I've only learned in the last 20 minutes that there's such a thing as National Book Lovers' Day, but it has made me reflect on my history with reading and writing, so I wanted to spend a bit of time today discussing it.
Input (a love letter, not a credentials list): I started reading at the age of two, and by the time I reached first grade I was reading at a college level. I read Michael Crichton and Stephen King and Stephen Hawking, John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe and Frankenstein and Dracula and J.R.R. Tolkien and Isaac Asimov and John Steinbeck Then when I was 13 and living on Maui, one of my most beloved teachers introduced me to Neil Gaiman, who quickly became my favorite author and comics writer (although I'd also become enamored with the comics of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Katsuhiro Otomo). I sat and absorbed George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway (of whom I'm still not a fan), F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Paradise Lost and T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner. At some point in high school I went through a Noam Chomsky phase (because, hey, who doesn't?) and gobbled down the Beat Generation as quickly as I could get my hands on it - my friend Jimmy Campbell was so entranced with Kerouac's The Dharma Bums after I loaned it to him that he started buying and carrying around five copies of it at a time, giving it to friends as gifts for no reason other than its potential influence on them. Around this time I also started my collections of Chuck Palahniuk (whose nonfiction collection Stranger than Fiction influenced my first book, 100,000 Years in Detention) and HP Lovecraft. I read Ernie Pyle and Hunter S. Thompson and Jonathan Swift and I decided I was going to major in journalism, so I did.
College introduced me to the works of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell and The Best American Short Stories anthologies and The Epic of Son-Jara and John Locke and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Journey to the West and Benjamin Franklin. I dropped my bullshit veneer of tough guy machismo that got me through the jungle of high school and I finally read Virginia Woolf, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston. It wasn't until adulthood that I really fell in love with David Mitchell and Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy and Koji Suzuki, but they and every writer previously mentioned have invaluably influenced me as an author, a journalist, a reader, a father, a husband, a son and a friend. For example, I first read McCarthy's The Road in the back room of a Hot Topic I was running when my wife was six months pregnant with our daughter and it completely changed my outlook on parenting. Growing up in white suburban Illinois I rarely saw any institutionalized racism, but reading Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son and the speeches of Dr. King began to open my eyes to it at a young age. I learned to break rules and how objectively ridiculous we all are from Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, and that plenty of great fiction begins with a simple "What if?" question from Neil Gaiman. Great literature affects us, opens our eyes to worlds we didn't know existed, becomes a potpourri of compassion and thought, puts our imagination into overdrive. A regular reader can live 1,000 lives in every era of history and on every planet in the cosmos. When people tell me they don't read, I feel bad for them. Instead, I hear them discuss hours a day spent with reality television, but with the same anger and frustration and derision as politics or incompetent colleagues, and I'm too afraid of sounding snooty to ask why they'd devote so much time to making themselves miserable.
Output (a learning experience, not a resumé): The other side of the reading coin is writing. I started writing typical angsty teenage bullshit when I was 13 - two-paragraph flash fiction imitating David Lynch about people vanishing into thin air or finding dead bodies in abandoned houses. A friend told me to keep writing, and a few years later he told me I seemed to be on to something. I was incredibly fortunate to have "found my voice" by my second year of college, thanks in no small part to the authors I'd read by then (see? I told you there'd be a point to this!). Armed with a few tricks I'd inferred from Palahniuk, Sedaris, Thompson and Gaiman, I spent my final two years of college exclusively in literature and journalism classes, hammering away at keyboards in my dorm and college library. I took British Lit, American Lit, Media Ethics, Feature Writing, News Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Interviewing Skills, Photojournalism, Grammar and Editing, Page Layout and Design, Photo Editing, Copy Editing and Journalism Law. Two professors set the bar high for me and didn't let me slack, which was bad news for Party Jonny and Girl-Seeking Jonny but good news for Everything Else Jonny. I doubled down and tried twice as hard for their classes (and, eventually by habit, all my other classes) as I ever had and I walked the line in cap and gown with a 3.4 cumulative GPA and half of my first book.
So here's what I did and why. I finished my first book around the birth of our daughter in Spring 2010. A collection of silly and sad true short stories about me growing up as a geek, 100,000 Years in Detention is about 38,000 words of NPR-inspired self-deprecating Americana. The day I sent its manuscript off for print I started working on my sophomore project, Penny Cavalier - a year-long investigative journalism project (thank you, diploma!) about "real-life superheroes," people who dress up in costume and fight crime for a living. At what I thought was around the halfway point in my book, I watched a bizarre maelstrom of events unfold among my interview subjects and their peers that included jealousy, mistrust and sabotage. I asked my brother for advice and he said "Spend a month away from it, come back and work whatever Jonny magic you do with all your shit and finish it." During that month off I reread Heart of Darkness and rewatched Apocalypse Now Redux and framed the book around my parallel experiences starting as a window or passive character who is pulled into involvement in the story. Once I had my outline, I sat and wrote the book in four weekends from cover to cover, working for 16 hours a day each Saturday and Sunday in April 2011.
