The Man Comes Around...to Amazon (now available)

The Man Comes Around is now available on Amazon.

This has been a passion project literally for decades.  When Amazon unlocked hardcover options a few years back, in beta mode, I knew if I was ever going to pull the trigger on self-(re)publishing The Cloak of Shrouded Men it was going to be in that format.  Formatting it was a little tricky once I learned that there's an actual pagecount limit, which, given what I wanted to include as extras, took a little maneuvering.  This is how I spent my Thanksgiving afternoon (before I ever got around to cooking Thanksgiving dinner!) (besides writing the last element, the last of the script projects included, which you can also read here, an account of just how The Duke ended up in the state we find him in Nine Panel Grid from where he is in the Ferryman tales), thanks to wanting to include it for my nephew as part of the Christmas gifts I just sent off (he's not supposed to actually get it until early January), in part because of the many notes I left him in the books sitting on his shelves I got to see a few months back when I visited (hey, Julian!), since it includes something that wasn't in the original edition of Nine Panel but is subsequently essential to its overall packaging, and to my mind to the Man Comes Around edition, too.

...If I could just get some readers as interested in all this as I am...

The Man Comes Around...

 Twenty years ago, November 2004, I stumbled on National Novel Writing Month, and assumed I had to come up with the story and write it all in that month.  I’d graduated from college about a year prior, and that January had assembled material for a Top Cow contest, coming up with a new story for an old character I’d played with for a number of years, Bandit, and that didn’t go anywhere because I didn’t win and had no idea what else to do with the material, but since I still knew superheroes and superhero storytelling better than anything at that point, I came up with a new superhero and a story to tell about him, and for a month I wrote and completed 50,000 words, and assumed I was done.  Then November 2005 came along, and I discovered not only did I want to try NaNoWriMo (as the acronym goes), but I had more to write about that character, and then again in November 2006…So by the end of that I had a hundred and fifty thousand words of a story, a novel by any standard, and in 2007 I decided to self-publish the results, through iUniverse, as The Cloak of Shrouded Men.  I somehow ended up getting my author copies the same day the final Harry Potter was published that July.

The edition that existed then had some editing issues I wished had been intercepted.  I’m not great at self-editing, and I’m also not great at paying for or finding services from others.  I have no idea how much better the manuscript is now, but I’ve certainly combed through it over the ensuing two decades, so hopefully it’s better.  It’s been reformatted a little (Tom King’s A Once Crowded Sky was an inspiration), and retitled (no one ever really got the original), and sports a new ending, a dramatic turnaround for a character from the first act but thematically putting a pin in an element that otherwise hadn’t really been resolved or explored previously.  Since we follow Cotton Colinaude so closely throughout the book, it’s not inconceivable that he wasn’t clear about what actually happened to Cassie Dawes, and besides, there’s at least one comic book writer whose whole career is owed to pointing out the “women in fridges” phenomenon.

Since this all began, I’ve of course continued writing, and a few years back I finally wrote a version of Bandit’s story, somewhat in alarm since in the meantime a whole movie kind of borrowed from the ether one of its central premises (Hancock), and that’s Nine Panel Grid, included in this new edition, sort of a primer on the art of comic book storytelling.  Since I never have yet broken into comics themselves, I’ve dedicated more than a little time to writing scripts, just for the fun of it, and that’s why there’s some of those included as well, eventually tying together the careers of Bandit and the Eidolon (pronounced “Idol-on,” in case you were wondering).  There was a time when I was promoting the original book at the bottom of columns I wrote for a website called Paperback Reader with the tagline suggesting Cotton “never had a ghost of a chance,” which would simplify things so much if I could just call the guy the Ghost, but there’s already registered and trademarked for that, and besides, I like Eidolon.  The last guy holding the ball at Paperback Reader was one of several acquaintances who was going to help issue a corrected reprint of the book in the first decade of its existence, which never ended up happening.  I tried traditional publishers.  I had a coworker at Borders who tried to help sell it to customers.  Had it stocked on the shelves.  This was around the release of The Dark Knight.  No takers, alas.

