Well, that was underwhelming

Eight books into my half-assed writing career, I got tired of begging my friends and family to write me reviews. So for my ninth and tenth books, I tried different strategies.

When I published Mary Monster, I focused on giveaways. The week the book came out, I distributed 1,200 copies. Fifty of those were to readers who promised to post a review in exchange for an advance copy. The other 1,150 were through a promotion I supported with paid advertising. The result? Zilch. I saw zero sales after my giveaways ended. And the reviews online are mostly from my friends and family. To date, Mary Monster has sold maybe 80 copies.

So for Camille, I focused on advertising a special $0.99 launch price. I invested $300 in different platforms, one of which "guaranteed" at least 50 sales. The result? Again, basically nothing. Camille has sold about 20 copies, at least six of which were purchased by personal friends. Only one review has been posted on Amazon.

I sort of expected Mary Monster to flop. It's too stylized for a self-pubbed genre thriller. But too supernatural to be considered serious literature.

But I really thought Camille might take off. The cover design is killer. The keywords and book description are solid. It's a popular genre. It's very dark, in a way some readers might miss until the book's final chapters, but I don't think it flopped because the hero was an antihero.

Anyway, I have four different books marinating, but I'm ignoring them for a bit. I shared some of my songs back in 2017, and I'm going to focus energy on writing more music and publishing an EP. Once that's done, maybe I'll write another novel the world can ignore.

Thoughts on books I read in 2019

I wrote one of these year-end wrap-up posts in 2015. That was a huge reading year, volume-wise. I bet I read 40 novels. And I had an awkward conversation with James Ellroy, too.

This year, I only rated 19 books on Goodreads. And two of them - Mary Monster and Camille - were my own. (Spoiler alert, I gave them five stars.)

Point being, when I talk about the books I read in 2019, I'm talking about a pretty short list. However, two of the novels on that list are Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest. So I bet I read as many words as ever. They just added up to fewer books.

I think about this all the time. Life is so finite. Is it better to use two months finishing eight clever crime thrillers or reading one literary masterpiece that (as readers of either of the two aforementioned novels will tell you) doesn't finish at all, in the conventional sense of the term?

Reading Gravity's Rainbow was a bit like going for a long run. I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad it's over. I can now say I've read Pynchon's most difficult novel in all its disturbing glory. The highs were so high, but the lows, man... There is some sick stuff in there.

There's some sickness in Infinite Jest, too. It's a whole book about sickness, in fact. About our modern sickness: our obsessive need to be distracted. Some satisfy it through alcoholism. Others through seduction. And others through devotion to a cause, a sport or an entertainment. But all this sickness is surrounded by so much love, humor, and Wallace's empathy for all these broken people. Infinite Jest is maybe the only book I've ever read that made me want to be a better human.

I also read some Big Important American Novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Some genre thrillers like Head Full of Ghosts. Some European satire like Submission. And some modern stylists like Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the single most devastating sentence I've ever read, "We only feel we're floating because we're forever falling." I stared into my drink for a good 10 minutes after I read those words.

Perhaps the non-Infinite Jest book I remember best is The Elementals by Michael McDowell. In The Elementals, the heat is a character, the same way the cold was a character in Hold the Dark. In both books, the weather is an ever-present metaphor for meaninglessness and memory, for all the things you can't ever, ever escape. McDowell's Alabama coast is the loneliest, wettest, hottest place in the world. The heat weighs you down. The heat slows you down. In the end, the heat decides if you live or die.

Maybe I just have a thing for the weather.

Indie Reader reviews Mary Monster

This is one of those reviews where you get the feeling that if people'd just read it, surely they'd give your work a shot.

Writing a horror novel that plays off a seminal classic of the genre is a huge risk, but Matt Ingwalson does more than a credible job of pulling the feat off in MARY MONSTER. Rather than focus on her most famous literary work, Ingwalson instead brings Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley forward as both monster and creator... An interesting premise and a well-done presentation wrapped in a horror novel, MARY MONSTER is an engaging, fun and thoughtful critique of the creative process and relationship between artists and inspiration.

If that's enough to grab your attention, here's the link.

I've written an unpublishable mashup of a novel

Between January 3, 2013 and February 8, 2017, I put out eight novellas. That's a clip of a new book every six months. What's been the hold-up since?

The good news is I'm on my third draft of a novel. The bad news? I'm fairly sure it's unpublishable.

Mary Monster isn't going to be easy to sell. It's a mashup of urban surrealism and gothic horror. Dance Dance Dance meets Penny Dreadful. My first-person protagonist narrates the story in an awkward combination of 1976 Manchester and 2002 Manhattan slang. He drops dozens of indie music references, some explained and some that'll only make sense to the sort of person who obsesses over The Smiths. Meanwhile, the titular Mary speaks in wholly imagined accents, double entendres and literary allusions.

