For those of you who are breathlessly following the weekly episodes from my first published mess of a novel, I apologize that I am not following through on my regular Tuesday feature today. Of course, I know that the number of regular followers of this novel is actually zero. Understandable because of what a confusing mess it is. But I need to explain things anyway.
This whole saga began back in 2006 when I had time on my hands from being laid off from my teaching job by the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley. I had two years worth of substitute teaching because said witch first hired me for my teaching philosophy, and then fired me for implementing it in my classroom. (She had never actually been a teacher herself, just an administrator.) I found myself with ample time to do a lot of writing, and I created my first published novel. It was inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune saga combined with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. So, naturally, it was doomed from the very start because it had too many characters in a long and rambling plot that was three novels too long in only one novel.
And on top of those serious rookie-writer mistakes, I added getting it published long before I actually had it ready for publishing with a fly-by-night publishing house called Publish America whom I can safely ridicule and defame here after they have been sued by authors numerous times because my contract with them expired in 2014, well after the company had morphed and changed its name to avoid paying any of their authors damages. They did all the things they were accused of in lawsuits to my book. They published it without reading it (proven by some of their authors who copied and pasted Wikipedia pages and got the company to publish that in book form). They screwed up my chapter numbers and font styles intentionally to get me to pay for publishable revisions. And they marketed my book only to friends and family for five times the price of a normal paperback. They were the worst publishers I ever dealt with. But in the end, I didn’t pay them a cent. My relatives, however, bought the horrible book and refused ever after to fall for buying another Mickey Book.
The result is a large pile of garbage chapters with some good things and funny moments in them that I can use to mess around with, rewrite, reorganize, post here weekly, and eventually form into new novels. That’s why I claim that this Tuesday feature is about novel writing in categories and tags. I will take the first part of this mess and whip it up into a new book called Aeroquest 1: Stars and Stones.
It will have the whole first adventure on the planet Don’t Go Here where the entire planet’s population is trying to live within an episode of the Flintstones cartoon show. It will reach the point where the three main characters will split up and go their separate ways, Ged Aero becoming the prophesied teacher of Psions known as the White Spider, Ham Aero becoming the rebel hero in the fight against the Imperium, and Trav “Goofy” Dalgoda taking his chaotic clown act to depths of dangerous depravity. I am not, of course, trying to claim it will be good for anything. But never let it be said that Mickey ever wasted a really bad idea. Or even a really, really bad idea. Or a terrible idea. Or… well, you get the picture if you were fool enough to read this far. If you put in that kind of effort, you certainly deserve to give yourself a “Yay me!” in the comments.
At that moment the room filled with an unnatural pinkish light. By the wall opposite the bed a really old-style phone booth materialized out of thin air. One creature was inside, a middle-aged human with shaggy gray hair and a large nose. He also had bags under his eyes as if from excessive fatigue. And he carried an umbrella under one arm. He opened the phone booth and stepped out.
