#676. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse January 2014

It's that time of the month again.  Yes, in different context that means something completely different.  Here, it means books.  To be clear, we're talking books!

Anyway, now that I've made it pleasantly awkward for everyone...It's time to celebrate the thing that has just made Lord Founder Squid feel terrible about being associated with a blog that can make perfectly innocent talk about books sound so weird.  But he knew what I was like when he recruited me.  Granted, he had only seen my traveling petting zoo act, and you can't go wrong with a traveling petting zoo (unless it has koalas...they bite), but still.  (I had koalas.)

Without further inane adieu, here are the books I finished in the past month:

• Zealot by Reza Aslan
• Justice League Beyond: Konstriction by Derek Fridolfs and various
• Teen Titans Vol. 3: Death of the Family by Scott Lobdell and various
• Monorama by Tony Laplume

By Tony Laplume???  Hey, what is this, Pat Dilloway's blog???  (I'd provide a link, but he set it to self-destruct because he read so many spy novels last year.)

Technically, I read Zealot at the very end of 2013, but it wasn't included in December's Coffeehouse chat because I hadn't read it by the time I wrote that one.  It's ridiculously good, in terms of illuminating certain things if you're open to their illumination without religious outrage (of a...zealot nature).  If I'd chosen to write about reading the Bible, which I'm very close to finishing, only weeks away, I might have talked about both it and Zealot today.

But I'm doing the full Dilloway.  (This is different from the Full Monty in that neither of us is British and hey! that means "Monty Python" means "Naked Python"...!)  I'm writing about my own book.  I'm not too concerned about seeming a little full of myself, though, because I know talking about my books on my blog(s) doesn't translate to sales.  I do have a whole blog dedicated to talking about my books and writing and such, so this is kind of infringing on my own territory.  But still.

And the neat thing is that Monorama is a lot more relevant to this blog than you might think.  The whole concept of the "Eponymous Monk" strip I've been running is taken from a few of the stories in this collection, which in turn is based on stories I originally wrote in high school.  (When I was creating a comic strip I actually drew.)  There's another piece of relevant prelude material here, by the way, which in fact comes from here.  Just in case you wanted to see some of the pieces in place.  If you at all care about "Eponymous Monk."  Although there are not too many spoilers there.  That I'm aware of.  (Honestly, I'm making all this up as I go along, even the parts I already know myself...)

Okay, so I'm talking about Monorama, one of my own books.  (One???)  It's a collection of stories I put together from material I had lying around, filled with nonsensical science-fictiony ideas.  Some of the stories are incredibly short, so I grouped those together in the opening section of the book.  One of them is a novella (not Nutella), and that's at the back of the book.  All of it covers basically a decade's worth of my creative output.

The copy I recently finished reading was one I'd given my parents.  I ended up picking it up and started reading.  (If I was a better editor, which is really clear if you read it for yourself, I would have read all of it when I prepared it for self-publication back in the summer of 2012.)  And you know what?  I liked what I saw.

This is not a matter of self-aggrandizement.  Some of this material I really hadn't read in years.  Now, I know I tend to read about as differently from other people as I write, but there's a comfortable overlap between my twin exercises, which I'm always happy to see for myself.  I really didn't come across anything that I found embarrassing to have in this book (other than, again, the editing).

Some of the stories, two or three in particular, I knew when I made the collection, I had never actually finished writing, the novella included (which is the longest source material to date for the "Eponymous Monk" strip).  I was surprised to find that they still read well, even the novella that somewhat blatantly ends mid-story, or the strict excerpt from another story that ends the collection.  They make sense in their own kind of logic, which is to say the internal logic of the storytelling.  (And really, any decent story ought to be able to be enjoyed even if you haven't experienced the beginning or ending, which is why I sometimes actually enjoy catching a movie or TV show only in part.  People assuming it's the complete story that gives them satisfaction, but really it's the overall quality of the material.  No matter what they say.)

The whole point of Monorama was to present material that potential paying readers could sample in order to figure out what kind of writer I am.  And again, maybe it's simply that I overlap comfortably my "reader" and "writer" hats (like the winter hat some people wear over their ball caps!), but I'm as convinced as ever that I wasn't mistaken in putting this book out there.  In fact, I'm actually a little more proud now, having read the complete book, completely removed from the creative process, and still enjoyed the material.

/full Dilloway

#436. Books

Not to be upstaged by Michael Abayomi, I want to reiterate (because as someone noted on his blog, if not here where?) that I've got a new book of short stories available.  The cover looks like this:

It's called, as you can see for yourself, Monorama, and collects a number, as you can read for yourself, of short stories, including a showcase novella called "Leopold's Concentration," as well as an introductory, bewildering "Lost Books of Tomorrow" section of thirty-two shorter works, and then five other stories besides, including "Lost Convoy" and "Quagmire," which ties in with Space Corps, which is the sci-fi universe I'll be writing about in my next book.

