Disco Smash

Let me just take a second to share my gratitude in a reasonable, dignified manner:

HOLY FUCKING TURTLEWAX WE DID IT WE DID IT WE DID IT!

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business.

The Now

My Kickstarter for my novel Roller Disco Saturday Night is now funded. It’s more than funded, actually. The final total is $5,683.52. My goal was $3,100, meaning we raised over $2,500 more than I was aiming for.

We did that. We. I’m just blown away.

The original goal for the money was to take a month off of one or two of my jobs, get some new writing hardware and software, and set to work to make Roller Disco Saturday Night the best novel it can be. All of that is still in place. I’ve already requested April off. At this point, I may actually be able to take a second month off (right now, I’m thinking July) and dedicate even more time and effort to finish this book by October – the month this novel will hopefully be complete.

I envision many late Friday and Saturday nights out in the city, hunched over my laptop, bringing this world of mid-1980s teenagers to life. It’s my big writer’s dream to do stuff like that – fighting through my insomnia and my own doubts, fueled by caffeine and drive, pounding out keys and getting out 10 pages in a sitting. It doesn’t always happen now because my life is so busy. I usually get out three pages a day if I’m writing fiction. It will be able to happen starting in April, and that’s because of your generosity and my indomitable ambition.

What Happens Next

I’ve got a bunch of writing to do.

Currently, I’m working on a novel called My Agent of Chaos. I didn’t plan for it to be a novel, but that’s how it worked out. I haven’t finished a brand-new novel in a couple years, in part because the two books I tried my hand at (Tangerine and American Storm) either fizzled or stopped working, and in part because I was up to my elbows in nonfiction. And I still am, at that. I’m very nearly finished with a book called Stephen King Limited, a revision and expansion of two chapterbooks I worked on last year for my publisher, and I’m contracted for a book on King’s Dark Tower mythos.

My Agent of Chaos will, hopefully, wrap up this month. I’m proud of it; almost all my novels are Watch Kev Work Through Shit experiments, and this one takes on a time of my life that I never really examined before. It’s dark, maybe, but good. I have never used an unreliable narrator before, and it’s been fun to try.

SKL will likely be done within a couple weeks. The Dark Tower book will be one I work on going forward, concurrently with Roller Disco Saturday Night. My plan is to do the nonfiction in the daytime, where I can nerd out with research and stuff. I’ll save my fiction for the night.

I also have promised a few things to my backers. The 10 people who became Major Backers will receive places in Roller Disco, unless they’ve asked not to. The 45 people I’ve promised to write poems for will get them over the course of my writing process. As promised, I will sign them and send them to you. Haiku, free verse, epic poem – I don’t know what will come out, but those are all yours. Those same 45 people also get a new compilation of work I will deliver digitally: short stories, essays, sketches, and of course those poems. That collection will be called Hack Music and will be ready as soon as the poems are.

And Finally

From the bottom of my heart, I thank you all. When I was growing up, reading Stephen King’s behind the scenes stuff about the publishing industry and how the cogs and wheels all turned, I dreamed about writing a book that was good enough that a publisher would take it and send it out to the world and people would buy it and like it and I’d be a bestselling novelist. I have not given up on that dream, and likely never will.

But the reality is that I’m not there yet, and working on a dream is hard, hungry work. I’ve been a published author for three years and have never had an advance. Until now.

The way that publishing works in my idyllic dream head is not the way it works in reality; maybe it’s how it happened once, but like I’ve said elsewhere, it’s not the 80s anymore and the midlist has all but disappeared. But if this experiment has shown me anything, people still believe in writers and writing, and want books to succeed. This book is going to succeed.

Thank you.