I am learning a lot about why I write today.
At the moment, I have written and published three novels, the Sex Bunker Apocalypse trilogy, which is as silly as it sounds. The most difficult part of getting people to interact with this book is the title of the first novel, Sex Bunker Apocalypse, because people think it’s erotica. It has some sex in it – but you can skip it and it never takes very long (insert your own jokes here). It’s more of a Greek-style apocalypse; the world changes. Does it change for the better? That’s up to the reader. I suppose it depends on how much you value community, and capitalism. Personally I think it’s a good book, especially for a first attempt from someone who’s really never written anything before.
The second book, Spin The Throttle, is basically the road trip we all took when we were teenagers or in our early twenties. Something Has To Be Done and our heroes go and do it, or try to. There’s a bit more sex in this book, but it’s mostly farce, or at least pretty silly, and far more plot relevant than it has any right to be. But mostly it’s sets up what happened to some of the places on the East Coast after the apocalypse, the major players, and in the end, changes our heroes unalterably. It’s funny, like the first, but it’s got more serious bits than SBA.
Then we get to Handcuffed to Never, the third and final (for now) Sex Bunker Apocalypse book, where, as my editor once put it, “everything goes wonderfully off the rails” — our heroes are separated, meet bizarre new creatures, explore strange new worlds, and finally defeat capitalism. Along the way there’s an author insert (I like cats, what can I say), moving mountains that deserve far more screen time than they get and our heroes have nightmares. There’s some more sex, too, but it’s desperate, almost, an oasis for the participating characters in a world gone mad. Fear not, there’s a pretty happy ending. You can all thank Isabel Kunkle for that, she threatened me with grievous bodily harm if I didn’t change my original ending.
I’m telling you all this not because I want you to read my books – though I suppose I do, if you’re not turned off by silliness, or sex – but to give you a good baseline of why I’m creating this post at all. Hold on, we’re nearly there.
I submitted a book to editing last week. My editor really likes it. It’s more accomplished than the last three, descends nicely into chaos and wraps up well. A secondary hero from the SBA trilogy features as our protagonist – London, secret agent from the post-apocalyptic Saints of the Ster. London suffers an injury in Handcuffed to Never, and that’s a big part of the fourth book. It’s a novel set after the adventure – and there’s no sex whatsoever. My editor and beta readers were shocked. One was even disappointed. London is nonbinary, but they were part of a very naked, very silly escape from a mansion in the second book. Including them in the “physicality of the moment” is something I know how to do. I couldn’t quite explain the lack of sexy times at first. I like writing it, and my readers, clearly, like reading it, or are at least willing to skim over it to get back to saving the world.
There were long spates last year where I didn’t write at all. My pain was too bad, my hearing loss is getting worse, and that tends to sour a person’s mood. Sometimes I’d sit down at the computer and think, “Ok, just one thousand words today, you have to do it, you want to be a writer” but nothing would come. I run another business; easy enough to put my efforts there. And being a writer’s not really achievable, is it? You have to be good, and lucky, and work like mad. And I’m only two of those things at most, and only one on bad days. And now there’s A.I. and the enshitification of the Internet and it all feels a bit hopeless.
Anyways.
While the book’s being edited, I’m writing another, or more precisely rewriting a manuscript I wrote last autumn while the SBA trilogy was being edited. It’s a story about strange people on a strange island. One of them, the Smith, is a man obsessed with perfection. He doesn’t leave his house by the sea. It takes a series of very worrying events to get him to leave his beach house, shoulder his backpack and go into the forest. He’s going to meet some scary things there, especially his best friend. New things bother the Smith a great deal. He’s good at what he does; why change it? He’d rather work than eat, be at his forge rather than sleep.
This is all a bit more complicated than I’m making it here, but while I was reviewing the original manuscript today, I suddenly got it. I understood, finally, somehow, why I write.
I am not writing to make a zillion dollars and have Sex Bunker Apocalypse show up on Netflix. I have a wonderful life, a great job outside of writing that I really treasure, and have brilliant, funny, bizarre friends who encourage me to live my best life. My family does the same, albeit with gentle concern. I cannot ask for more.
I’m writing because the stories pull me along. Some literary magnet hooks up to the wild electromagnetism of the universe and pulls from inside my chest. I don’t want my chest to explode (just go with me here, this is a terrible metaphor) so I go along. I wrote Sex Bunker Apocalypse because my world needed, badly, to change, to move away from “How much money does it make?” and further towards “Does this make me happy?” I wrote Spin the Throttle because I wanted to run from the new, go anywhere, do anything other than write. Handcuffed to Never reminded me how scary corporate is, how much I do not miss the 9-5, how change is good for us sometimes. And what started as something silly, something fun and sexy (and sexy, remember is simply not knowing what’s coming next) started to grow more serious, more intent. London’s story is a story about my own pain, my own hearing loss, the sense of not being good enough to do your job when you’re down or hurting. And the Smith – I mean, what makes us shrug off the weight of middle age and try something new? I can paint model miniatures until my hands fall off, until I die at my desk. But I don’t think most of us want that. We don’t want to be chained to our job, at least not all the time. We want new. We are human, we crave novelty, we yearn for what we have not seen yet. “I want to see mountains again, Gandalf,” Bilbo grumbles, and out of all Tolkein’s works that resonates deepest within me.
So yes, I am shouldering my pack and walking into the woods. I do not know when I will be back. There might be silliness along the way. There might be mountains. If you want to wait for me to return, I look forward to our reunion back at the house on the beach. I’ll tell you all about what I saw.
But if you’ve got a backpack and aren’t afraid of the dark, let’s see what’s in these pine trees together.
