Original article @: http://inabsentia.bloodlettersink.com...

It's true. I have an ugly baby. Its name is 314 Crescent Manor and it has a snotty nose and its eyes are kind of crooked and I'm pretty sure it has colic. I did everything I could to make it a pretty baby. I edited it until my eyes bled, I reformatted and experimented and redesigned it until it can finally now travel across different ereaders with impunity. I burped it and fixed its typos. I hammered at it and sweated in coffee shops and obsessed for weeks and months, I hand picked character pictures based on DNA, I studied and scraped inside the marrow of quantum suicide looking for ways to exploit it with authorial psychopathy. I envisioned, chipped at and melted my characters and the setting down until they finally fit the shape they were meant for. I worked hard, and my baby was born. But not many people love my baby. They think it's ugly, its face a mish-mash of caricatures, the very fact I had it in the first place irking many. Just who is its father, anyway? How dare you create that ugly looking thing by yourself. For a while, I was thinking maybe they had a point. Maybe my baby should have been an abortion that happened somewhere around chapter ten. But I can't help it, I look at that baby and I realize, even though it isn't appreciated or understood, it's still my baby and it's still my proof of success.

I'm not saying the premise was easy, because I certainly wasn't going for simple. It's about quantum suicide and many worlds theory, taking it a step further and assuming that if many worlds are possible, they must be in some sort of order. If an event happens where that order is disturbed and those many worlds are shuffled, what happens to an existence that tries to thrive within it? The result in the 314 world is fragmented universes blending into each other, where gender, location and human interaction become a mess of shattered mirrors, each world reflecting another reality, these possibilities superimposing themselves on daily life. Accusations of it being too confusing are duly noted–it's supposed to be confusing. You can't turn the workings of a linear world into a non-linear one without mucking about with perception. I imagined that worlds toppling into each other are messy. So, really, all those negative reviews about my ugly baby saying it's too confusing puts me in the strange position of telling that reviewer, yes, you get it. You're right. I wrote it that way on purpose. One gold star!

Maybe I should be more clear about my influences. I was pretty sure I said in my author bio that I'm a big fan of Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick. I'm not as good as them by even a molecule, and I doubt I ever will be, but I am telling lies if I said their unhinged, skewered perspective on the world didn't influence me in a big way. I love books that make me think, that distort reality and make you look at it from beyond the back door of your expectations, books that are like Escher lithographs and as detailed and strange as a journey through Bosch's garden. I wanted to walk with those who are the formation of my creative ideals. I feel confident that I did so with the best of my ability.

So what if I stumbled here and there? A misstep is not the end of the world. Besides, I wasn't aiming to please the masses, this was a homage to the creative work I loved. 314 Crescent Manor was a web serial, written episodically and a grand, happy experiment. It wasn't supposed to be commercial styled fiction and that's okay. 314 Crescent Manor will not sit on a shelf with Sue Grafton, nodding at me while my head swirls with sales numbers and spreadsheets. That's not where I wanted the book to be, but I keep getting the feeling that people want it there, put on a shelf, making perfect sense and being a boring love story. I didn't follow the rules properly, bad author me.

When did we become so enamoured with doing what other people tell us to do just because they say it with bitchy authority? Hello world, please fit into this box labelled 'B', for Box. Those who know me understand that I'm not in a box. I'm not even the same room as a box. I'm still from that world where indie actually meant something. The word indie is just a short form of independent, which according to this dictionary is defined as "...1. not influenced or controlled by others in matters of opinion, conduct, etc.; thinking or acting for oneself: an independent thinker. ..."

Okay, okay, I give, I'm a special snowflake and you think my work melts on impact and is irrelevant but really, I don't care. I did something, for me, without anyone else's influence, and that's something I'm very, very happy about.

Making other people happy shouldn't be the goal of a writer, in my opinion. Studying how the market is going and how to force your book into that niche isn't a pathway to great writing, but it is a good way to gain commercial success if what I'm hearing all the time is true. I don't think it's where a good book should come from. I can't help but notice the more I visit bookstores the more I see millions of words saying the same things, the same themes and the same judgements within the pages, the same polished style, the same, the same, the same. For all of our war cries for standing out and being unusual there's this huge fear of independence that lurks in coffee mugs with Motley Crue and Clash logos printed on them. It's more than just books where this generic sameness is creeping in, it's in our grocery stores, in our clothing lines and in our choices of music, none of which really are choices any longer. There seems to be this collective comfort being taken in generality and any tipping of what's good for us or 'right' is reacted upon with anger.

I didn't anticipate the hate with 314 Crescent Manor, and that is what I find most disturbing and disappointing. I've learned that people get angry over any cracks in their concrete definitions, even if those definitions don't truly exist. Things like gender and how the universe is supposed to be arranged. I'd thought we'd evolved further than that, but I guess we've swung backwards when I wasn't looking. The conservatism is spreading throughout our lives like a virulent, banal leukaemia, blanching all in its path. I learned after writing this book that the expectation of certain structures, be they social or environmental, are things that many cling to with a very tight grip. Chipping at it causes controversy.

I didn't go out of my way to have an ugly baby. I just wanted to try something new and interesting and hoped there were others out there who shared in that ideal, and there are and they did enjoy the book. The things I learned about human nature, however, were disappointing. Very few people want to be challenged by something they read, and whatever you put onscreen or on paper had better have clearly outlined reused plots, sparse description and characters that aren't as vibrant as they could be. I learned my lesson. Subsequent works don't challenge the envelope as much. I try to be more linear, and use less confusing themes in other projects. I'm not selling out so much as acknowledging that not every project needs to rewrite the rules of the universe, and I do understand that 314 Crescent Manor will be flawed because I am flawed, and no amount of editorial hand wringing is going to cure the fact that a flawed person wrote a flawed book. These days, imperfection is the same as murder. Still...So what if I'm standing beside the guillotine? I love my ugly baby. If you have one, you should too.