1094 days later.
1094 DAYS LATER
How to rearrange the universe
The following is the true story of how I used my psychic powers to bend this simulated reality into the shape I wanted it to be, like a balloon animal, except we all live inside the balloon animal as a printed projection upon its surface, and the inside is the outside, and it’s a tipler cylinder, or a klein bottle, or something.
This is a photograph of the original, first-edition WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? as it arrived at my good old friend Hayden’s house.
Facebook showed me this picture today, just as I was about to post a new excerpt from Earthloop, which came with its own little story about how my writing life is going at present. It’s interesting, every time I reach a low point in my mood around writing, something comes up to say “Hey, keep going.”
Sometimes it’s a supportive email from someone here.
Sometimes it’s an invitation to an artsy event.
Sometimes it’s a memory from three years ago.
And to think, today I'm working on the special edition of WBTH, with a bonus story (which, after 3 years of doing the publishing thing myself, will finally be in physical stock in Waterstones and Barnes&Noble). I started work on that special edition not just to undo the publishing glitches from the beginning, but because one person, just one, asked for a special edition. I doubt they will buy it, but they made me realise there might be more people out there who will.
I'm also hard at work on the second one, which a handful of you have pledged finanancial support for, and that £60 keeps me motivated. I’ve already spent it a few times over getting to and from gigs, where I’ve had ideas for jokes and those jokes have turned into stories.
Both WBTH2 and the WBTH1 special edition will be available on my Crowdfundr site soon. WBTH2 already is.
Here’s the special edition cover. Much nicer, don’t you think?
But it’s not all been cocktail bars and standup comedy nights.
This has privately been a very difficult journey. I have kept a diary of events I've said 'no' to along the way to save money. The other day, the list went over 100. I have missed birthdays, reunions, holidays, conventions, parties, nights out. Mostly nights out. Just as people lose track of how many they've attended, I too have lost track of how many I have avoided. It's a lot easier to save money and write books if you're sober, by the way.
But I do like a cider or a disaronno when I’m editing, to turn the nagging perfectionist in my brain off, so I can be more confident with the cutting and the pasting.
After a year or two, most people stopped inviting me to things. A few people lost their patience with me. But it was worth it, because I'm not in debt to anyone, I know what I want out of life, and I get to write the stories I want to read.
Sometimes, those stories are things that you want to read too.
I know this particular book, as a debut, is a hard sell. I wasn't just slapping together an anthology of my old work like a poetry press desperate to grope another collection out of their hard drive before they slide into liquidation; No, each and every story in this book was new. All of them written in 2019 and 2020, with the odd callback and flash forward. I could have took the easy route, could have put together all my uni work (around 310,000 words total) and called it perhaps six books of poetry, short stories, and a novella or two. But that felt wrong. Even in the early drafts, when the short (and still unpublished) story Menhir was part of the Furukawa Universe, it felt wrong. That story was written in 2015, so spiritually it didn’t fit with what I wanted from the book, even though in my mind I still wish it would fit into Nori’s weird cosmos.
It’s about gorillas beating aliens to death, by the way.
So I felt I'd levelled up as a writer, and the ordering of each piece in WBTH was deliberate.
Most people read it left-to-right.
More devoted fans go back and read it universe-by-universe.
My favourite people read the Furukawa Universe backwards, digging up the secrets that unfold with a read that follows retrocausality.
It's a book with easter eggs. There aren't many writers who bother making things this weird any more, even if some of them want to, precisely because of what I have seen first hand: After two years, only about three people will have noticed them. If you’re a writer sneaking easter eggs into a book, you’re doing it because you love doing it, and because you can’t imagine doing anything less.
I see it like game design. Sure, not everyone will explore the whole map. But you absolutely must care for the people that do. The completionists, the explorers, the archaeologists of your story worlds. You must care for these people and supply them with something because otherwise they will find that your plot is just a line drawn from the beginning to the end, and they will turn away.
My primary audience is those explorers. My primary audience is you.
The universe keeps reminding me to keep writing.
Recently, I had a short story rejected by a publisher, and I was upset about it. But within 24 hours got a very nice message from a physicist, who told me it was the best story about time travel she had ever read. That’s my audience.
Nerds.
Funny nerds.
Nerds like you, perhaps.
Every time I feel low about writing. Every time I think there’s no point in finishing the next big project, someone turns up and buys a copy or sends me a message or asks me what happens next in a story, and it keeps me going. But you’ve got eerie timing, which is helping cement my theory that we live in a totally malleable psychic reality, that we are daydreams inside a vast cosmic brain.