Anyway, I also want to remind anyone who might care that I maintain a reader's blog, Hub City, where I write about the books I've been reading.  I'm thinking of using it for some other book-related topics as well, perhaps noting books I don't have yet but foolishly want to add to an already bloated library I have not read 25% of and perhaps even notable efforts from bloggers I follow.  You can find a link there and here and everywhere to my Austen Paradise bookshop, which is my example of one writer's immense contribution to popular culture, and sometimes I'm tempted to justify its existence by writing about it more.  If you like, you can also visit a skeletal Facebook page devoted to it.

Also, for the record, there's a list of links at the right side of this blog explaining some of this on a more regular basis, including covers to all of my books (anthology included), in case you wanted to have a look.

#435. A Stroll Around My Head

If you poke around this blog enough, you may stumble on the fact that I've got a couple of books in print, each of them self-published (as well as a short story in an anthology).  I haven't plastered Scouring Monk with images of the covers, mostly because the covers aren't terribly exciting, and I guess I suck at marketing, much less providing a coherent direction to readers trying to figure out why they should bother reading the blog in any effort to know who Tony Laplume is, besides someone who loves movies and stuff.

I published The Cloak of Shrouded Men five years ago, and have sold maybe half a dozen copies (and that's probably being generous), and in that case can it really be said to be published at all?  I'm not really good at promoting myself, and really not good about networking, because the people who really inspire me are creators who aren't looking to make friends with some anonymous bum in Colorado.  My favorite social activity is watching movies in the dark with strangers, and I'm otherwise a comedian whose only stage has been a bookstore, torturing the ears off coworkers, and besides don't really like talking so much as writing, and mostly about the things I'm passionate about.  I don't do conversation well, even at the exchange of a computer screen.

My writing tends to feel a little exclusive.  I don't write so that you can immerse yourself in a narrative so much as in someone else's mind, their experiences as they think about them more than how they actually experience them.  I wrote Shrouded Men as a superhero story where the superhero tortures himself over his failures, bad relationships, and nihilistic revenge against those who didn't share his crusade, destroying everything around him, basically, and then calling it a day, hanging up his cape, and letting the reader decide what the hell just happened.  I wrote in a number of parallels to stories I love, or were influenced by at the time, and besides family members the one outside reaction I got said it reminded him of City of Heroes, an online game that I didn't and still don't see any direct relation to in the pages of the book other than the fact that they both feature superheroes.  I wonder if he even read the book.  I'm not kidding when I say that it's basically Watchmen as an internal monologue from Rorschach (with more complete sentences).  I should note that it isn't literally Watchmen, because at the time I started writing it, I had never read Watchmen, and by the time I finished writing it, there's no way I was writing about anything else but the mad crusade of Cotton Colinaude, the Eidolon (a name I came across in a Hart Crane poem, "Legend," which should one day rightfully take its place in the book's pages), who gains and loses scores of allies, but most of them are already in his past by the time the story begins, with only glimpses of his erstwhile glory days sprinkled throughout.

Last week I published Monorama, and unless I start learning, I will probably sell as many copies, and maybe by the time Yoshimi is published, if Hall Bros. Entertainment ends up liking what it reads, I will start selling a few more books.  Monorama is a collection of esoteric short stories, mostly in a science fiction vein, but in the same basic style as what can be found in Shrouded Men (this is exactly what I referenced a few weeks ago, when I went out of my way to potentially alienate some of the folks who might have cared from my time writing here at Scouring Monk).  I figured I might as well make it available, in case more digestible chunks of this kind of writing may go down more easily.   


I've been a lot less active in my blogs the past couple weeks than usual, even here, certainly since the grind of A-to-Z, perhaps because all that activity is finally catching up with me, or I'm more depressed about being jobless again than I thought I was, or I'm depressed that I still don't really have a significant amount of readers, even if I keep telling myself that I don't care, that the act of writing does not demand the act of reading, because I want to be able to make a living on my own terms, especially as it seems increasingly that I maybe can't do it on anyone else's.

Act of writing does not demand the act of reading...?  I'm an eager reader, maybe not a fast one, but an eager reader all the same, and I have been all my life, and I still feel as if I've only read a quarter of what I should have by now.  If I could make a living reading, I would.  Some people do that, and they do so grudgingly, either as submission readers or as reviewers, and because almost no one actually reads and most publicity is self-publicity in this version of the world, most readers never really know what anyone else is reading.  I guess that's one reason to care about Good Reads, or wish that I was back at least in the break room at Borders, where some people still did this crazy thing.

If I had the ambition, I would absolutely transform this blog into a record of everything I find interesting and would love to share with everyone, and perhaps that's something I will still do, or perhaps create a new blog and try to have a go at it (this one currently mixes "mouldwarp" in the URL and Scouring Monk in the title, and never the twain do they meet).

Anyway, as a writer and as a person and as a blogger, I guess I may have some improving to do, not the least figuring out how all those identities merge.