How a book gets written.
So, if anyone cares: my first novel, Jackie and Craig, was released on October 30th, 2017. I ordered a pizza and drank, because why the hell not, right?
Truth be told, finally getting this book off the ground was less a Dionysiac riot of depravity and shameless debauchery (as most of my celebrations are) and more a long, guttural sigh of relief that lasted until.....well, until Yule rolled around and I just sorta forgot about it. I started illustrating my next book, a picture book that'll be released on January 20th, and I just sort of.....well, moved on.
I didn't know what else to do, really. I mean, somebody was kind enough to put up a TV Tropes page and I heard from around seven or eight people about it, but so far it's just been one more thing to do. Of course, that doesn't mean I'll stop - anyone who can be dissuaded from writing should be, in the words of one of my idols, Harlan Ellison - but in a lot of ways, I'm not sure where to go from here. I hear that this is a symptomatic of the early 20's, so at least I know I'm not alone in that (I hope), but for now all I can think to do regarding this particular book is talk about.....well, how this book came to be.
It started when I was sixteen. See, I had a feeling back then that this whole dark, gritty YA thing was about to become real big (oh, how I wish CreateSpace was around back then - or maybe not) so, to experiment, I wrote a short story that was to be the first chapter of an incredibly vicious, mean-spirited, Roald Dahl/Gremlins-type book about kids and monsters. It was called Diggin' Graves, and you might be able to read it at some point. I could've sworn I published it on this blog, but either I'm mistaken or blogger is a filthy goddamn liar.
I finished that story in spring and decided to sit on it, because I thought it was actually too dark to really be accessible to the preteens I was writing for and also because I loved the way it ended, and decided it should really come to a halt there. So I forgot about it, and then in my senior year of High School (easily one of the absolute worst years of my life, and I can't really say I've had a particularly good one for the past twenty-two) I decided to try again after a failed attempt at two different adult novels - both Clive Barkerish horror/fantasies, one of which is being reworked into a book I'll have out this Summer.
I've always loved the Conan stories, and it's no secret that I always imagined what would eventually become Jackie and Craig as a sort of YA Conan The Barbarian to Harry Potter's Lord of the Rings. (That wasn't originally my phrasing, but a friend who read the first novel-length version of JAC described it this way and it's just stuck since then). So when I sat down to try and create a compilation of stories for preteens, it was in that mold - two characters named Juniper and Gary (he changed names constantly, but this was his name at that point) adventured through the 'Suburban Wasteland' as homeless runaways, fighting chupacabras, lake monsters, sasquatch, feral tribes of other homeless kids, teenaged Lovecraftian Cultists (including a tribe of Girl Scouts who worshiped Bloody Mary as a deity) and othersuch fearsome critters and urban legends, all under the noses of oblivious, incompetent adults who usually got themselves slaughtered. A more Southern version of Will Watson (Big Willy, because dick jokes are always appropriate) told the tale, and it was all very weird, gory and over-the-top; very much in the vein of the Evil Dead movies. Hey - that's what I wanted to read in Middle School!
Though the stories were popular with some kids I knew and got me sent to the office a few times (and even suspended once!), there really wasn't much going for them outside time-killing fun. They were just sort of weird, random vignettes in a world where feral children and extra-dimensional monsters were the norm. One story involved that old Edgar Rice Burroughs standby, the arena battle (God, I'm a sucker for these - I even kick off my annual Star Wars Marathon with Attack of the Clones for that reason). Gary and Juniper slaughter a bunch of 'fearsome critters' (popular staples of lumberjack folklore, which you may or may not have known was a thing) over the course of a few days in a mud-pit in Florida, where of course a group of redneck teenagers have trapped them (and a Hodag, and a Tupilaq, etc.) before rising to the top of that tribe's heirarchy and setting the other children free. Crazy stuff, fun stuff......but not really fulfilling stuff, if you get what I mean. I took a shot at illustrating these stories, but the energy needed to pull this off combined with the stresses and depression I was going through kept me from ever making it beyond just a few conceptual creature drawings. I began work on an Hyborian Age-type essay about the world of Gary and Juniper, but not much ever came of it if I remember correctly. Can't see if I remember correctly, either; as the computer I had then is as dead as I will someday be. I still have a two or three printed or handwritten Gary and Juniper stories, but I'd have to go searching for them and retype them for this blog, something I won't have time for until, maybe, my next book is already done.
