Life, Love, and Full Contact Sports

Intro to this Substack

This is where I’ll be posting chapters from my time-travel sports adventure coming-of-age conspiracy thriller. Before I tell you about it, I want to share what a beta reader said about it:

“As a precocious elementary kid, I wish I'd have read what I've read so far of Paradox over the many Hubbard-style sci-fi and Grisham-style thrillers I found all over the alleyways of my parents' gallery. Thankfully I'd read enough masculine fiction to know when to fight against bullies and how to handle them, but I do prefer how you lay things out in Paradox.

As a man who would one day like to have kids but have not received much fathering, what I've read so far has been quite educational to me.

But most importantly, it's been fun.”

I quoted those comments because they suggest Paradox hit the target.

You creative types out there will understand this: I just had to write this book. It defies genre limitations. It is ambitious well beyond the average 21st Century attention span. It’s outside the boundaries of the stuff I built my “brand” (paid link) with. But I couldn’t reason myself out of writing it. I was overwhelmed with the compulsion to do it. So literally for years, I kept working on the rough draft. There were multiple long-term interruptions when life happened and other endeavors took precedent. But I kept going back to it. It became my hobby, and I didn’t want it to end.

And it didn’t.

I reached 50 chapters and my mind was still constructing miles of road ahead. 70 chapters and no end in sight. 90 chapters. Wow, this is a doorstop. (Or a “behemoth,” as my proofreader called it.) 100 chapters. 110. Oh, the climax is here. Dang. This means the end is near.

I write fiction that I hope readers find fun. (Some don’t, but a lot do.) Even when the setting is dreary, I want the story to be enjoyable. I avoid postmodern “realism” 99% of the time because real life is depressing enough already, for most of us. We don’t need more bleak hopelessness—what we need is an escape from that.

Beyond the fun, I wrote this as if I was writing a story for my 13, 15, 17, 19, or 21 year old self. Heck, even my 30 and 35 year old self. Since the time travel in the narrative is either impossible or at least inaccessible to me IRL, I can never deliver it to that young self. So my young self didn’t have a fun doorstop-sized novel that could teach him all the important lessons his father failed to pass down and he would have to learn the hard way—often after it was too late.

The next best thing was to make it available to the current younger generations of boys and men who have been left to figure out the fundamentals of manhood on their own.

You know: the most functionally illiterate demographic in America.

And then, there’s the mass of this behemoth. Here’s something I blogged about it last year:

“My Great American Novel (which I have been calling Paradox lately) has 123 chapters and about 1585 pages. The page count may go down a bit as I edit, but that’s still Tolstoy length.

A year or more ago, when the size of the story was obvious, I pondered how I would ever market such a book, who would take a chance on reading it, and what a fair price would be to ask for it. I soberly faced the reality that there really isn’t a market for it. Nobody’s gonna buy a doorstop-sized novel in a male-friendly genre unless the author name is Tom Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin. But even those guys don’t write books this huge…

Break it up and make it a series, of course. Right? The entire publishing shitshow market is geared toward series fiction. And our functionally illiterate culture has cultivated attention spans that can’t handle much beyond a TikTok video or Facebook post. A 1500+ page BOOK????????? One of those crazy outdated relics with pages, and words? I might as well have written a harpsichord concerto in the Baroque style.

Making Paradox a series is a no-brainer, on the surface.

Trouble with that is, this is a time-traveling sports adventure saga that follows the protagonist from his pre-adolescent years into his late ’20s. So, by fragmenting it, the first one or two books in the series would technically be “young adult” or “coming of age” time-traveling sports adventure (and [gasp! the horror!] without any lesbians, vampires, or Kickass Womyn Warriors). The other series installments would not be. So the unicorns male coming-of-age readers might feel cheated because of where the first book or two leave off. This was not written to be episodic. There is one character arc–not three or four. And the readers…both of them…besides myself, who would buy and read grown-up time-travel sports adventure sagas, might never even begin the series because young adult just does not float their boat.

I shoved those concerns aside and kept writing the story I wanted to tell.

But now here I am: editing the rough draft and still clueless about how to market Paradox and how much to charge for it.“

I did finally choose the episodic option, and the first three books in the series (paid link)are published. Six books total, fourth coming out in April, most likely.

Honestly, it’s been a win so far. This was a labor of love/joyous hobby, so in a way I’ve already got my reward. On top of that, each published book so far has been a bestseller on Amazon. They’ve got very few reader ratings and even fewer reviews, which is disappointing. But again, writing it was its own reward. I should be happy this series has collected any fans at all. Any reviews at all. I guess its my competitive nature that drives me to yearning for crazy viral success.

Anyway, I plan to share sample chapters right here on this Substack. Maybe some posts about inspiration behind it, some flexing over what success its had, deleted scenes, author’s commentary, ideas for sequels beyond the series I may never have time to write, etc. I would love to get readers’ thoughts in the comments—maybe even spark some interesting conversations…but that may take some time since I’m starting from scratch on Substack and y’all don’t know me; possibly never heard of me.

Today is a Thursday, so I’ll try to make Thursday my day for posting Paradox-related content.