Mike Schneider's Blog, page 77

THIS BOOK DOES NOT EXIST 2: NEW GHOSTS TO CHASE

Well, I went and did it. I wrote a sequel to This Book Does Not Exist. More specifically, I wrote part one of the sequel, as I’m serializing the project, offering new installments every two to three months. The plan - right now at least - is to do five parts, although that could change, as could the timing of all of this since being a working writer necessitates juggling multiple projects simultaneously. But when I say I’m going to do something I do it; no need to worry that it won’t get finished. 

For $.99 you can buy Part I of TBDNE 2: New Ghosts To Chase here. If you’re a member of Amazon Prime you can borrow it for free. Part I is about 21K words long, or roughly 38% of the length of the original. 

***Spoilers regarding TBDNE follow***

The story of TBDNE 2 concerns Mike’s struggle to overcome the loss of Naomi and the start of his search for new love. Concurrently, we follow a mysterious unidentified girl who discovers the Door after breaking up with her boyfriend. Her name: the girl. Part I even features a chapter written by Geppetto. And most important it explains why Naomi failed to get on the plane to Los Angeles, and how come she didn’t show up at the movies after destroying the Door, two questions, I know, that a lot of people wished had been answered in the first book!

As always, I welcome your encouragement, discouragement, reviews, nudes… okay, not nudes, that was a joke, but everything else I’m deeply serious about. Your feedback will influence me as I write the rest of the parts of the book. You have the power to change what I write next!

With appreciation and love,

Mike

Target Audience

I’ve long held the belief that TBDNE holds the most appeal for young readers, teens and those in their early 20s…

…I am using this blog post to say I was wrong.

In reality, it seems to hold the most appeal for those who have been in an intense, deeply loving relationship no matter their age. 

Free Promotions and Backlash and Target Audience

A couple points I’d like to write about as a means of thinking them through…

1) Using free promotions on Amazon, as I’m able to do as a member of KDP Select, is a double-edged sword. Yes, it gets the book into the hands of more people, but it also gets the book into the hands of more people who would otherwise never be interested in your work. As a result, you get more readers who give up on the book and then write negative reviews. See here and here.

2) I’m beginning to wonder if I’m entering the backlash stage of the public’s perception of the novel. The reviews on Goodreads are particularly vicious, but that’s not uncommon for the site. 

3) The more I think about the book and read some of the reviews, especially by older people (30s, 40s, 50s), I start to realize that this is and always has been a novel for young people, teenagers and those in their early to mid 20s. When it comes to hitting my target audience then, citing Murakami and House of Leaves probably does not do me any favors. Is anyone aware of a more appropriate comparison? 

"Knocking" | A Chapter From the Work-in-Progress Sequel to THIS BOOK DOES NOT EXIST