After I failed out of high school, I wound up moving to a new town in a fit of really severe stress and anxiety. Terrified of literally everything, I began having frantic, hellish panic attacks just before and after falling asleep for a few hours, as my insomnia tends to do to me. For about a week I had waves of really intensive nostalgia, during which I was overcome by such deep emotions I really didn't know what to do. So of course, I wrote about it.
From this experience came No Sleep 'Till Nu-Urth, as MCA had just died; still a sore spot for me, y'know. No Sleep 'Till Nu-Urth was posted to this blog as it was written, influenced by the books I enjoyed as a kid in school (Harry Potter, Bridge to Terabithia and The Outsiders amongst them) and the books I read outside of school (Barry Lyga, The Chronicles of Prydain, Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of course H.P. Lovecraft & pals, as should be self-evident from how tonally bizarre my work so often is). It featured Jackie-Lynn, a southern rebel, and Gary Steiger, a neurotic New Yorker, as they discovered a parallel universe where cryptids came from and made it their secret hangout. Their friends, two of whom made it to the final cut of Jackie and Craig, came with them on their adventures until the world was sabotaged by a bully named Timmy Bach; Gary died there trying to escape, and Jackie-Lynn was left to mourn him. A Spider-Goddess named Jykunne showed up, but she wasn't particularly prominent save for three key points in the story.
Besides being crushingly depressing, there wasn't much of a plot to it (I was nineteen and it was my first novel, cut me a break, alright?) and it lacked a great deal of the emotion I was seeking to encapsulate. About 25 percent of what was in No Sleep 'Till Nu-Urth survived to Jackie and Craig - mostly the early chapters, which I still feel capture my own childhood perfectly. Chupacabras, a staple since the Gary and Juniper stories, and the Maraw Sorceresses Talon, Screech and Fang show up, being holdovers from a Gary and Juniper story set in Nashville.....they were promising enough that after my next two books crashed and burned, I decided to return to it. From this we got a book twice as long as the finished version...Greg: Nightmare Hunter. Or G:NH for short.
If I were Stephen King, this would've been the published version you'd read today. Hell, I finally understand why the unstoppable titan George Lucas made all his best movies in the 70's - back then, producers and actors could rein him in when his storylines, exposition or dialogue got too out-of-hand. Nowadays, people like him can do literally anything they want to, and look what we got out of it - The Phantom Menace.
G:NH was all over the place, in every way. Anything I could come up with, I threw in. Talon, Screech and Fang had a major part in Greg and Jackie's crossing between this world and the other (still called Nu-Urth, after Jackie's affinity for misspelled Nu-Metal acts like KoRn and Staind). Any creature I wanted there, from ghosts tied to runestones that the Maraw set up like landmines to goddamn behemoths that slaughtered entire herds of deer. There was a subplot involving Timmy Bach (the world's few dozen Jackie and Craig fans now know him as Travis) starting a Jykunne Cult in exchange for advanced, interdimensional weaponry. He died a gruesome death in G:NH, slain by a domesticated chupacabra (not sure what I was thinking with that). It later turned out that Jykunne, in this book, was a sentient virus that inhabited and co-opted human and animal bodies into a hive mind. This was how it controlled its hordes, including Timmy and his cultists. So, kind of influenced by IT. There was actually a reference to IT in this draft, in that the kids called the junkyard the Barrens. About three or four fights took place here, if I remember correctly. As the junkyard appears only once in the final version, this reference was reduced to one line.
With G:NH, I knew there had to be a series - why? Because that's how all YA novels are nowadays, goddamnit, and that's the way it has to be. So I figured, after Greg died, we could just follow each character through a different part of Greg's (former) world. The spin-off would've followed Jackie, and included scenes I excised from G:NH. After I was done with G:NH, however, I was so sick to death of monsters and the occult that I wrote a screenplay to just get away from creature features for a little while - The Saga of Tabitha Irons. As scripts are so hard to sell, I wound up just using this to cool off before I finally put together Jackie and Craig, two years later. If a sequel to Jackie and Craig ever materializes, it's gonna be a repurposed version of that script; since I don't wanna be stuck in Jikungah writing about monsters for the next three years of my goddamn life, especially with other books I wanna write in the interim.
