(Is the Kindle store compatible with the readout on my cybernetic glasses? Only one way to find out!)
My long-awaited sequel novel to Your New Church Family is out now! Enjoy another adventure into the rough but quirky world of Creosote Canyon as seen through the eyes of spiritually seeking 15-year-old Jack Dinero. I listened to everyone’s feedback about the first book, so this sequel has over 90% less whining, 50% less working through the author’s personal childhood trauma, at least 1 new joke, and over 300% more cyborgs! There’s even a car chase, a fistfight or two, and a lone band of heroes standing up against a enraged mob in a last ditch effort to save their family. Coffee after Church with Cyborgs is now available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book or as a printed paperback. Get your copy today: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CWTH7GHN
And if you haven’t started the Jack Dinero series yet, the original novel, Your New Church Family, is free as an e-book download on the Kindle Store until Friday. Amazon lets me give away my own book five days out of every 90 so here it is again if you haven’t already read it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6STS611
Thank you all for supporting me and my art. I hope you’re all having a great day!
After almost a year of writing, deleting, rewriting the things I deleted, editing whatever was left, and agonizing over margins and headers and footers and PDF export settings, I am now ready to share my sequel to the world. Following straight on the heels of the end of Your New Church Family, Coffee after Church with Cyborgs sees our teenage protagonist Jack Dinero fighting a form of religious oppression even more insidious and dangerous than cult mind control: neo-fascist hate gangs committing acts of stochastic terrorism against Jack’s cybernetic friend Carrie Layson and the rest of the Cyborg-American community. However, confronting this horrific new form of violence will force Jack to confront the darkest desires lurking in his heart as well as come to terms with his feelings for the smart, adorable cyborg he is desperately trying to protect, as well as his former girlfriend, Brianna Bubger, who has been forced to shun him by her church, but who might still have feelings for him….
Jack must also resist the temptations of mysterious older woman, Lori Brinstar, wife of the richest man in Creosote Canyon, an intoxicating femme fatale who may hold the keys to solving the mystery of these baseball bat-wielding zealots, or the keys to destroying the Dinero family altogether…
I have set a release date on Amazon of Tuesday, April 2nd. I needed time to make sure everything was as good as it could be, and if I released it the day before April 2nd, people would think it was some kind of April Fool’s prank. It will be available as a Kindle e-book and as a paperback. If you want to pre-order the Kindle version, you can do so at this link. For some reason, you can’t pre-order paperbacks, so I will release the link on that day. I don’t know if I am going to order a bunch of copies to sell as autographed versions like I did last time, but if anyone is interested in that, please let me know.
In the meantime, you can read the first three chapters here. This is a special preview version in PDF format that will match the formatting and style of the print paperback. This will take you to a third-party website for download. Once I get a few bucks, I’ll upgrade my WordPress subscription so I can host files more… seamlessly. This is a much-rewritten version of my first preview, plus the next chapter where Jack finally finds the church he was looking for… only to have his post-worship brunch plans rudely interrupted. Want to know more? Read the preview, and then buy the book!
I’ve always been more of a visual medium guy than a literature guy. I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but I’ve watched far more movies than I’ve read books in my life. I prefer scenes with dialogue and action over long-winded descriptions of natural settings. I find it hard to actually do something unless I see someone show me the steps first. And I had always intended the adventures of Jack Dinero and his merry band of Sullen Teenage Rebels to be a comic strip, an animated series, and a video game franchise. Jack Dinero was even born in the crude cartoons I drew for my high school’s newspaper back in the 1990s. There was only one problem: I couldn’t draw for sh*t.
(Yes, that is Jack Dinero, far removed from the suave, upbeat, spiritual romantic he would later become.)(more…)
What must it have been to be a Christian convert in the first century? Just imagine you’re an average Greek guy living in Hellenized Asia Minor around the year 60 or so. You’ve heard all the stories about the Greek gods since youth, and you sacrifice the firstlings of your flocks at the Temple of Zeus, and attend festivals at the temples of the local gods of your village, and sometimes you throw in an obol or a drachma now and then at the fountain in the Temple of the Unknown God just to be on the safe side, and you also worship the deified Roman Emperor because those angry Italians with spears and brushes on their helmets make you, but you’re not particularly religious. You just go to work every day, raise your family, have a gay lover on the side like all Greek noblemen did back then, but you generally leave the fine points of who and what God is to the philosophers and the priests.
You know the Jews have some very particular ideas about religion, but you don’t really mingle with them since they tend to keep to themselves, they never attend any of your village’s communal pork chop barbecues they have at the Temple of Zeus, and have strange practices you might find abhorrent including chopping off pieces of baby boys’ penises to dedicate them to God or whatever. So they do their thing and you do yours.
