If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve had a bit of a crappy year. For awhile, I thought it was just in comparison to the prior two years, which were some of the best of my life. It took abruptly losing a job on top of all that other stuff to make me realize, no, Kev, you’re having an objectively bad year.
Now, look. I know I’m not playing Job here. There aren’t locusts. I know me dropping my phone and having the glass shatter isn’t going to make Rwandan refugees feel my plight. Bob Costas had an eye infection and he went on national TV. It’s not like most sketch groups don’t fall apart. People lose jobs. People get bronchitis. Sometimes peoples’ favorite actors die, and you just keep living your life and trying to make it a good one.
But all of that is kind of beside the point. Or it should be. See, I didn’t want people to donate to my Kickstarter because they felt bad for me. There was a situation, and while it wasn’t dire, it sucked … but that’s not the reason I created this. I do Kickstarters when I have a vision for a book I want to create. When I have a clear concept and a passion to see that concept through to completion, that’s when I do these things.
Wayne Corbin, my private eye, has starred in four novels so far. I wrote the first one in 1999, when I first met my husband and I was still living in a studio apartment in deep suburbia. I was still new to writing novels, and I had never written a crime or a mystery novel before. That one was called The Eighth Acre and it was an okay start. Pretty good. Some of the characters went on to feature in other books, non-mystery novels that still figure into the Wayne Corbin universe because most of my books connect. Not in obnoxious ways (except for that long sequence in Maybe You’re Right when the entire cast of Find the River shows up and it took forever to sort things out), but they’re all part of one shared universe. Even the horror novels.
I wrote the second Wayne Corbin book, The Color of Blood and Rust, a year later, in 2000. It remains the shortest of my books (except my first one, Spare Parts, which is like a novella with a few extra pages), but it was leagues better than The Eighth Acre. Blood and Rust is where I really figured out what made Wayne Corbin tick. More importantly, it’s where I figured out that the obnoxious brat from the first book, Wayne’s girlfriend’s daughter, was actually way more interesting than I’d first thought. Tamatha, who I’d created specifically to be a foil for Wayne’s relationship with his girlfriend, became the second most important character in the series.
The third book, Roses in the Rain, was the biggest so far, and the most fun to write. I just dove in. I explored character motivations. I looked deeper into Wayne’s friendships. And I think I actually wrote a pretty compelling mystery, for once. I also got to take some jabs at superfans who hate the thing they say they love.
Then came The Taste of Concrete On Your Tongue, the hardest book I ever had to write. People that had been reading the series all along hated me for what I did in that book. It was the best written, and it utilized a storytelling device I’ve always liked but use sparingly because it can be indulgent: when the plot gets too much, the main character just leaves it. Goes somewhere else and has adventures there for awhile before coming back home. I love writing that stuff. I loved it so much that I used again it in Maybe You’re Right.
But those final things take a lot to come back from. Wayne’s entire paradigm changed. The status quo of the first four books is different now. And for the last five years, I’ve been trying to figure out what that means to Wayne. How he’s different. How his friendships and relationships are different. How things are the same. I always had ideas, but without any clear direction for how to utilize them.
You know what unstuck me? Remember a comic book graphic novel called The Archer’s Quest, a Green Arrow story by Brad Meltzer and Phil Hester. See, Green Arrow had gotten resurrected and was alive again after dying or some such nonsense. And basically, he wasn’t really feeling alive. Like Buffy in Season 6, he was alive but not really living. What helped Green Arrow was a quest, a road trip of sorts that Green Lantern went on with him. (What helped Buffy was some rough sex and a realization that she had a lot of self-hate issues, but that’s not where I was going with Wayne).
So: a quest. An adventure. A caper. Wayne hasn’t had a caper before. And if he’s still dealing with everything that happened in Concrete, he’s going to need something sort of fun to shake him out of it.
Well, I can write fun. I can write fun well. Well, as fun as fun can be when it starts with a decades-old murder and maybe more bodies in the future. I don’t know.
But that’s just it. I don’t know. But for the first time in forever, I have a way in. I know how to start.
Last year, my Kickstarter for Roller Disco Saturday Night was very successful. A big part of that is my cult of personality. I like things a lot, and a good number of people enjoy knowing someone who bases his life on liking stuff. As my friend Duncan recently said, I have a lot of jams. Plus, I try to be good to people. I like people to be happy and successful. I put people on stage. I review people’s work and give them better exposure. I post links to their sex toy party business. I want people to succeed. And people respond to that, too. I’m not sad about that. If people want to donate to my projects because of good stuff I’ve done, that’s fine. More than.
But that’s not what it felt like this year. With some exceptions, the donations this year didn’t feel like, “We like you, take our money” or, “sorry you lost your job, here’s some money.” It felt more like, “Hey, that book sounds cool. I want to back that.” For awhile, I was worried that Panic Town wouldn’t succeed as a project. But then folks started coming out of the woodwork to tell me that they liked my writing. They had more confidence in my ability to spin a yarn than I did. And that, my friends, is even more gratifying than fully funding this project. More gratifying by half.
There are still about 50 hours left for Panic Town. I am fully funded, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still donate if you want to. There are still plenty of prizes, including signed trade paperbacks – actual books! – I can then mail to you. So, if you haven’t donated yet and you want to, I will be pleased as punch. If you didn’t, hey, that’s okay, too. Maybe you’ll buy the book when it eventually comes out.
For all those who have donated: thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I quite honestly could not be writing this book without you.
Click here to donate to PANIC TOWN: A crime novel by Kevin Quigley
No comments:
Post a Comment