Which brings us to the final draft: Jackie and Craig. I had begun putting together a short story anthology in early 2017, which was to come out on Halloween to begin my career as an author. Not happy I'm consigned to self-publishing, but I've been exiled to society's gutters and wastelands enough in my short, ugly twenty-two years of life that I've gotten used to it by now. Eventually, though, I decided I wanted my first foray into the world of publishing to be a novel. And as I only had one even close to readable, this became......Jackie and Craig.
Jackie and Craig was the streamlined version of G:NH. I removed any creatures that slowed the book down, or that were just there to be creatively crazy, and put together a version of the story that progressed more smoothly. Craig, who was once Greg, Gary, and a few other names I considered, does not die at the end.......even though this is the logical conclusion of the story as far as I'm concerned and one hinted at all throughout every preceding novel-length version, in some way or another. Still edgy, but not so bad that I couldn't have handled it at thirteen or so. Hopefully, you or your kids can, too.
I cut it down to about half its length (the final version is about 90,000 words, I believe), and the journey to the other world was saved until the book's third act, where it had been a constant back-and-forth before. About twenty-five percent of JAC is preserved from Nu-Urth, while about forty to sixty percent is preserved from G:NH. The surviving elements of the Gary and Juniper stories - The Maraw Sorceresses, the Chupacabras, Portals to other worlds and the existence of Will and Amy - are, to me, deeply nostalgic and nice in-jokes, that show how far the series - and in a way, my writing and my life - has come the past six years, since I first wrote Diggin' Graves in the hope that it'd become a book I could sell and touch people's lives with.
At the time of this writing, a few dozen people have read Jackie and Craig. I am eternally grateful. This is, of course, only the beginning. My first picture book will be out on January 20th, and my aforementioned anthology will be released shortly after that - maybe March or April. If self-publishing is the route I have to take, then that's that. Robert E. Howard wouldn't be Robert E. Howard if he stopped at the first Conan story, and Lovecraft was nobody until near the end of his life. John Dies at the End was a print-on-demand title for the first ten years of its existence, and a public internet story for years before that. I should be grateful that my first novel was released at the tender young age of twenty-two, even if I feel as ancient as Time Itself on bad days. I've made a commitment to a more constant web presence this year, so you'll be seeing a lot more of me, my few dozen constant readers. I can only hope, now, that it was worth it for you.
I know it was sure as hell worth it for me.
Truth be told, finally getting this book off the ground was less a Dionysiac riot of depravity and shameless debauchery (as most of my celebrations are) and more a long, guttural sigh of relief that lasted until.....well, until Yule rolled around and I just sorta forgot about it. I started illustrating my next book, a picture book that'll be released on January 20th, and I just sort of.....well, moved on.
I didn't know what else to do, really. I mean, somebody was kind enough to put up a TV Tropes page and I heard from around seven or eight people about it, but so far it's just been one more thing to do. Of course, that doesn't mean I'll stop - anyone who can be dissuaded from writing should be, in the words of one of my idols, Harlan Ellison - but in a lot of ways, I'm not sure where to go from here. I hear that this is a symptomatic of the early 20's, so at least I know I'm not alone in that (I hope), but for now all I can think to do regarding this particular book is talk about.....well, how this book came to be.
It started when I was sixteen. See, I had a feeling back then that this whole dark, gritty YA thing was about to become real big (oh, how I wish CreateSpace was around back then - or maybe not) so, to experiment, I wrote a short story that was to be the first chapter of an incredibly vicious, mean-spirited, Roald Dahl/Gremlins-type book about kids and monsters. It was called Diggin' Graves, and you might be able to read it at some point. I could've sworn I published it on this blog, but either I'm mistaken or blogger is a filthy goddamn liar.
I finished that story in spring and decided to sit on it, because I thought it was actually too dark to really be accessible to the preteens I was writing for and also because I loved the way it ended, and decided it should really come to a halt there. So I forgot about it, and then in my senior year of High School (easily one of the absolute worst years of my life, and I can't really say I've had a particularly good one for the past twenty-two) I decided to try again after a failed attempt at two different adult novels - both Clive Barkerish horror/fantasies, one of which is being reworked into a book I'll have out this Summer.
