Aronnax released

 

I know a guy named Herb who liked this when it was serialized on Kindle Vella, so that's at least one satisfied reader.

Which is to say, I have released Aronnax as a paperback book.  

For those who might be reading this but are unfamiliar with the story, this is, as the subtitle suggests, "a tale of twenty thousand leagues," the twenty thousand leagues, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne, also known as the Captain Nemo story.

Although my version doesn't lean on Nemo so much as the French biologist Pierre Aronnax, whose discovery of Nemo is the impetus for the original story.  In the present, Pierre's descendants Sylvio and his son Julian embark on an improbable journey of resubmerging Nemo's ship, the Nautilus, which in recent decades has become a forgotten neighborhood landmark, the "yellow submarine" (several chapter titles are indeed drawn from the Beatles song), a journey of discovery and self-discovery.

It's another novella, but it was a project that started out much differently and ended up becoming a personal favorite, not the least because it drew on my own family ancestry, and family in general.

Nine Panel Grid, World Famous released, Event Fatigue

 I've added Event Fatigue to the list of my Kindle Vella projects on the right.  Apparently I skipped a month between chapters, but will be digging back in.  Two additional will be populating today, and, well, there are plenty more to come. 

Happily I can announce the release of a book from the second Kindle Vella project, Nine Panel Grid!

Keeping my present preferences, there is only a paperback release, which you can find here.  This is something of a metafiction, a story about a comic book that doesn't exist, detailing what happens in its final issue, including descriptions of art that does not exist, and a history that is equally fictional.  It involves characters I began working on nearly two decades ago, including one I created nearly three decades ago.  So it's got a lot of real history behind it, too, plus a bonus comic book script that's a version of Batman relevant to the story.  It's very much a project that's very interesting to me, and I will be peddling copies to a comic book shop that recently opened down the road from me, and I will keep you informed about that as things develope.

A few weeks before this one I also released World Famous, a story I worked on occasionally throughout 2021 (and finished earlier this year).

Likewise this is only a paperback release, which you can find here.  As the cover heavily implies, this one is about professional wrestling, and draws on stuff I've been dabbling with for the same general three decade period, so this has certainly been a good time to be writing stories on old material for me.  

Later I will be releasing my first Kindle Vella project, Aronnax, when I decide what (if anything) to add in order to bulk up the page count a little.  I have a timeline I put together for the abortive project that led to Aronnax, and I could certainly include the associated essay as well.  Who knows what else.  

Kindle Vella adventures continue

 I just submitted the eleventh installment of Nine Panel Grid at Kindle Vella, which is the halfway point for the story.  Like Aronnax it isn't exactly blowing up in popularity (actually, like any of my works!), but at least with this one I would totally understand readers not at all understanding what it is that it's supposed to be accomplishing.  This one's very much something that appeals to my sensibilities.  I would have to be someone readers already care about in order to care about it, and that isn't part of this reality, so...!

The good news is I already have another Kindle Vella project lined up, and I think it will be an easier sell.  It's called Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue, and I'm going to try and be conventional with this one.  Really!  Try!  With me this is always a difficult proposition.  Once I sketch it out I will probably even be writing it simultaneously with Nine Panel, and it'll be a longer story.

As I wrote last time I checked in, I submitted Seven Thunders to an agent last weekend, and said agent somehow thought it was a great idea to get back to me on Thursday with a rejection notice.  So that was pretty cool.  Maybe they were having a really bad Thanksgiving, apparently having to work an' all, I don't know.  It may have contributed to how yesterday began playing out for me, but realistically, everyone who participates in this game struggles to get in, and since I have been playing so poorly it doesn't really surprise me to still be on the bench, but I'm determined not to give up.  I'm gonna persist.  

I did just send out Christmas presents, including this year's collection, Gracie, which I would like to believe is another opportunity to at least convince my family I'm worth rooting for, but who knows?  I had fun writing it, anyway.

Aronnax, completed

I just finished writing the twelfth and final chapter Aronnax.

