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!

Danab Cycle, Nazi Crimes released

 

Nazi Crimes was released last November; have a look at the Amazon listing here.

Danab Cycle has just been released.  You can find the Amazon listing here.

Both are short story collections.  Nazi Crimes features material almost entirely written in 2020, in a variety of genres.  Danab Cycle features material written generally in the past decade, and is intended as a kind of overview of the Space Corps saga, covering a number of interesting angles that serve as excellent entry points.

Both are available only in paperback.

Monkey Flip, Reading Biblically released

 

  

Released a couple of books recently!

The first was actually Reading Biblically, which I mentioned previously.  This is a compilation of a blog I wrote a few years back, based on thoughts I had reading the Bible all the way through for the first time.  It's not deeply religiously reverential.  In fact I hope it makes approaching the Bible more approachable. Anyway, check out the results here.

The second was Monkey Flip, the results of having a look at what might be possible from a narrative standpoint from the crazy wrestling stories I've talked about previously here.  It's another novella.  Theoretically there's a sequel waiting to happen in the future!  Anyway, you can check out the results here.

These might be the last self-published releases I do for at least the foreseeable future.

Appearing in a new anthology just released.

It's always nice to report being published in something I didn't myself put together.  5 Totems is the second anthology edited by Scott Quine (after WriteClubCo, named for the writing group it sprang from) to feature my work.  Here's the Amazon listing for the paperback.

Scott's one of the nicest people I've ever known, and the best boss I've ever had.  The thing anyone knows about him is his abiding love for Chuck Palahniuk, and maybe most people he knows know he looks like Paul Rudd.  His father, Dennis Quine, also appears in the anthology, and I can begin to understand Scott's obsession with UFO radio shows based on the little I've discovered about Dennis recently. 

(I can't say I know Bruce Kooken or Robert Davis, but if Scott vouches for them, they've got to be okay, too.)

I've got six stories in the book, including a Space Corps story I've been itching to write for years.  Actually, the version in the book is an abbreviated take on the one I originally wrote, but Dennis found it confusing, so I tried one that was a little more straightforward.  Dennis read through all my stories, and I rewrote another one ("Nothere") based on his feedback.  It was interesting, that process.  Made the experience seem professional.  The Space Corps story used to be incorporated into two separate books in the saga (outlines, as they have yet to be written), but it seemed prudent to extract the material, put it in its own context.  In a lot of ways, that brought me back to how I used to write Star Trek stories, which was the first fiction of any kind I wrote outside of school projects.  If for some reason you end up actually reading the anthology, the story I'm referring to is "Rue the Day."

A few of the stories have been reclaimed from projects fizzled out with other people over the years, so it was good becoming reacquainted with them and seeing them appear, finally, somewhere.  One of those ("Ajax"), I honestly can't recall the original project, but it was fun to reread, and to remember I could write something like that.  Apparently I have a label for one of them (The Tarnished Age); that story's called "Unsafe at Any Speed."  All I had to do with that previously collaborative landscape was rename the city and a hero from the project's creator.

So, again, thanks to Scott for making this happen, and I hope you'll have a look.

The Kennedy Curse releases 10/1/13!

The Kennedy Curse, the new anthology from Big Pulp, is scheduled to be released on October 1.  I'm excited, of course, because my story, "The Cuban Exile Crisis," is included.  And even more exited, because it marks the first time a Space Corps story is published by someone other than me.

Of course, it's not just Space Corps, my sprawling space opera epic, that interests me about the story or the anthology, but my long interest in JFK and his whole family, something I picked up from my mother and I've enthusiastically continued.  I'm one of those people who believes in the conspiracy theory, that the events that will be commemorated for their fiftieth anniversary this coming November may not be exactly how history remembers them.

But my story isn't about that.  It's set in the future, actually, and as the title suggests occurs in Cuba, where a descendant has ended up.  She finds herself entangled in another international incident, although this one unlike the other one comes in the midst of a full-blown war the whole world is facing.  In the Space Corps universe this is humanity's introduction to the Danab menace.  The story doesn't worry too much about this war so much as the main character's troubles as she attempts to figure out where she stands and what if anything she can do about it.

And other people contribute other stories, too!  Here's the Amazon link.

The Complete Yoshimi comes to paperback

That would be the cover for The Whole Bloody Affair, a.k.a. The Complete Yoshimi.

Available here in paperback!