And you may have heard some rumors about this group called the “Christians,” who are kind of like Jews but not really, but all you know about them is that they meet in secret to eat their god’s flesh and drink their god’s blood, and for some reason the Romans hate their guts because every so often they round a bunch of them up and feed them to the lions. To be fair it didn’t take much enticement for the Romans to commit mass slaughter of entire groups of people, but you know you yourself would never intentionally sign up for that.
And then one day you’re at the marketplace and you see this Greek-speaking Jew named Paul preaching to a huge crowd about how he had some based and redpilled gospel that would really blow your mind. It turned out this Jewish guy named Jesus, who preached a bunch of stuff in a far-off province when your grandfather was a boy, was not just a carpenter, but the son of God, like the One God. And that God was not just God of the province of Judea, but actually the God of the whole universe, and all the gods you grew up worshipping were just false idols perpetuated by the ruling classes to control the populace. And this Jewish carpenter god got the Romans so pissed at him that they executed him in the most brutal and horrific way possible, but that was great because he needed to die to save us all from something called “sin,” which you had no idea about before, but apparently it had something to do with having sex for any reason than procreation, eating meat sacrificed to idols, attending smutty Greek plays and gladiator fights, and doing the bare minimum of genuflections at the statue of the deified Caesar to make sure the Romans didn’t crucify you too.
But if you gave up all that fun stuff, and also (preferably) gave up all your possessions to become a wandering ascetic missionary for this foreign god, you would get to live forever in the Jewish god’s heaven when you died, but anyone who didn’t convert would burn for all eternity in a torturous prison hell that made the worst conceptions of Hades and Tartarus seem like a country club by comparison. So even if you converted, the chance of your family and your lover and your neighbors and your emperor and your favorite gladiators joining you up there would be right around zero. But all you had to do to gain eternal life was make a lifelong commitment to an executed foreign terrorist, meet in secret every 7 days to commit ritual cannibalism, read ancient Hebrew scriptures that were nowhere near as exciting as the stories of Hercules and Theseus, give up to all of your money to the poor and to any wandering apostles who came by, not participate in society for fear of being led astray by pagan ideas and false idols, and end up on the Empire’s shit list the next time they run out of lion chow. But at least this Paul guy didn’t make you mutilate your own penis, unlike some of the other Christian guys like Peter and James also ranting in the agora and writing angry epistles to your bishops, all fighting with each other over how much of the Jewish law non-Israelite converts had to abide by, or about ideas like whether Jesus was one god, half a god, two gods, or actually three gods in one.
Would you sign up for this? I wouldn’t have. I’m at a loss to understand why anyone would. Many did, people from all walks of life and all corners of the Greco-Roman world became Christian, fighting persecution and martyrdom and untold hardships for hundreds of years until they themselves became the persecutors. It’s hard to imagine in this day and age when Christianity has been an institution in our society for so long now, and everybody’s heard about Jesus whether they wanted to or not, but I’m probably imagining that this was a hard sell to a lot of people in the ancient world.
It’s still a hard sell today, but for completely different reasons now than in the 1st Century. Christianity has become so broken through thousands of years of schisms that it’s impossible to know what you need to do or believe to become a Christian. No matter which denomination you join there are a thousand other denominations that claim that you will burn in hell for joining them. I know Jesus said that he didn’t come to bring peace but rather a sword, and that strife and division were just part of the program when it came to him, but you’d think there would be some consistency. And Christianity can’t run from its brutal and bloody history. For every Christian martyr who was fed to the lions, there are hundreds of innocent people who were burned at the stake for believing things incorrectly, or murdered by Crusaders in a land grab, or lynched for loving the “wrong” person, or brutalized and tortured in a residential school designed to erase native children’s culture and dignity. And there are many Christians in great positions of power who want to return America to the days when it was socially acceptable to set people on fire for not being part of their in-group, and lovingly watch them burn in the name of Jesus.
When I think of Christians I don’t think of Jesus, or Paul, or Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or even C.S. Lewis. I can’t even see my friends who I know love Jesus with all their hearts. I see people holding up signs that read “God hates Fags.” I see megachurch pastors who cheat on their spouses while at the same time exhorting their parishioners to hate and shun trans people. I see televangelists grifting their followers for private jets, and flaunting the 1st Amendment to promote political agendas. I see “faith healers” toying with people’s lives and health for a quick buck. I see millionaire “Biblical scholars” refusing to open up their stadium-sized chapels to people who have lost their homes in hurricanes. I see the greedy nonagenarian hands of the Twelve Apostles of the Mormon Church, who own billions of dollars in private property, but who tell poor people in Africa that they need to tithe until it hurts. And I see the bloated carcass of our 45th President, who has a hundred “prophets” and “spiritual advisers” still to this day telling gullible people that he’s God’s anointed priest-king while he is currently under investigation for fraud, rape, selling state secrets, and fomenting armed insurrection. And they do this all in the name of a man, a Palestinian Jewish peasant who advocated for the redistribution of wealth and the equality of every human being, who they would probably have deported if they ever saw him face to face.
