But Why Did He Fade?

The first piece of fiction I ever got published in any professional capacity was a short story called Fading Man. I had originally written it as a creative writing assignment for a college class in the Fall of 1994, but it got a good enough response from fellow students that I thought it might pique the interest of an editor somewhere.

Eventually, it appeared in a now-defunct magazine called Starblade sometime in 1995. I was paid in contributor's copies (2, to be exact). Although it was exciting to get published, when I went back and read the story, I was embarrassed at the poor quality of my prose. My writing just didn't live up to my imagination, so I didn't show the story to very many people.

Fading Man the short story was set in a vague post-apocalyptic version of Tulsa, and it told the story of a man named Joe who has disjointed memories of a place he once lived. He can't connect the memory with the rest of his life, so he is trying to get back to this place, driven by a need to understand himself. Along the way, of course, terrible things happen.

Anyway, despite being not particularly well written, the concept of the story stuck with me over the years. There was something about it that really resonated with me, so occasionally I considered how I might turn the thing into a novel.

Fast forward to February 2014. I started working on a new novel, a young adult novel called The Figment Tree. At the time, for various reasons, including a short-lived job that was a horrible ordeal, I found that the tone of The Figment Tree wasn't a good fit. It was too lighthearted, too much of a coming-of-age tale, and writing it wasn't cathartic.

When my mood and the tone of a novel I'm writing are in opposition to each other, it becomes like nails on a chalkboard. I needed something a little darker and more emotionally exhausting, something that mirrored my true state.

Now, by this point, I had already written Shadows of Tockland, which is set in a bleak and dangerous post-apocalyptic version of Northwest Arkansas. I began to see a connection. Maybe the world of Cakey and the Klown Kroo was the same world as Fading Man.

That gave me my inroad, and the novel of Fading Man began to take shape in my mind. It became a story with a bit more complexity, not the story of a lone man but the story of a relationship, not the story of a man trying to figure out who he is but the story of a man looking for a destination where everything will finally make sense.

What I ended up writing, thanks in large part to my mood during the first half of 2014, became rather bleak but hopefully compelling. It's not, by any means, the lighthearted story that The Figment Tree would have been. But I hope it will resonate with people.

It was a profoundly cathartic experience for me. I used to long to sit down and work on it, and there were specific scenes that I yearned to get to during the process. Whether or not readers take to it, this novel will always mean a lot to me.

Anyway, we shall soon see. Fading Man is now available in paperback and soon to be available as an e-book. In fact, you can read a free sample here.

Fading into Tockland

So here is how it all went down...

Sometime in the near future, there was a meteor shower one crisp autumn night, but these were no run-of-the-mill meteors. These weren't the kind that streak across the sky for a couple of seconds like a shimmering green fire before burning out. No, these rained down upon the earth for days on end, and many of them reached the ground, causing widespread devastation. The areas hit worst were Siberia and the Pacific Northwest.

Massive loss of life and the destruction of cities and infrastructure had profound consequences, but, truth be told, if it had only been the meteor shower, the world might have recovered. Oh, it would have taken many years, and scars would have remained. But the world might have rebuilt.

But, in a truly strange twist of fate, there were living organisms on some of the meteorites. They were burrowed in deeply, but they must have been incredibly resilient to have survived the vacuum of space and the intense heat upon entering the atmosphere, not to mention the impact of hitting the ground. But survive they did. We can theorize that the meteorites might have been the pieces of a destroyed planet on which these little organisms lived. But how can we ever really know?

They resembled nematodes, parasitic roundworms. In the larval stage, they are microscopic, but as they grow, they become visible, tiny little wriggling shapes, purple and shiny. They were not designed for life on our planet, but they adapted quickly.

The parasites found their way into the waterways and formed colonies. From these colonies developed queens, large and bloated creatures with long tentacles, and the queens began to eject larvae by the thousands. Rivers carried the larvae far and wide, and people drank the contaminated water without realizing they were ingesting their own madness and death.

The larvae first latch onto the inner lining of the small intestine. As they grow, they work their way into the bloodstream and slowly travel to the brain. We will never know what their original food source was on their home world, but on earth, they loved human brains the most.

Common symptoms of infected people include severe anxiety, fits of rage, uncontrollable outbursts, flu-like body aches, sensitive skin, paranoia, and confusion. Eventually, inevitably, the worms kill the host, and unless they are close to their queen, the worms also die. This is not, after all, their home. They are struggling to survive just as much as we are.

The brainworm plague hit at the worst possible time, as humanity was struggling to rebuild. It sent the world into chaos. Governments fell, cities were emptied, crime and desperation tore nations apart. And it was during the years of chaos that the great emperor arose. As the story goes, he was the self-appointed general of a ragtag militia formed to protect villages from bandits. But from humble beginning, he rose to become a great conqueror.

He was called General Mattock, and his empire was called Tockland. At its peak, it stretched from the Llano Estacado to the Ozark Mountains and north deep into the Great Plains. Somehow, the plague was almost nonexistent in Tockland, while it raged in the surrounding nations. How could anyone stand against him?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the backdrop of both Shadows of Tockland and my next novel, the upcoming Fading Man. More to come soon. Stay tuned!

Oh, the Shadows! Oh, the Tockland!

Once upon a time, I wrote a book about a troupe of clowns who end up fighting through a city filled with zombie-like hordes and an army with tanks. What would possess an otherwise sane person to write such a book? Well, unfortunately, an exploration of the origin of this particular book will only cast doubt upon my sanity. Nevertheless, let's go.