For those unfamiliar with Yoshimi and her fictional and well as publishing history, here's a brief recap: The warrior orphan was originally conceived at the behest of a friend's budding publishing label.  They were just getting into the business of releasing novels at the time, and I saw this as an opportunity.  I don't tend to write terrifically straightforward fiction (in other words, I'm more of a literary guy than James Patterson, or in other other words I'm not usually very commercial in the traditional sense).  Yoshimi's story was immediately cast in the vein of things I'd enjoyed, in books and film (and her name taken from a Flaming Lips album), the revenge plot.

The complete story is very similar to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third in that series, while it borrows significantly from Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's Kill Bill.  The truth isn't always what it seems, and Yoshimi has a lot of people to defeat along the way.  (So, she's also similar to Scott Pilgrim!)

The small publisher folded in the midst of the planning stages for the book's release.  

Earlier this year I started and intended to release each of the book's three volumes separately.  Then a lot of things very rapidly changed for me, and I lost the original schedule.  When things finally settled down again, I had the impulse to release the whole story in a single volume, as I had intended to at the conclusion of the serialization.  And so here we are.

As for the cover, I've pretty much been sticking to the available templates at CreateSpace, and that's true again here.  The color scheme is an homage to the iconic posters for Kill Bill, Vol. 1 while also evoking the red pattern for the second (here it takes the shape of an ominous field of blood).

As to whether or not I'm trying to trick unsuspecting consumers into buying my book by using a phrase closely associated with Kill Bill, well, as far as I figure, Tarantino is in no rush to use it, and it has a nice ring.  Why not?  (Then again, perhaps I'll find out.)

...Of course, it's my fervent wish that this is the very last book I'll ever have to release myself, and I hope I'm going out with a bang.

The Complete Yoshimi comes to Kindle

This is the lovely listing for the Kindle edition of The Whole Bloody Affair!

The Temporal Element anthology now available!

The Temporal Element, the first anthology from Martinus Publishing, is now available!

As you can imagine, I'm excited about it mainly for blatantly selfish reasons.  If you haven't guessed already (or skipped over previous discussions about it), I've got a story included, "A Home More Welcoming," which like everything else in the collection and as the title implies is a time travel story, a sort of Looper without blunderbusses (or, alas, Emily Blunt).  It's a rare story I completely rewrote, at editor Martin T. Ingham's request (although I'm told he still did a tense edit).

Temporal Element is also the result of Ingham's Shootout from last summer, one of several writing exercises that I complained a lot about in this particular blog's formative days.  Frankly, I'm still surprised I didn't manage to completely alienate everyone from those exercises, much less the ever-patient Ingham, also author of numerous books like Curse of Selwood, which includes an undead Jesse James.

As a writer and reader I can be pretty particular, and have consistently demonstrated an inability to appropriately react to material that doesn't conform to my standards for professional-level writing, and those who think this is only something that manifests online will take terrible solace in the fact that I did this in writing classes as well.  I come from the Simon Cowell school of criticism.  I don't see the point in sugarcoating my reactions.  I think too many writers are surrounded by people who only feel the need to encourage the activity rather than improve it, because improvement is not only possible for any writer but necessary.  If we just assume that our hobby (a term that may still need explaining so that it doesn't sound insulting) is good enough to sustain our ambitions, we end up with material that will not live up to any objective or enduring standards, and therefore only satisfy our own ego.  Writing of that quality infests more than just books, although most people assume it only exists in stuff like the TV or film or pop songs they don't like.  I understand that we all have different goals and expectations, but the writing itself rather than simply the story always needs to be addressed.  Sometimes I think we allow ourselves to assume the story alone will justify the work.  Sometimes that's the case.  But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ensure the writing is as good as possible.  I think some writers let go the need to refine their craft in their rush to tell stories they believe only they can tell.  Maybe they are the only writer capable of telling that story, but they should still tell it in a manner that's worth reading.

Although there's always the argument that once written, however well, that story enters the collective consciousness, and there will always be the possibility and indeed inevitability that someone else will tell that story again, perhaps better.  This is the real strength of any story, and any storytelling, and far too often we as readers lose sight of that.  And perhaps that's something that I can sometimes forget, too.

The Temporal Element is an entire exercise in this mindset.  Everyone's read or seen dozens of time travel stories.  There are certain tropes and versions of the basic narrative that you might need to understand.  One is that time travel affects the timeline.  One is that time travel can't affect the timeline.  Another is that time travel leads to parallel realities.  There's an ever-present debate as to whether time travel is even or will ever be possible.  Although in an expansive sense, it either already exists or won't ever, because time itself isn't relegated to the limited human perspective.

