So, much like I recently did with Book of Dreams, I recently re-read my 2020 book The Failure Cascade, and made the decision to republish it.
TL;DR – here: https://amzn.to/3JwiUu7
My description of this book from a long-deleted post:
This is […] a bit of a departure because although it contains a few super-short flash pieces, there are also four much longer stories. I felt a need to stretch out some stories a bit, and spend more time in them, so instead of a bunch of sub-thousand word things, there are some that go beyond the 3000-4000 word mark.
This isn’t like a major departure from what I’ve done in the last few books, but it is starting to move away from it. For almost ten years now, I’ve tried this absurdist/gonzo thing, and I feel like I’ve painted myself in a corner a bit. I’ve burned a lot of cycles creating a persona I now can’t stand. I’m not exactly ready to go off and write murder mysteries or tales of martians or anything, but I feel like the part of my personality I’ve mined for stories in all of my books in the 2010s has been stripped away, and I need to start doing something else. I write about this a bit in the title story of the book.
This was a difficult book to pull together. I mean, the problem was this year, 2020, and everything shitty that happened to all of us. I took a little break after Ranch, and when I went off to Vegas in the first week of March, my goal was to hole up in a suite and spend seven days starting to build out this work-in-progress which was to become Atmospheres 2. And just as I got into that, the whole world ended and we got locked down and… well, you know the rest of that story, and it’s still ongoing. As the pandemic built, I worked on the book, and got it above 100,000 words. (The original was 60,000.) But the more I got into it, the more it didn’t make sense. And the idea of writing a manic book of post-apocalyptic non-linear madness wasn’t that appetizing, especially since I was spending most of my day doom-scrolling through a reality that was that but worse. So I set that book aside a couple of months ago, and started collecting together the core bits for this book.
Of course, I never finished Atmospheres 2. After about nine months of beating my head against the wall, I gave up writing entirely. But now, it looks like I’m back.
While I like Book of Dreams like 95%, I like Failure Cascade maybe 75%. It’s too “Konrath” and some of the structure isn’t as good as I’d like it. Not a ringing endorsement, but it’s going in the right direction. When I read through the book, I found maybe a dozen typos, and corrected those in the new version. If you already have this book, you don’t need to buy it again. I didn’t want to do anything more than fix the obvious typos, so I didn’t. Chances are, you didn’t buy this book, because almost nobody did. The Amazon algorithm does not work for me. Oh well.
I love the cover of this book. I took the picture in Mendocino, California, from a 2017 trip up there. It’s at Point Mendocino, looking out at Portugese Beach and Mendocino Bay. There was a really good taco place behind another restaurant there, and I can’t find it on the map anymore. I’ll have to go back at some point. I think probably three of my favorite twenty pictures I ever took are from that trip.
Anyway, it’s live now, so check it out. Now I’ve got to figure out what’s next.
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