Book Trailer for Unselfish Gene

Okay, personally, I think a movie type trailer for a book is a bit …. well, not silly, not exactly an oxymoron, but …. I don’t know. CLICK HERE for the YouTube link if you’re curious.

Back from the Storm

Back from the Storm

I thought I was going to get fired today, but I didn’t, and you know what? I’m almost disappointed. Now I still have to spend my evenings, not my days, writing fiction. Still, without my cushy, though bureaucratic day job, I would probably have to spend just as much time not writing to make a living.

Also, as I was getting chewed out, I was thinking about Knut Hamsun’s innovative novel, “Hunger,” having read it a few days previously. Hunger is about a starving writer. Sound dull? It was written about 1850, I think, and (I should get my facts straight first but what the hell!) and was one of the novels that led to him winning the Nobel Prize. But when I first started it I thought, “huh?” What’s so innovative about this? Then I started comparing it to other mid-19th Century novels and realized that a lot of his technique, which seems good but commonplace for late 20th and early 21st century novels, was just that: innovative, and decades ahead of his time.

And it’s just good writing. It’s hard to imagine that a starving journalist’s day-to-day struggle just to raise a penny for a loaf of bread, or the ranting of this malnourished mind, could be so absorbing, but trust me, it is.

Too bad he became a Nazi supporter in his senior years. I wonder if he and E. Pound were buddies. Is there anyone out there reading this that knows? Care to comment?

Me, I’m going to have a roast beef sandwich and toast the old writer, Nazi or not, for “Hunger” which kept me from popping off during my ass-chewing.

Dreamtime of an Alien God

As I’ve written before, writing is a kind of obsessive-disorder disease. You might (I do) also compare it to a destructive love affair, one where you make all the sacrifices and your loved one — the work, not the readers or publisher — gives you little or nothing back in return. The work says, “Isn’t it enough that you love loving me?” You say to the work, “Bullshit, you’re just using me,” but keep on writing anyway.

Along this line of thinking I just finished my third copyedit/revision of Dreamtime of an Alien God and turned it over to my publisher,  Swimming Kangaroo Books, Arlington. If I smoked, I would have had a cigarette afterwards. Get the picture?

I started the first book more than a decade ago, while living in MIssouri, in response to a recurring vivid dream I was having about huge angels colliding with a small plane near the farm house I was renting at the time.

There were no zombies per se in the first book. I guess I hadn’t developed the obsessive zombie writing disorder (OZword) yet. But true to form, as I started Dreamtime a little more than a year ago, I found myself not just writing about the dead who have returned to life but making two of them main protagonists.

These are not the decaying, body-part-dropping type of zombies. Rather they get better looking, sort of  like vampires, but they neither drink blood or eat brains. Instead, they become someones obsesive love interest. The perfect lovers. The one you’ve been looking for all your life and never found. Needless to say, there are a lot of sexual scenes,  which I hope are erotic not pornographic.

So it’s over. Goodbye. Except for going through a couple of more revisions and galleys as the publisher edits — which is kind of like approving divorce papers. Now, I can get busy being abused as I start the third book in the series, Awakening of the Alien God.