Do you have to care about anything that I've just written to enjoy the stories in The Temporal Element?  Absolutely not.  But this is my writing blog, and so I get to dictate exactly what you read about it as long as you're here.  Depending on your personal philosophy, time travel could help you resolve any lingering misgivings on reading all or any of it...

In the meantime, you can purchase the anthology in its Kindle edition here!

Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan

For the past year I've been following Pat Dilloway's devotion to his Scarlet Knight series on his eponymous blog.  The more I became aware that it was a series the more Pat's devotion intrigued me.  At first it was just about the one book, A Hero's Journey, but then he unveiled the rest of the books, which he is currently in the midst of releasing.

Now, there are certain parallels to what I've been doing.  Yes, Seven Thunders as I've been talking about it is very similar.  And the book this post is about is the first of a trilogy.  Yet I should note for the record that the complete Yoshimi trilogy was written well before last April, when I read Pat's blog for the first time.

Yet Pat is still something of an inspiration, and when I read A Hero's Journey for the first time, I didn't realize how closely it resembled Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan.  When I read Journey earlier this year, I called it, along with Martin Ingham's Curse of Selwood, I came to see it as a kind of young adult adventure, and when I reviewed it I'm not sure I expressed that well enough.  Young adult fiction is not something to feel bad about reading.  Even I've struggled with this perception in the past.  Most of it is inspired directly by popular fiction meant for anyone, though with themes that younger readers will appreciate.  Journey in fact features a young adult of a different kind, one who's moved on from high school but in her own mind maybe doesn't feel like she has.

When I wrote about Yoshimi, I wrote very specifically for the traditional young adult market, and yet while I was editing it I was surprised to find language that was in places very similar to Pat's and even Ingham's, characterizations that resonated in exactly the way I'd planned.  I tend to write very esoterically, and the whole point of Yoshimi was that she'd be my way to suppress that instinct.  This works really well in Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan, though in the concluding volumes I shift a little more into more familiar territory.  Which to my mind is a good thing.  If you like what you see in the first book, hopefully you'll be that much more interested and invested in what follows.

Pat spends the Scarlet Knight series deepening his mythology, which is exactly what you want to see in a series.  We're both budding writers looking for a way into the hearts of readers.  His dedication to Scarlet Knight was one of the main reasons I was finally able to overcome the dejection of what Yoshimi's original publishing fate was supposed to be.  Ingham plays a part here, too, because he released Selwood himself, the second in a series.

Yoshimi's story is all about finding a sense of forward momentum when everything seems to work against her.  Her publishing history has turned out to reflect that.

You can find Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan available at Amazon as a paperback and ebook.

Accepted into a Big Pulp anthology!

In the first bit of publishing, as opposed to self-publishing (including the "Project Mayhem" anthology) to come around this blog since its inception, I've gotten a short story accepted into a Big Pulp.  Pretty happy about that.

Although now that I think about it I've also got one in Martin Ingham's forthcoming Temporal Element anthology, and that's pretty cool, too.  Ingham was the host of last summer's Shootout, one of the infamous writing exercises that caused me some misery in 2012.  The Shootout's winner in fact was the first story accepted into Temporal Element.  After swallowing my pride, I decided to write another story for him, and then rewrote it, and had it accepted.  I've done an interview for him as part of the run-up to publication, and will let you know when that appears.  The other thing I owe Ingham is the inspiration to do "Project Mayhem" in the first place.  His Curse of Selwood was scheduled to be the next book published by the company that would have released my own Yoshimi (as a reminder, I'll be releasing that myself in the coming months through installments), and when that company fell apart, he decided to set up his own label, and that's where Element where come from.  I took his idea as a sign that maybe I ought to look into that sort of thing myself, although my efforts are far less official (he has a website for Martinus, I have a link here for the Mouldwarp Press Presents series, which includes details on the next anthology, "Song Remains the Same").

Big Pulp is pretty big, though.  I have no personal connection to these guys, so that's one of the reasons why I'm proud to have been accepted into the forthcoming Kennedy Curse anthology.  I was born almost twenty years after JFK's assassination, but for some reason he's always loomed as a pretty major figure in my life.  Fun fact!  My mother once made a robe for him.  No kidding!  The anthology covers the whole family, which has had a series of tragedies affect it over the years.  My entry, "The Cuban Exile Crisis," will also be the first official publication (i.e. by someone other than me) of the Space Corps saga, so that's another reason I'm excited and proud to have accomplished this.  I'm getting paid for this one, a free copy...it's like someone thinks I'm a real boy!

