I’m interested to see what will happen with a novel.
For anyone new (as I’m hoping such a promotion will attract), The Prodigal Hour might well be the world’s only pre-/post-9/11 novel. It’s about time travel and alternate histories and trying to change the world one moment at a time.
For anyone not new who hasn’t yet picked it up, now’s the time. Hope you enjoy it.
“It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.”
-Ernst Mach
“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
-Traditional Gaelic prayer
“The sole purpose of history is to be rewritten.”
-Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying”
“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty.”
-John D. Rockefeller
Every hair on Chance’s body had tensed as if it planned to jump from its follicle, and goosebumps singed up his back and around his arms and legs. Even his lips tingled.
The lightning blazed the sky around it electrostatic blue-white, which faded first to purple, then indigo, and then finally into darkness. Raindrops like crystal pebbles filled the air, and a giant smoke cloud, highlighted by orange flame, smudged the night where Chance’s house had been.
Hanley, Geisel, and Nazor all stood paused in the street like mannequins, pointing their guns at each like characters in comic-book panels, their faces stunned, angry. A tiny burst of white clung to the muzzle of Hanley’s gun, and a thin curlicue of smoke like a prehensile tail trailed upwards from it without ever moving at all.
Chance took everything in without ever moving his head. His gut had clenched, his hands bunched into frightened fists, and his whole body had locked up tight, not like it couldn’t move but rather like he was too petrified.
“What’d you do?” he whispered. He barely moved his lips when he did so, and he didn’t turn his head to look at her.
When she spoke, her voice shook between awed, desperate, defensive, and apologetic. “I had to. Everything you said would happen was—I needed to think.”
“So what, you paused time?” His attention focused on the millions of frozen raindrops, each like a glass bead. “Can we move? Is it safe?”
“Should be.”
I mentioned the primary reason Inside the Outside came to my attention was that its author, Martin Lastrapes, contacted me personally after I commented on a post he wrote. His contact came at a serendipitous moment; I’ve never really run interviews with authors before, but I’ve been corresponding with pen monkey extraordinaire Chuck Wendig, who offered me an interview spot on his site to help with promoting The Prodigal Hour. In addition to writing a ridiculous amount of material and posting every day to his site, Chuck is also a new father, which is to say I sent him answers to the questions he posed but it’ll probably be a couple more weeks yet before he runs it.
Point being, given that Chuck’s generosity, when Martin emailed me, I decided to pay it forward. I downloaded his book and agreed to take part in his web tour. So without further ado, an exciting interview with Martin Lastrapes:
Hundreds of meters below the Operations Center, Leonard strode across the Schrodinger Chamber at the core of the Large Hadron Collider. Behind him, the Safe looked like a gunmetal cigar resting on its unlit tip, rising twenty feet before its tapered top intersected with the bottom of a down-pointing, porcelain white cone. Because the entire room was brilliant white as a laser-treated smile, its exact dimensions were elusive; its only visible feature besides the semi-cylindrical chamber was a small, dark-glassed screen next to a large door.
Leonard placed his palm on the screen, and a bright blue laser scanned his palm. It sped his fingerprints through CIRTN’s electronic databases before the door next to it whirred open. Leonard stepped through, into a long, white corridor where a man wearing the CIRTN uniform, khaki fatigues and dark shoes, waited.
The man half-raised his arm to salute, but paused at Leonard’s outfit. “Lieutenant Kensington,” he said, with an accent Leonard couldn’t identify.
“At ease,” Leonard said as he strode past.
The man fell into step behind him. “Grand Marshall Atropos asked me to brief you,” he said. “I’m Private Madison—.”
Leonard nodded. “There’s a problem.”
Which may or may not reveal my fortune, or my heart’s content, but certainly contains a first-act gun above a mantle
It was like walking into an alternate dimension.
If you had asked me what I expected while I’d stood in the curio-foyer with Veronica, I’m not sure what I would have guessed. Nothing much after having seen that other room; mismatched furniture, a threadbare rug, an old coffee table. Something ordinary, the kind of sitting room you grew up in, the kind of living room your great-aunt had, perhaps with plastic covers on the furniture.