I've always loved the Conan stories, and it's no secret that I always imagined what would eventually become Jackie and Craig as a sort of YA Conan The Barbarian to Harry Potter's Lord of the Rings. (That wasn't originally my phrasing, but a friend who read the first novel-length version of JAC described it this way and it's just stuck since then). So when I sat down to try and create a compilation of stories for preteens, it was in that mold - two characters named Juniper and Gary (he changed names constantly, but this was his name at that point) adventured through the 'Suburban Wasteland' as homeless runaways, fighting chupacabras, lake monsters, sasquatch, feral tribes of other homeless kids, teenaged Lovecraftian Cultists (including a tribe of Girl Scouts who worshiped Bloody Mary as a deity) and othersuch fearsome critters and urban legends, all under the noses of oblivious, incompetent adults who usually got themselves slaughtered. A more Southern version of Will Watson (Big Willy, because dick jokes are always appropriate) told the tale, and it was all very weird, gory and over-the-top; very much in the vein of the Evil Dead movies. Hey - that's what I wanted to read in Middle School!
Though the stories were popular with some kids I knew and got me sent to the office a few times (and even suspended once!), there really wasn't much going for them outside time-killing fun. They were just sort of weird, random vignettes in a world where feral children and extra-dimensional monsters were the norm. One story involved that old Edgar Rice Burroughs standby, the arena battle (God, I'm a sucker for these - I even kick off my annual Star Wars Marathon with Attack of the Clones for that reason). Gary and Juniper slaughter a bunch of 'fearsome critters' (popular staples of lumberjack folklore, which you may or may not have known was a thing) over the course of a few days in a mud-pit in Florida, where of course a group of redneck teenagers have trapped them (and a Hodag, and a Tupilaq, etc.) before rising to the top of that tribe's heirarchy and setting the other children free. Crazy stuff, fun stuff......but not really fulfilling stuff, if you get what I mean. I took a shot at illustrating these stories, but the energy needed to pull this off combined with the stresses and depression I was going through kept me from ever making it beyond just a few conceptual creature drawings. I began work on an Hyborian Age-type essay about the world of Gary and Juniper, but not much ever came of it if I remember correctly. Can't see if I remember correctly, either; as the computer I had then is as dead as I will someday be. I still have a two or three printed or handwritten Gary and Juniper stories, but I'd have to go searching for them and retype them for this blog, something I won't have time for until, maybe, my next book is already done.
After I failed out of high school, I wound up moving to a new town in a fit of really severe stress and anxiety. Terrified of literally everything, I began having frantic, hellish panic attacks just before and after falling asleep for a few hours, as my insomnia tends to do to me. For about a week I had waves of really intensive nostalgia, during which I was overcome by such deep emotions I really didn't know what to do. So of course, I wrote about it.
From this experience came No Sleep 'Till Nu-Urth, as MCA had just died; still a sore spot for me, y'know. No Sleep 'Till Nu-Urth was posted to this blog as it was written, influenced by the books I enjoyed as a kid in school (Harry Potter, Bridge to Terabithia and The Outsiders amongst them) and the books I read outside of school (Barry Lyga, The Chronicles of Prydain, Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of course H.P. Lovecraft & pals, as should be self-evident from how tonally bizarre my work so often is). It featured Jackie-Lynn, a southern rebel, and Gary Steiger, a neurotic New Yorker, as they discovered a parallel universe where cryptids came from and made it their secret hangout. Their friends, two of whom made it to the final cut of Jackie and Craig, came with them on their adventures until the world was sabotaged by a bully named Timmy Bach; Gary died there trying to escape, and Jackie-Lynn was left to mourn him. A Spider-Goddess named Jykunne showed up, but she wasn't particularly prominent save for three key points in the story.
Besides being crushingly depressing, there wasn't much of a plot to it (I was nineteen and it was my first novel, cut me a break, alright?) and it lacked a great deal of the emotion I was seeking to encapsulate. About 25 percent of what was in No Sleep 'Till Nu-Urth survived to Jackie and Craig - mostly the early chapters, which I still feel capture my own childhood perfectly. Chupacabras, a staple since the Gary and Juniper stories, and the Maraw Sorceresses Talon, Screech and Fang show up, being holdovers from a Gary and Juniper story set in Nashville.....they were promising enough that after my next two books crashed and burned, I decided to return to it. From this we got a book twice as long as the finished version...Greg: Nightmare Hunter. Or G:NH for short.
If I were Stephen King, this would've been the published version you'd read today. Hell, I finally understand why the unstoppable titan George Lucas made all his best movies in the 70's - back then, producers and actors could rein him in when his storylines, exposition or dialogue got too out-of-hand. Nowadays, people like him can do literally anything they want to, and look what we got out of it - The Phantom Menace.
