Saturinus Mons: An Authors Commentary Track #1

So have you ever been watching a DVD late at night, your half-drunk but there's still booze sitting in your glass promising to keep you company for another few minutes more?  The movie is ended but, for some reason, bed just seems like a waste of some perfectly bad decisions so you start scrolling through the special features and come across the directors commentary.  And you start thinking to yourself... yeah, I could listen to that.

That ever happen to you?

Or have I revealed way too much about my drinking habits late at night?

Think of this as the Writer's Commentary Track.  Grab a drink and have a seat.

Saturnius Mons Chapter 1: Writers Commentary

Saturnius Mons is not actually my first book.  My first book is still locked away deep within the recesses of my hard drive never to harm a living soul as long as I'm alive.  It was a kind of bizarre absurdist comedy written by a guy who really, really wanted to be Terry Pratchett and Chuck Palahniuk's illegitimate love child.  Except with none of the skill with prose of either of those two men.

I wrote it.  I tried to re-write it.  And I started to realize that the story I was writing had been built up too much in my head.  Seriously, I had talking about writing it for over a decade.  I didn't actually write, to be clear, but I talked the fuck out of it.  And in my mind it was going to be the greatest social commentary ever told.  It got bigger and bigger in my head while on paper it remained about the same size as it was when it started... that was to say nothing happened.   So when I actually did write it I tried to incorporate every idea I ever had about this book EVER!!

The result was a clown car of ideas and a story that was the narrative equivalent of doing six shots of whiskey, closing your eyes, spinning in circles for thirty minutes and then charging forward at a full sprint.

Yeah....

 So I decided to lock it away for the time being.

And I wanted to start from scratch.  So I sat around and tried to think of a new idea.  I imagined a world where we had colonized the whole solar system before the Earth fell into a post-industrial stone age.   I thought about a societies left on other planets and moons and what might happen to them if Earth civilization just kinda stopped.

The result was the first outlines of Saturnius Mons.   But the first drafts were nothing like the novel that I am in the final stages of finishing.

I sometimes think about my first book.  Maybe someday I will dig it out, slap some electrodes on its face and try to bring it back to life.  But not now. The villagers can't handle it.