The funny thing is that after I wrote my serial killer novel, I thought, OK, I need to write something a little less extreme. Instead, I wrote something where everyone dies.
TK: Tell us about your musical pursuits. Did the idea for the soundtrack come up before or after you finished your novel? And do you always write music alongside your stories?
HB: I’ve been a musician for longer than I’ve been a writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time playing drums or bass in people’s bands (example: http://myspace.com/montagband ). All the while I was writing songs of my own, but never really pursued starting a band with my own songs. Also a lot of my songs remained unfinished – especially lyrically. I may write fiction but for some reason I hate writing lyrics. I’ve done some recording over the years, pretty haphazardly. Finally I’m outfitted with a way to record on the computer, a keyboard so I can mimic any instrument, and an electronic drumset. My idea was that giving the songs a purpose around the plot of the novel would help me finish them. Some of these songs are 15 years old. Now I’m finally concentrating on songwriting with the same energy I’ve devoted to fiction.
TK: Toward the end of American Book, I saw a lot of correlations to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Was this intentional, or did I simply read too much into it?
HB: Oh yeah. I was immersed in esoteric thinking leading up to writing the book, and it’s not something I’ve shed. At the risk of alienating myself from people who might think I’m a kook, I also read a lot about UFO’s, which also plays a part in the book. Jung wrote about the subject too. My attitude towards UFO’s is similar to my attitude towards self-publishing – My God, the implications are amazing and immense. Stop mocking it. And so, I really do believe a lot of the stuff in the book – the evolution of human consciousness, being able to control reality with our minds, willfully entering dreams. It could take a million years, but evolution isn’t static, and a mind evolution is plausible. I think it’s important to think about we’re capable of in a world that shows we’re capable of so much destruction. The book’s about those opposing forces – destruction and evolution. I hope we don’t need one without the other, but I’m not so sure.
TK: Can you give us some insight into what’s in store for Eugene Meyers in the sequel?
HB: Not entirely sure yet, but the book’s going to be set in the present tense as well. A writer releases a book, gets involved in some of the conspiracies he writes about. I’m going to be posting this online, so people won’t be sure what’s real and what’s fiction, which is one of the threads in Part I.
TK: It’s self-promotion time. Why should people read your work?
HB: Because I think I’ve got something unique and interesting to say. None of my writing holds to any one genre, and when I do write in a genre I try to be inventive. I think too that these ideas are important – the possibility of evolving past what the world is today. We’ve got a lot of weapons of mass distraction during a time when we’re heading towards ecological crisis, financial crisis, Sarah Palin’s popularity. I really think this is what people should be waking up thinking about. These are hugely important ideas compared to the latest episode of whatever TV show. It’s like the epigraph of Bright Lights, Big City from A Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?
Gradually, then suddenly”
Suddenly is approaching. These days that doesn’t make a person a doomsayer, but rational.
Bonus Question: Do you really think Portishead is suicide music for supermodels?
HB: I do.
If you would like to read more of Henry’s work, be sure and check out his other novels, THE GOLDEN CALF, and NORTH OF SUNSET. Many thanks to Mr. Baum for taking the time to respond to my questions. You can also follow Henry on Twitter, and be sure to check out his website, where he posts all sorts of apocalyptic happenings.
Stay tuned for next month’s feature.
Until then,
TK
P.S. Have a recommendation? Think I should feature a writer you absolutely adore? Say so!
