As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new book out. It’s called The Earworm Inception, and it’s only 99 cents on the Kindle.  So please go check that out.

This book is the latest in a series — can I call it a series if there’s only two and I vaguely plan to do it again?  The idea is that I write a lot of short stuff, flash fiction and one-off blog posts and whatnot, and within a calendar year, that grows to be about book-sized, so I put it in a book and release it.  It’s sort of the same concept as a comedian developing a set, and then when they get a strong hour, they shoot a special.  And, if you’re Louie C.K., you shoot the special, declare the hour officially dead, and move on to the next one, tabula rasa-style.  I love that concept. The tough part is that I can’t go to a shitty comedy club and try out my material bit-by-bit in front of a Tuesday crowd.  I have to develop it with no input, then put it out there and hope you guys read it and give me back comments.

And here’s the real problem: I have all of these half-dead projects.  I started writing in 1993, and I now have seven books: two “real” novels, two of these roll-up collections, and three that are more or less non-fiction.  I feel like if I’ve been writing more or less every year (with the whole day job thing) I should have more than that.  And I do, but it’s all in incomplete projects.

I did a survey of all of this yesterday.  It’s depressing that I have 320,000 words invested in projects that will most likely never see the light of day.  But it’s a learning experience, and when I crack open old stuff, it makes me see I’m learning something.  And it’s good to know my time went somewhere.

Anyway, for your amusement, here’s the list.  Maybe if I officially say all of these are dead, I can get the monkey off my back and work on the next thing.

The Device

• Started in 1998
• Tried restarting in 2001, 2002
• 30,000 words

This was an offshoot of Rumored to Exist, an attempt to add a plot to the nonlinear book that got too overbearing, and got split off into its own book. The basic “plot” had to do with someone coming back from the future and interacting with themselves in the past.  This was one of my first attempts to write a strictly plotted book, and it failed miserably, but I came back and revisited it at least a couple of times. There might be a few paragraphs of this that are usable elsewhere, but there really isn’t even a structure to build on to revive the book in any way.

The Device, mk2 (aka Zombie Fever)

• Started around 2004
• Last worked on in 2008
• 72,930 words

A guy who is retired from the army is called back by the president to take out a drug cartel leader who only eats at Carl’s Jr, and ends up uncovering a conspiracy involving Nazi UFOs from the South Pole.  It has nothing to do with zombies, but that name got stuck on the project as a working title. The first third of the draft was pretty complete; the second part wavered, and the last third was barely plotted.  Big elements of this story ended up being reused in the short story “My Friend, The Jihadist”, which is included in Fistful of Pizza. There are other pieces that beg to be reused elsewhere, like a whole bit on Anthony Bourdain’s khmer rouge-themed restaurant on the Vegas strip, and a president who spends all of his time playing freecell while his secretary of defense wants to nuke Canada.

Six Year Plan

• Started, sort of, in 1994
• Still keep puttering with it
• 88,934 words

This is a short story collection of things that took place during my college years in Bloomington.  One of the stories was the original short story “Summer Rain”, which was later developed into my first book.  Maybe half of these stories appeared in Air in the Paragraph Line over the years.  I’ve never been happy with the quality of the stories, and this type of writing isn’t really “me” anymore, so it’s hard to justify the six months it would take to beat this into a great book.

Voodoo Sex Fire

• Nano 10 book
• 51,636 words

This book is about a group of hackers that are trying to destroy this Glenn Beck-like character because the main character’s friend has a sex machine business that got shut down by the guy’s insane fans.  There are bits of genius that get incredibly bogged down in the attempt to follow the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey plot structure too much.  My favorite part is when the characters play a video game called Fuck Shit Up, which is loosely based on the first RoboCop movie, except you’re one of the bad guys looting and destroying Detroit.

Arylcyclohexylamine Is Not a Flower

• Nanowrimo 11 book
• Worked on for a few days of November, 2011
• 20,000 words

This is an absurdist zombie book.  It’s a very stereotypical zombie story where a group of teens take a roadtrip across a post-apocalyptic America to go to a secret government lab outside of Vegas to help a scientist develop the cure.  There are a lot of bizarre elements, like that their shop teacher is Charles Manson and all of his dialogue is quotes from Geraldo interviews, and the zombie virus was spread by a hamburger chain’s genetically-modified meat.  Part of me wants to eventually finish this.

Heavy Metal Hell

• Started in about 2006
• A completely new draft and new outline was my Nano 09 book
• 64,692 words

This is a book similar to Summer Rain, but it takes place immediately before college.  Book 1 is a semester of my junior year; book 2 is senior year; book 3 is the summer between HS and college.  I wanted to capture what it was like to be a heavy metal fan in a nowhere town in Indiana in the 80s, and that desire to get the hell out.  This book is very plotless and difficult for me to even look at.

”Book 3”

Just a brief mention that I have about 30,000 words in a book that’s mostly a collection of surreal scenes that don’t entirely flow together. I have vague hopes that at some point, I will find a structure to stitch all of this together into a Rumored-type book. Time will tell.

