Behind the Book: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Verne wrote political manifestos with a plot wrapped around them. The situation is strong and there is nobody inside it, so this version hands the narration to the harpooner who wants off the ship.
Category: Behind the Book (Page 5)
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Time Machine
Wells wrote a class allegory dressed in science fiction and sent his Time Traveller forward alone, which makes the middle of the book pure narration. This version puts somebody in the seat beside him.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Sphere
The Sphere began with one rule: no faster than light travel. Remove that and humanity cannot leave, which means the only remaining direction is inward. The subject is a forty thousand year construction project, which contains no action at all,…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: My Life in Crazytown
I was diagnosed AuADHD at sixty-four, and the diagnosis is the reason this book exists. One of the answers it supplied was that the traits my family spent nineteen years trying to suppress were the traits keeping me alive in…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The ADHD Christian
I wrote this immediately after finding out I was ADHD, before the autobiography. It came out of a real church I attended and eventually stopped attending. I was baptized there and then simply stopped going, and I never told anybody…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Mysterious Island
Gideon Spilett kept two sets of records on Lincoln Island, one for the New York Herald and one for himself. What he left out of the published account was the whole of Neb, and the reason was that an equal…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For
I wrote this for specific friends who could not work out why relationships kept going wrong. The credential behind it is not on the sales page: eight years photographing performers meant thousands of hours of unguarded conversation with women backstage,…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
I wrote this alongside Gettin Laid, one from each side, to see what the difference looked like on the page instead of in an argument. The distinction turned out sharper than expected: the women learn about each other, and the…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Cloudborn
Cloudborn started with a place instead of a person. The hard part was writing a mind with no words, no bodies as we understand them, and no experience of a solid surface, without turning it into a person in a…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: God Is Everything
I held this idea for decades before writing it down, and what I was fighting was not doubt. It was the social conditioning that tells you which beliefs are permitted. I was raised Church of Christ and I still am…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Family Cybersecurity
A woman I barely knew called at 2:47 in the morning because ransomware had taken thirty years of family photographs. I knew within seconds there was nothing I could do, and worked until dawn anyway. The book that came out…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Sins of the Internet
It began around 2000 as a couple dozen HTML pages and grew across 25 years into a book. Here is the story behind my moral critique of the digital age.