(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.
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.”
Well, my total worldwide sales figures for Your New Church Family have skyrocketed to… six. I have now sold six copies of the novel I promised my younger self I’d write all the way back in 2015. It’s mutated quite a lot in the last nine years, but I think my 2015 younger self would be proud, even if my 1992 younger self, the one who drew those depressing and violent cartoons that the novel is extremely loosely based on, would seriously question why there wasn’t enough punching and explosions in it.
(1992 Me would probably also be a little disappointed that I changed the characters around from his thinly veiled depictions of guys he wished were his friend and girls he had crushes on, and got rid of most, if not all, the references to Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Simpsons. Sorry, lonely teenage rebel, I don’t want to be sued or harangued by former classmates asking if such and such character was based on them. It’s bad enough I named some minor characters after random monster names swiped from the manual of Super Metroid which might actually be trademarked by Nintendo.)
The funny thing about all of this is that, looking back at all the old posts on this blog, I realize I was far more concerned with what software and hardware to write my book with. I was obsessed with the idea that I needed to find the right ancient computer and the right archaic DOS word processor to get my brain into the writing zone. And indeed, I spent far too much time and money tinkering with old, limited laptops to strip them down to the bare distraction-free essentials, only to be needlessly distracted by the complexities and frustrations of running Linux and FreeDOS on old, limited hardware. Then I tried the fabled AlphaSmart portable word processor, which worked great for a while, but I ended up getting frustrated by being unable to adjust the dim, pocket-calculator-esque screen to a viewing angle suitable for an adult and typing on a crappy keyboard made to be banged on by children. Then I replaced that setup with a Bluetooth keyboard and an old Android phone with disabled networking. It seemed like unless I shilled out megabucks for the Freewrite e-ink word processor, I was never going to find something that I could put in a backpack, take anywhere, and meet all of my writer’s use cases.
But you know what I discovered that got me to writing? That worked when all of these other technological solutions failed me? That I could do anywhere, at any time, on any screen or scrap of paper I had lying around?
All I had to do… was…
JUST. FUCKING. WRITE.
That’s all it took, but it took many years of starts and stops and restarts and dealing with work and personal trauma and a move across the state and a nervous breakdown brought on by a toxic work environment to figure that out. I just had to stop procrastinating, put down the video games and endless YouTube videos I was using to distract myself from my inner turmoil, and let my inner turmoil out on the page. And you know what word processor I used to complete my magnum opus? It wasn’t from the 1980s nor was it an esoteric Unix text editor made for people with five hands and Ghost in the Shell typing fingers. It was Microsoft Word. I used what I had available. Every work, school, and library computer I’ve ever used had a copy, and it was so easy to sync the drafts to OneDrive. I stopped worrying and learned to love the Evil Empire. It embraced me, I was extended… but I have not been extinguished.
I did switch to LibreOffice near the end, however, mostly because it comes with a built-in EPUB exporter, and a PDF exporter that works so much better than Word’s. I spent all weekend messing around with the manuscript document trying to get it to fit Amazon’s margin and font requirements, and it spent forever to do what I needed to do in Word, but LibreOffice Writer just did it in like three clicks. I also made a perfectly passable even if completely amateurish book cover in GIMP, the open-source equivalent to Photoshop. I am aware that none of these programs are substitutes for professional typesetting and desktop publishing solutions but for a first self-published novel by a completely unknown author I doubt anyone will notice too much. The important thing is that it’s up now, and I am already starting on reviving and rewriting the sequel to this book I started during the pandemic. I’m sure 2020 me will be happy I no longer have to write around the reality about everyone having to wear masks and being unable to leave the house.
After all this time, I have finally decided to dust off this ancient blog and reopen it to the world. It’s been so long. It seems like all of my projects end up like this–I get super-enthusiastic about them for a while, but then my interest wanes or the chaos in my life swallows up all my attention, and next thing I know, they’ve been confined to the dustbin of my life. All my projects except one, that is. That’s the reason I’m writing in my blog again now. My novel is complete. After almost a decade I have a thing I can put on Amazon and sell to the world. Here it is, Your New Church Family by S. P. Hoctor.
(And I’ve already made a sale! I’m a sold author!)
The book has undergone numerous changes since I started writing a book to tie together and modernize the sketchy characters and vague storylines I created for my comic strip back in high school. The book has even undergone several revisions since I completed the first draft. I’m looking at this original draft I posted back in 2017 and I’m kind of shocked at the violence and darkness and bleakness this original vision presented. In the original draft, Jack’s mother died a horrific death on the very first page, Jack’s father was even more cynical and outright racist than the person he would eventually become, and when Jack enters the desert cabin, he’s as much afraid of being eaten by rats and wolves as he is being away from cell service and Starbucks. Let’s just say I had some issues I was working out back then.
The original plot was going to be a 1980s teen-movie-esque story where Jack struggled to fit in with the locals of Creosote Canyon, punching out the high school’s bullies and dating the bullies’ girlfriends with furious vengeance only to find himself in hot water with the bullies’ parents, the rich elites who held the town of Creosote Canyon under an iron grip. Run out of town on a rail, Jack and his new friends, comprised of Dylan, the beached surfer dude, Carl, a sullen, moody super-genius who has listened to far too much Jordan Peterson, and Heather, the sassy and street-wise girl who had formerly dated the head bully, were to head back to Jack’s home city to take on the drug lords/real estate investors/tech industry bros/crooked cops/secret society who either murdered Jack’s mom or drove her to suicide. I hadn’t gotten far enough to figure out who the villains were intended to be. It was for the best though, as my spouse pointed out to me exactly how cliche and dark this story was shaping into.
