Help Me Write A Novel!

Hey, gang! I'm stoked to have a chance at writing the type of thing I love this spring: a funny, crazy science fiction novel. It's called Hive Five and it's about a hive mind that's not very good at being a hive mind. Here's the opening:

 Everyone was covered in either blood, kisses, or barbecue sauce. 

 Sammy's Recipe for Barbecued Chaos: 

 1. Decide you want a nice little party at your house. 

 2. Forget for a moment that you're part of a hive mind with fifty-six other people. Not a very good hive mind, admittedly, but good enough that those fifty-six other people simultaneously decide they want a nice little party . . . at your house. You do have the biggest yard in the treeborhood, of course, nearly an entire limb to yourself ever since you convinced the Umumwei family there was such a thing as a cybernetic squirrelfestation thanks to the loan of your friend Barry's Travelling Squirrel Zoo, some manufactured doodads from your garage forge, and a hot glue gun. The Umumweis folded up their house and moved it two levels down that same afternoon. 

 3. Allow your now enormous party to be crashed by the rest of the treeborhood who, for some reason known only to God's Clone, have become more affectionate than spawning salmon at a grizzly bear swingers party. 

 4. Remind yourself you have to get better at creating metaphors, but in your defense there is a half-love, half-fistfight free-for-all going on in your yard at the moment.

Tell me that doesn't look like fun! Here's where you can help. I need to raise the money so I can crank this out in three months and get the finished novel into your hands this summer. Besides the book, you can also get cool rewards, like a personalized episode of Beware the Hairy Mango, a ringtone of my voice, having a character named after you, and more!

Check out my page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/189894541/hive-five

And my video right here:

Wolf in White Van

When I heard John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats had a novel coming out, there was no question in my mind that I'd be gobbling it up as soon as I got my hands on it. Darnielle writes the most visceral lyrics I've ever heard, with a knack for cutting right to the pain, whether emotional or physical, in just a line or two. I got what I expected from Wolf in White Van's prose by the second paragraph:

"Every other day they'd bathe me, and every time, I'd feel like it wasn't so bad for a few minutes; and then the heat would slacken the resewn flaps of my cheeks a little, and the tingling would start up, a rippling alarm traveling down confused wires."

If you figure the paragraph which precedes that one explains what's led up to that point of the narrator's life, you're no expert figurer. Answers come in time, but not all of them. There are a couple of things going on here. The telling leaps all over the story's timeline and it's meant to be disorienting. There are times the reader isn't quite sure when an event is happening or which of the other narrative strands it might be connected to. We're left to attach the pieces with little reference, perhaps echoing the reassembly of the narrator and his life after the accident that is central to the story. And centers are important here.

A little Robert Frost:

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

There are many unknowable centers in the book, from the imaginary fortress which sits right in the middle of the country and is the unachievable goal of the narrator's play-by-mail game, Trace Italian; to his motivation for the central act of the novel, which may be unknown even to him; to the unspoken feelings of so many of the characters.

It's the search for what lies in those centers that drive us on through the book and drive the characters through their inner turmoil. The answers at the core of everything are cloaked in many layers of protection, the innermost wrapping being the hardest and most inviting of them all: the apprehension of the seeker. Darnielle lays out the story so we can see the ending coming, and it's probably for this reason the last ten pages of Wolf in White Van filled me with dread.

Take a look for yourself: http://us.macmillan.com/wolfinwhitevan/johndarnielle

The Novel, She Is Done

I just finished my first novel, By Any Other Form, and shipped it off to New York to find its way in the world. This is number 139 in The One-Thousand, and boy, does it feel good to change that tally again. This was the longest thing I've ever done (90,000 words, a year and a half of my life) and I feel the best thing I've ever done. Grant Stone tells me I should throw a party. At the moment, I'll settle for a shower.

In the immortal words of Ned Flanders, "Godspeed, little doodle."