A phone call with a photographer I know in New York turned into a two-day visit to Centralia, Pennsylvania, which itself turned into a 10,000-word feature essay called DisasterLand: Centralia, complete with beautiful pictures of the abandoned coal mining town that inspired the film Silent Hill. Part narrative nonfiction, part geology lesson, part local history, it eventually got the attention and approval of both Konami Europe and Konami UK. In an effort to write video games off my taxes for 18 months, I wrote my longest geek nonfiction project to date, The Broken Paragon, a collection of essays on video games and the gaming industry. Using my modest experience as a reader and writer of academic essays in college, as well as the Feature Writing class I took, I sought to bridge the gap of casual reading and games studies to give gamers something new to think about and non-gamers an easy entry point to the art form.
Then came Fogworld. I've always loved themes of isolation and lawlessness in fiction, so somewhere between Fallout 3, The Mist, Lord of the Flies, Waterworld, Mad Max, Metro 2033 and The Last of Us, I IM'ed my college roommates one day and asked "What if (thank you Neil Gaiman) we had to live way above the surface of the Earth? Like in skyscraper penthouses or on the backs of enormous creatures? I'd need something to drive us away from ground level though." So I decided on a poisonous fog, and I wanted to see the project done so badly that I decided to write my first sci-fi novel, Wandering City Blues. Set 99 years after a red-orange fog (which carries an incurable respiratory illness) blankets the Earth and mankind has left the surface permanently, WCB is ultimately a noir-inspired murder mystery set on five of the 13 colossi on which mankind has built cities to escape the fog. The pain of it was making every single thing in the book (aside from the titans) be 100% believable. I spent up to 60 hours a week for four months researching everything from renewable food and energy sources to cigarette substitutes, various methods of fire-building without matches or lighters or trees, catching and filtering rainwater, transferring from one colossus to another, rope-climbing gear, consequences of incest and cannibalism, distance in miles between over 100 cities across the world, growing fruit and vegetables in soil substitutes, indoor gardening, aeroponic and hydroponic gardening, compost, manufacturing pharmaceuticals, Islam, Tlingit Indians, survivor's guilt and a whole lot more. I wrote Wandering City Blues in under a year, published it last Halloween and have turned the Fogworld series into an interactive community experience and a Patreon page while I work on future installments in its series.
So what, right? I mean, not to be a dick, but by this point, if you're still reading, you've got to be wondering where the hell this is going. It occurred to me after I started doing the Virginia convention circuit with my first two books and getting proper feedback from audiences that I had the opportunity to repay my debts to the industry that had shaped me so much as a human being. Dozens of authors, poets and playwrights had played such an enormous part in my life, helping me think outside my usual perspective and giving me opportunities to go on adventures across time and space, I could finally turn the tables and take everything I'd learned and inspire someone else. I couldn't have written 100,000 Years in Detention without having read David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and Chuck Palahniuk, and the greatest compliment I've gotten on it is from readers seeing the book cover again at a future meeting and immediately bursting into laughter, telling their friends how much they enjoyed my self-deprecation. "I was howling laughing, dude." I get the best wide-eyed reactions from people who have read Penny Cavalier and infer the subtle "Fuck You" and final takeaway of some of the RLSH culture that I wrote into PC's ending. I've been honored by parents telling me The Broken Paragon finally convinced their kids to pick up and read a book, since it's about video games; or by gamers themselves, saying that I've given them something to think about with their favorite franchises. Fans have told me how blown away they were by Wandering City Blues and its twists and turns - they've even started hounding me for the sequel. I had someone walk by my table at a convention two weeks ago and point to it and tell a potential reader "That's one of the best books I've ever read."
I don't care if it's a cliché; giving is just as important as receiving when it comes to literature. I'm humbled to the point of tears to be able to send friends, family, fans and strangers on the kinds of journeys that opened my mind or inspired me to live my life in a slightly different way than I had before. Books take the time and the effort to flesh out worlds and stories and people and events, giving readers an inimitable experience. I'm a lover of film, music, visual art, comic books, video games, even TV at its finest, but to not curl up with a good novel every so often is unwise at best, pitiable at worst.
Happy National Book Lovers' Day. Go read something awesome.
Self-serving and rather shameless shilling:
100,000 Years in Detention on Amazon: http://a.co/8oVnsoo
Penny Cavalier on Amazon: http://a.co/gSFMj5e
The Broken Paragon on Amazon: http://a.co/5MCf072
Wandering City Blues on Amazon: http://a.co/aV62TS4
Fogworld information on Blogger: http://www.WanderingCityBlues.com
Fogworld Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/jonnylupsha
A Carrier of Fire (my publisher) on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ACarrierofFire
A Carrier of Fire on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/acarrieroffire
Me on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jonnylupsha
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