The Return (almost) of a Super Hero

For those who are not keeping track (everyone but me), it has been over two years since I published my last book on Amazon for Kindle.  Please indulge me as I treat the appearance of my new novella as if it were a grand event and tell how "Slow Motion Man" came to be written. (For the uninitiated, a novella is a story that isn't long enough to be a novel, but is too short to be a short story. Don't ask me what a novelette is: a female novella?) 

So I am celebrating.The best thing about a virtual online book release party - sorry, novella release party - is that you don't have to hire a caterer. Feel free to walk to the kitchen now and grab some finger food and a cup of fruit punch.

Approximately twenty-five years ago I wrote a short story called "Slo-Motion Man and the Royals." In that story the narrator remembered when he was a kid how he used to throw a ball against the wall of his house and keep track of games between four imaginary teams, one of which was called the Royals. Clearly he favored that team and somehow reached herculean heights of play on their behalf, as they often won the make-believe championship.

He also used to make up superheroes in his mind, and pictured how they would fare against equally super-powered villains. One of those super heroes was Slo-Motion Man, a freak of nature who could copy the super power of any other super hero, but with the drawback that, while using any super power, he moved in slow motion.  How this played out in the narrator's mind was that Slo-Motion Man always defeated the bad guy, but he usually looked silly doing it. 

I (the author) didn't comment during the writing of that story, but in looking back now I wonder if that awkward super hero to some extent symbolized the author more than he would have admitted.  I didn't always defeat my own childhood problems, but I did feel silly trying at times, especially in front of girls.  

And speaking of girls, unlike most stories of the coming of age variety, the character in  that story was more concerned with his older sister's virginity than his own, since he caught her and a boyfriend clumsily moving in that general direction and worried that she might pulverize him for doing so.  Well, I never had an older sister, but my younger sister would confirm without hesitation and perhaps in a raised voice that this piece of the story was pure and unadulterated fiction. In fact, in re-reading that story, it is also the weakest part of the plot.

"Slo-Motion Man and the Royals" appeared in a regional literary journal back when I wrote it, a magazine that took a lot of my stories at the time, for reasons best known to them.  I tend to cringe at times when I re-read those stories, not because they are badly written, (though they aren't great either) but rather because I hadn't quite settled into my ultimate style of writing.  My devoted but all-too-few fans will recognize it (hopefully) as a curious and heartwarming mixture of mystery, romance and humor.  My writing was still developing back then, and only lacked elements of mystery, romance and humor to become recognizable.  Going back to college as an English major and having to write short papers almost every day for Honors classes seemed to improve my writing.  Go figure.

Anyway, my novella (remember my novella?) is not a rewrite of that short story.  What I did was extract Slo-Motion Man from that short story - painlessly; he was not harmed in the process. I also gave him back the letter 'w' that, for some reason that escapes me now, was missing from his name at the time. So he became Slow Motion Man, aka Matt. Matt is given that super hero nickname by his girlfriend Roxy for delightful reasons I will let you enjoy finding out for yourselves when you read it, if that happy day should ever arrive.

Now, if I wanted to charge $2.99 or more for this sterling piece of writing, Amazon in their infinite wisdom would grant me 75% of the purchase price as a royalty.  But since I charge that amount for my full-length books, I like to charge just 99 cents for my shorter works.  So in order for Amazon to remain a profitable entity so that your stock portfolio keeps increasing, my royalty must therefore drop to 35%.  Fortunately (?) my stories do not sell enough copies for this to become financially painful for me.  For example, if 100,000 copies of the novella sold, I would lose nearly $190,000 with the 35% royalty. But if it sells 10 copies, I  would lose just under $19.  I saved more than that by not hiring a caterer.

Speaking of food, all that is left are the celery sticks, so I will bring this novella release party to a close. Don't worry; I will clean up the mess.

If our author is a loser, what are we?

Tess:  So obviously nobody would want to read a blog written by McGinn.  What has he sold, like about 200 books in his entire life?

Leanne: Surely more than that; 210 maybe?

Tess: [Laughs] Good one. But I mean, seriously? There could be this reverse psychology I suppose, like, here is what I did, so don't do this, young writers.

Leanne: But what would that look like? Don't do what? It's not like he drank himself into the bottom of a bottle. F. Scott Fitzgerald did that, didn't he?  He sold a few books. And McGinn didn't relocate some of his brains outside his head, like Hemingway.  He sold some stuff too.  So what did he do, or not do, that writer could learn from? McGinn, I mean, not Hemingway.

