Trying to Find a Comic Book Artist

Part 10: Musical Back Burners and My Prolific Prose Project

Back before the publisher contacted me about writing graphic novels, I had two major works-in-progress. One was a novel-length story for my Tales of the Honor Triad continuity, and the other was my epic time travel adventure.

The latter, which originally had the working title “Sci-Fi-Coming-of-Age,” was already the length of a doorstop-sized novel. I had thought about it for years before ever starting to write it. Then other endeavors interrupted the writing of the rough draft. But my enthusiasm for the story never waned enough for me to completely abandon it.

This opportunity to bring other ideas to life in a different medium caused me to shove it back on the backburner once again.

But trying to arrange illustration for the graphic novels proved such a frustrating time suck, a sober analysis told me I was putting too much time, effort and energy in the wrong project. I needed to rescue my literary behemoth from the backburner and finish it, then worry about the expensive, time-consuming projects after it was done. I could finish the prose project myself, with no collaborative involvement from anybody else (until it was time for beta reads and proofing). Accelerate forward, instead of hopelessly spinning my wheels.

And so, that’s what I did.

Out of all the fiction I’ve written, Paradox is the most personal. And it was the most fun. I didn’t want it to end. So even though the project had remained unfinished for years already, there was no sense of urgency. I took my time developing the plot, exploring the sub-plots, going back to edit, re-write, add to or cut out previous chapters. The page count climbed past anything I’d attempted before…and kept climbing.

In the back of my mind, I suspected it wouldn’t be commercially viable in today’s market. Well, I kept that in the back of my mind. This was for me, not for the market. More accurately, this story was for the “me” in the past, who could have benefitted from reading something like Paradox.

This is as good a point as any to expound on my reference to “the market.”

For all the feminists screeching about “the Patriarchy,” our culture is as gynocentric as the island of Lesbos. Everything, and I mean everything, caters to women. Including entertainment. Including in genres that have traditionally been considered “male.” Simultaneously, almost every message that’s delivered today denigrates men. It’s so ubiquitous, and has been going on for so long, normies have been conditioned to expect it, and feel like something is missing if they encounter entertainment without it. Very few people consider themselves feminist, but the vast majority of people (male and female) have adopted the planks of feminism.

In addition to all the normal hurdles an author has to negotiate, I’ve run up against that since my career as an author began. And as if that weren’t handicap enough, how do you even find an audience for masculine fiction in this pozzed culture when most men quit reading after high school? All the jokes and narratives about how ignorant men are is arguably a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And if my quest weren’t Quixotic enough already, I also don’t write anti-American narratives or insert the obligatory pandering to the LGBT Advocacy Mafia.

Knowing all that from the outset, I drove on with the rough draft anyway. Not because I believed it would be a big hit, or even find an audience at all, possibly, but because it was a story I just had to tell, or I would find no peace. Other authors might at least understand that aspect of my eccentric behavior.

Some other working titles I considered while writing the rough draft:

• Continuum (Scrapped when I learned there was a TV show[?] of the same name.)

• Here and Now

• There and Then

• Where or When (Like the old song.)

• Traveling Man (Like the old song.)

• The Big Spooky

• What If?

• Spinning Plates

• Timestreams

The world didn’t end first, so I eventually finished the rough draft. Then I had to revisit my dilemma regarding the market. Around that time, I decided to break it up into a series. There were pros and cons to doing it either way. There was no perfect solution. But making it a series was the best option I had. Plus, after I’ve launched the sixth and final* book in the series, I’ll probably make the e-series available as a “box set” and maybe release a hard bound edition of the comprehensive series. Who knows.

Oh yeah, I settled on “Paradox” for the series title and decided (since the personification of fate by a major character is a revisited theme) that “Fate” would be in each individual title, preceded by a three-syllable verb. I used to make fun of authors who packaged their fiction in similar fashion, but now I am one.

After some tweaking and additions, I began to publish the books. They’ve been successful beyond what I anticipated. Getting reviews (and even ratings) is like pulling teeth, as per usual, but each book has ranked high in the category bestseller charts, and two of them hit the “#1 Hot New Release.” All this for books which were not meant to be parts of a series.

And really, I can’t complain about the anemic ratings/reviews issue either, because I assumed that would be even worse.

More important than bestseller ranks or any other form of “social proof”: the readers from the target audience, whom I’ve heard from, all find Paradox educational, immersive, and fun. What more could I ask for, really?

In the next couple weeks, I hope to rewrite the ending of the sixth and final book* and get it to press.

Once done with that, then I’ll probably be concentrating all my creative efforts on the graphic novels, and trying to build up an audience from scratch for those. I do have some updates on that front, BTW. There might be a happy ending ahead—or at least reason to hope for one.

I’ve posted 11 chapters from Book 1 (Escaping Fate) over on Henry’s Sneak Peeks, which you are welcome to read for free with no obligation to subscribe. Amazon, for reasons of its own, still has it and Book 3 (Defying Fate) discounted to 99 cents as of this writing, hint hint.

See ya next time.

*Well, for now, it’s the final book. There’s already more ideas percolating for sequels, but I’m gonna try real hard to concentrate on the graphic novels to the exclusion of more prose, with the possible exception of the aforementioned novel-length WIP for Tales of the Honor Triad.