Instead: a hall grander than I would have imagined and larger than seemed possible, given the dimensions of the house Veronica and I had entered. A marble floor with a deep, dark rug that could only have come from Persia, so intricate I would have believed it had taken several generations to handweave. A large, rough-hewn stone fireplace, in which crackled away bright orange flame that smelled like autumn and above the mantle of which rested a large, antique rifle—
If a gun is on a mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.—
with a coal-black barrel and mahogany finish. Solid, dark wood rafters decorated the high ceiling in even intervals; I could have believed we’d just crossed the pond to end up in a castle in Scotland.
“Wow, it’s—,” I started to say, turning back toward the beads, but the woman pulled me farther in. Two burgundy leather chairs in front of the fireplace, between them a small table that looked as if it had been carved centuries before.
“It’s home. Come, sit,” she ushered me toward one of the armchairs as she sat opposite me. “Let’s get to know each other,” she said, as reflections of orange flame danced in her eyes, so lucid that I could have believed they weren’t actually reflections at all.
“Once upon a time, I fell in love with a girl who didn’t love me in return.”
New York City, circa 2006. A young man lucking into any temp job he can while following his dream to be a writer. A dream girl and a bad case of unrequited love (is there any other kind?).
If the story ended there, it wouldn’t be extraordinary. It would be just another tale from the big, bad, glorious city; just another romance that never was; just another friendship that never got the chance to be anything more.
But the story doesn’t end there.
I write to
And about
Will be someone.
Eventually, my lady, you
Will have a
Name,
A personality,
A face.
Eventually I will know
Just who you are,
You, about whom I have
Wondered for years.
Eventually I will not
Have to settle for a
Good time.
Eventually I will
Find you,
Know you when I
See you,
Hear you,
When your soft, light
Footsteps
Finally echo from my
Dreams to my floor.
Thank God I’m
Patient.
***
One of six poems in the collection, and one of the earliest overall. I wrote it during college, which is also true of “Inspiration Point,” “This Ain’t Wonderland,” and “A New Drink.” This was, of course, at a time when I thought every line of a poem should be capitalized (I’m no longer sure, and I’d concede this one might look better without the capped lines). These and my other college poems were the ones that came closest to not making it into the collection, in fact, because I thought so much else seemed so much stronger, but one of the good things about doing it in the first place was recording those times.
I think every writer has early work that makes them cringe a little. I know I have a novel on the top shelf of the closet in my parents basement, which will, as far as I’m concerned, remain there forever (or at least until they move), a big, thick, hunk of a novel I thought it took nearly a ream of paper to tell. I’m pretty sure it’s up near 500 single-spaced pages.
Better I offer you the poems than that, I think. The poems, it’s fun to see how I’ve grown.
The novel you might just bludgeon me with were I to try to sell it to you.
As well you should.
It’s nice to know, as well as a little ironic, that a couple of you cited this and other poetry as your favorite. We are so rarely good at judging what of our work will appeal to others.
***
I finished my novel, The Prodigal Hour, earlier. At final count, I had trimmed nearly 15,000 words from the previous draft–the final clocks in at a brisk, crisp 90,000 words.
All of which, I probably don’t need to tell you, are awesome.
(well. That’s the hope, anyway. Ultimately, it’s for you to decide. And heck, you even show up in the book. Because you’re just that rad)
Given that, I’ve begun to submit it for representation. Just a couple of queries so far to a couple of agents I think would be a really good fit for it.
Actually, really, to a couple of agents I think would fall in love with it.
And can I just ask: in this day and age, what’s with any agent who doesn’t accept e-queries (or any editor/publisher, for that matter)?
Come on: it’s 2008.
(wow. 2008. Yaysh)
Anyway, a few queries out. First round.
Wish me luck!
It’s really settling in, with full force, that I’ve finished USC’s MPW program for all intents and purposes. Today, in my email, I got a note about some loan exit interview I’m supposed to do before I graduate.
And then I came home to find a box from Lulu on my stoop:
Which I then opened:
To find a stack of two books, sheathed protectively in foam:
Which I then turned over:
To find my uber-pretty, perfect-bound thesis, The Prodigal Hour:
With its title page:
And then a page I’ll give you a ‘before’ of:
Because I’m meeting with my advisor tomorrow so he can sign it.
A note on the cover: I actually made one myself, with Photoshop, but then got up to the Lulu page and decided to just go with one of theirs, for a simple reason: this copy, in particular, is going to do nothing more than collect dust on a couple of shelves (one with me, the other with my program). It’s really kind of cheesy, but then, I was like, well, who’s really going to see it, and it does sorta match the story (with cool light effects around a pair of eyes, and a cityscape, and then cosmic implication, all of which are included in what the novel is about).
