The Fall of Man!
I grew up in an era where everybody was worried about the atomic bomb. Heck, in the fifties my father worked at a radar station whose purpose was to detect Russian planes coming over the pole.
Also, I grew up in Los Altos, right below San Francisco and the San Andreas fault. We were constantly being told The Big One (an earthquake) was going to slide everything into the ocean.
Then, going to college I experimented with a few drugs, and came across the works of Franz Kafka. In Metamorphosis a kid turns into a bug. Sheesh! And if that wasn’t bad enough I came across a fellow name of Stephen King. The world was going to hell, eh?
Little did I know that these influences would form a fusion in me, that I would burst out with a massive epic which starts with an atomic bomb, segues into an earthquake, and then people would begin transforming into something really bad.
Then I ran into a problem. Publishers don’t want to publish big books. After my experiences with pushing The Bomber’s Story I didn’t even try to push Machina.
What a crime, eh? I’m sitting on one of the most fantastical, tight-knitted, creative epics of all literature…and…I just sit.
Well, I did publish it myself. In fact, I was so disappointed in the publishing business, I started making my own books.
That’s right. I figured out how to paginate the pages, how to make the covers and spines, how to laminate the covers, how to press and glue the interior, and I sold them to a few friends. I think holding those homemade suckers gave me more pleasure than getting getting published by some ‘official’ publisher.
In fact, I was now a publisher! And an editor! And a proof reader! And I was learning more things about making books than I had ever imagined! The fact of actually making books from the ground up made me a better writer.
I recommend self-publishing, and I recommend making actual books. You have something solid in your hands. You can sell them, put on seminars at libraries showing how to make books, and you’ll know the difference between recto and verso and all sorts of other stuff!
So here it is. A vast saga of world shaking disasters, people with strange abilities, concepts of an insectile world where mankind is on the ropes. And, I guarantee, you have NEVER seen an ending such as the one in Machina! All you have to do is click on…