The Project Mayhem roll-out continues!

Mouldwarp Press Presents #1: Project Mayhem is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.  I couldn't be more proud about the anthology.  When the Dead Letter Quarterly debacle unraveled in 2007/2008, I was pretty humiliated personally.  I was one of three editors in the start-up literary journal, and took great pride in providing feedback to everyone who submitted to us, whether or not we accepted them into the subsequently nonexistent first issue.  Years later, I had another look at the stories I personally edited, and now am almost glad that the venture fizzled, because I was no longer happy with my efforts in that regard, so it was a personal redemption to get that part right with Project Mayhem, especially since I had eleven other contributors to account for, regardless of how long the stories were.  In the end I ended up retyping each of the stories, just to make sure I was perfectly happy with the end results.  It was another triumph just to get the thing released, closing the loop of a disappointment that I felt not only for myself but for everyone who'd been accepted into DLQ.

Aside from PT Dilloway and Christy Wiabel (a member in good standing of the WriteClubCo that I've previously written about), I didn't know any of the contributors to Project Mayhem prior to last December, when the submission period originally opened.  Dana Jerman contributed the most stories, three in all, and prior to her I hadn't even considered that anyone would do that.  Dave Elsensohn gave me two as well as the cracked concrete photo (the crack is visible behind the yellow box with the title in it, and is the most obvious indication of where the title "Project Mayhem" came from, other than a response to the WRiTE CLUB exercise last summer) that's the background image on the cover.  Every one of the writers in the anthology has earned my everlasting gratitude.

And for anyone who doesn't know where "Project Mayhem" actually comes from, it's Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, which was later adapted into a David Fincher movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.  It's what Pitt (who's really Norton) is up to besides the eponymous club, urban anarchy that probably wouldn't have been possible after 9/11 as a pop culture event.

I'm not really up to describing the origins and background to anyone else's story (although if they want to share, feel free to, assuming any of you follow this blog), but "Seventy-One and Counting" works two ways.  Personally, it's a tribute to my mother, who turned 71 yesterday, an achievement considering she's been battling advanced-stage cancer for two years now, as well as a piece of Space Corps history.  Space Corps, you'll remember, is my science fiction saga, the subject of my current WIP, Seven Thunders, and what I've dedicated 2013 to advancing as a reality in my fiction writing activities.

The story is based on a crucial period of Space Corps lore, although one that heretofore had not really been visible in my stories, and is notably absent from any of the seven other books that will follow Seven Thunders.  It's the story of the first Danab War, the version of the classic alien invasion story that's most relevant to the Space Corps saga, how humanity first battled the Danab, a prequel of sorts to the conflict at the center of Seven Thunders.  It also features the first print reference to the Space Corps covert division, which plays a huge role in A Tremor of Bones, which is the fourth book in the cycle.

Anyway, I don't want to make it sound like my contribution is the only one of note.  Project Mayhem is a small (42 pages in print) anthology packed with big goodness.

Poet Who Did Know It

One of the aspects of my writing career that hasn't been emphasized here is that I am a poet.

I know, it caught me by surprise, too, when it started taking shape.  The first poem I remember writing of any note was about Lee Harvey Oswald in eighth grade (seventh?).  It was an aberration.  After taking a trip to Boston in my freshmen year of college, I struck on the idea to commemorate it by writing a series of poems about it, and got pretty far along, but...still didn't feel like an actual poet.

Then I started attending the University of Maine.  For some reason, much as my home town of Lisbon, Maine, inexplicably experienced a surge of musical talent in the early 1990s, the Orono campus practically fell face-first into poetry during my time studying English.  There were a number of teachers who were themselves poets, and I took classes from them, but it was the students who kept taking the same ones, and who formed such a close-knit group that several of us launched a short-lived literary journal of our own that really solidified the time for me.

When I graduated, most of these classmates had also moved on.  By the time I moved out of state a year later, I saw the journal come to an end, despite my best long-distance efforts to keep it afloat.  I started composing new work in earnest, thanks to my emerging habit of keeping a notebook on me at all times, so I could always make a note of inspiration.  In March of 2005, I composed "(The) Beat," the first of what I considered my mature poetry.  And I just kept writing the stuff.