I remain proud of it.  It’s the first thing of substance I wrote, finished, completed, and it forced me to write in ways I’d never managed to, before, when I was always scrambling for ways to tell stories that felt authentic to me, which was a longer journey than many writers claim.  I knew, and know, comic book storytelling, though, and in a lot of ways, its language is what still permeates my work, perhaps more than ever, to this day, and its logic, its insane publishing models, is what I still understand best, even while I still pursue traditional publishers with other material.

Twenty years has just flown by, though. 

The Man Comes Around.  Coming soon. 

61 Years…

Today marked sixty-one years since JFK’s assassination, and as certainly seemed apparent to me last year, I think interest in it and/or John Kennedy in general has officially waned in the popular consciousness. 

This is both sad and I guess expected. Public memory is relatively short. What we obsess over today becomes tomorrow’s trivia. There was a time when it seemed 11/22/63 was inescapable, even just the obsession with conspiracy theories, but even that has become marginalized. Rob Reiner did a whole ballyhooed podcast series promising names, and by the time it reached its conclusion all the hype had completely dissipated, but even supermarket tabloids (which themselves are now consigned to a bygone era) couldn’t interest anyone with their ideas just a few years back, claiming surefire Cuban connections, or Martin Scorsese, in The Irishman, claiming a certain mob association.

Some of us remember. For some, Kennedy remains a giant. Years ago I skimmed a book extolling the 100 greatest persons of the 20th century, which claimed he simply didn’t accomplish enough to warrant serious consideration.

Well. Personally I can think of fewer more consequential lives. His legacy endures to this day, and stood like a specter over the Democrats who followed him in the White House straight through Obama. They were all chasing him. All of them.

One day I will write a novel and Hamilton and Burr, despite that fancy musical that created such a fuss. I think that’s one of the defining stories of American history, and has plenty of juice left in it. And one day I will write a novel about Kennedy and Oswald. I have no idea how any author could ever struggle for material. I have stories I’ve burned decades to write. Whatever you think of Oswald, he’s beyond fascinating subject matter, and his story is perfect counterpoint to Kennedy’s. There is great material in there. I might only help contribute. But I know I will have to. 

I can’t ignore it. I can’t forget it. And a little bit of time makes no difference at all. It heightens the drama, if anything.

Abigail Only!

Last week I finalized and Amazon published Abigail Only, the 2024 family Christmas collection.

Every year this millennium (or more or less) I've written and distributed at least a poem each Christmas for family, and since 2020 I've led the chapbooks I've been distributing with novellas.  This year's was a departure from the ones I'd been writing, the first one set in the real world rather than the fantasy land of Wendale.  This year I had the story already set, but the title was inspired by something my sister said in relation to my newest and possibly last of all niece, a phrase that just seemed irresistible.

Among the other material I included is a short story relating to the Danab Cycle, a follow-up to a story I wrote years ago that I'd been wanting to revisit, and anyway helps further flesh out Danab society, which since I decided finally to call the Space Corps stories the Danab Cycle because of their huge importance in the saga, was always necessary as I've gotten around to writing more of it, and am headed steadily toward writing Collider, thirty years in the making...Before I get there, though, I have another short project I want to tackle, examining a kind of origin (in this world there are a lot of origin stories that need telling, and I've got two of the last books I intend to write dedicated to the two biggest secret origins of the whole saga), what exactly might be known about all this in the present day, Earth, when nothing at all here seems to be happening in relation to it.

A Journal of the Pandemic #36: A Conclusion

Back in 2020, the pandemic for me began with the cancellation of a family reunion. I’m happy to report we finally got around to making up for that.

COVID is still circulating. At my workplace it was running kind of rampant (as much as it can these days) in recent weeks, so obviously it’s not going away anytime soon. 

The good news is that life is pretty much back to normal, where it was before all that began. 

My brother, the oldest one, who was the first to bow out of the 2020 reunion when it was still voluntary to decide about lockdown measures, is retiring from the Air Force. This ended up being the occasion, at the ceremony yesterday, to getting the gang back together for the first time in nine years (at Mom’s funeral).

