Second Look: The Italics Are My Own
This novella is weird. Odd. Unconventional and difficult to describe. Experimental and dreamy, I knew when I conceived it that it would not be for everyone. In fact I knew it probably would be something very few people would look into, even once I started marketing it.
I wrote it anyway.
So why did I write in The Italics Are My Own?
Actually, how is the first question I should answer. I was determined to write something as wistful, poetic, and meandering as I damn well pleased. Though there is a light theme and a story to be told within it, this novella’s central purpose was language. I wanted to delve deeper into the sound and sequence of words and phrases in service of mood and setting, and to some degree character than I had ever done before. Mostly, I did it for me, hoping prose and language lovers out there might stumble on to it, and give it a chance.
Short of that, I wanted the concept to appeal to fans of ambiguity, non-linear narratives, and symbolism. Of allegory.
Four mysterious men meet one another at a cafe in search of a missing fifth among their number. Determined to locate their one-time fellow, they set off through a set of oneiric venues that for the reader borders on the edges of reality, but for them may be more believable.
Then, every other chapter we meet up with two men, one young, one older, who speak in script/dialogue form, their conversations becoming more sophisticated each time, and taking place in a more recognizable reality. How do they relate to the mission of the four mysterious men? You’d have to read it to see if you can detect it.
Other than to call it an “experiment” and a “language focused” book, I recognize there is little I can do to market this work, to date my strangest. There are light spoilers for it on this website, back during the time of its original release though, if you wanted to read those entries to give you a better idea before or after you give this oddity a try.
This is one of, if not the least purchased works in my entire catalog so far, and I suppose I see why. And I had hoped one or two people would have read it and offered thoughts on it by now. Perhaps you will be the first one to do so?
Not long enough to warrant the time and effort for a paperback, you can download this one for 99 cents from various ebook retailers.
Second Look: There Is Pain Here
To date the most full-fledge fantasy novel I’ve written is There Is Pain Here.
I’d call it a sort of historical fantasy, but for the fact that such refers to a specific and established subgenera with characteristics my novel does not have.
Nevertheless, it is a fantasy story, and the protagonist is a historical figure: the 20th president of the United States and victim of assassination, James Garfield.
The story is mostly set in the afterlife, or at least a version of a it. An in-between state for certain souls called “The Overlap.”
Upon his death bed, James is recruited to this state, to help fight malevolent forces that are bent on destroying or taking over not just that part of reality, but all parts.
But first he must learn to walk talk and fight as a spirit does in this realm, not as one would with a corporal body during life on earth.
Garfield in our world is a more obscure figure now, but his tomb Cleveland, Ohio, (which I visited prior to finishing the book) is testament not just to his life, but to the esteem in which the country held him art the time of his death. (Being the second president felled by a bullet in living memory, after Lincoln.)
I had wanted to write a fantasy story featuring historical figures at some point, and had even made early notes for a different story with a different person. But something about Garfield, and the circumstances of his death won out.
A somewhat flawed man, I found him nonetheless fascinating in a number of ways. His brilliance with languages and mathematics. His stance on corruption in government. Some of his pithy quotations. His use of his advanced mind to navigate a whole new reality appealed to me. (Shifting his every day more than a few inches in this case…)
Plus, it is that relative obscurity that I mentioned that made him ideal for this tale. Lincoln himself is over done in fiction, and even in fantasy fiction. (He visits the bardo, fights vampires, etc,) No, a worthy but lesser known president, usually related to a pub trivia answer, was the type of presence I wanted in The Overlap.
More than anything else, however, his haunting last words sealed the deal. They are reported to have been, “There is pain here.” I asked myself what if he were not referring to his body, or even to an afterlife as we understood, but to the circumstances in The Overlap that convinced him he had to be of service to people there, if he could not longer serve the people on earth.
Hence the title.
It was quite freeing to world build without worrying about the accuracies of streets and roads, or even weather patterns and physics. The world could behave in whatever way I chose, and that was something I had not yet experimented with in novel form at the time.
And for fun, I even included a few historical notes at the end about the real Garfield and how he compared to my version, for which I did more research than usual for a novel.
The cover is simple a photo of the real Garfield that I put together myself. I thought about spending money once again to hire the same professional designer that I worked with for The Beacons I See, but for whatever reason that feel through, and the notion of the minimalist approach appealed to me.
