Bestseller Chart Update:
Jeneva Rose’s The Perfect Marriage dominated the Kindle Bestseller charts this week. The Washington Post subscription (very strange to see that in the Kindle Store) has overtaken it as of this writing, but that’s a huge national newspaper. The tagline for The Perfect Marriage: “His mistress is dead. His wife is his only hope.” Banger.
After that we have The Quarry Girls by Jess Lourey, a kind of “all is not well in small-town America” style joint. Colleen Hoover continues her reign as the queen of the bestseller lists, with four books charting on the top 100.
The usual suspects continue to do well, with Stephen King taking the top spot for Fairy Tale in both the Mystery/Thriller and Sci-Fi/Fantasy lists. We’ve got Dean Koontz hitting with a top-ten new release. Janet Evanovich drops another bestseller.
And after that, it seems like the list is mostly populated with pornography. Porn continues to do well, with The Alpha’s Fated Encounter, Twins for the Mafia Boss, and Her Righteous Protector all cashing in for their respective authors.
Speaking of porn, in my genres (crime/sci-fi), Backyard Dungeon 8: A Reverse Portal Mystery blasted up the charts. Inferno (Kelly Turnbull Book 7) is putting in a great showing, hitting 78 on the overall charts as of this writing. It’s about America’s Second Civil War, and the patriots of the south fighting the antifa terrorists of the north (aka “Hillaryia”). The Hedge Wizard 2 is killing the game on the fantasy charts. I find the method of this book’s creation fascinating: it’s a D&D game written out in the style of a novel.
Which brings me to a point the very smart and talented E Rathke brought up in the group chat last night: people want porn. Whether that’s being sexually dominated by a mafia boss, curbstomping liberals, or being a goofy wizard, readers will eat it up. Another friend of mine, Jordan Harper, has said that “pornography is when you deny the audience nothing.”
Much to consider.
How Dying World Came to Be
I typically follow Kurt Vonnegut’s advice. It’s smart to listen to the masters. He once said to “start your novel as close to the end as possible,” and that seemed like sensible advice to me. However, looking at, say a fantasy series, it becomes clear that these authors decidedly did not do that. The Wizard of Earthsea doesn’t start out near the end. Neither does The Lord of the Rings, for that matter. No, most books tend to start at the beginning, with a prologue and everything.
The process of writing Dying World is funny, because no matter how close to the beginning I thought I was, there was more beginning waiting.
Dying World was initially conceived as a surreal novel about an ecoterrorist living in the woods. I sketched out the plot and wrote the first twenty pages of it. Hubris led me to believe that the book was as good as done at that point. I put it up on my 4-book Kickstarter crowing about how the books were done and ready to go (besides that being a lie, I’ll have to do a whole post at some point about why Kickstarter was the worst decision I could have made at the time) and, when the KS reached its goal…I froze completely.
So for the next five years I deleted and rewrote, deleted and rewrote. This, I think, is an important step in any writer’s journey. It sucked at the time, but I needed to pump the brakes a bit, to realize that I didn’t have enough life experience or craft experience to spin gold out of thin air. I didn’t even know what I truly liked about art. I only really knew what was good in relief, through the negative process of weeding out “the bad stuff.” Whatever was left standing was “good.”
That’s no way to write a book.
If you approach this shit negatively, all you’re going to see is blocks. Well, I’m never going to write Backyard Dungeon 8, so I might as well hang it up. I’m never going to be a presentable professional in literary circles, so I might as well hang it up. But it’s because I’m not like these other people!
C’mon. Admit it. You know people like this. There’s a possibility you are one of these people. There’s no shame in admitting it (shame is another block). We all have room to grow.
My lightbulb moment came a short time after starting the Agitator podcast with my friend Kelby Losack. We talk about the films of Takashi Miike, in addition to anime, manga, novels, and other movies by Japanese directors. What I found through that process was that there’s a whole bunch of art out there that I deeply love.