Abraham Lincoln and Helen Keller opened a Subway sandwich shop on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker to finance their speed metal band, in which I was auditioning as their road ileostomy technician, so I spent a lot of free time in that neighborhood. A lot of touring bands, at least the serious ones, switched over to diverting their intestinal waste into surgical-grade pouches instead of dropping a deuce in a tour bus, so my part-time hobby was sure to pay off, eventually.

I’m proud to announce that my latest book, The Earworm Inception, is now available on the Amazon Kindle for just 99 cents. Also, if you are an Amazon Prime member in the US with a Kindle, you can check out this book for free.

This book is a collection of 20 flash fiction pieces and short stories. It’s not a novel, but they are all tangentially related.  Like Fistful of Pizza, it’s a mix of previously published work and new stuff, and it’s a cheap way to get a good look at my writing style.  Also, it’s funny as hell. The book description:

A food truck craze involving human cannibalism. A Texas Governor who obsessively listens to Rebecca Black right before every state execution. A chainsaw factory that plays Ozzy Osbourne for its welding robots. An ex-girlfriend drunk-dialing from Kandahar, where she’s starting a Shakey’s Pizza restaurant chain. And an endless search to find the right mix of prescription medication to stop the memories of a bizarre past.

These mad stories make up the latest by Jon Konrath, a collection of 20 flash fiction narratives that cross between metafiction and experimental prose, telling grim and absurd fast-paced tales about Konrath’s life in a twisted fashion.

There’s also a print version on the way; I’m waiting to approve proofs, but it will be available for $8.99.

Insert desperate plea for you to check out the book, like the page, share on your faceplace thingee, and tell all your friends.  Also, if you review books, get in touch and I’ll send you a copy. Thank you!

The linkage:

• On Amazon
• The book page

I guess I haven’t written in here yet in 2012.  Oops.  I’ve been busy working on getting a new book released, another collection of short stories and flash, and that’s about done.  But it’s been hard to get started on something new, and I really need to.

Part of this is that I’m trying to quit caffeine, and that shit’s a wonder drug for my creative productivity.  I am tapering down, and I’m down to two cokes a day, but I used to drink about two cokes per thousand words, so that’s been a struggle.  I’m probably sleeping more and better, but sleep doesn’t write books.

One thing I forgot about - I used to use my own crappy  set of scripts to run this site, a bunch of cobbled-together duct tape and cardboard that generated the index sidebar out of a bunch of PHP and shell script.  And every year, the whole thing would break, and required me to move all of the files to a new directory and edit a script by hand and regenerate the index and whatever.  And one of two things would happen: either I’d stay up late on the morning of the first and fix everything and post an “okay, this works” message, or I’d procrastinate horribly, and not post anything for days.  Maybe it wasn’t days, but I remember the dread of not having anything to write about, not knowing what to write.  Every New Year’s, I’d have grandiose ideas of how I’d write a story a day or a thousand words per 24 hours, and how that year would be the year I’d write a dozen books and submit a million stories and blah blah blah blah, and sitting staring at that blank page always felt like if I resolved to lose a hundred pounds, and then found myself in line at McDonald’s.

The other big part of 2012 is that it marks the 20-year mark from when the events of Summer Rain happened in real life.  I have very conflicted thoughts about this, and there are two different things going on in my head.

First, it’s been 11 years since that book came out.  I’m slowly moving to using nothing but CreateSpace and Kindle for publishing, and I feel like I should gather up all of my old stuff and push it to there, then unpublish it from iUniverse or lulu.  And I feel like I should get all of this old stuff on the Kindle.  So I loaded SR into Scrivener and started fixing all of the line breaks and indents and whatnot, thinking I’d eventually on some rainy day (no pun intended), I’d get the thing exported into .mobi format.  And of course, this degraded into this pulling-a-loose-thread-on-a-sweater thing of “maybe I need a new cover” and “maybe I need an new intro” and whatnot.  But it also made me stop and read the old writing, and I really don’t like it anymore.  I mean, there are the minor typos and things that could be reworked.  But I am no longer in love with those characters or what I did with the book.  Maybe this will change if I give it another serious read.  But I also did this same process with Rumored to Exist recently, and I really liked it.  It made me wish I could keep writing more stuff like that.  But the idea of revisiting Bloomington in 1992, or the thought of finishing this incomplete book of IU stories from 1989-1995 is somewhat boring to me.

And I just went to Bloomington, a couple of weeks ago.  It was the first time I’d touched foot in 47404 in ten years.  I only had a couple of hours, long enough to eat dinner with Simms and grab a quick drink with Bill, but I cruised around town for a few loops, taking it in.  And I was strangely unenthused.  Maybe I’d shut off that part of my brain, the part that usually swims in nostalgia trips like this, because the whole Indiana experience was so surreal to me.  But I didn’t experience the huge charge I used to get when I returned to town.  I swung past Mitchell Street, and around the fountain, and up and down Jordan, and to the library, but none of it caught me.  It seemed so long ago, so distant - and it was.

No real moral of the story here - I know what I’ve been writing best for the last couple of years is not the rehashing of this old college stuff, and that’s fine.  I’m still struggling with what exactly I call the stuff I do now, and how to sell it or tell people about it is the big question, but it’s slowly happening.

In other news, I bought a rowing machine the other day.  Not sure why.