Anyway, did I say there was one thing that particularly annoys me about die Stunde X? Well, I'm lying. What really, really annoys me about that book, written when I was perhaps 24 or 25, is the fact that people love it. It's my best-seller. It's the one that keeps me in beer money. It's a proper thriller, and you know what, I'm fucking struggling to write something like that again. I mean, I'm really struggling. After die Stunde X, I wrote The Journal (actually, I'm kind of lying - I wrote a few bits of work between die Stunde X and The Journal ...). I wrote The Journal after I read Fight Club. I was inspired by Chuck Palahniuk's style. Indeed, my friend Gary Wright (whose own book, The Caging of George James, is now available on the Kindle) said at the time, "That book sounds a bit too much like Fight Club." But since The Journal, I've really become obsessed with writing books from a first person perspective. I like to get into the mind of the lead character, but that leads to problems. My last lead character, Benjamin Beerenwinkel, was a hardcore drinker. But then, was he based on me, or vice versa? To be honest, in that respect, I gave up alcohol for a month with no side effects, so I'm not as bad as him.
But anyway, I digress. Back to die Stunde X. That book was very episodic. I ended virtually every chapter on a cliff hanger. And people kept turning the pages. I look back at it now, and I think it's very juvenile. I think it's a work of YA fiction kind of mixed in with alternative history. When I sent that book to publishers in the mid 1990s, I was told, "Yeah, it's written in a strong style, but there's already two or three books out there with a similar topic - you know, alternative history, what if Germany had won the war, so I think we'll pass." Now look at the alternative history market. Even King (that's Stephen, not John) has written an alternative history book. And look at the YA market. Every single wannabe writer who sees writing as a way of making money (misled, sad fucks) writes a YA book. The "free" section and even the low-rent section of the Kindle marketplace on Amazon is full of young girls falling in love with vampires and zombies. Anybody who knows me will know that I'd rather cut off my own nutsack, remove the testes and fry the scrotum, still with hairs attached, in a shallow pan, and eat it with a variety of herbs and spices, than write a work of young adult fiction ...
Or would I? The irony is that die Stunde X has two young people (people in their early twenties) as the lead characters. For the Love of the Devil, an erotic paranormal novel which was unfairly cast aside by an erotic paranormal website because it featured Hellish scenes of a character getting his genitals bitten off by prepubescent boys, features a handful of young characters, and so can be defined as a YA novel (albeit one which was deemed too strong for a certain blog - it might've been, but don't quote me because my publicist at the time was dealing with them, Read Our Lips).
What I'm trying to say is that I now write transgressive fiction, which is a niche market. My best seller is an alternative history book, which used to be a very niche market, but has now expanded. And the book I'm least happy with is actually a piece of YA fiction, written in 1999, where a young girl, the singer in a band, falls in love with somebody who turns out to be a demon. Actually, shit, I was fucking ahead of my time. Anyway, digressing again. The thing is, my most successful work is the commercial stuff. But it's not the stuff I like writing anymore.
Should I whore myself out and write that kind of shit again, or should I just say, "Fuck it", and write the stuff I myself enjoy reading?
To be fair, I don't even care what people say. I know exactly what I'll continue doing. Here's to Besotted, my next book. Don't fucking have nightmares.
No comments:
Post a Comment