Control: Suffer the Days…
I, Dalton Lewis, write novels, blogs, and fan fiction. For the first four months of the year I worked like crazy to finish three works of fiction — The Dread Lord Icon was my first fantasy novel, Modern Goth was a work that I had labored for a long time on, and The Omniscience Cult was a little slasher that just…happened organically, growing out of some interesting ideas that I had. I published them between mid-March and mid-April, and they all got hundreds of downloads and some reads and a few buys — but not enough buys. I think that the results were…unexpected.
The Dread Lord Icon was a fantasy epic growing out of an idea I had to feature the conflict between two cultures — one sort of Christian or knights and the other sort of Muslim or necromancy. I also wanted a character to represent each group and to show their eventual descent into terrible violence. I wrote like hell to make it into something that people would feel was an interesting and effective look at a new fantasy world. I also contrasted the fantasy elements with college — something I hadn’t written about before.
Modern Goth was a labor of love. Around 2001 or 2002 I had a dream of a bunch of nightmarish children tormenting an intellectual researcher type who wanted to cure them. This turned into a little story that wasn’t quite finished until 2021 because Covid gave me time to look at the old stories that were still around. I also wanted to show a character who was a true outsider, one who didn’t have friends, one who was totally empty and alone, and I thought that I did a pretty good job of showing that isolation and unhappiness. The rest of the story included a band which played goth music and enabled me to show a story which didn’t include as many bad guys to be defeated — dramatic rather than melodramatic conflict. The three interconnected stories led to a steampunk city in the middle of nowhere in a new dimension with the supernatural created by technology — and the characters ended the story fighting a big bad guy. I thought that I threw everything into the novel.
Then I got to writing The Omniscience Cult. I decided, for this story, to write about a group of evil outsiders who wanted to kill some wonderful teenagers who were, well, pretty people with problems. I did this because some of the best people that I have ever met are pretty people with problems. I know some wonderful people who are attractive and interesting and well-spoken and charming. I wanted them to have a book and a perspective. I also know plenty of evil geeks out there, and I wanted to show a geek — Eli — who was evil beyond belief. I knew that some geeks just throw out all morality and do whatever they want without thinking about everyone else. I tried to also write a story about parents and the relationships between people and their parents and the ways that those relationships create our personalities. I felt that I wrote a strong story. I thought that this was the best of the three stories.
The Dread Lord Icon rating on Amazon: 4.5 stars.
The Modern Goth rating on Amazon: 4.4 stars or so.
The Omniscience Cult rating: 2.5 stars.
I don’t know what the problem is. Maybe there haven’t been enough people giving the novella a chance. Maybe the numbers will balance out over time. I worked like crazy on the novella and thought that it was an improvement on my previous works. I don’t know why it is getting the reviews that it is getting.
I didn’t plan out the novella. I also mostly wrote it on impulse, letting my emotions dictate the story and the directions of the story. I just started writing and let the story go wherever it would go. I didn’t plan the characters very well, either. I don’t know if the novella is worse or not — I just know that I have to make changes before the next story.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