So the origin of the book Shadows of Tockland starts with a character named Cakey the Clown, AKA Cakey the Jacked-Up Clown. This is a character who precedes the writing of the book by many years. In fact, Cakey came into being on Halloween night in 1999, and here is what he originally looked like:

You see, I was invited to a friend's Halloween party out in the country, and I didn't have a costume. So another friend of mine went with me to Wal-Mart to find something, but Wal-Mart was down to slim pickings on the Halloween aisle. I wound up with this strange clown makeup that had to be water activated in order to be applied. Well, I didn't have any water, but I did have a bottle of Sprite. So I used Sprite to apply the makeup as my friend drove down this rough and bumpy country road, and the end result is the picture you see above.

Because the makeup was all clumpy and caked on, I called myself Cakey the Jacked-Up Clown, and even though it was just a one-time gimmick for a Halloween party, the idea and the name stuck with me. Cakey began to appear each year at Halloween parties, taking on a slightly different appearance each time (all of them fairly disturbing so apologies in advance):

Now, of course, because I have an overactive imagination, this character began to take on a life of his own in my brain. I began to work out a storyline for him. Who is Cakey? Where does he come from? Why is he a "jacked-up" clown? This led to me to create a whole strange world for Cakey. And that led me to create an extremely crude website full of amateurish flash cartoons called The Klown Kroo (a fragment of which survives right here).

Now, that early version of Cakey and The Klown Kroo was just a joke, but eventually, I decided to take the idea seriously. Could I actually transform this silly concept into a serious novel? For years, I worked out various ideas. Initially, I intended to set the story in a twisted version of the modern world. Later, I toyed with the idea of some kind of pseudo-mythological setting.

Eventually, I gave up on Cakey (and writing) for a few years, but after Mary of the Aether was published, I returned to the concept. By that time, I had become somewhat obsessed with the post-apocalyptic genre, so I decided to translate Cakey into that setting. An idea began to form in my mind of a clown troupe facing hostile crowds in some kind of wasteland.

In transforming Cakey from a silly cartoon to a believable character, I realized the only reasonable explanation for his behavior is that he is in some sense mentally ill or at least deeply damaged. But nobody wants to read about another deranged, violent clown, so I gave Cakey a strong (if skewed) moral foundation. He is not a nihilist by any means. Instead, he is driven by an almost prophetic conviction about his own destiny. And that is how we wound up with a character that The Brass Rag called "a demented poet."

But one of the key changes that came about in crafting the novel was that I shifted the narrative perspective away from Cakey and onto a newcomer. Cakey is too damaged to give a reliable point-of-view and too self-justifying to offer a clear understanding of himself. So David Morr became the protagonist, and as a newcomer, he offers an unfiltered view of Cakey and the rest of this ragtag group of weirdos. 

The completed novel, Shadows of Tockland, proved to be too baffling for most publishers. I got a host of responses that said similar things: "this is well-written and the characters are interesting, but we don't know what to do with it." One publisher said it didn't have enough science fiction to be considered science fiction. Another said it was really good but they had no idea how they would market it. A post-apocalyptic adventure novel about a clown troupe just didn't have mainstream appeal, they said, no matter how interesting it was.

So the book sat on my hard drive for a couple of years. Finally, I decided to just release the thing as an e-book, and that brings us to today. Shadows of Tockland is currently a Kindle exclusive. It hasn't gotten the attention of Mary of the Aether because it is a strange concept, but it just might be the best thing I've ever written. Check it out.

Finding Chesset

Chesset is the primary setting of the Mary of the Aether series. It manages to be right at the center of every major event that happens over the course of the four novels, despite the fact that the significance of the events grows exponentially with each volume. Of course, Chesset doesn't exist outside of the novels. It is an amalgam of certain tiny Arkansas towns, chiefly Mountainburg, but also a bit of Chester, West Fork, and Winslow.

However, it is not located in the same place as any of those towns. Instead, it is somewhere between Mountainburg and the Bobby Hopper Tunnel on the west side of Interstate 49. In reality, the place where it would be located is just a grassy valley. In fact, here is what Chesset's location looks like on Google Maps:

Here's the street level view of what the area looks like that should be Chesset:

In the words of chef Justin Wilson, "Don't that pretty?" Can't you just imagine a little Chesset existing right there in that valley, all nestled in snugly waiting for aether and Devourers and Lookers to come barging in?

Now, did I really have all of this in mind when I was writing the series? Actually, yes. When you spend years working on a four volume series, you have a lot of time to ponder each and every facet of the story, the characters, and the locations. And you do. Believe me, you do. I used to drive past this area and say to myself, "Yep, that's about where Chesset would be."

Dinky Dairy

In the novel, the Dinky Dairy is a local ice cream and burger place that the locals like to frequent. It was loosely inspired by the Dairy Dreme in Mountainburg:

Lucky's Truck Stop

Lucky's is the big truck stop that comes to town at the beginning of Mary of Shadows and causes quite a stir. It is the biggest store in town, threatening poor little Cholly's One Stop. It was loosely inspired by this now-defunct place in Mountainburg, a truck stop that opened right around the time the first section of I-49 opened (which was then called I-540). It has since closed down, and the building might be looking for a new tenant. Someone should call Vera.

Anyway, there you go. Another little glimpse of the inspirations behind Chesset. If you haven't read the whole series, I highly recommend you check it out. It represents years' worth of mental regurgitation from an overactive imagination.