After about two-and-a-half years, I’m finally done with this book—and I’m pretty pleased with the result. If nothing else, I at least feel as though I’ve scratched a weird itch that’s been nagging me for a while.
I’d like to thank anyone who bought a copy of The Roark, Matlock and Gabe’s Perfectly Adequate Vacation and Other Stories from The Roark1, and/or Wary of Astronauts along the way. The little money that I made covered the cost of proof copies as I taught myself formatting2, so, not counting art supplies, the production of this book cost me nothing but time. It also happened to be a lot of fun to develop, so I’d say that it was time well spent. Or at least time not completely wasted3.
The idea behind the book was pretty simple: build a contained setting, pack it with a diverse cast of characters, then introduce chaos and examine it from various perspectives. As it developed, I decided that I also wanted to play around with genres4, experiment a little with tense and pronouns and pace, and geek out on structure. I managed to do all that, and I think it worked out okay5.
I’ll spare you my self-indulgence about subtext and themes and crap like that because I don’t even know what I’d be trying to say anyway6, and there’s a very real chance that the whole book is an incoherent mess and I’m just too crazy to see that. At this point, I’ve read everything in there at least twenty times in various stages of development, and I’ve grown completely blind to its flaws7. But I wrote it for me, to my own peculiar specifications, as something that I can reread years later and still enjoy8. Only time will tell if I pulled that off.
In the end, I don’t really know what to call it. Maybe it’s a deconstructed postmodern thriller that’s been reassembled into a short story collection flanked by novellas. Maybe it’s just a vehicle for me to riff on topics like inequality, deregulation, and hero worship; or perhaps it’s a bitter screed against a potential AI oligarchy. Honestly, I’m just too close to see it for what it really is. To me it’s just a fun story with an orgy9.
It’ll come out November 1510 in both paperback and e-book through Amazon11, at which point I’m also going to remove the older editions of The Roark, Matlock and Gabe’s…, and Wary of Astronauts12. Prior to release, I’ll post the prologue here, as well as a page of “trigger warnings13,” so you will be fully informed on whether or not you’d care to read it at all. But I hope that you do, and I hope that you enjoy it, and if your takeaway from reading it is that I’m a crazy14 person, then please have the decency to alert me to that fact15.
Thank you.
1I thought it would be funny to have a ridiculously long title, but even I got tired of that joke pretty quickly.
2No refunds!
3You might disagree, and that’s fair.
4It’s at parts action/adventure, thriller, sci-fi, psychological horror, comedy, drama, slice-of-life narrative, fake memoir, and fake journalism. I’m not saying that I did any of that particularly well, just that I tried to do all of it.
5You might disagree, and that’s fair.
6The last English class I passed was in the 10th grade, and it was just a mercy credit so the teacher wouldn’t risk seeing me again the next year.
7Though right up to the end I would still occasionally find a word out of place, so I’ll never be confident that I caught them all.
8And I reserve the right to change my mind later and hate it. Maybe even be embarrassed by it.
9I got the idea to include an orgy while reading The Great Gatsby and thinking that it would have been better if Fitzgerald had included one. If you were to measure the quality of literature by its frequency of orgies, my book would be one greater than The Great Gatsby.
10The book takes place on a Wednesday in mid-November, so it made sense to publish it on one.
11If you’re opposed to giving Amazon money, I respect that. Email me and I’m happy to send you a PDF. I go the Amazon route because it’s the only completely free option and I don’t have disposable income to squander on a silly vanity project.
12Which is why I’m going to dump some of the art that I used for various releases here, since it’s all going away.
13I don’t feel as though anything is really gratuitous and it’s all in good fun, but the whole book is influenced by a gleeful nihilism that might be objectionable to more sensitive readers. Discretion is advised.
14This is just an example of the kind of ableist language that appears at times in the book.
15So that I may disclose it to potential insurers, as it may affect my rates. They have a right to know.
