Update on FPP and other shit
Hey everyone. Apologies for no updates in the last little bit. I would just like to take a few moments to promise a return to regular blogs and updates on the site.
Summer is here where I live and that means a lot of additional hours in my side gigs. Hospitality really ramps up during tourist season and leaves me with a lot less time to spend creatively and doing what I love. If something had to take a hit with a much truncated schedule, it was this. But, I can promise everyone that I have been grinding my balls off with some projects.
I am very happy with the feedback from Coward: A Novel. I have received messages, e-mails and face-to-face feedback which is so goddamned awesome. I am happy that Sam and the crew have connected with people and that the book, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t suck a fat one. There is always that fear. I mean, I think it’s dope, but that means only so much. Some of the feedback that I have heard has ranged from things like: I had to use a dictionary in the first part; Am I a character (mostly Sam); and, what happened at the end, I mean did (blank) really (blank blank blankety blank).
I love talking about it the way people love talking about their kids. So don’t hesitate to throw any comments or feedback in my direction. It means a lot and I am really grateful.
What have I been working on recently?
Oh man.
I had signed a marketing contract during the onset of Coward’s release and I am working with a couple of slick, smart cats. I fucking hate the marketing side and find it as terrifying as one might find snakes or spiders. I abhor the shit. I really hate it. So, having someone else pump my tires and fight the good one on the advertising end was a good choice. Thanks to Ashleigh and Jordan.
I immediately began reworking two novels. One that has an indefinite title but should be release in 2020. It’s a Swedish Noir Sci-fi that still needs a bit of work, but is coming along nicely. It is out of my comfort zone, but then again, everything else is.
The bigger project on the book side is the preparation of my next release called The Furies. This is a special and vastly different book.
The reason Fly Pelican Press exists was so that I, and in the future other writers, can write about whatever. I don’t mean to ladle on a sense of apathy with the angst-sounding ‘whatever’ uttered by a lethargically minded teenager. But, I mean what-the fuck-ever. I found that trying to shop the first novel and speaking to the industry types, it was difficult to propose ideas for subsequent work that did not fall in to a line of ‘sameness’. In the literary world, at least from what I saw, if you write a book, the next book can’t stray too far from the previous. You have to maintain a sameness in genre and the branding of your name as it ties in to your work. I don’t think that I could or can write in the same vein over and over. Seems boring. Seems too glued-together for someone of my unhinged status. Fly Pelican, then, was a platform that would let me write about some wild-ass shit one day, a grounded narrative the next, and then something different the next. The only link between them is that ya boy wrote them, so you know they’re gonna be great. Affected egotism aside, we are all complex beings who don’t all see the linear and homogeneous aspects of life; our desires and ambitions may be at odds with each other; we are fickle and fucked-up, to a man.
So.
If Coward was a satirical, dark comedy, The Furies is a dark, urban, young adult book. It drops September 1st and I can promise that there is humour, violence, drugs, family and all the social dynamics that a mid-90’s story set in a blue-collar town promises.
We have been working on getting an early copy for reviewers to have a crack at before the release and get a leg-up on promotion that was absent for Coward. That means hardcore editing, cover art, formatting and the like. I learned a lot from Coward and made some changes to the process. One day, I might not get ulcers. Yay.
I have also been working on a new series. A possible trilogy of novels or a series of novellas called the February Sessions. The first book is called Scumbag Rehab and it is moving a healthy clip. It’s a hard-boiled type first person narrative, like the detective novels of the mid-20th century. But Feb ain’t no cop. It’s gritty, irreverent and very dark. It would be closer to the third novel I have planned for this year’s release Becoming Buddha. I have really enjoyed writing it and sacrificed the blogging to strike while the sword is beaming rouge.
On top of those, I went through a spate of shorts that we (the marketing team mostly) has been suggesting for journal release. I have to holler at my already-overburdened editor: the beautiful and talented Syd, to help me perfect a couple for the website. I would like to release a couple throughout the summer. But, like we always say here in the existential wasteland of nihilism and side-gigs: “No Promises”. The next couple are sure to offer again another purview at the styles and subjects I have been dicking around with in the old cantaloupe.
Finally, big fucking news. An old friend of mine read Coward and was made a fan. He asked me if I intended to write a screenplay. I think everything I write is worthy of being a movie and it was very much in my mind, for later. I don’t know how to write a screenplay, that shit is something you go to school for. It’s an art in it’s own and something that I would have to buckle down and concentrate on.
But he knows how.
My friend Kevin Hawkins and myself have been working for the last bit on Coward: A movie! It takes much of the book but will evidently change things here and there to make it a better fit in a cinema and not be 40 hours long, apparently that is a run time that is not marketable in North America. Pussies.
We have made some amazing work and my dude is a stud. He saw the novel and used his knowledge of film to hammer out the beats and the scenes and we’ve been conversing over email and writing the bastard in a coffee shop in Vancouver. I’m excited and it’s starting to take a real shape. I am very eager to see what our minds can do and how we can make Coward a captivating watch.
So, that is what I have been up to. Thick schedule and I haven’t seen my mates in months. I apologize if I haven’t seen or spoken to you but I have had a tunnel vision that has kept me roped to the computer whenever I haven’t been working.
Thanks for your patience and I’m sorry for cussing or not cussing enough,
Papa Croft
