First Post and Hello

Just last week I published my first work on Amazon. Love/Kroft S01/E01: Event Day . As the "S01/E01" in the title indicates, this is the first in a line of many stories set in the Love/Kroft universe. This world has lived in my head for the past six years.

I decided to self-publish rather than trying to find an agent or a publishing house due to the intended length of this series of books. You see, I'm afflicted by length in two opposite scopes. Each "episode" is novella length. That's about 45,000 words. I constrained myself to this length as a discipline to keep each episode moving and to discourage myself from writing "fluff" that might be interesting, but doesn't advance the plot.

On the other side of the spectrum, I intend to write many of these episodes in a serialized format. Much like a modern (i.e. 2015) TV show, each episode is a short(-ish) story that is self contained and complete, yet it contains the continuation of plot lines, character arcs, and seeds of future developments within that story. Anyone who has watched Buffy, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica (the Ronald D. Moore version), Mad Men, Hannibal, etc knows this format well.

Traditional publishers would not commit at the start to a large number of volumes, nor would they commit to each volume containing 45,000 words. They'd want to reduce the number of volumes, and make each one, um, "puffier".

Amazon is tailor made for this kind of storytelling. It is the successor to the grand pulp magazine traditions. Even "Dune" was serialized in a magazine before it was published as a single tome.

In that spirit, I intend to concatenate all of the episodes in each "series" into a consolidated book that can be read like a single novel.

Barring incident, I plan on publishing one novella-length episode every two months. According to my calculations, I will finish the "Love/Kroft" story in ten years of consistent writing. Yes, it's all planned out. So don't worry about it being another "Lost". While I won't deny it'll evolve in the process of writing, it has a definite end that has been envisioned since the start.

I want to state another thing up front. The name "Love/Kroft" should (and does) imply a certain subject matter. H.P. Lovecraft's view of the universe and our place in it is very much present in "Love/Kroft". His kind of existential horror is even more appropriate today than it was in 1937. We live in a world today where the individual human keeps shrinking in scale compared to the vast ocean of information we swim in. Where in 1937 we might have considered ourselves minnows in the scale of existence, we now know that we are but single celled organisms, or smaller. Perhaps viruses. Perhaps smaller.

A wise man once said that childhood is over the moment you know you're going to die. In 1937, the Manhattan Project was spiraling toward detonation, but we hadn't seen Hiroshima or Nagasaki yet. H.P. Lovecraft existed in a world where humans, however evil, could not wipe the entire species off the planet. Yet his fears thrust him beyond the atomic event horizon, beyond fears of a planet killing asteroid hitting the Earth, beyond a ravaging disease emerging from Africa to turn living men into the very visions of the rotting undead.

I hope I prove worthy to extract from H.P. Lovecraft that holistic, secular, and existential fear and place it into the stories that describe my particular vision. I will not, however, ape his style. I will tip my hat to it once in a while, but I need to follow my own inner voice.

One thing I will try to lace into my narratives is humor. Broad humor. Black humor. I'm not above fart jokes. It can be the most highbrow cerebral humor, or the lowest five year old playground humor. I'm fine with either. I'm not an elitist. And I'm thankful every day that I don't turn down chances to laugh because, "I am too mature for that..."

The mood I'm going for is a bit like the movie "Tremors". In fact, if you become a fan of Love/Kroft and want to tell your friends to read it, if they enjoyed "Tremors", they should enjoy Love/Kroft.

Also, unlike Mr. Lovecraft, I believe that sexuality is a core part of human nature. I will not shy away from sex. This series may get NC-17 at times. This isn't a "Young Adult" series. If I feel it advances the plot, I will describe sex in, ahem, intimate detail. I will treat violence the same way.

I think I will end my little mission statement here. I hope I haven't scared anyone off, yet. I hope I haven't bored anyone, either. I thought that, as an unproven author who has never been traditionally published, I should give some indication of what people should expect from me.

Thanks for reading. Have a good day!