A knocking sound wakes me up. Where is it coming from? Could there be someone at my door? Who would be here now? I have no idea what time it is, but I know the sun hasn’t risen. I shift my body underneath the covers, taking care not to rustle the sheets too loudly. If I hadn’t gotten rid of the box springs, just thrown them away in the dumpster behind my apartment building, they would be squeaking right now and I would be in trouble. I silently laud myself for finally making a good decision. I hear more knocks. Are they coming from inside my apartment, from somewhere on the bottom floor? I’m upstairs in the loft. No, no one would be knocking if they were already inside. They would have no reason to knock. Would they? I reach for my nightstand, for my watch with the black face. The digital readout is orange. Another knock. Several knocks. Persistent, like someone is rapping on plaster with their knuckles. Who is this person? What do they want? Are they inside my walls? I look at my watch. The readout isn’t bright. My contacts aren’t in. It’s too dark. I can’t tell the time. I can’t see anything. The someone knocks again. That’s it, they’re at my door, I’m sure of it. I’m afraid to go downstairs. I flee the protection of my bed and the shield of my blankets and sneak towards my phone, which is plugged into the wall opposite my bed, resting on the floor. I pass my desk. My old BlackBerry, which I now use as an alarm clock and a place to keep all my passwords, is sitting on top of it, waiting to be called into duty at 8 AM, positioned far enough away from my bed that I can’t shut off the alarm and immediately fall back asleep. The time on the device is no longer in sync with real time, as the clock keeps running faster and faster. As of yesterday morning, it was fourteen minutes ahead. I keep getting up earlier and earlier. The knocking has me out of bed before the alarm. There the person goes again, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven knocks. But not on my door, somewhere else. Is she in the ceiling? In a crouch, I reach for on my iPhone on the floor. There is more knocking, and more knocking, and - this is driving me mad. Is the sound coming from the wall again? I think the knocking is coming from the wall behind my bed, but lower, outside of the loft, somewhere near the kitchen, downstairs. Is something inside the walls? I used “she” before. Why did I say “she?” Could it be the girl? Could the girl be hiding inside my walls? If it’s the girl then I should be making noise. I should be yelling. I should be banging on the floor trying to notify her where I am, that I’m here, that I need her to take me to the Door. I should be tearing open the walls to see her face. But how can I know if it’s her or not? Even when I see her face, I won’t know that she’s the girl. I’ve been thinking that I will, looking at women on the street, checking them out online, believing in the critical nature of physical attraction, or something more fraudulent, love at first sight, or worse, love at first profile viewing. I’m useless. I still can’t even tell where the knocking is coming from. I look over the edge of the loft, through my floor-to-ceiling windows, outside, to where I thought I saw red and blue colors flashing earlier. Now I see nothing. I start to cry. Can the person outside my apartment door hear me? What about the creature in the walls? How about the serial killer in the ceiling? My phone says it’s 7:21 AM. Why would anyone come to me at this time of day? The bars closed too long ago. FedEx never shows up before nine. What if I go downstairs and the door to my apartment is red? What if it has become the Door like what happened inside the bathroom of the Olive Garden before the World Trade Center Incident? I destroyed the Door. I blew it up. We used a bomb. We watched it explode. A reviewer on Goodreads said I was deploying an on-the-nose metaphor for moving on, but she didn’t see the blood on my face, the bruise on my ankle, the strands of my soul leaving my chest. The other world cannot be bleeding again. But yet I’m looking for the Door part-two, another entrance. Why, why, why? Why am I doing this? Because Geppetto told me to. Because I believe I need to be in love to be whole again. The knocking will never end. I think it’s happening inside the wall, not outside the door or beneath the ceiling. I don’t have any missed calls. Outside, there has never been a rainbow. I don’t know what the colors were. Lights from a police car. Geppetto dressed as a cop. This isn’t a nightmare, I don’t think, because I am the nightmare. I am paranoia. I lean over my loft. There are no holes in the wall downstairs, no snarling, fur-covered monster, no version of Satan from Rosemary’s Baby. I think about continuing to lean until I fall. If I fell head first I would break my neck and perish. I need to make a will. I lean away from the edge. I cling to my phone. I bend at my knees. Nothing has happened on Twitter. I stand up straight. I realize the knocking has stopped. The someone is gone. I said the knocking would never end. I was wrong. After being right about the box spring, I’m back to being wrong. I walk across the floor and collapse into my bed. I curl into the fetal position. The knocking was nothing, I think. The knocking was nothing at all…  

For the next thirty minutes, I dream of God and the Devil and the other world and a rotten cartoon heart that crumbles apart while pumping blood.

"From the Author"

I just wrote a “From the Author” blurb for Amazon. It may not be up for a few days, so you can read it here first —

Dearest Reader, 

Some time ago, I was on the brink of emotional collapse. I was in the midst of a breakup… breaking up and getting back together and cracking, and eroding, and finally breaking apart… having lost the first girl I ever loved through a combination of circumstance and something else, something indefinable that yet I yearned to define. I can remember breaking down in tears on the bathroom floor one October morning in Los Angeles. I had been writing a novel about a screenwriter whose girlfriend vanishes into another world, a bizarre and dangerous place shaped by the mingling of memories and imagination. I thought writing might help. The book wasn’t finished. I was unstable. I didn’t know what else to do besides go home. So I went. I drove across country to Ohio in 37 hours without stoping to sleep overnight. I had lost the love of my life. When I got to Cleveland, my goal was to complete the book. It was my only plan for survival. 

