The weather from under the bridge: Writing and real life
Okay, so, two things you need to understand about this blog these days:
1) It’s mostly comic books, in case you haven’t noticed the distinct lack of original content. I now write weekly reviews for upwards of fifteen books over at MARVEL Disassembled. Occasionally I get hate-mail from butthurt Tumblr fanboys who feel I’m doing their lifestyle a disservice but not raving about the latest issue of Whatever-the-Hell. Most of the time I get nice mentions from the writers themselves because I manage to not spew hateful vitriol about their work every single month. (Or, if I do spew hateful vitriol, I try to back it up with a bunch of fancy book-words I learned in college.) Overall, it’s been pretty good.
2) About those fancy book-words. I am now enrolled full-time in college in order to learn them. I also work part-time. Basically, I write at least one paper a week, then come home and write about comic books all day. In my spare time, I try to work on my original fiction. As you can tell, that doesn’t leave much time for keeping a fun and interesting blog full of fun and interesting things. So you get a lot of comic book reviews instead. Congratulations?
Anyway, the real reason I’m writing this now, beyond just letting people know that I’m not actually curled in a blanket-burrito regretting my decision to go back to school (Who, me?), is that lately I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my writing from the depths of the internet. I don’t know why people are taking the time to write me questions, whether on Twitter or Tumblr. I’m not exactly prolific, and I’m not exactly well-known. But, I guess I should probably be a decent human being and respond to them, because these people were nice enough to ask.
Have you ever written a novel?
Yes. A long, long time ago, when I actually had hopes of publishing professionally, I wrote a psychological horror fiction novel called Flesh Trap. I talked it up for a while; you probably suffered through numerous descriptions and chapter excerpts without even realizing what it was. It was released as a free-to-read weekly serial for about six months, wherein it was open to the public and anybody could read it and all that stuff.
That sounds so cool, are you going to get it published?
No. Well, yes. But no. It was technically already published as a serial, so that counts. Will a publisher ever pick it up? I doubt it. I’ve sent it out to a few publishing entities in the last year, but I have no real hopes for getting this project off the ground. It was my first completed novel, and as such feels like a really freshman effort. Now that I’ve had some distance between myself and the manuscript, I can see that. So, oh well. Maybe one day when I can bear to look at it again, I can give it another go-around, but today is not that day.
Are you working on anything else?
Yes. Five other books, in fact. I’ve kind of given up on writing short stories, though; it’s a non-existent market, and I don’t have the name recognition to carry anything on my own. If I feel like getting something off my chest I jot down a comic script and go from there. Because, you know. Comics.
What is your current project about?
It’s still early days, but I’m currently entrenched in a five-part superhero fiction series called The Crashers. I’ve written a little bit about it already, although I also routinely harass the denizens of Tumblr with random bits and bobs from the project, as well. Basically? It’s my take on deconstructionist superhero fiction, wherein I take a group of archetypal characters and kind of just destroy them in an effort to open a dialogue about the mythic nature of the genre itself. This is pure existentialism: A little Watchmen, a little Earth X, and a whole hell of a lot of Misfits. I want it to be warm and familiar, full of people you can easily recognize and relate to, whose lives you’re deeply invested in. And then I want to punch you in the gut, ruin your favorite character’s life, and make you cry. So, yeah.
Do you want to get this published?
I mean. Yeah, that would be awesome. But superhero fiction is a niche market, and…I don’t think anybody actually reads superhero fiction? I dunno. I kind of have a feeling I’ll have to beg for money on a Kickstarter page and publish it on my own as a serial with some proper marketing, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Would you ever consider self-publishing?
Like, a physical edition that I expect people to pay money for? No, I wouldn’t. Not unless I had considerable name recognition and some money lying around in order to do it with some level of professionalism. I wouldn’t even do an ebook unless I could get it out in such a way that it would actually reach people. I fear the slush pile. The slush pile gives me hives.
Does that about cover it? Thank you for your questions, faceless denizens of the internet. I only wish I could be less cynical and profit-motivated, but, you know, I am a broke college student. Cash rules everything around me and all that. (Dollah dollah bills, y’all.) If you ever want to bother me, shoot me a message at magencubed@gmail.com, or harass me on Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. Or, you know, smoke signals work too, I guess.