So yeah… I’d love to be a follower of Christ, but like the person listening to Paul at the marketplace, I can’t be sure that the ride is worth the cost of admission. The cost being having to be in the same club as Fred Phelps, Joel Osteen, John Hagee, and Donald Trump. I’d basically have to give up my conscience, which I doubt Jesus would approve of anyway. At any rate, I think being eaten by lions would be preferable.
I have been going through all my old content throughout the years to find stuff to add to my portfolio of writing and I came across this little story I wrote in the dark days of 2009, when I was a night auditor at Zion Lodge in Zion National Park. I was obsessed at the time with playing Pac-Man and getting to the secret kill screen, and thought I could write a story that used the classic video game as symbolism for life. I had to dig through Facebook’s secret kill screens to get this short story back from the depths of 14 years ago. So I am presenting it here so fans of this story as well as fans of Jack Dinero can enjoy it anew.
NOTE: This story was written 14 years ago and does not reflect who I am today or where I am as a writer. There are bits of swearing as well as adult situations. Also while there is a character in Your New Church Family named Randall Tonberry Gravitt, he is not the same character as the Randall Tonberry in this novel. I just reused the name. I also seem to have used a lot of clichéd dialogue markers like “she flashed a wry smile” a lot when I could have just said “she said.” Feel free to judge me though and leave your hate mail in the comments below.
(Book II’s Presbyterian Church is based, at least architecturally, on the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona.As the fictitious Chozodia County where Jack Dinero lives is essentially a pastiche of both the Victor Valley in Southern California and Yavapai County in Arizona, I only felt it appropriate to appropriate Sedona’s most famous Christian landmark.)
I know I haven’t posted much in the last month. I have been working very hard on the draft of my next novel, which is tentatively titled Coffee and Donuts with Cyborgs. In this book I’m leaning harder into both the sci-fi aspects of Carrie Layson’s cyborg identity and using it as a metaphor to describe my feelings about the quest for identity in general, especially given all of the terrible things going on to erase the identities of trans and genderqueer people right now in the United States. Since it has been a month and a half since I released the first book, I felt it was the right time to release an excerpt to show you all what I have been doing. This is the first chapter, in which our point-of-view character Jack Dinero attempts to find a new church to go to, and runs up against hilarious sendups of various real Christian denominations. (Not just the fake one I made up in the first novel.) In the process he is struggling to reconcile his own notions of identity in a conservative Arizona town that doesn’t like his looks or his race or his sexual orientation. It should be easy enough to follow along with even if you haven’t finished Book I.
SPOILERS for those of you who haven’t finished Your New Church Family, but Jack doesn’t join the cult in the end. This isn’t really a spoiler; I’m sure you all knew this was a foregone conclusion if you read more than 17 pages in. If you care about other spoilers, the excerpt will be behind a “Read More” tag. Bear in mind it’s still the first draft and many things may change in the process of my rewriting and editing this. I’d be happy for any and all input.
It’s not my novel, nor my essays, nor all the poetry I put on my Geocities page when I was a college-aged cringemeister in the 1990s. It’s a little article from all the way back in 2014, called “Top 10 Games That Pushed the ATARI 2600 to its Limits, Part 2.” Somehow this list of weird games that have slightly-better graphics than the rest of the Atari library has been viewed over 20,000 times in the last 9 years. Even today, it keeps getting viewed on average 10-15 times a day. I don’t even feel like this is my best work. I just kind of slapped it together because I wanted to be a video game blogger at the time and I decided a Buzzfeed-esque listicle about impressive yet overambitious titles like Space Shuttle from the back end of the 2600 era would make for a good thing to put in my portfolio.
And I split the article into two parts because I wanted to get engagement, as was the style at the time, like “tune in next week to see the really good stuff.” But hardly anyone by comparison has read Part 1, according to the WordPress stats page anyway. I guess that’s just how the algorithm goes. In retrospect I should have just combined them into one article because nobody really cares. If I wrote it today with today’s clickbait nonsense in mind it would probably be titled “39 Forbidden Secret Techniques Atari Developers Do With Their Hardware for Maximum Performance; #17 Is Ribbed for Your Pleasure” and it would just be a bunch of screenshots of Atari games and some sexual innuendo about bank switching and interfacing with the joystick ports with huge banner and video ads after every picture.