I tried to embrace all this artifice. In fact, I ran at it. In places I rewrote things to feel purposefully self-conscious, so readers have to slow down and make choices about what to Google and what to let go.

How do I explain this work in a query letter? And even if I could, who'd want it? Fantasy publishers will find my style obtrusive. While literary agents are going to be turned off by all the zombies.

But I can't self-publish, either. The type of people who download self-published fiction are looking for error-free genre fun. That means the first wave of consumer reviews would be terrible. Some jerk would claim my book was filled with typos. Another would drop the where-was-the-editor bomb. And snap, Amazon's algorithm would bury Mary Monster before it got a chance to find a niche.

To publish this book, I either need to find a publisher who believes in it. Or an audience ready to champion it. And I'm not sure either exists.

Things I thought after rewatching Frailty

1. "I can't believe how accurate my memory of this movie is." Typically I forget scenes and transpose lines. But my recall of Frailty was almost shot-for-shot accurate. I suppose that's because it's a movie I've replayed in my mind constantly since the day I saw it.

2. "I wish I was watching this movie with an extremely religious person." The end of Frailty left me absolutely floored. For awhile I considered it one of cinema's greatest twists. But the second time through, I saw how completely Paxton telegraphed the solution. So was Frailty a twist film at all? Or did my secular paradigm make it impossible for me to put the clues together?

Introducing The Baby Monitor: A Podcast of Family Horrors

The Baby Monitor is a plot I have been playing around with for a long time. It's the tale of a couple whose son wakes up screaming. Every single night. Does he have night terrors? Is their home haunted? Or is there something even darker waiting inside their American dream?

In a way, The Baby Monitor is just a creepy story. But it has something serious to say about the way the secrets and banalities of adult life gnaw away at you.

The novella is coming out in March. But I'm publishing the entire thing as a free podcast, starting right now. This is partially because I love doing stuff. Partially out of the hope that podcast listeners will show their support by purchasing the novella. And partially for fun.

The first few episodes are on Soundcloud (here) and you can subscribe on iTunes (here) or on Stitcher (here). (Subscribing and rating is a huge help, making sure new podcasts bump to the top of the recommendation engine.)

The plan is to publish a new one every few days until the story ends. Enjoy.

Sever, Writer's Digest and new short stories

Sever did not win the 24th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards, but it did get a very kind review from the judges. Writer's Digest allows you to publish their commentary, as long as you cite “Judge, 24th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards” and don't cherrypick it to make it sound better than it is. I figured I'd just publish the whole darn thing.

Structure, Organization, and Pacing: 4
Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar: 5
Production Quality and Cover Design: 5
Plot and Story Appeal: 4
Character Appeal and Development: 4
Voice and Writing Style: 5

Aimed at a young adult or even teen audience, Sever pulls in the shadows around the characters quickly, suggesting that life can all go terribly wrong even before one gets out of college.

Narrator Leo Thomas tells us that in the town of Epshire where “Sophie” is going to graduate, four axe murderers (two of them serial killers) have nestled in. I wish the author had been a little more specific when introducing his characters. Nonetheless, I appreciated the growing parallel I felt the author suggested: to wit, that once college ends, it cuts off everything, just like death does. As this horror thriller progresses, I felt awful for Leo when he saw the mutilated female. I liked the way Leo goes about investigating and I liked his relationship with Becky. I became convinced, while I read the book, that Epshire was the center of all evil in the universe. The author did a good job convincing me.

I liked the front cover art. The back blurb is well worded. The author does not give away “Sever,” which is as it should be. I liked his voice, both telling the tale in that random college guy way, narrating all the dumb things college students do, and in hindsight, sounding spooked, looking into lakes and imagining monsters. The story was well told, though a bit choppy at the beginning.

I am a little disturbed that Sever is so consistently identified as YA. But I love, love, love the identification of the parallels between the end of college and the end of life. And the idea you have to kill the person you were to live in the waiting world.

Sever has won a different award which'll be announced sometime next month. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I have been writing short stories about the various killers that inhabit Epshire. I always send my short stories free to my email list, so if you want the next one, sign up in the sidebar of this blog.

Presenting a novella about how four ax murderers can really jack up your summer

Publishing is like pregnancy. The first few months are all mysterious and wonderful. But the last couple are frustrating and gross, and you mostly just want the whole thing over. So it is with pride and no small amount of relief that I finally hit the publish button on my first horror novella, Sever.

It's not just horror, of course. Sever's also a coming-of-age story. And a love letter to college. And a memoir of the '90s. And a melancholy reflection on how to raise kids in a scary world. But there's a whole lot of slasher mayhem going on.

If that sounds fun, the Kindle version is on Amazon. As is a print version.