I wonder if there exists an even vaster cosmic headache, and that’s when the universe might end…
Anyway. Hayden bought the pre-order of the book, which came with a limited edition cover which reacts to 3D glasses. The galaxy moves about. You can see this in the poster and bookmarks also, which I think should come back. What say you, humanoids, crab people, and others?
*Note, the limited edition is the permanent edition according to Goodreads, who have neglected to update the cover and ISBN code, which I know has impacted my sales as in the beginning a few people did ask why it wasn’t available, when it so obviously is. But it’s fine, self-pub doesn’t always go perfectly, and I can sell it elsewhere.
Hayden was and still is, one of my best friends. We’ve helped each other out through our writing journeys, and whilst our paths have briefly diverged, I think I’ll bump into him in the USA when I visit.
He likes Batman, I like Aliens. Thus explains the art.
I still draw inside all the signed copies. I have 40 odd left, if people want one. Same website as everything else, whobuiltthehumans.com
But that’s not the point of this post. The point is to say that I am going to keep being weird, whether or not it is marketable.
I think it is marketable.
Just not to boring people.
Being weird: The cons
WBTH is so original, and by proxy so hard to market, that a while back, marketers who might otherwise want my money said no to advertising the book, because they need good reviews, and authors who don't make their investment back because their books are mind-bending mixtures of sci-fi and comedy don't oft write good reviews. Fair enough I say, I can't blame them. This is a weird beast. It's not going to show up in people's holiday snaps in Spain any time soon. There's not nearly enough billionaire fingering or werewolf lovemaking for that.
(This may be resolved in WBTH2).
To be fair to the marketers, they did the right thing by telling me the difficult truth. That I’m a genre def[y/in]ing creature, that I build my own poetic rules and devices only to push them to their conceptual limits, that putting rude jokes in with existential sci-fi horror might be a hard sell to the mass markets.
But the mass markets don’t know what they’re doing.
The mass markets are smelly and also probably stupid.
Weird books are the future.
Being weird: The pros
I listen to my intuition. This means if I think a story needs a poem in the middle, I will put the poem in the middle. I won’t think “Oh, but the market doesn’t like that” because I don’t care what the market wants. I exist to serve the story, and to make it the best version of itself that it can be.
That intuition helps in the real world, too.
Thanks to my intuition, I managed to save my time travelling comedy career and reconnect with Bright Club by turning up to an open mic and speaking to one of their past performers, long after BC lost my email, and mere hours before they closed their final open slot (which was intended for me). The longer story is this: I watched a BC gig some months before, signed myself up, and waited for an email. When it didn’t arrive, I had a feeling I needed to go with my friend Ruth to a different gig, believing I’d bump into a BC organiser there, and on the way we accidentally got the wrong bus and wound up outside BC’s venue, which convinced me my intution was correct. We didn’t go into the venue, because I was convinced the person I needed to speak to would in fact be at Ruth’s gig, which we were now late for. We got back on the bus, in the right direction this time, and I met one of BC’s past performers, who put me in touch with Bright Club with only hours left before they filled my slot with someone else. Turns out the paper I’d written my email on vanished. Knowing my luck, it will likely fly into my face in the year 2079, resulting in a totally cool scar.
That same intuition correctly guessed it would take two years before anyone noticed the secrets in the Furukawa Universe of WBTH. I planted the seed, and I knew I would not get instant gratification from its fruits.
The weirdness of my writing means that whoever likes it, loves it. This has resulted in what I think are some of the best amazon reviews in the business. People love WBTH, provided I can convince them to read it.
Another fun bonus of being weird: I can tell jokes about time travel and give my audience tin foil hats and nobody questions me when I’m doing it.
“I can honestly say that I have never read anything like this before.”
Not many people get reviews like that. That, my friends, is why I write weird stuff.
(That and the inescapable fact that it comes so naturally to me that I have to try really hard to appear normal sometimes).
Here’s to more weirdness
These past three years were weird.
The next three years will be a lot weirder.
So, if you’re out there, dear reader, know that you just have to survive the bad days and the good ones will eventually show up. Like buses, they may arrive in a small herd or cluster long after you’ve given up waiting for them. Analogy also applies to dating. Remember, there are 800 hot singles in your area, and 799 of them are robots sent back through time to destroy you.
Please do consider subscribing, it’s free, unless you want lots of extra stuff. I send out regular comedy and sci-fi things, as well as loads of free books each month.
I wrote this post at the outer edge of a vicious migraine that enabled some brief telepathy, meant I missed my Minecraft world’s birthday, and had me rearrange the chapters in Earthloop into poetic order, rather than causal order, so I could get the feeling of each scene right.
I will talk more about that soon.