I hope the whole book appeals to you. It is available in ebook form for $2.00 at present. There is a paperback version on Amazon for 7.00, though it has a different cover as in that case it was last minute to make it a paperback for the benefit of a specific party, and I saw no need to make it off the market after the fact.
Second Look: The Beacons I See
With this novel I return to the light fantasy elements of my first few works of fictions. The Beacons I See is a novel of many firsts/onlys as of this writing.
To begin with, it is the only work of fiction that came to me as the result of a dream.
Partially.
I’d fallen asleep in my chair watching TV, and woke up with the first sentence of this novel in my head, though I didn’t know it would be a novel yet. I liked the line enough to write it down right away. I was determined to start there and continue from it until what I wrote felt complete.
The result was this novel, one for which I had no outline of any kind at the start, and never wrote one. I wrote as it cane to me the entire time. The only novel in which I did so.
More firsts? Though in Flowers of Dionysus I had included multiple points of view, some of which were of women characters, they were in third person. Beacons is the only time I’ve written an entire novel in first person from the view of a female character. To that end it has been my only novel so far read by a sensitivity reader as they are called. A female friend of mine read a draft to see if I was in any way being accidentally unfair to a female perspective.
It features my Autistic protagonist.
Finally, is the only one of my novels with a cover designed 100% out of “house.” Most of the time I design at least part of a cover.
All of that makes for a unique book among my catalog in many ways. Yet even if all that were not so, I think it is both the most personal novel I’ve written, as well as the prose I am most proud of.
Vanessa can see remnants of promises made by people. They hang in various colored lights in the air where the soul stood when the promise was made. She comes from a long line of such “Seers.”
But oner day she is stunned to see one of those imprints of a promise high above the forest near her grandmother’s cabin. How in the world did somebody make a promise all the way up there? She makes it a point to look into this mystery herself.
The first full novel of mine (there’s a first I forgot to mention earlier) written after my official Autism diagnosis. I wanted to convey the nature of Autism in both a universal sense, and in a manner particularly suited to the main character. In this world of this story, Seers exist. Autistic people exist. Vanessa is the only currently known Seer that is also on the Spectrum.
A rare power in the mind of a neurotypical person is often explored in fiction. Yet once I started writing the first paragraph or so, I knew I wanted to explore what a rare power would look like in the not0so-typical mind of someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
I don’t consider Vanessa a hidden version of myself. She is calmer, more able to navigate certain situations, and probably in the end smarter than I am. On the other hand Vanessa needs more time to recover than I, and is probably out of commission when things do not go as planned to a greater degree than I am.
So we are not the same person. But Vanessa is among my brethren, as it were. Through her, I was able to tell a story not about Autism, but about a woman with a gift, and a mystery to solve that happens to have Autism. It was important to me in the wake of my official diagnosis to embrace fully what made folks with ASD different, without spotlighting it as freaky.
That is why it is my most personal novel as of now, even though all of my work is personal to some degree.
I wanted to reach fellow Autistic people that felt like me, or at least like Vanessa thought the course of her story. The usual marketing issues I mention all the time got in the way a bit, though I did my best. Maybe even more than usual, entering it into a forum in search of a review. (I barely ended with what I paid for.)
How very Autistic of me.
Nevertheless, by the numbers, though it trails for behind Murder, Theatre, Solitaire, at last check this novel is my second-most popular in terms of purchases. I like to think that at least some of those people are also on the Spectrum.
The ebook is currently prices any 2.00. The paperback you can get for 4.50.
In the off chance you decide you want to read one and only one of my books ever, (odd as that would be) make it this one.
Second Look: Thoughts I Wrote Down Because I Hate Talking to People
My first foray into publishing book length non-fiction was Thoughts I Wrote Down Because I Hate Talking to People. It’s a collection of thought pieces or life essays, most of which I kept light hearted, but not all.
It is the first work I published after my Autism diagnosis. As such, the Autistic perceptive on several topics is explored and acknowledged in full. Pure “me,” so to speak.
That explains the cover. Yes I was and am on a budget and cannot afford to hire a cover artist for every book right now. However in this case, I wanted the down to earth aesthetic and perplexed expression on my face to hint right away at what the reader will encounter within. Goofy as it is, I am still proud and amused by my minimalist choice here. Not to mention I did manage to capture how I feel much of the time as I navigate society, even if I rarely make such an obvious face as I do so.
I cover talking food, views from a local library, porn, vultures, (yes, the literal bird), and several other everyday topics. “Everyday” meaning that though I do touch on some deeper themes, I do so by way of a guy observing through the lens of his own life and his place on the Spectrum, even when I do not mention the Spectrum by name.
