I’m going to tell you a little story about illness and the power of books, and then I’m going to ask you to back the Kickstarter for the first two anthologies from Atomic Carnival Books. Just so there’s no confusion about where I’m going with all this.
When I was 15, I was admitted to the hospital for the first time. Among all the obvious things that are terrible about spending a week in the hospital with a respiratory infection, I was also struggling to come to terms with my cystic fibrosis. While I knew that, technically, I had CF, this was the first time having the disease actually meant anything – the first time that CF was actually doing something to me.
My entire extended family was uncharacteristically involved. Having a kid in the hospital was still a big deal that first time, and not yet an obligatory annual affair. I had visitors every day. And I needed them, because I wasn’t used to being sick yet. I was scared and vulnerable, not yet broken down and inured to corporeal malfeasance.
My Uncle Mike brought me his copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dog-eared and worn. I tore through it in a single afternoon, in between blood draws and antibiotic infusions; he brought me the rest of the series shortly after.
There was something unhinged and anarchic about the Hitchhiker’s books. Until then, I’d mostly only read classics and Michael Crichton, a couple of kids’ horror books that got snuck into the school library. Douglas Adams was a revelation. Quite literally, anything could happen in his stories, in his universe – and, quite often, anything did.
I became a writer because of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’d dabbled as a kid, wrote a short story that was essentially Jurassic Park fan-fiction, but Hitchhiker’s blew everything wide open. Unlocked something inside of me.
When I wrote the first Exponential Apocalypse, I prided myself on cobbling together sentences that I was certain had never been written before. A personal favorite remains:
“And with that, the ghost of fabled pioneer Daniel Boone – summoned at an hourly rate via an online grilling instructional site – possessed the last remaining clone of William H. Taft, the twenty-seventh President of the United States, with the sole purpose of converting an undead cow into a pile of flank, chuck, and other assorted cuts of steak.”
That was, in the beginning especially, the whole impetus. Trying to outdo myself in outlandishness, trying to entertain myself when I was working a call center solo during the dead hours between 8 and midnight. And it was fun!
At some point, though, I got tied up in trying to be a real writer – in trying to get traditionally published. My little books were entertaining other people, too, and I wanted to keep going, as far and as high as I could. But, despite all my efforts to reign in my writing, to make it more palatable to a broader audience, I was still too weird.
This is the email, from a prospective literary agent, that finally shook me from my stupor. That calcified a notion that had been growing inside of me. My novel was “nothing like anything that’s crossed [their] desk before” but – because there’s always a but – they had no fucking clue how to sell it.
It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d received that email – but it might’ve been the last.
Back in college I had a creative writing professor who, on the last day of class, a few days away from graduation, took me aside and told me that I’d never make it as a writer. I was too funny, too strange. It was impossible to edit me and, for some reason, that was a bad thing. She failed to elaborate any further and, for twenty years, I took it as a personal insult rather than a warning. I carried that grudge with me everywhere, like a duffel bag full of life-saving prescriptions.
Turns out, though, she was right.
I didn’t understand then – and I still don’t agree with it now – but the elevator pitch is everything. If you can’t boil down your story into a single sentence, there’s too much going on. If whatever you’re writing isn’t similar to at least one other existing property, there’s no room for it.
There’s room at Atomic Carnival Books.
I’ve been struggling to come up with a tweetable tagline for the Kickstarter, for our first two anthologies, Greater Than His Nature and Open All Night, but that’s because I don’t want them to be easily described. My tastes in literature are wide-ranging. In the past month, I’ve read Danger Slater’s Little Miss Apocalypse, J.A.W. McCarthy’s Sleep Alone, several dozen Victorian sci-fi and horror shorts, and a 600-page history of Palo Alto. And I’ve loved each and every one equally.
Atomic Carnival’s brand, such as it is, is chaos. I want to put everything into these anthologies. I want each new story to feel wildly different than the one before. I want the reader to constantly wonder what the next turn of the page will bring. I want possibility and improbability to be broken wide open. Or, in the words of Douglas Adams himself:
“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
Back our Kickstarter. Help a small, independent publisher make small, independent books. Support writing of all kinds, from writers of all stripes. Read chaos. Ride into the unknown. Be uneditable.
Let’s make something weird.
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