In Cleveland, writing was therapy. I went out at night and explored a city in transition much like me. I found massive hospital campuses, pockets of rebuilt vibrancy serving Belgian beer and gourmet pizza, and so much open space, so many forgotten people, so many abandoned homes and factories connected by roads snow plows had torn apart. Every night, when I got home, I wrote about what I saw and did. These excursions filtered their way into the novel, becoming the basis for the majority of the plot. One night, I got lost in East Cleveland on my way to the movies. Another, I drove past a ramshackle house with a sign on it: “Come to Jesus today because tomorrow may be too late.” Perhaps most unbelievably, I even had dinner with a girl at an Olive Garden restaurant. 

In about eight months, I finished the book. At this, at least, I was successful. I sent the manuscript to a couple literary agents, both of whom thought the work was too hard of a sell… too odd, too unsettling, too personal, a mixture of genres … and why did it have to be so contemporary? “High school kids and college students don’t read unless they have to,” I was told. “Adults used to period pieces and historical drama will find this world full of digital communication and relationships with strangers the hero has only met online off-putting…” I ignored everything that was said. I turned to Amazon. I knew there was a stigma attached to “self-publishing” - in the eyes of some people, it was code for “not good enough.” But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me what the literary elite thought or what people would say to me at parties. I needed to live. If I didn’t get the book out of my head and into the world I knew I might not make it. So I published, without barriers or restrictions.

This Book Does Not Exist is the book I wrote to survive a breakup, a strange, melancholic combination of science fiction and memoir, created for anyone who has loved and lost. Based on many of the kind messages I have received since publication, I know it has meant something to more than a few others. Maybe, if you need it, the story could mean something to you as well. 

Most sincerely,

Mike

Questions and Ideas For a Sequel

Over the weekend, I moved closer to the idea of writing a sequel to TBDNE (for more, read this post). The overarching narrative would be about the character of Mike searching for love in a post-Naomi world… as opposed to a novel, I think it would be a collection of very short stories, without fantastical elements. In other words, no new incidents. Mike, I think, would, however, be searching for the Door again as he would come to believe the only way to find true love would be by re-entering the other world. 

Ideally, the book would be funnier than the last one, as searching for love is always a lot more humorous than watching it fall apart. I would try to replicate my actual personality - or the personality I’ve grown into - this time around. 

Finally, I wonder if I could write in the third person instead of the first… It would give me more flexibility in terms of the voice and also more freedom to render the secondary characters with greater depth. 

Broadly speaking, that’s where I’m at. If you have comments or questions or feedback of any sort please send it my way via email, Twitter, or Facebook.

A Model for TBDNE: The Video Game?

I would love to turn TBDNE into a video game for iOS like this…

lets-head-west:“This much I’m certain of: it doesn’t happen...

lets-head-west:

“This much I’m certain of: it doesn’t happen immediately. You’ll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place” —House of Leaves

Images created by collaging body parts from Vogues most recent issue, then photographed with iphone and edited it Juxtaposer.  

I like this passage from House of Leaves a lot, and I would feel like I accomplished something tangible if anyone had this reaction to TBDNE.

"'Chuck, please don't write a book about women you used to be in love with.''Why not?''Because..."

“

'Chuck, please don't write a book about women you used to be in love with.'

'Why not?'

'Because that's exploitative. And narcissistic. And a bit desperate, because it makes you seem like someone who can't let go of the past.'

'But that's actually true,' I say. 'I can't let go of the past. I can't fall out of love with any of these women. I can only exist in the past and in the future.'

”

- From Killing Yourself To Live by Chuck Klosterman

"‘Chuck, please don’t write a book about women you used to be in love..."

“

‘Chuck, please don’t write a book about women you used to be in love with.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that’s exploitative. And narcissistic. And a bit desperate, because it makes you seem like someone who can’t let go of the past.’

‘But that’s actually true,’ I say. ‘I can’t let go of the past. I can’t fall out of love with any of these women. I can only exist in the past and in the future.’

”

- From Killing Yourself To Live by Chuck Klosterman