It is not a philosophical treatise on anything. I wrote it in hopes of both reaching out to others with ASD, but also offering what I hope are thought-provoking takes on topics that most people have experienced to some degree.
Even by my own standards I did not promote this one heavily. I knew going in it was likely not going to be a “hit” per se, and I was fine with that. I wanted it to find a specific audience of simpatico folks.
I am not sure if it did, there are not many reviews of it. I can however say that one or two copies get downloaded per year even now. Nothing worth noting in the business department, but it does indicate interest for someone on a regular if periodic basis. As always I wish I had some more positive reviews on the book, but if it is reaching those who think as I do on at least some of the topics I raise, I am happy to have written it.
I won’t claim the mask is entirely off within those pages, but it is a good place to start if you want to get to know me as a person and not just as an author.
In ebook form only, but now free of charge.
Second Look: Order! Ten Stories, Ten Very Different Meetings
From my top selling murder mystery title last week, to my little thought of short story collection. This week’s second look focuses on Order! Ten Stories, Ten Very Different Meetings.
I smile when I think of this short volume. Not merely because it was a [particular delight to write, though that is of course part of the reason.
More to the point, there was no intentional nod towards my Autism in it, and I may have published it before my official diagnosis. The dates in this case are a bit fuzzy. I only bring it up here because the theme is quite ASD of me, even if the action was not.
The title just screams, almost literally, about a concept beloved of almost every person on the Spectrum: order.
In this case, specifically Robert’s Rules of Parliamentary Procedure–the long time, though occasionally updated blueprint by which most proper deliberative bodies conduct their meetings to this day.
I was gifted a copy of Robert’s Rules–an antique nearly 80 years old, because of my known interest in parliamentary order as both a concept in real life and as a light-special focus. Reading through it on a regular basis inspired an idea.
No, I don’t have the entirety of it memorized. I would however commit it all to memory if it meant I would never again be required to attend a chaotic, unfocused meeting of any kind. I felt then, and still do, that a lot more in the world would get done if more events were conducted according to at least some of Robert’s Rules.
That of course is a dream. Even places that are supposed to use Robert’s Rules often end up ignoring them.
But what if there were a group of stories where the procedure was properly followed, better or worse, by everyone involved? Could short fiction sustain such a theme as parliamentary procedure?
To answer that question, and to give form to my preoccupation with different aspects of Robert’s Rules that don’t often come up, I set out to write such stories. I determined if I could not sustain ten stories or various genres, I’d give up the idea.
A few months and many careful flippings through the pages of my old copy or Robert’s Rules later, and I had myself a collection.
It is only available in e-book, as I thought the brevity of the piece probably did not warrant all of the fuss and bother, (and in some cases the money) to create a paperback of same. And as you can probably tell, I did not hire a cover artist. That etching of 18th century men arguing was too much to resist. It hit the entire mood of the collection on the head. (With a gavel.) As soon as I saw it was a public domain image, I knew it would be the cover, despite some advice from others.
The appalled dude looking back from the front bench was worth the price of admission for me.
As with Thank You For Ten, I endeavored to cover several genres. There is sci-fi. Comedy. Mystery(ish.) I even managed to throw a Western in there for good measure, my only such fiction to date. (Though I am sure it does not literally qualify as a Western.)
It’s not merely a bunch of people having a meeting, though. That would be even more boring to read about than to sit through in person. My goal was to home in on (mostly) obscure possibilities or tactics that one could use, (albeit not always in good faith) to make something, or stop something from happening. The goal of the characters is always the focus.
In some ways, the theme of parliamentary meetings aided the plot, if you can believe that. The whole purpose of such rules is for any given person to put forth a very specific motion, and provide reasons for its acceptance, while others may provide reasons for its rejection. I simplify both the stories and the nature of Robert’s Rules when I say that, but in the broadest sense its true. The best stories, like the most disciplined meetings, are about people striving to get something, while someone or something else may strive to prevent it.
Put it another way, in a meeting, everyone is the protagonist. That might have made an interesting tagline for this collection now that I think of it.
Order! is currently free to download, and will probably always remain so. It was a fun jaunt over a year or so while I worked toward the release of the next novel. I had a great deal of fun writing these, and I hope you will give it a chance and have some fun as well.
Do I hear any objections?
Ty Unglebower 