Then my spouse told me, “Don’t kill off the mom. That’s the most stereotypical thing in any story. If you don’t want her around, find another way to move her away from the action.”
Around the mid-2010s as you know, it was a tumultuous time for the LGBT community, with gay marriage bans being overturned in 2014 and the cultural backlash of homophobia and bigotry that ensued from this decision by the Religious Right that helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016. I realized that if you wanted to separate family members from each other, the easiest way to do it was to introduce religion into the equation. So I introduced the story conceit of Jack’s parents being divorced, and Jack’s mom having taken up with a conservative megachurch pastor and becoming so blinded by evangelical rhetoric that she would ship her son off to his drunken, deadbeat father living in an unsafe cabin in a no-name town in Arizona sooner than deal with the fact that he was LGBT. I realize this is a bad look for her, seeing as she is the only major Hispanic character other than Jack himself, but I left it vague enough that there might be a redemption arc in the future.
And having the love of his mother, the support of his online communities, and his entire religious footing–one foot in the Catholicism he was born in, and one half in the evangelical Protestantism his mother and stepdad were a part of–stripped away from Jack at such a young age, it made total sense that Jack would need to find another religion in order to fill the holes these left behind. The Church of Universal Love and Truth started out as just a quirky but mostly harmless sect that appeared in a few chapters of the first draft. It borrowed heavily from the church I was a part of growing up in a small town in the Southwest. Jack would start going to the church to impress Heather, get far too involved in it for his own good, and Alex would break him out of it before Jack was shipped off to become a missionary in Tora Bora or wherever. Eventually the church and this sideplot became bigger and bigger until it became the entire story. I had to figure out what would appeal so much to Jack to make him sacrifice his entire previous morals and belief systems, and the dark secrets behind the placid smiles and wide-eyed stares of the parishioners that would compel him to make the decisions he would make at the end of the book.
The Church and its numerous tendrils would mutate everything it came into contact with. What changed most of all were Jack’s friends, who were no longer the archetypes from my original comics I drew inspiration from. Dylan Decards was still the same sweet, slightly befuddled Pauly Shore-esque surfer dude character from the comics, but now he was a troubled church-going teen torn between his life in the church and the mandates of his own heart. He also gained an entire family, with similar punny “card” names, each of whom were also victims of the religion in their own ways. Heather Doyle, the sassy street-wise girl based on a girl I had a crush on in high school, got split into two sisters. The sister named Heather Bubger, a rebellious teen dating the football team’s quarterback under the pretense of “converting” him to the faith someday, eventually would get her parts cut out so much so that I almost considered removing her entirely, but as I have plans for her in the sequel, I opted against it. The other sister, a deeply devout girl named Brianna Bubger, became Jack’s primary love interest–and one of the story’s main antagonists.
Carl Delaney, a stereotypical nerd character, was the most changed of all of them. He was completely reworked into Carrie A. E. Layson, a super-genius born with numerous birth defects who solved the many problems of their life by covering their body with jury-rigged home-made cybernetic enhancements. In addition, in honor of my spouse, I made them nonbinary and transgender. They were placed in the novel as a sort of lesson to Jack on self-sufficiency and expressing one’s independence, and to reinforce a theme of using technology to redefine your place in society, but they quickly became the breakout character of the whole novel (according to my beta readers, at least.) And yes, Carrie Layson is kind of a punny take on “kyrie eleison,” and the name was originally meant for the religious, pious, and meek character who would eventually become Brianna, but I liked the name so much I gave it to the atheist, outspoken, and mercilessly sarcastic cyborg.
Numerous subplots from the original draft were excised, including one where Jack joins the football team, and he and Carrie bond while rebuilding the high school’s scorpion mascot costume into a cool cybernetic power suit that helps Jack fight bullies. I also removed about five pages of travelogue description concerning Creosote Canyon and the fictional region of Arizona, Chozodia County, that the story is located in. I’m sure people will figure out that the story is set in a small desert town well enough. But I think what’s left is a pretty darn good story.
I will continue to post here while I figure out how to market this book and find its audience. Please stay tuned. And if you want to read more, head on over to Your New Church Family’s Amazon marketplace page to pick up your own copy for Kindle today.
Looking at my stats, it seems like my random articles on obsolete technology, like when I discussed WordPerfect 5.1 in Rearranging My Pencils and the games that pushed the Atari 2600 to its limits (parts 1 and 2) have been getting an amazing amount of hits, years after I wrote them. Meanwhile, few if any people have read the excerpt to my novel. I’m not criticizing anyone for not reading it–it’s 9,000 words long and it isn’t even a complete story. I’m just thinking that maybe there’s more demand for informative, entertaining, concise pieces on the history of computing and video games than there is for yet another coming-of-age novel. I’m not giving up on Sullen Teenage Rebels–I’m 120,000 words too late to just dump the project completely–but I am definitely looking into writing more stuff about the games that time forgot. Thanks for listening.
I thought you all might enjoy a small sample of the thing I have been working on for the last 3 years. This is just the beginning though. There is so much I have to go through in order to produce a quality draft. I have also decided on a pen name: S. P. Hoctor. Those of you from the Grand Canyon or Williams, AZ area will probably figure out the significance of the name, and if you aren’t, it’s an intersection just north of Williams: “Espee Rd” turns into “Hoctor Rd” at State Route 64. But I digress. Please enjoy.
[Trigger warning: suicide, drug use, violence, cactus]
S. P. Hoctor, The Wandering Nerd 