I’m still working out the details of my experiment in the brave new world of alt-publishing. Part of this experiment has meant defining my writing. It’s kind of been all over the place. My first novel, Torque, which gained me representation in the traditional publishing world in NYC, was neo-Noir. It’s a fun genre and through that I went to NoirCon in Philadelphia and met some of the best people I know.
But since then, I haven’t written neo-Noir. My writing, and even Torque, to some extent has been laden with questions of identity. In many of my fictions characters wear masks, or in the case of the new book, My Alien Sex Fiend, there’s a character who literary shape-shifts. The book has an alien in it, and it has clones, and it’s not entirely serious. So what category of fiction is it? Sci-Fi fans wouldn’t called it Sci-Fi. I don’t think it fits comedy either, and is that even a real literary genre?
Thematically, my writing has been dealing with the idea that identity is mutable. You can decide who you are and change it as quickly as you change your profile pic in Google or Yahoo. In our current age, it’s really that easy.
This is absurd. Or should I say neo-Absurdism. So am I really an absurdist? I think the world is pretty absurd. Is that what the world thinks of me? I mean outside of my wife and kid.
Absurdism questions the nature of identity, but it’s also allowed to tell jokes without being dismissed as genre, which sounds like my description of the Alien book.
One of the things I need to do on this quest, is find others who’s literature is similar to my own and see how they define themselves.
I sought and found Tom Cho. The title of his book, Look Who’s Morphing, caught my eye. So I looked it up. And the cover of his book made my eyes sore. But the reviews and the tidbits I read of it made me instantly connect with it.
Kind of an Asian Fonzie look, isn’t it? How absurd is that? His jacket cover reads,
“Within my fantasies there is a deep intellectual and emotional engagement, a fundamental questioning of the nature of identity, and the way it is constructed in a world filled with images of popular culture.”
I can jive with that–identity questions and pop culture references, that’s what I’m playing with as well. So there’s one example. But his book is full of short stories.
Most of my writing colleagues have gone the traditional path that the University system lays out for us as writers. Write short stories. Publish those stories. Then write novels. At Johns Hopkins I learned very quickly that my short stories suck. And they did. Big time. They read like treatments for novels. And that’s what I treated them like. So I started writing novels. I was one of the first in my group to get a novel finished.
But then the question came up. How does an unknown writer, even one with an agent, attract the attention of an editor? My good friend Scott Phillips came back with, “Publish short stories, editors read those lit mags.”
Well shit.
And I’m currently disillusioned with traditional publishing. Not really so much, but I know they aren’t going to take My Alien Sex Fiend because by nature it defies categorization which is required to fit into the machine of the big publishing houses. Hence my experiment for the year on alt-publishing. But perhaps the principle of attracting attention through short work still applies? Especially during the run up to publishing a novel. Yeah, that sounds good.
So I reached out to an alt-publisher, Bryce Beattie, over at Story Hack. He’s conducting his own experiment. I decided to contribute. I sent him a 140 word version of a flash fiction story called “Fashioning Time.” And he’s accepted it for publication in a POD magazine.
I haven’t published the full length version of this story on my blog because I’ve promised it to another site who’s looking for an artist to make some paintings inspired by the story.
I’ll post updates as they come in.