It was pretty awesome. I’m not going to describe everything here, but it also meant I got to catch up with my Maine nephews for the first time since 2017, in which they’ve both been literally and figuratively growing leaps and bounds.

Of course I got to see the Burito (as I did last year) (twice) (and again in June!), and her expanding network of sisters and brother, and that was great!

I learned a little of the new Billy Joel song and almost pulled it off at the ceremony (my brother’s a big fan, but I seem to be a little more involved in some of Billy Joel’s career in recent years than he’s been, but then he’s been very, very busy in his career(s)).

Played some card games! Card games are one of the religions we ascribe to.

And other games. Even a little of the Olympic Games! 

And some good tours of a little local nature (including the obligatory trip to Bailey Island) (and several helpings of Moxie).

May have made the most significant breakthroughs in thirty years of prep work on Collider! So that was pretty cool.

And yes, officially closing the thoughts on the pandemic here, about a year after I last discussed it.

A new Kindle Vella project: A Most Excellent Fancy

In the ordinary course of events, Kindle Vella announced it was holding a contest, and eventually I heard about it, and came up with a story for it:

A Most Excellent Fancy

This is my fourth Vella, following somewhat belatedly from the others after tackling two novel manuscripts in the past few years.  Given the rapid nature of the affair, I somewhat calculatedly followed the minimum guidelines (at least ten chapters, at least 10,000 words), which I was able to accommodate given all my writing experience with little difficulty.

Since Vella, as with much of the internet, is geared toward the fancies of the young, I don't know how likely I am, as ever, to spontaneously appeal to their interests, but it's fun to pretend I might otherwise pique some readers.  

Given the timetable (August 20), I buckled down yesterday and got about half the thing done (the first chapter was written a week ago), with the most important, and crucial, material to go, including a fun final chapter and a bonus one to act as coda.

Happily, this project speaks to what I wrote earlier this year (The Children's Crusade), and what I'm tackling next (Abigail Only).

May the Fourth Be with You

May 4th is considered Star Wars Day since it sounds so similar to the classic Jedi blessing, and has become a thing in recent years for fans to celebrate. 

I’ve been a fan basically my whole life. I can’t begin to guess when the first time I watched. It was a fond memory by the time I was eight or nine, writing about it in fourth or fifth grade, the latest rewatch. None of us saw any of the original movies in theaters, as the oldest of the kids were either just being born or having just been, and we really didn’t start going to the movies until the ‘90s. When the Star Wars revival happened at the start of that decade (it’s difficult to believe now but after the release of Return of the Jedi there really was a chance the phenomenon would fade into history quite easily) with the Dark Horse comics and Timothy Zahn books (Zahn’s was the start of a splinter in the fan community that persists to this day), we were onboard. When the movies started in on their many home video rereleases, we were there. When they were released in the special editions to theaters again, we were there! One of my brothers legitimately grew a Jedi rat tail after The Phantom Menace, which was the foundation for the long hair he sports to this day.

Of course today the prequels struggle to find any truly positive opinions, although less so in the aftermath of the sequel trilogy. I don’t care because I love all of them. I lost interest in the comics (my brothers dove deeply into those early ones, but they never shared with me, and by the time Shadows of the Empire was a thing, it was too late for me), and I lost interest in Star Wars books sooner than I did with their Star Trek rivals (it didn’t help that I never found any of them as interesting as the earlier Han Solo and Lando Calrissian series; I decided they tried too hard to be the movies, and I don’t like when spinoff material doesn’t have the integrity to just be itself).

I love John Williams’ scores. We all did. They were some of the original gateways to my wider appreciation of music. That he continued his duties straight to the complete trilogies is astounding. By the sequel trilogy he had eliminated most of his bombast, certainly didn’t challenge the legacy of “Duel of the Fates,” and yet if anything it challenges me to revisit that work to see where he ends up in this coda.

I frequently meditate on Star Wars, its many implications and ways it’s influenced me. George Lucas didn’t intend to hang the bulk of his legacy on this space opera, but eventually it was inescapable for him, even if he tried to work around it. 

And don’t forget, tomorrow is the Revenge of the Fifth! It just continues to grow…