Yes, just two copies:
And here will be the only place you’ll ever be able to see them.
Lucky you.
Fuckall, I’m done with grad school.
I was going to write about why I’m moving on to Denver, but that’ll wait for another time. I’m going to take an evening to process this.
First, this post at BookSlut, a books blog, which points to this post, over at Self Publishing News. I was unfamiliar with the latter, but its author discusses, at length, whether self-published books will ever be recognized for their quality, etc., thesis roughly being: “But an indie or self published book will never get one of the major book awards as things presently stand, simply because the major book awards are a completely closed shop.”
Sorry to call it a thesis. I’ve been grading all day. We’ve been talking a lot about argumentation. My students would probably note that as a hasty generalization or a logical fallacy.
Back at BookSlut, there’s a tag on that link: (No. -Ed.) I think the Ed in question is Jessa Crispin. Seems to be. Again, hasty generalization.
Of course, my students require support for the claims they make, so here’s mine: in 2006, Dave Eggers’ What is the What was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. The book was published by McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company founded by Eggers, where he is also an editor.
You don’t have to take me at my word he’s self-published. Over here, Sarah Weinman notes the guidelines of the Mystery Writers Association, mainly in the context that a former Edgar winner was disqualified because he owns the company that, in conjunction with another, published his novel. Which means Eggers’ novel would be disqualified there (well. Were it a crime novel. It’s not, of course. But you get my point).
I think self-published authors should stop worrying so damned much about the attention they believe they are entitled to but haven’t yet received and start worrying more about the work they’re producing. Also, the continuous talk about sales, copies, and marketing is tedious at best.
I’ve read a bit about Marie Philips’ Gods Behaving Badly (though not the book itself, I’ll admit). The premise, to quote its Amazon.com page, is:
the Greek gods and goddesses living in a tumbledown house in modern-day London and facing a very serious problem: their powers are waning, and immortality does not seem guaranteed. In between looking for work and keeping house, the ancient family is still up to its oldest pursuit: crossing and double-crossing each other. Apollo, who has been cosmically bored for centuries, has been appearing as a television psychic in a bid for stardom. His aunt Aphrodite, a phone-sex worker, sabotages him by having her son Eros shoot him with an arrow of love, making him fall for a very ordinary mortal-a cleaning woman named Alice, who happens to be in love with Neil, another nice, retiring mortal. When Artemis-the goddess of the moon, chastity and the hunt, who has been working as a dog walker-hires Alice to tidy up, the household is set to combust, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
And while this sounds intriguing, as such things go, the reason I haven’t already picked up the novel is that, reading that, I feel like I read the book back in 2001, when Neil Gaiman wrote it and called it American Gods.
American Gods is not my favorite Neil Gaiman novel (that’s Anansi Boys), nor do I think it’s his best (actually, I think that’s Anansi Boys, as well), but it’s certainly damned good enough to have won a whole mess of awards and slake quite well my thirst for novels about no-longer-employed gods. It’s long and meandering (in a very good way), with an extraordinarily likable protagonist matched up against extraordinarily likable antagonists.
I bring this up because, for the month of March, HarperCollins is basically giving the book away. Well. Close to, at any rate.
So here’s my part: I’m going to embed their code here, which you can click to follow and read the novel in its entirety.
If you like it, you can pick it up here.
And I think you will. Like it, I mean. It’s a great book.
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  Browse Inside this book
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Yes, I wrote that I’d begin blogging again, in earnest, the moment I finished my novel. And I am, just about.
I finished it last night around five in the evening. I saved it in, like, nine different places (one can never be too rich, too thin, or have their work saved in too many places), copied and pasted 80,000 words to fire off to my thesis advisor.
Which means I haven’t just finished my novel. I’ve also finished my thesis, which means I’ve finished my degree. All that’s left is the formality.
I remember two years ago. I remember how scared I was to do this, how I worried I was going to fall on my face, but I knew that I could no longer remain where I was.
It’s funny, the cycles in which life moves. Two years later, there’s something beautifully poetic about accomplishing exactly what I set out to do (and more), growing and changing and working, and then looking up and finding myself in exactly the same place I was in before. Scared about what I’m about to do in a few months, worried I’m going to fall on my face, but completely knowing that I can no longer remain where I am.
“And it was mom who showed that raging terror of where you’re headed is the surest sign you’re traveling in the right direction.” -Marty McConnell
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