I’ve been working on this since the end of July, and for the first six chapters, it was one chapter a week. This week, I was on vacation, so starting on Tuesday, I wrote every day. They were never overly long chapters. The complete story is somewhere around 12k (actually 13,440, plus notes I intend to include in a future print edition) words, generously  considered a novelette, very generously a novella (I’ve published a whole string of novellas in the past five years, I should know). Not so long.

But I’m pretty happy with it.

As with a few other stories I’ve done over the years, each chapter is from a different perspective. Most of them deliberately cut off the narrative to keep the ending a secret, but the thrust of this one thing, Captain Nemo’s submarine the Nautilus, as a catalyst in disparate lives, remains at the heart of the story, I hope in effective ways. The idea, as with all the good stories, is to tell something about the human condition.

Hopefully something worthwhile.

The chapter will populate later today at Kindle Vella, and that’ll be that. I haven’t decided if I will tackle another project on the platform, a longer one (it wasn’t the original intention for Aronnax to be twelve chapters, but that ended up feeling like its natural shape), as apart from the story I’ve been writing once a month every month this year (I will have to play catch-up next weekend as I took up last month’s slot with Aronnax) I really haven’t told a full-length story in ages, and I have yet to find the courage to begin tackling Collider (maybe next month’s week-long vacation!). 

But it always feels nice to work on a story, and to finish it. With this one the original goal was to retell Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea without Nemo, or Nemo minimized, or Nemo contextualized. I think I accomplished that.

Aronnax (2.0)

 About a month ago, I was completing a project and attempting to publish it via Amazon's KDP when I hit the unexpected snag of Kindle needing to know who the translator was for the edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea I had transcribed from.  The idea of the project wasn't a complete transcription, although it had originally been intended to be a partial one, and the rest of the story completely rewritten or cherrypicked, as I had determined, when I read the book five years earlier, that I liked the parts without Captain Nemo best.

Well, I didn't know the translator, and Kindle didn't like that, so the book was left unpublished.  I had transcribed only to the point Pierre Aronnax and company discover the Nautilus, and as yet are unaware of its true nature, much less its chief occupant.  I'm not sure Jules Verne really nailed the shape of Nemo's role, but I loved the opening act as the mystery of the Nautilus unfolds, a kind of lost coda to the great age of maritime exploration last represented by Moby-Dick, so that's what I chose to feature in my version, and that alone.

Then I decided to tackle the idea from a different vantage point.  Kindle has recently launched Vella, a serialized storytelling venture, and that's one thing I can always make time for, so last week I launched a revised version that features entirely original writing, a parallel narrative recapping the Verne tale and a modern sequel in which a descendant of Aronnax, a deteriorating Nautilus resting in his backyard, decides to undertake one last adventure.

I don't know how often I'll be plugging away at this, maybe once a week or so, which is the pace, at two weeks, I have set, but you can keep up with the results here.  I also don't know how long it'll be, and I haven't attempted to prepare a full outline.  At times such things can feel like both blessing and curse, as I have discovered with other current projects.  I know the shape of it, thanks in part to half being drawn from existing material, as well as the probable conclusion to the original material.  

Should be interesting.

Aronnax, Space Colony Bactria

Haven’t actually written about what I’ve been busy working on, so here’s a quick update:

Aronnax is an interesting project I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but only just gotten around to starting. It’s an edited version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I think there’s a really interesting story in there, but it’s been buried for years under a lot of forgettable Nemo material. I know this sounds crazy, as Nemo is literally the reason anyone cares about the book. Well, what can I say? Sounds crazy. Probably is crazy. 

Space Colony Bactria is my latest comics scripting project. It’s an entirely original idea (…somewhat, ah, riffing in Star Wars), and so it’ll be the most ambitious one I’ve tackled yet, and longest. At the moment I’m plotting the whole thing out.

And as I’ve been doing for a quarter century, I’m still working toward writing Collider. In a few months I will probably have a different set of free time to play with. I’ve found it difficult to concentrate as I have when tackling book-length manuscripts in the past with the arrangement I have now.