Finally (really!) writing Collider

I started writing Collider yesterday. 

It’s only about thirty years in the making. When I first came up with the Space Corps stories, the Danab didn’t even exist. It’s since become known as the Danab Cycle. I didn’t really have a story, back then, but I stumbled into one when I very unexpectedly decided to kill off one of the main characters early on.  Hey, I’m a Star Trek geek. I’m sure there was some Tasha Yar reasoning involved. 

As the years advanced, I worked on the story until everything about it made sense. I even figured out why that character’s death meant something. I wrote a novella, eventually, dealing specifically with that (Terrestrial Affairs), which kind of lightened the load a little. It remains absolutely essential to this story, but the whole story doesn’t have to explain why it happened so much as what resulted. 

I had the last of the needful breakthroughs, really, only later in the day. So I added to what I wrote yesterday this morning. And can now plunge confidently forward.

I‘ll keep you posted…

My Dr. Seuss comic book script is going to be published???

 https://a.co/d/gJwZ6uh

Wow. So. Wow. 

This isn’t scheduled to happen until next January, but this is something I gave up on ever happening. I wrote this thing more than a decade ago, a lifetime ago in a lot of respects. 

It’s the third comic book script I wrote for this publisher (I don’t get paid at all, and clearly, after those first two, even getting exposure certainly never happened, either). The first two garnered a smattering of reviews, some of them about what you’d expect from these things.

Since this thing was written so long ago, it’s not up to date. It doesn’t cover the recent censorship of Dr. Seuss’s career that we somehow let happen. I know there are different ways to phrase that, and if the publisher itself plays along, does it really count? To me, it does. Not because I have an abiding love for the “lost” material. In fact, I read far more Seuss after I wrote this script, and it’s not all the Seuss, not even that “new” Seuss that happened after all this. 

But there’s a rhyming scheme to the thing. I tried. I tried to cover the spirit. It’s been entirely out of my hands for many years.

But it apparently will be a real thing!

What all those books looked like when I unboxed them…

 I can’t control what happens when they’re released into the world, but gosh do I like looking at ‘em. 

Oh...only NINE books released the last few months...

• A Most Excellent Fancy
• The Ripped Blade
• City of Tomorrow
• Easter Tales
• The Annotated Series of Short Trips
• The Age of Theory
• American Poems
• Life & Theft
• 52 Reasons to Love

Woo!

So I finally went ahead and cleared the backlog, which resulted in a true glut of new material in paperback edition...

A Most Excellent Fancy, whose release was already reported here, started all this.  This was my final Kindle Vella project, and also the first of the many books to be filled (increasingly so) with footnotes.  I finally poked around my Word program enough to figure out how to do this, and walked away from Kindle Direct Publishing's templates so that I could produce the results in book form, too.  I really, really got carried away.  Read more so I can explain...

The Ripped Blade is the most recent release, which theoretical readers of this blog (I think I've lost all of the real ones finally!) just finished reading last month in the annual A to Z Challenge.  Anyone picking up a paperback edition will find it festooned with footnotes, as previously suggested, which was really half the reason I wrote the story in the first place.  Originally I was going to write them in a fictitious fashion, but I realized I had plenty of real world material to round out the volume.  I got so carried away with the footnotes in other books I desperately wanted to keep it going, so by April (I didn't choose to unofficially participate until the first of the month, so everything was literally generated and written during it) I came up with as convenient an excuse as was available.  I'd previously decided writing a mystery from a host of perspectives, most of them investigators of some fashion, was a good idea, so I was able to graft that onto the experiment from the start.  I had good great fun, anyway.

City of Tomorrow is a collection of material that picks up where my very first short story collection, Monorama (which, incidentally, the publication for which ushered this very blog), left off from stories posted to Sigild V (until last month the bulk of where my fiction is posted).  Of course it's chock full of footnotes.  It's also the longest of the books released in this period, and it's got the best cover, probably the best cover I've ever done.

Easter Tales is the culmination of a project inadvertently begun in 2017 but picked up in earnest in 2020, short stories written for various days of the three day Easter story from various points in history and perspectives, each of them explaining what the death and resurrection of Jesus means to them, and us.  I think it's some of the best stuff I've ever written, and it's a rare reflection of my Catholic/Christian faith in my writing (the hardest book I've ever published to actually recommend is Reading Biblically, which is my tour of the Bible, which happens to include commentary on "the real Ten Commandments" that makes sense in context, but would probably be somewhat controversial if anyone ever just stumbled on it).

The Annotated Series of Short Trips is the most shameless release as far as footnotes go; it's right there in the title, a hodgepodge mishmash of brief material that on its own wouldn't have been considered for any of these books, but makes a nice package, at least as far as authors desperately enamored with footnotes go.

The Age of Theory, American Poems, and Life & Theft wrap up the collections of poems posted to various blogs over the years.  I'd never really publicized these here, but it's increasingly significant material, including earlier volumes that are filled with my personal philosophies as well as mounds of angst...

Finally, there's 52 Reasons to Love, which is not about love itself, but rather 52, the DC weekly comic book series that I've long championed and continue to recommend as one of the great superhero experiences yet created.  This is an unofficial guidebook, including summaries of every issue, background information including about the main creators for the uninitiated (they're all big deals for those already in the know), everything that followed, and tacked on because of the title, 52 concise reasons, well, to love 52.

It's very possible I've finally gone insane.  If true, at least I have a few books to show for it.