Tess: Well, he didn't try all that hard, did he? Didn't rewrite his books a million times, didn't write like a bazillion cover letters to literary agents, didn't write about vampires or the end of the world, didn't inflict his own past and his dysfunctional family on readers through fictional versions of his family.

Leanne: No, he inflicted us on them instead.

Tess: That's where he went wrong!

[Both laugh]

Leanne: But seriously, girlfriend. Surely writers can't learn how to be successful from an unsuccessful writer.  You learn about success from someone who has achieved it.  They made some of the same mistakes losers like McGinn made, but they overcame tyhem and learned from them.

Tess: Whoa, way harsh girl. This loser created me, after all. That makes him a winner in my book. Literally. Ha! And who gets to define success, anyway? Is it writing vaguely the same bestseller over and over again, with slightly different plots and dialogue, keeping the readers from going off and reading something new and original? That's success?  Maybe the obscure, undiscovered, true to their art type artists are the successful ones.  They get to keep their creations as is, rather than dumbing it down using a bestselling formula in exchange for filthy lucre.

Leanne: [doubt in her voice]  You think so?

Tess: [Shrugs] I guess. But what do I know? I'm a fictional character languishing at #915,264 in sales on Amazon.

Leanne: Literally one in a million

Tess: [Claps hands] Exactly! And not even a real book, mind you. A fictional character in an unsold, unprinted hyperspace novel. If McGinn is a loser, what am I? Now if someone else had written me…

Leanne: Or stolen you?

Tess: What?

Leanne: Well, what if someone plagiarized us for their own book and it became like this massive bestseller? Made into a movie, the whole package deal. Would that make us better characters?

Tess: [Sarcastically] Oh wow, Lee, that's deep. Where's my shovel?

Leanne: [Shrugs] I'm just saying. Being successful  doesn't make you better; it just makes you wealthier.

Tess: My Dad would say being successful does make you better.

Leanne: And suddenly you believe everything your father has told you?

Tess: Ouch. Good point. 

Leanne: Rule number one, girlfriend. Never quote your father if you want to be cool in a young adult novel.

Tess: We're not in a novel now. We're in a blog.

Leanne: Same rule applies.

Tess: [After a pause] I was thinking. Why did he send me to a Maine island anyway?

Leanne: As she gracefully changes the subject.

Tess: No, really. What's up with that? An author could think of like a bazillion or even a kajillion interesting places to send a misbehaving but oh so cool and hip teenaged girl for her sins, and he sends her to a village off the coast of Maine like totally and unrealistically frozen in time. Seriously?  And you want to redefine success, presumably to include McGinn? Do you perhaps want to rethink that?

Leanne: Maybe success is the wrong word.

Tess: You think? Does that bring us back to "Loser" maybe?

Leanne: That island worked, didn't it? If you had been dropped into some mind boggling fascinating utopia, populated by eccentric, luminous characters, would you have stood out  from the masses to be the star of the book?

[Silence]

Tess: Still… Maine?

Leanne: It worked for Stephen King.

Tess: Then why aren't his characters writing this blog?

Leanne: They're all dead, I guess, or suffering from PTSD. Or maybe they won't work for Union Scale, like we do.

Tess: Are we getting that much then?

Leanne: Dunno. I made that up, or rather, McGinn did. Maybe we're getting a percentage of his profits.

Tess: Oh. Not a cent, then.

[Both laugh]

Leanne: But listen. He writes because he enjoys it - I mean, totally because he enjoys it. Not for money or fame. So we exist because he loves us, not because we are money machines.  How can he, or for that matter we, not be more fulfilled as characters than a large dog with a bloody hand sticking out of its mouth?

Tess: Well, when you put it like that, I can see your point. It is a lovely perspective, something to hang my hat on, as Dad would say. It is magic, poetic even.

Leanne: And almost total crap.

Tess: Exactly. So I just have one question.

Leanne: Yes?

Tess: Do blogs have sequels?

Leanne: No idea. Maybe not with us in it. Hey, before we go, did I ever say that I loved you in the book, or did it get edited out?

Tess: I don't remember. But I kind of got it, whether you said it or not.

Leanne: Cool. Well, back to obscurity we go.

Tess: That statement seems to imply that we left obscurity for like, even one millisecond.

[Both laugh]