Here goes with a series of posts that goes behind the scenes of the books I’ve published. Starting with the last first, I’ll write an occasional post about each book until I’ve got through all six … or is it seven … maybe it’s eight. All depends on how I want to count them. Stick around and find out.

The Jump is an absurdist dystopian tale about an America some time in the next decade. It is an America ruled by a dictator who has established a cult of personality and destroyed much of America. I did not intend on this to be some type of allegory about our current situation. I started writing it in 2015 a few months before Trump first announced he was running for President.

I no longer remember where the idea for this story came from. A lot of my stories start from prompts that I find in various corners of the internet. Some start with an idea that pops in my head and I decide to see what I can do with it. I’m pretty sure this story did not come … hold on a sec. I decided to search my blog to see if I shared where this idea came from and found this. And now that I’ve read that, I’m just kind of blown away at how the idea popped into my head.

To be clear, in case you don’t read what I linked to — I had a dream that my sister called me and told me she was going to take the jump. That’s it. That’s all I remembered from the dream. And I turned that into the absurdist dystopian tale that became The Jump.

I wrote that post after I had managed to squeeze out the first three chapters of the book. I continued writing in fits and starts for years. Some of the delay was caused by the typical excuses for my long-running struggle with writer’s block. Some was caused by my reluctance to be seen as writing an allegory for the Trump years. Some was caused by struggles with how to get from here to there. Eventually, I figured out the path and was able to finish the book.

So … why this idea? See above for where it came from. One of the things I most enjoyed about this book was that I could make up the rules. I think that’s one of the things writers who dabble in fantasy, science fiction, and dystopia enjoy the most. We can make things up and as long as they are internally consistent and make sense, what the heck. Right?

This is probably the first longer story I’ve written where I could do something like that. The first story where I really did some world building, even if it was on the foundation of an America that isn’t completely different from what it is today. And I went all in on it. Trying to make it as absurd as I possibly could.

One of the biggest challenges for me was how to end it. I knew there was an element or two I wanted in that ending, but it offered some risks and opportunities for me and I struggled with how exactly to get there and how to completely end the story. There were two points in the latter half of the story where I got bogged down and in each case, I eventually just decided to “skip ahead.” To just ignore the place where I was bogged down and skip ahead to a later scene and keep writing. I think it worked out because otherwise, the story would probably have been twice as long and probably filled with a whole bunch of repetitive, boring crap.

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Where can you find the book? Pretty much everywhere books are sold on-line. Paperback and ebook.

Here are all of the places the ebook is available. (Note: while Amazon isn’t listed there, The Jump is available for your Kindle via Amazon.)

And the paperback? Among other places: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells Bookstore, and the Harvard Bookstore.