But if I really were chasing the likes and the ad revenue, I wouldn’t have spent the last nine years writing a very commercially unviable teen novel containing numerous profanities and blasphemies, set in a fictional small town, starring a character I invented in middle school by drawing black straight hair on a notebook doodle of Bart Simpson and making him a too-cool-for-school, bully-punching, one-liner-quipping Mary Sue in a blatant representation of my real life. (I’ll have to share those comics with the world sometime if I don’t die from embarrassment first.) I didn’t even publish it under my real name for fear the cult I was a member of in high school would somehow track me down and send missionaries to my door.
Even so, maybe I need to diversify my writing portfolio a bit, if nothing else, to attract people to Your New Church Family and the other things I have in the pipeline. Maybe it’s time to give the Atari fans what they want. Stay tuned to this spot for further blasphemy… and maybe a 1970’s video game console doing sick, twisted things that nature never intended…
…for my second novel. I was going to call it Echoes of Angels. I’ve always been a fan of the song “Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon and thought it was an excellent turn of phrase for a novel in which young Jack Dinero goes deep into investigating the dark past of the Church of Universal Love and Truth. I could then follow it up with another lyric from the same song for Book 3. I could have called it Anger of Angels. Well, a quick Google search reveals that there are over half a dozen books for sale right now with those exact titles:
I guess it’s back to the old drawing board. There’s still more ’90s songs I can crib from. If I still want to go with the angel theme, I could always go with When Angels Deserve To Die from System of a Down’s “Chop Suey.”
Yesterday I posted my original version for the cover art of Your New Church Family, a blurry impressionistic image of a dirt biker on a desert road in front of a giant saguaro cactus created by the DALL-E mini AI art program, on my Facebook page, and someone made an interesting comment. Paraphrasing, they said, “AI cannot create. It can only iterate. It’s basically a plagiarism machine.” And then I thought, “Aren’t we all, really? Is my work not so different from everything that’s come before it?” On a basic level, it follows a standard young adult coming-of-age trope about an individual at odds with his community. Teenagers clashing with their parents over values and morality is a trope as old as time, as well as the standard stock trope of an “evil cult” insidiously corrupting the hearts and minds of the townsfolk. ChatGPT could probably whip something up just like it in seconds.
But it wouldn’t understand what it was like growing up queer in a small conservative town where the only acceptance you could find came at the hands of a church congregation with obscured and suspicious motivations. It would never feel the feeling of finding yourself even more alone when you realize your new friends who had showered you with love and praise merely seconds ago would turn on you in an instant if you failed to tow the party line.
ChatGPT may one day write an Oscar-winning script, but it no more understands the need to find your own truth in a world polluted with lies than your average human scriptwriter living in L.A. understands the motivations of blue-collar rural Americans living in fly-over country. A novel written by AI might sell a million times more copies than my current grand total of ten (which includes the proof copy I bought to test the viability of publishing paperbacks on Amazon) but it never needed to write the book in the first place.
If Your New Church Family never sells a single more copy, it’s important to me because I wrote it, it helped me resolve my feelings while going through a dark emotional place, and my hope is that it finds a community that needs to hear its core message: that you are not alone, and there are people who will accept you for who you are as long as you’re willing to do the work necessary to accept yourself, and to see things the way they are rather than the way you want them to be. And that sometimes the alluring promises of the in-crowd aren’t worth the price of admission, and you have to work out for yourself whether they are or not. Maybe that’s not the most original sentiment in the world, but it’s what I needed to say, and what I needed to hear. And that’s why I write. And that is why AI will never replace me. I feel that someday, like Carrie Layson said in my book, that human and robot will merge into a glorious hybrid of metal and dreams, but until then, until AI can develop a serious neurotic complex and a deepseated need for approval and validation, it will never replace the need for humans to do art.
For those of you interested in the kind of writing in this novel I’ve written, I have decided to publish a free excerpt. This one is from the middle of the book, but it should be easy to understand what’s going on. It encapsulates all the major themes of the novel: the starkness and inhospitality of the desert, Jack Dinero’s strained relationship with his parents, and the hypnotic pull of the cult, personified in the seductively adorkable personality of Brianna Bubger. I pulled from the middle of the book because you can read the first three chapters in the Kindle preview. If you like what you’ve read so far, check out the Amazon page and/or consider subscribing to this blog for more dispatches from Creosote Canyon and S. P. Hoctor.
S. P. Hoctor, The Wandering Nerd 