Letters From the Labyrinth 455
Mainstream Mullings
Busy week here at Castle Keenegiovanni. If you’ve been reading Algorithm Zero (my free daily blog), then you know that all the warehouse moving is finished, and the old Vortex physical store is vacated, and I’ve now returned to writing full-time (seven hours a day plus one hour to tend to the Vortex online store).
Dallas is delighted by this turn of events, because it means he gets to do this seven hours per day.
Which, as it turns out, is good for my back, because in order to type, I have to sit up straight and stretch my arms out like the Frankenstein Monster so that I can reach the keyboard. That is, in fact, how I am typing right now.
Something else that was announced over on the Blog earlier this week is that Chris Golden and I signed the contract for OPERATION LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK, which is the codename I’ve given to our next anthology project. You may remember that THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: NEW TALES OF STEPHEN KING’S THE STAND had a codename of OPERATION WALKABOUT. The codenames exist so that I can talk about things I’m working on even when I’m not allowed to talk about them. It’s a trick I swiped many years ago from writer Warren Ellis. For example, Chris and I were working on TEOTWAWKI for two years before the public ever found out what it actually was. And we weren’t allowed to tell the public about it during that time. But I’m someone who, for 30 years now, has always given his audience work updates. So, in order not to violate anything, on days when we were working on the anthology, I’d say “Worked on OPERATION WALKABOUT today.”
OPERATION LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK is the new codename for the new anthology, and yes, much like there was a clue for TEOTWAWKI in the codename OPERATION WALKABOUT (i.e. The Walking Dude), there is a clue in the codename OPERATION LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK. I look forward to your guesses as to what it might be. So far, Brian Conner has the best guess.
It feels good to be back to writing full-time again. Today will not be spent actually writing, though. Instead it will be spent mulling over ideas.
About a year ago, an editor for one of the Big Five said to me, “I know you’re really happy being an indie author, and no one can argue that you’ve been successful with it over the last decade, but if you ever want to return to the mainstream, I’d love to publish the big Brian Keene epic you would have eventually written for Leisure had things turned out differently.”
And I was flattered, and told him I’d think about it. And i have been for the last year. I mean, I still pretty much keep one foot in mainstream publishing anyway, as books like TEOTWAWKI prove. But I am much happier being an indie these days, and yes, I say that with a full awareness of my privilege in that I have an audience that a lot of indie authors would kill to have.
The one thing about indie publishing is there’s either no advance or a very low advance. You make your money on the back-end, with royalties. And indeed, over time, I’ve made far more money from indie royalties than I ever made from my time with mainstream publishers like Leisure, Bantam, or Thomas-Dunne. (Having a lengthy backlist that new readers are still discovering every year is the key to this, by the way).
But… my youngest has been accepted to a good college. I’m not going to say which one other than it’s one of the so-called Little Ivies. To say that his entire family is proud of him would be a severe understatement. I’ve never been prouder of anyone for anything in life, because I know how hard he worked for this, and I know how it will change his life for the better. The problem is that there was a snafu with the deadline for tuition assistance, and — long story short — his mother and I have to come up with that entire $$$ nut for his first year. And it’s… a lot. More than his middle-class parents make, for sure.
Which is why I’m going to take that editor up on his offer. A good advance would go a long way to alleviating the stress of scrambling to come up with that cash.
What’s throwing me off is “the big Brian Keene epic you would have eventually written for Leisure had things turned out differently”. I don’t know what that would be. Objectively, it would have been THE LABYRINTH series. But given that I’m working on the fourth book in that series as we speak, I reckon that’s not a possibility for this. I have a lot of ideas, but so far, all of them feel “small” — short, personal narratives rather than a big sweeping horror epic. So today is going to be spent with a cat in my lap and a Moleskine and pen in my hands, jotting down ideas as they come to me. And once I have 2 or 4 that I really like, I’ll run them by the editor and see if there’s anything there that strikes his fancy.
