#whorebaggery

Good morning! Here is a book! It is an Alex Rourke story, but it's not the writer's cut of Burial Ground. The (thoroughly undramatic) reasons for that we'll get to in a post tomorrow, but today - hey, here's The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned!

The full story blurb is at Amazon US and UK, but this novella picks up several years after the novels with Alex scraping out a living as the only investigatory outlet for those with no better or more legitimate channels to turn to, in the occasional company of a young woman with plenty of dark patches in her own background.

Kayleigh gave me the phone back. “I don’t have to ask why he won’t go to the cops with this, do I?”

“Even bad people are still people, K. They still need help at times, and where else are they going to go?”

“Alex Rourke: last resort of the desperate, the dying, and the damned,” she said and shook her head. “I suppose I shouldn’t complain; it’s rent week."

It's a proper, real, actual PI story. No thriller overtones. No 'he will kill again!' stop-the-baddie nonsense. And it was a lot of fun to write, especially Alex's working relationship and the dialogue therein.

(Aside before I forget, as I always do - the cover image is this one by Luis Hernandez, cc-by licensed. Changing it to make it rainy - it's near as damnit from a scene in the story - was much fun.)

The principal reason for Alex's fall from respectability is something that was hinted at in the earlier stories and in his background (he had, for those who've never read any of them, a psychotic episode/breakdown following a run of Bad Things back in the past. This breakdown was the reason he left the FBI to go private). The tricks of his vision and the weird goings-on in The Touch Of Ghosts? The sense of disconnection and obsession in The Darkness Inside? The full-blown hallucinations in Burial Ground?

Not just cheap tricks and jump scares, my friends. Alex is suffering from a serious psychotic, schizophrenia-type mental illness. He is, to use the vernacular, mad as a bag of weasels.

Not in a kooky/melodramatic/UNHOLY. ACTING. TALENT. way, though. Or at least I hope not. His mental state was slowly degenerating over the course of the novels and the illness is now an ever-present in his daily life. Which is to say: he lives with it. This is years after it became a chronic thing, and obviously he's still functioning. Life goes on. Controlling it in part with medication and in part by deliberately and carefully separating reality and hallucination as he encounters it. So that, like a migraine or a limp or whatever, it's something you manage and you put up with because you have to. Backdrop, rather than story center.

(From a writing standpoint, it does allow me to get all unreliable narrator if I want to, and I'm sure that'll come out in time. And, for what it's worth, it doesn't come up that much this time out, enough to establish it, sure, but not so much that I front-load with The Weird.)

I had something like it in mind way back when. It always struck me as a reasonable path for a series character who has to face the amount of horrible stuff as your average crimefighter. (And the "turn to drink to drown the awfulness" thing had been done to death, often schlockily.)

Fictional investigators have to face the most outlandish - and often the most improbably personal - terrors on an astonishingly regular basis that you'd assume some of them would lose it somewhere. PTSD, MPD, some kind of dissociative disorder, anything really. And yet not everyone with such mental illness is non-functional. In many cases, you adjust, and struggle on. Alex was always a guilt-driven character. I liked the idea of seeing him trying on the one hand to keep a grip on his fractured psyche while still, futilely, trying to make the world a better place in some small way.

The aim - and I don't know if I'll stick it out or not - is to do six novellas to make one full 'season' of a wider story. The second is half written at the moment. But first we need a beginning.

So this is that.

“Home.” I climbed out and stumbled round to the passenger side while she slid between seats.

“This thing’s a heap,” she said, grinding it into first gear. “It’s full of trash and the steering’s like a shopping cart. You should ditch it for something better. Like a skateboard, or a hobby horse.”

“The car’s fine.” I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch the horror unfold in the streets.

“It’s falling apart.”

I know what you’re thinking: it’s been at least a couple of weeks since you last released a book, John, so what gives? I know, mysterious stranger. Crazy, huh? So, as part of my plan to win at self-publishing by sheer force of numbers, here’s DAY ZERO for you - in the UK, the US, and Kobo, with other outlets to follow in the fullness of time.

There it is. Lovely, no?

(And yes, this should’ve been happening yesterday because Saturday is a poor time to do anything online, but both sites were grindingly slow at letting stuff go live so time slipped. Be prepared for annoying “reminder” tweets to compensate on Monday as people return to work. Sorry.)

You may have noticed that it’s not the next writer’s cut novel but another Sean Cregan, and well done for spotting that. A run of colds and other minor illnesses, and extra work shifts for my wife last week, made it less likely I’d have the editing on the next Rourke done in time for Friday, while this book - the book formerly known as Submission Thing - needed only a final proof and a cover. The cover meant flexing my rusty matte painting skills (and the resources available to them; I’m sure there’s another post there on the topic of jacket design/production), but I got there in the end. The second recut Rourke novel will follow very soon.

So what is DAY ZERO?

