Shamelessly Shilling Shadowbooks

The book is done. The art is done. Thanks to help from the Glibertariat, the blurb is done. Now I come to the hardest part of writing – selling. In the spirit of free enterprise, this article is nothing more than an exhortation to read my books and tell other people to do the same. I’m not going to sneak around and pretend to be saying anything else, so let’s get that out there right from the start.

The history in the real world:

Comic books are strange places. You have aliens, magic, psychics and completely unexplained superpowers running amok alongside superscience and fantastical creatures. Sometimes they get silly, sometimes they get serious, but oh the tales you can tell. As someone who likes the art of storytelling, there was an appeal to the possibilities presented.

Back before 2012, I had started work on a science fiction piece which drew deliberate inspiration from the superhero genre. With it I was trying to skirt the edges of the conventions, trying to not sink too deeply into them. This book had a working title of ‘Three of Swords’ and only got to about half-done before it stalled so badly I had to storm away. On May 8th I began working on a less dark tale that fully embraced the conventions of the genre. I spent every evening and weekend writing, as I kept up my day job full-time. By June 8th, I’d churned out over a hundred thousand words and had a completed draft of ‘Shadowboy’. I had no plan going into the book, indeed, I wasn’t sure I was even going to finish it. But I had a complete novel. It then sat on a thumb drive.

Sometime around this time I was also trying to sell works to a publishing house in the UK. So I made two trips to attend conventions they were hosting. At the second convention, I got to attend a dinner with authors currently published by the company. Most of the discussions, while fascinating, are not relevant to this ramble. But one thread was. William King spoke about the changes he’d seen over the years in the publishing industry. He went into how even a reliable, established name like him had trouble convincing places to take his work because the big houses had started looking only for blockbusters. Anyone who didn’t reliably turn out blockbusters was quietly sidelined. Since he could still reliably move books, he had taken to independent publishing. Now, prior to this discussion, independent publishing still had the stigma of the old vanity press in my mind. If no one remembers vanity presses, they were companies who would print editions of works for a fee regardless of the quality and then the author could try to hawk them. Usually, it meant the work was crap because the publishing house standard was not “is this a blockbuster” but “will this sell enough to be worth the cost”.

But technology and the shift in the traditional publishing houses had changed that. In chasing the blockbuster, the old guard was ignoring a great many otherwise worthwhile works. With eBooks and print on demand technology, these authors could still get their books to market, without the overhead of the old methodology. So, I went down this road. It did mean I had to find an editor and cover artist and foot the bill for their services out of my own pocket. But I did so for ‘Shadowboy’. That book had some pains, as I needed to expunge the typographical errors from the text, and even with two editors having picked over it, I still get the nagging feeling I missed some. You’ve seen me type, I’m lousy at it.

The first book

But apparently, I spin a good yarn as even people I didn’t badger into reading the book were bugging me for a sequel.

I started on ‘Gruefield’ immediately after having finished the draft of ‘Shadowboy’. It took a year to finish and got a name change to ‘Shadowdemon’ along the way. I made a big mistake in storytelling, as my focus in the story was inside the narrator’s head. The tale I thought I was telling was about Travis’ character, and I treated the day to day hero work as things that were happening while the story was going on. I should have made a greater effort to at least echo some of what was going on inside Travis’ head, along with more adequately covering the All-Star Elementals. Most only got Cameos despite the entire separate story circling them. Perhaps I can revisit their tale in a future spin-off.

That’s when Travis’ tale hit a snag. I had too many contradictory ideas for tales to tell, and being contradictory meant Travis couldn’t follow them all. I also had ideas for yarns not involving Travis. So while I tried to put together a third book, I was also writing a mess of other works of varying lengths. It was a good way to use ideas that didn’t fit for Travis. So while content piled up for an anthology, I struggled to get the third book together. I tried to tell Doctor Rudra’s tale of revenge, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t get my head around the plan or the sequence of events it would unfold. So, I set that aside and started another. ‘Dirge of Carcosa’ was supposed to be book three, and I sliced out pieces from the previous draft to add to it. But the tale ran its course, and I ran out of ideas to continue it around novella length. It ended up as the tail end of the Anthology instead. ‘Lucid Blue (and Other Tales Too)’ was not intended to be book three, but Amazon doesn’t like fractional volume numbers, and it worked better tied to the other books. Besides, ‘Lucid Blue’ itself is more than forty thousand words, which is novel length by some metrics.

The quick turnaround sequel

So I went back to the drawing board again, trying to write ‘Book Three’ even though a third volume was already on the shelves. I took those pieces from Doctor Rudra’s tale that were not in ‘Dirge of Carcosa’ and reworked them with a new thread. I so wanted to have it out in 2016, but it was less than half done when the value of $CURRENT_YEAR changed. For the longest time it didn’t have even a working title, but eventually gained the moniker of ‘Shadowrealm’. As a story, I decided to make ‘Shadowrealm’ more streamlined, reducing the proliferation of side plots that had made ‘Shadowdemon’ a bit of a slog to write. The downside of downsizing the number of plots was that I couldn’t just start updating a different one when I needed to think on the current plot’s progress. But in the end, I think the book is better for it.