It comes at a good time. The first draft of FALLING ANGELS: THE LABYRINTH Book 4 is almost finished, and Laurel Hightower and I are chugging along on the first draft of our collaborative novel. That only leaves about two dozen short stories to write, half of which are those LOST LEVEL commissioned stories. At some point this year, I owe Clash Books a novella called BINKY, but the first draft of that is already done. So… conceivably, this novel is something I could get to work on pretty quickly. At some point, I have a novel by Weston Ochse to finish and Jesus’s final novel to finish, but the boys will understand that this would need to come first.
So, yeah. Today will be spent deep in thought.
Copies of the eighth issue of The Obituaries are going fast! Each one comes SIGNED by me, Aron Beauregard, Daniel J. Volpe, and Kristopher Triana. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE
My contributor copies arrived in the mail earlier this week, and it looks great.
Something else that arrived in the mail this past week was my Haunted Minds Book Club Award for Best Anthology. Pic of it here. I am honored, and thanks to all involved.
IMPORTANT:
Here is the preliminary programming schedule for Scares That Care’s AuthorCon VI. If you are attending as a vendor or a Guest of Honor, please read it carefully and thoroughly and follow the instructions.
Deadline is January 25th.
Compartmentalization - Keeneversations - Episode 30
New year! New season! And we kick things off with an intense conversation about how Brian deals with stress and workloads, and whether or not Mary think it's a healthy outlook. Listen now via Patreon or Spotify.
Currently Watching: Nobody Wants This season 2, Fallout season 2, Landman season 1, and Roofman.
Currently Reading: Manuscripts by Todd Keisling and Bev Vincent.
Currently Listening: Blood, Sweat and No Tears by Sick of It All, Bark At the Moon by Ozzy Osbourne, Rhyme Pays by Ice-T, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, and (on Sirius/XM) Howard 100, Howard 101, and Yacht Rock Radio.
Bark At the Moon has always been my favorite of Ozzy’s solo discography — and that’s a discography wherein the vast majority are all solid albums. I have a vivid memory of the first time I heard the title track. I was a teenager, in my bedroom, listening to DC101, because back in 1983, if you wanted to hear metal on the radio, you had to wait until after dark, at which point DC101 out of D.C., and 98 Rock out of Baltimore, and 93.5 out of Harrisburg would all switch over from classic rock to stuff like Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motorhead, and Def Leppard. The only time you’d hear metal during the day was the occasional AC/DC or KISS song, and Kix every hour on the hour, because Kix were the hometown heroes for this region.
I remember that the older kids at school talked crap about the album, mostly because Randy Rhoads wasn’t playing guitar. Well, I don’t know how he could have, given that he was dead. I’ve always wondered what it must have been like for Jake E. Lee, stepping into that role. In my opinion, he came through in spades. Bark At the Moon has been a long-time favorite of mine — easily in my Top 20 favorite albums of all time. I’ll put tracks like “Waiting For Darkness” up against anything else from that era of metal, and I’ll go to my grave insisting that “So Tired” beats “Changes”.
Somewhere out there in the Labyrinth is a level where Randy never left Quiet Riot, and thus, didn’t die when that plane hit Ozzy’s tour bus. And maybe young Yngwie Malmsteen got tapped for Ozzy’s solo band, instead, and Jake E. Lee did his own thing, and eventually there was some kind of big benefit concert in the late 80s featuring all of them along with Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen, and Steve Vai. Maybe for Dio’s Hear N’ Aid project.
That’s the beauty of the Labyrinth. If you can imagine it, then it exists out there… somewhere.
And that does it for this week. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you every day this week on my Blog and back here next Sunday.
I can't say that "Bark at the Moon" was my favorite Ozzy album, but I agree Jake E. Lee, one of my favorite guitarist of all time, had an impossible job following in Randy's footsteps. I also like the work he did with his band Badlands, and more recently, with Red Dragon Cartel. Thank God he survived being shot a year or so ago. Great post!
Now I am imagining the Keene and Golden version of The Poky Little Puppy. Terrifying! 😱