It’s YA, it’s sci-fi, and it’s about three 16-year-olds caught up in a sudden, overwhelming alien assault that destroys Philadelphia and leaves most of the city’s people dead, fleeing in panic, or, in the case of its children, taken. It’s about surviving the apocalypse as it happens. It’s about facing the loss of everyone you ever loved and forming new bonds in the aftermath.

It’s also about human greed and ambition cut free of society’s restraints, and about one of the invaders coming to terms with what he is, what he’s doing, and how he might stop it.

You can see the official movie-announcer-voice jacket blurb type material at yonder ebook emporium if you’re so inclined.

And why didn’t it make it on submission? Is it just rubbish?

Mostly it fell down at marketing rather than editorial (everything being done by committee at the moment, it seems): principally because it was perhaps too ‘crossover’, too much adult-centered material from the POV of the human villains to be true YA, or because it wasn’t world-buildy enough. Which in fairness it’s not; this is world-destroy-y; creating the new order of things, explaining and developing the reasons for what’s happened, that all comes after.

Further random factoid: only when I came to give it a final proofing so soon after finishing TTOG did I realize that several partial character names are reused here. By sheer coincidence - mostly I take my names from footballers (surnames) and “popular/unpopular boy/girl names for year X” lists. But the main threesome contains the “Flint” surname, the “Stef” first name, and an “Alex”, though this one’s a girl. Pure chance, but odd nonetheless.

Further random factoid #2: there’s a reference to the ‘Newport’ novels in the name of the ultimate owner of the villainous corporation. This one’s deliberate.

The short, short, short version of this entire post: today sees the launch of THE TOUCH OF GHOSTS: WRITER’S CUT in the UK and the US for pocket change. This is a massively rewritten version of the old Penguin edition and serves as the first book in the revamped Alex Rourke series, with THE DARKNESS INSIDE and BURIAL GROUND to follow very shortly indeed.

There it is, and isn’t it pretty?

I’ll touch on the actual experience and why/how of doing a complete rebuild of an old novel in a later post (because it’s a vaguely interesting process, to me at least, and because, while I’m sure it has happened, I don’t know of any other backlist books that have had a similar treatment), though I will say once again that no one should ever, ever have to scan in an entire novel using a goddamn phone. But for now, here’s some spoiler-free potted information, fact-fans:

The writer’s cut has been very heavily reworked to be more like it was originally conceived. I did three drafts in total with Penguin, and the first change required was to turn it into a whodunnit-type mystery, an investigation with suspects and red herrings and all the rest. Since the main character was (a) rather heavily affected by events and (b) not a bloody cop, this never really worked very well. He had to hang out with the police an awful lot in ways that would get everyone fired/imprisoned in real life. And it was never the point, originally. The story was about the effects of loss and guilt on people, not a puzzle.

That’s not to say my first original draft was actually capable of delivering this; I’m a much, much better writer now than I was ten years ago. Now I can do it, then, not so much.

The writer’s cut is roughly 30% shorter than the original, taking out all the extraneous waffle and giving the story a much tighter focus and snappier pace.

It’s also in a different tense. Which means just about every single line has been changed and polished. Originally they were in first person present, which at the time I liked (blame Chuck Palahniuk), but which turned a surprising number of people off. You also end up tying yourself in knots when you get into flashbacks, which isn’t such an issue in this one (they exist but… well, you’ll see), but which come into TDI in a big way as chunks of the story are set in the past.

“First book in the series”, John? Yes. If I were to do a similar job on Winter’s End (I can’t; don’t have the rights), I’d delete pretty much the whole thing. Character introduction and development was always handled in TTOG since I wrote all the books to function as standalones, and there is nothing in WE needed for the later books. On top of which, it’s first-book cheesy, has a very hackneyed ending, and it’s a bit rubbish all round. TTOG was thus reworked from the start to be a Book One.

It’s dirt cheap either temporarily, as launch-purchase-bait, or permanently as a low-risk lead in to the other books. It depends somewhat on how popular it is. At the moment it’s Amazon-exclusive, but in the long run I might even take a leaf from James’s book and price-match it into permanent free-ness. The later books will be more reasonably priced.

I’m aware that a “cut” is a film-only term. However, “writer’s draft” and “writer’s edit” sounded like an incomplete version and nonsense respectively, so I’m sticking with the technically incorrect but popularly-understood terminology.

I’m also aware that there’s a minor typo on the “also by this author” page at the very end, because there’s always a typo you spot after you’ve hit ‘save and publish’. I’m uploading a new version at this very moment, but if you get in early enough you might see a teensy (really, very unimportant) error in this most nothing-y of sections.

Credit where it's due (it's in the book, but I'll mention it here as well) - the superb base cover image is by Sylvia McFadden, cc-by licensed. Finding it spared my wife having to strike a very similar pose so I could shoot it myself, and it's rather nippy to be faffing around in the grass.

So there you have it. And I know, I know, is it worth all this effort for these books? They came out long ago, the series is dead and it’s not like I’m building up to anything ne—