In case you haven't been able to tell from my last few posts (seriously, what was up with that
baby post yesterday?), I've been a little pressed for blogging time lately. My wife's extended family was in town for a reunion, so I've had a lot of important drinking to do. I'm still recovering, so I'm going to give you a rain check on this week's caption contest.
While you're here, though, I have a favor to ask of you. I've been trying to figure out lately how many devoted, regular readers this blog actually has, but even with a kickass tool like
Google Analytics it's very hard to determine. Adding to the difficulty is that fact that a lot of you read my posts in your email or a feed reader. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy that you read this stuff, however you do it, but it does make it tough to figure out how many of you are actually reading.
Why do I care how many regular readers I have? Well, to be perfectly frank, I have two motivations for blogging.* First, it's a way to force myself to write on a regular basis, even if all I have on a given day is some horrible idea about pretending to misunderstand the phrase "celebrity baby." Second, I'm hoping to build my readership to the point where I can interest a publisher in the novel I'm writing.
Yes, I'm writing a novel. And this isn't the proverbial "great idea for a novel" that every blogger has either. I've written a beginning, middle and end -- about 140 pages total. There are a few areas that I need to flesh out more (it will be around 200 pages when I'm finished), but the bulk of it is done. I've gotten feedback from a few people that I trust that would seem to indicate that what I've got so far is pretty damn good. My buddy Joel from
Crummy Church Signs actually asked me not to send him any more chapters until it was finished because he couldn't stand not knowing how it ended. Well, that's the reason he gave me anyway. It doesn't explain the restraining order, but whatever.
The novel, entitled
Mercury Falls, is about an angel (Mercury) who is supposed to be helping out with the apocalypse, but feels he has better things to do -- like performing card tricks and playing ping-pong. Despite his desire to remain uninvolved, however, Mercury gets pulled into the bewildering politics of Armageddon when a reporter named Christine shows up at his doorstep bearing a mysterious briefcase that was given to her by a high ranking member of the Israeli Defense Force moments before his death. Together Christine and Mercury thwart the attempted assassination of the Antichrist, thereby incurring the wrath of both Heaven and Hell, whose agents have spent millennia negotiating every detail of the end of the world. Will Mercury be sent to Hell for going AWOL in the apocalypse or will he be rewarded for stopping the assassination of the Antichrist? Can Christine stop Armageddon, and if she does, will something even worse happen? And why does she feel so uneasy about her linoleum?
If you read this blog, you pretty much know what to expect from my writing. Just imagine a bunch of my better posts strung together and wrapped around a plot involving an AWOL cherub and the end of the world. There are a lot of semi-serious conversations about religion, a lot of jabs at people who let other people do their thinking for them, and a lot of references to Credence Clearwater Revival, Dishwalla, and Occam's Razor. You get the idea.
So the favor is this: Whether you're reading this in your email, a feed reader, a web browser, or a gay biker bar,
please take a moment to answer this poll. It's ok if you answer"no" -- at least I'll know that you're reading and that you're willing to take a few seconds out of your day to vote. Oh, and if for any reason you're unable to vote (like maybe the poll doesn't work in your browser), please email me with your vote at diesel (at) mattresspolice.com.
(Update: It's been pointed out to me that if the poll doesn't work in one's browser, then one would have a hard time knowing what the question is. The question is simply: "Would you buy this book?" You can also try accessing the poll here.)The book cover, by the way, is something that I dummied up using a cool painting I found by a guy named Timothy Vermeulen. How weird is this: I did a Google image search for "Icarus", because I thought I'd find a nice picture of Icarus falling out of the sky. That painting was the first picture that caught my eye. Turns out that the artist and I went to the same college. The odds are pretty good that my dad was his freshman English professor.
Anyway, I hope he doesn't mind that I borrowed his painting. Check out his
other stuff if you like it.
*In addition to getting Huey Lewis the respect he deserves.
Labels: Books, Serious Stuff