The history in the fake world:

Magic and the number of people with unusual powers has waxed and waned over the millennia. In some periods, both are scarce, and reports of previous centuries are dismissed as superstitious claptrap. In others their commonality increases so that people once again believe. In the dawn of the modern age, there was a rare confluence of both rapid technological advance and a resurgence of powers. Some who had remarkable ability decided to exploit it for their personal gain. Others concluded that the best way to stop the first was for similarly powered people to step up and intervene. In the mid nineteen thirties, a band of these vigilantes founded a mutual aid society for helping out their fellows who were not as solvent after the expenses of fighting crime. The Community Fund largely acted as an insurance company and resource pool.

Initially, the Fund placed no rules on the membership beyond those of society at large. So long as they weren’t criminals, members could approach problems in whatever manner they saw fit. The use of lethal force was not expressly prohibited, though some chose to refrain from personal moral decisions. This was the Golden Age of the community. Members could and did operate under their own names, and the term ‘Hero’ got draped upon them like a mantle. When war broke out, many were quick to volunteer to fight the Axis powers. A “powers arms race” sparked renewed research into the source of these abilities, and new methods of uncovering people with latent abilities. Every one was needed to counteract the advances made by the other side. In the end, it was conventional arms in Europe and nuclear arms in Asia that ended the war.

With so many returning Heroes bolstering the ranks of the Community Fund’s membership, the Federal Government became concerned about their potential as a seditious force. As such, congressional hearings into the activities of the Community Fund began, ostensibly to root out Communists from among their ranks. The Golden Age was over.

A wider look around the world

In the midst of the hearings, First Contact was made. It was not the first time nonhuman intelligences had visited the Earth, but it was the first recorded, open contact. The Scyan Theocracy existed to spread the faith to the unenlightened of the galaxy. Fortunately, the tenets of their faith required an open and honest embrace by the convert. Force could not be used as this did not save the heathen and sullied the souls of the Scya who’d done it. Thus they came to preach. Their arrival sparked a crisis of faith among many, and cults proliferated. Few were in any way tied to the alien religion, but the number of such groups was massive. Needing to deal with Communists, Cultists and Alien threats, Congress decided that killing the Community Fund would not be the best move. So they regulated it, and legislated the Bureau of Hero Affairs into existence. As an appeasement, the Community Fund issued its first code of conduct, with Rule One being a prohibition on the use of lethal force.

The BHA took over the licensure and insurance of Heroes, under the pretext that there should not be a private monopoly on the matter. The Community refocused on helping with the Cults, Communists and Creatures of Extraterrestrial Origin, gliding into it’s Silver Age. Flamboyant and outrageous gimmicks became common among criminals. Sometimes edging into the absurd, and it became almost a non-issue to see young trainees in the field against such almost comical criminals. The sidekick became a semi-permanent fixture, with the apprenticeship proving useful for their later careers. This Silver Age died when the friends and families of licensed heroes stopped being out of bounds for criminals. A new defense was required – anonymity. Nicknames became codenames, and real names disappeared from the public discourse. A few had no choice but to retire, unable to put on a mask, and afraid for the safety of their loved ones.

Darkness crept in as the colorful criminals of the Silver Age were captured or disappeared, and a more brutal set replaced them. There were some who agitated for a removal of the prohibition on lethal force, as their opponents grew ever more brutal. The worst of it subsided as the new millennium dawned, but there were few who would dare operate openly under their real names. Continuing it’s own scope creep, the BHA took over the regulation of codenames, and the registration of anyone who was powered, regardless of their interest in becoming a licensed Hero. At the same time, the Community Fund proper has diversified, expanding into finance, manufacturing, healthcare, research and development, real estate and a bevvy of other fields.

The newest entry (to date)

It is into this world, with the following lament that we are introduced to the world:

“Bureaucracy. I’d rather take a fist to the face than have to deal with the Bureau of Hero Affairs, but then I’d end up having to fill out one of the innumerable BHA forms” — Travis Colfax, Shadowboy, Opening Lines

Final plea.

Even if you don’t want to read my stuff personally, should you happen to know anyone who might like some literary entertainment, point them in this direction. Also, feedback is much appreciated, even if it’s negative. I’ll bask in the positive, laugh at the abusive and contemplate the negative.

Random un-Fun Facts

• The Greelers with speaking parts were based on pastiches of internet communities, but their actual words got toned down because they were unrealistic.
• The acknowledgments were deliberately made somewhat odd because I didn’t expect anyone to read them – then someone lamented their absence in Lucid Blue.
• You lot got acknowledged at least twice…
• I had to cut Birdstrike’s takedown of his mother’s behavior because it distracted from the tone of the story.
• Doctor Lindenbaum’s office was visually inspired by the office of a similar professional in the series Monk.
• I didn’t even know the name of the city in Shadowboy until about the halfway point. I still don’t know the state.
• Doctor Omicron was hard to write for because I wanted him to avoid the classic villain mistakes.
• I wish I could write more scenes of Hephaestus III snarking at Social Justice types.
• The character of Shiva was based entirely off a bad joke – one which the Shiva itself makes in Shadowdemon.
• Dan Fullbright has found a supplier of audio cassette tapes…
• …and was inspired by a mystery-solving gentleman burglar, though he is no gentleman.
• No one has yet pointed out that the time of Shadowboy was obviously not the first trip the Ygnaza made to Earth. The evidence is in the text.
• I did not expect the audiobook narrator to be able to pronounce Uta|la||tek|li, but he managed.
• Ranger Roy is afraid of robots.
• The UnCivilServant avatar is the Shadowrealm-era Doctor Omicron.

E Pluribus, Omnibus. From many, for all.