Instead of approaching everything from a negative perspective (“Nobody wants the type of book I write, so why even bother?”) I decided to approach it from a positive perspective. Why not emulate the things that both stimulate my creativity and managed to find an audience?
For Dying World, I picked three non-literary influences: Akira, Dark Souls, and the cult classic Miike film Dead or Alive. I knew I wanted it to involve cyberpunk aesthetics, extreme gore and sex, and an overall colorful, beautiful, but slightly melancholy tone. I knew I wanted there to be a motorcycle gang. I settled on a world that knew its days were numbered. The World Serpent appears in the sky, swallowing its tail. This is taken as a prophecy of doom. Several “palliative societies” (a term I lifted from the Byung-Chul Han book of the same name) form, each with its own idea about how to help the world die as peacefully as possible.
But the world doesn’t die, and over time the differences between the societies descends into good old fashioned gang warfare. Many people forget that the American street gangs of today often start as positive social clubs for disaffected youth. Then, well, humanity happens. In Dying World, you have these kids who are heavily technologically modified engaging in brutal violence and body modification, but with a strong magical/animist approach to the universe. I forgot to mention that in this world, magic is “real” (which it is in our world, too, but I mean in the Dark Souls sense).
Anyway, that tension appealed to me. Warrior monks with magic swords who talk to plants and install guns under their skin. That’s cool.
The development of Dying World, the actual book that drops December 1st, went like this:
Emulating the aesthetics and tone of stuff I liked.
Loose aesthetic idea: what if the book kept the energy and tone of the opening scene from Dead or Alive? The scene is notorious for the way Miike condensed almost 45 minutes of script into ten minutes. A yakuza goes on a shotgun street rampage. A man does a fifteen-yard line of coke. Strippers strip. Two men have sex in a bathroom, one stabbing the other in the throat. A man eats a bunch of ramen, then gets shotgunned in the belly, noodles flying everywhere. On and on, five stories play out with no explanation, all set to a rock soundtrack.
Loose plot idea: what if there was a cyberpunk Winter’s Bone? Our hero’s father is a degenerate gambler, and he’s disappeared, and a guild of assassins that swallow people whole tells our hero he’s got 48 hours to find his old man.
Writing the opening scene, where the Clerics (that’s the gang), have to save the city from sentient tornadoes, and realizing oh shit…these people need backstories. Deciding to develop a new plot, where the heroes are tasked with finding the origin of the deadly tornadoes and eliminating the threat. Pushing the initial concept back to Book 2.
Realizing oh shit…this is maybe two books. Pushing the initial concept to Book 3.
Realizing oh shit…I have the heroes leave the City way too quickly. This is a cyberpunk book, and they’re only in Cyclone City for the first fifty pages? No, that won’t do. So I invented a whole new story that gives you background on the characters, and lets them get up to all the stylish violence and sex that people love…leading me back to point #1. And pushing the initial concept to Book 4.
While this could be frustrating at times, it worked in my favor, as I had many scenes from future books already written. I enjoyed writing in a mode that aimed to go deeper, rather than finish as quickly as possible.
Because we’re working in the “series” model, it’s no longer the goal to race for the finish line. In true RPG fashion, we’re looking for detours to take. We’re looking to sink into the characters, let them talk to each other, let them get into side quests. It makes the writing process so much more fun. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Just more tunnels.
Next time…I’m not sure what I’ll write about. I have a few topics lined up, and I’ll pick one in a few days and get to tapping.
I hope your new bestseller is coming along nicely.
Working editorial at a porn magazine paid the bills during lockdown. Ultimately, it became unfulfilling (and the eic was pulling bank but holding out on me.) I still dip into writing it every time I want some fast cash.
"Because we’re working in the “series” model, it’s no longer the goal to race for the finish line. In true RPG fashion, we’re looking for detours to take. We’re looking to sink into the characters, let them talk to each other, let them get into side quests. It makes the writing process so much more fun. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Just more tunnels."
Something about this hits home for this book I'm currently working on. Thanks man.