G:NH was all over the place, in every way. Anything I could come up with, I threw in. Talon, Screech and Fang had a major part in Greg and Jackie's crossing between this world and the other (still called Nu-Urth, after Jackie's affinity for misspelled Nu-Metal acts like KoRn and Staind). Any creature I wanted there, from ghosts tied to runestones that the Maraw set up like landmines to goddamn behemoths that slaughtered entire herds of deer. There was a subplot involving Timmy Bach (the world's few dozen Jackie and Craig fans now know him as Travis) starting a Jykunne Cult in exchange for advanced, interdimensional weaponry. He died a gruesome death in G:NH, slain by a domesticated chupacabra (not sure what I was thinking with that). It later turned out that Jykunne, in this book, was a sentient virus that inhabited and co-opted human and animal bodies into a hive mind. This was how it controlled its hordes, including Timmy and his cultists. So, kind of influenced by IT. There was actually a reference to IT in this draft, in that the kids called the junkyard the Barrens. About three or four fights took place here, if I remember correctly. As the junkyard appears only once in the final version, this reference was reduced to one line.
With G:NH, I knew there had to be a series - why? Because that's how all YA novels are nowadays, goddamnit, and that's the way it has to be. So I figured, after Greg died, we could just follow each character through a different part of Greg's (former) world. The spin-off would've followed Jackie, and included scenes I excised from G:NH. After I was done with G:NH, however, I was so sick to death of monsters and the occult that I wrote a screenplay to just get away from creature features for a little while - The Saga of Tabitha Irons. As scripts are so hard to sell, I wound up just using this to cool off before I finally put together Jackie and Craig, two years later. If a sequel to Jackie and Craig ever materializes, it's gonna be a repurposed version of that script; since I don't wanna be stuck in Jikungah writing about monsters for the next three years of my goddamn life, especially with other books I wanna write in the interim.
Which brings us to the final draft: Jackie and Craig. I had begun putting together a short story anthology in early 2017, which was to come out on Halloween to begin my career as an author. Not happy I'm consigned to self-publishing, but I've been exiled to society's gutters and wastelands enough in my short, ugly twenty-two years of life that I've gotten used to it by now. Eventually, though, I decided I wanted my first foray into the world of publishing to be a novel. And as I only had one even close to readable, this became......Jackie and Craig.
Jackie and Craig was the streamlined version of G:NH. I removed any creatures that slowed the book down, or that were just there to be creatively crazy, and put together a version of the story that progressed more smoothly. Craig, who was once Greg, Gary, and a few other names I considered, does not die at the end.......even though this is the logical conclusion of the story as far as I'm concerned and one hinted at all throughout every preceding novel-length version, in some way or another. Still edgy, but not so bad that I couldn't have handled it at thirteen or so. Hopefully, you or your kids can, too.
I cut it down to about half its length (the final version is about 90,000 words, I believe), and the journey to the other world was saved until the book's third act, where it had been a constant back-and-forth before. About twenty-five percent of JAC is preserved from Nu-Urth, while about forty to sixty percent is preserved from G:NH. The surviving elements of the Gary and Juniper stories - The Maraw Sorceresses, the Chupacabras, Portals to other worlds and the existence of Will and Amy - are, to me, deeply nostalgic and nice in-jokes, that show how far the series - and in a way, my writing and my life - has come the past six years, since I first wrote Diggin' Graves in the hope that it'd become a book I could sell and touch people's lives with.
At the time of this writing, a few dozen people have read Jackie and Craig. I am eternally grateful. This is, of course, only the beginning. My first picture book will be out on January 20th, and my aforementioned anthology will be released shortly after that - maybe March or April. If self-publishing is the route I have to take, then that's that. Robert E. Howard wouldn't be Robert E. Howard if he stopped at the first Conan story, and Lovecraft was nobody until near the end of his life. John Dies at the End was a print-on-demand title for the first ten years of its existence, and a public internet story for years before that. I should be grateful that my first novel was released at the tender young age of twenty-two, even if I feel as ancient as Time Itself on bad days. I've made a commitment to a more constant web presence this year, so you'll be seeing a lot more of me, my few dozen constant readers. I can only hope, now, that it was worth it for you.
I know it was sure as hell worth it for me.
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