Eventually I started a personal challenge of writing a poem mostly on a daily basis, one hundred at a time, the first beginning in the summer of 2007.  I've since completed five of them.

I'm mentioning this now because I've just made the first of them available as a collection, Terror of Knowing.

The funny thing is, the only piece of advice I got just before graduation was to try and make an official career in the world of poetry.  I had just finished participating in a class that explored the vital world of contemporary poems, during which I was able to write a number of essays, and the advice was to submit these around.  At the time I didn't take the advice seriously, since I wanted to pitch a book called Tug Rushmore and had actually asked advice about that, and I didn't feel comfortable enough in my comprehension of poetry outside of that class to consider asserting myself in any regard.

Besides, I had tried submitting poems to publications outside of the UMaine system and come up empty.  (The same reaction that would greet so many of my later literary submissions.)  Perhaps a little like Emily Dickinson, I might be doomed to be a poet not read in their own lifetime.  (This is the only mark of comparison I'm willing to make between myself and Emily Dickinson, by the way.)

Like all of my poetry, rhyming is not the first rule of Terror.  In fact, there's little rhyming to be found. As my descriptions for the collection assert, the major theme in the major poem is the Metaphysics of Value, my extrapolation of Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book I discovered at UMaine, by the way).  Much of my poetry is simply my experience of the world, and mostly thought-wise.  What distinguishes Terror of Knowing is that there remains a significant remnant of the experiments I studied in UMaine classrooms.  Basically philosophy from your average joe.

It's marked as the first volume in the New Fade cycle, which links Terror to a poetic statement that predates "(The) Beat" (which is not in this collection), titled appropriately enough "The New Fade."  This is my conception of the modern age.  "New Fade" roughly translates to the increasingly quick way we cycle through eras, believing that we're escaping the barbarous past even as we complain about all the barbarity around us.  I wrote "The New Fade" in 2002 following a trip with my brother to New Jersey to visit relatives (including my godfather, a concept that seems strange today and not just because I myself am one), during a summer that saw some of my first independent experiments as a poet.

Why am I putting this out now?  I guess more or less to assert this part of my literary life, much as I have as a novelist (The Cloak of Shrouded Men) and short story writer (Monorama), all in the self-publishing realm.  Being a poem has dominated my self-identity for a decade.  It only felt right to make at least one record of it.

Digital proof that my comics career is moving forward

I've been mentioning my work with Bluewater Comics, a couple of biographies that I've written for the publisher.  One of them is getting that much closer to becoming a reality.

See here, here, and here for digital proof that I've got a profile of Mikhail Prokhorov, Russian superstar, in actual comics reality.  (There's also an American version of the Amazon UK listing here.)

Not only do I have digital proof, but for all you digital fans, it's also in digital format, which is apparently what all the budding writers are doing these days.  (I'll remind you that all my books are also in digital format, even if I myself prefer actual real material that's more than just a piece of plastic that you're reading off of like you think you're in Star Trek or something, with less Okudagrams.)

I guess that means I really will have to do that Dr. Seuss bio for Bluewater.  It's the one I'm most interested in, because I plan to do it in true Dr. Seuss style, all rhymes, so I've run out of excuses.  I hope they didn't find someone else while I procrastinated...

Welcome

I've just signed up for DL Hammons' 2012 WRiTE CLUB.  I'm also participating in Martin T. Ingham's Shootout, so I'll be a busy little writer, and that's not even counting the fact that I've got my own projects to work on and a new book to prep, Seven Thunders, which will be the first installment in the Space Corps series, something I've been working on for almost twenty years.

Who am I?  I'm Spider-Man.  Just kidding, I'm Tony Laplume.  I just recently released a collection of short stories:

I've been putting that together since last fall, writing most of the stories since January 2011, and in fact have also included a Space Corps story from 2003 and a novella from 2005, just for good measure, as well as a few slightly more recent efforts, but from outside of that general timeframe.  You can get a print edition or Kindle edition.  Or you can just look at the pretty cover.

I self-published that earlier this month, and self-published The Cloak of Shrouded Men in 2007.  That's a gritty superhero story about the illusion of control and its corrupting influence.  It was written in three successive Novembers as part of National Novel Writing Month, which was the only way I was going to write my first book.  I have since completed three additional manuscripts.

I currently have another book, Yoshimi, preparing to be published by Hall Bros. Entertainment, which if everything goes according to plan should be published later this summer.