Control: What to Do When No One Notices Your New Novel…

Read my book — it’s about how bad the world is and how you should love it. You should — you should love our disastrously broken world.

I, Dalton Lewis, hate this part. I published a novel that didn’t sell ten thousand copies on the first day. I didn’t sell one thousand copies on the first day. Hell, I didn’t sell many copies at all. I failed on the first day.

Well, I’m not quitting because things got hard. If I did that I’d long since be dead. Everything goes badly for everyone at some point. That’s a test; you have to respond. Well, I’m continuing to fight, fight despite low sales numbers, despite throwing my everything into a novel and the public shrugging and not fucking caring.

I think that I wrote a damn good book about the dark places in life, a book with substance, a book worth reading. Countless hours of effort went into this book. The first part of this book came into my mind fifteen-plus years ago in the American Southwest as I was dreaming — dreaming of little children torturing me in a mansion late at night. I decided to turn that into a character and a story. That idea needed to be tweaked, of course: I thought about cancer. That led me to think of an inventor, a researcher trying to cure cancer and failing. That led me to some dramatic conflict instead of melodramatic conflict. That made for a good story. I wrote the first part over fifteen years ago — before I became schizophrenic. It’s the last old work of writing to finish from that era, I think. I wrote the beginning and didn’t know where to go with it — the beginning was good but went into schlock after awhile. I tried to make this story go into an interesting and different direction but still go to an alternate reality — which is where this was heading all along.

The second part of the story came into my mind because I remembered how terrible it was to have no friends in high school — and how much that felt like a horror story. I didn’t have any friends during the ninth and tenth grades. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t hang out with anyone. Not once. Life sucked. I sat around on Friday and Saturday night, reading fantasy novels. That naturally turned into a slasher story in which someone tried to kill anyone who might have been decent or kind to EWP, the protagonist of that story. I wanted you to love him and believe that he doesn’t have anyone who won’t get killed for being a decent person to him.

The third story just sort of happened when I started to write: a twentysomething singer joins a goth band and tries to learn about the goth movement. She becomes haunted by people who died before their time, who didn’t succeed at everything they wanted to do in life. We all know that is true, right? Not everyone makes it in life. Most people don’t become the CEO, or the star of their own movie, or the author of a bestseller. Most people just live normal lives and then die. I wanted some of those people to be jealous of her as she starts to become famous and rich and successful. I thought that would be an interesting conflict instead of mindless violence. We already have enough of that with the fucking teenagers.

That’s the three interconnected stories in Modern Goth. I worked like crazy to write this book. I love this book. I want you to give it a chance. It’s three dollars. Three! Check it out.

Thanks, and take care, friends.