Did you get that?

If you really love me, you would know what I meant…

(See, ladies, that sentence looks a little crazy when you see it typed out)

Hey! That was a joke. I am trying to stir up controversy to get people talking about my book… which I am not going to do right now… sort of… I mean I am, but I am not just begging you all to buy a copy. Right now I want to talk about the writing process and how this series of books came to be. Because all of us use words, and there are so many ways to use them and we all have different ways of going about it. In fact, I write all kinds of stuff, and everything I write sort of happens in a different way. Like my original songs for example… which you can listen to and watch the amusing little videos if you click on that button at the top of the page called ‘my songs’.

When I write a song, I usually come up with the hook line, which usually ends up being the title of the song. Then I just write from there. And I don’t write songs about specific people but rather about emotions and feelings. But poems or short stories or even a blog post all happen and unfold in their own way. I am not someone who likes to plan a story all the way out, but I do usually have an idea of where I am going to end up, and a few ideas about places I am going to visit along the way.

But writing a long novel… my novel, which I have broken into four parts… came out to over 400 single-spaced pages. Writing anything that long is hard. Writing a story that long when it is full of many divergent plotlines and multitudes of characters coming and going, most of whom are aliens, is crazy hard. I can’t say in one chapter that an alien has eight fingers and then say something else 300 pages later. Here is the way I describe the act of writing a long science fiction novel. It is like having hundreds of strings, all a mile long, and you are holding them in a tight bundle at one end. You then take the other end of each of those strings and give them to hundreds of squirrels on crack, who then scamper off into the forest with their string, running up and down and all around the trees and branches, before finally emerging at the other side of the forest. As the author, all you have to do is make sure that all those hundreds of strings end up tied together in a neat bundle at the other end.

Sounds easy, right?

But I played an interesting trick on myself when I started to write this adventure. I forced myself to never think ahead. I wouldn’t even imagine what was around the next corner of a hallway or through the next door. I just let it happen. You know, like life does. And that caused some interesting things to happen. It flows like real life. It feels like real life. But I did keep in mind that someday I would like this all to be made into the best comedy/action science fiction movie of all times, so I kept the pace going at a speed that would fit a movie. I sort of framed it as a movie in my head as I went.

Making it up as I went along created problems and challenges as well. The minute I thought things were going too slowly I would add some sort of a speed bump. Then out loveable… more or less… hero, Arthur, would have to figure out how to get out of this jam. That was where having the main character be me… or having me be the main character, if you would rather… was so brilliant. Because that is how I handle all my problems. He doesn’t make clever plans and strategies. He just makes it up as he goes and relies on luck and his loyal friends to help him get through it.

Sometimes I would get myself… uh… my character… into a really tricky situation, and I would get stuck for a few days. It is sort of like when you are doing a puzzle and you can’t find that one piece you really want to find. You know what you need to do, right? Stop looking for that piece. You can stare at every piece for hours and not find it. But when you stop looking for it, when you go into that zen-state and unfocus your thoughts, sometimes your hand will go right to the piece you need. That certainly happened with me. I would just stop thinking about it, and then bam! I would be in the shower or on the toilet or cooking dinner or whatever, and the answer would pop into my head. There is no moment quite like that.

The other characters all ended up in the story just because there needed to be someone there. None of them were created to fulfill any kind of destiny. I had no plans for them further down the road. If the moment seemed to need a living being, I would just start with a basic idea of something alien, and mix in some funny traits. I will tell you a secret. Aliens are hard to make up. There are so many aliens already existing in fiction it is hard to come up with something new. I think I did a pretty good job. But none of them started off as anything other than a funny notion. Or someone for Arthur to talk to.

But here is the weird part. These characters grew. They became real. I spent four years of my life thinking about them, what they did, how they talked and moved and lived. I knew what they ate and thought about even when they weren’t in the story at that moment. I thought most of them would wander off after a few pages, but they ended up playing important roles later on. Roles that I had no idea they were perfectly suited for when I created them. I somehow created a group of beings that when they acted together, were the perfect group to do what needed to be done in some pretty outlandish situations. But I had no idea when I first put them on a page.

All of this thinking about this other reality so much comes across in the story. You can tell it is all real to me. And this strange way things had of just coming together and making sense later was something I got better and better at. I began to rely on this ability. I knew that sooner or later I would get my characters out of any kind of trouble. That left me free to invent progressively worse trouble to get them into. And this weird sense of writing a book that was sort of writing itself manifested itself in other ways. For instance, the novel has been broken down into four shorter books… there will be more after I publish the next three, trust me… The book just divided itself up into four equal parts of just about 100 hundred pages. I couldn’t have planned that if I had wanted to.

I know that using myself as the hero is risky. And it was tempting to make myself more likeable than I actually am. Or more glamorous, or younger and more handsome. Maybe less of a sarcastic, know-it-all smartass. But I am so glad I didn’t. Because this guy… me… is just such an unlikely hero that it makes him much more believable. The universe is full of Luke Skywalker, Captain Kirk characters. But there isn’t anybody quite like this Arthur guy. And trust me, the universe ends up needing me… him… way more than it ever needed any of those other guys. I made Arthur a custodian… (pronounced janitor)… on the alien space station because that is what I was doing when I started to write the novel. I worked at a church. I have been laid off since then, but maybe, like my character in the story, I am just destined for larger things.

You end up liking Arthur more than you might want to. He just grows on you.  And I wont give anything away, but by the end of the fourth book, he has access to some alien artifacts that are going to allow me to put him into situations that I can’t even begin to grasp until I start making them up as I go along.

To finish up, let me say that I am not one of those people who thinks that every written piece has some deeper hidden meaning. Sometimes a good story is just a good story. That being said, I did stick some stuff in the story that are deeper than they appear. You might think that the alien character who happens to have his penis growing out of the top of his head was just a juvenile attempt at potty humor on my part. Something to appeal to 14-year-old boys. And you would only be half right. I put that really frightfully large penis out there for all of us to see so we could wrestle with our views on sex and nudity and morality. About all those things that freak some us out so that we end up worrying about whether Betty Boop’s skirt is too short or if one of the Telletubbies is maybe gay, and eeeewwww… how can that lady breast feed her baby in public? We need to talk about these things. I just used an alien to bring it up, because can we really hold aliens to a higher morality than ourselves?

There are other subtle bits of depth stuck here and there amongst the adventure and humor. But mostly it is just a funny tale of living beings trying to do the best they can in a crazy universe, and maybe meet some good friends along the way.

Thank you.