If space aliens attack mankind to save our planet from environmental destruction, why not avoid a lot of present-day mayhem, death beams blazing, by traveling back in time to wipe out our caveman ancestors?
That was the genesis (pun intended) of my new novel, The Murder of Adam and Eve, my first foray into Young Adult fiction and my first adventure in self-publishing.
My mission was to write a thriller that would engage teens and adults with provocative questions about our past and future.
And to have fun with a survival adventure in prehistoric Africa!
Like many stories, it was pulled together from fragments that popped into my head. I wondered what it would be like to wake up and find everyone missing. Or how long any of us could survive if thrown into the wilderness with little preparation?
The result is what I think is my most intriguing novel. It hopefully leaves the reader pondering if its 16-year-old hero, Nick Brynner, makes the right decision about the fate of humankind. It’s a survival story, war story, love story, and fable.
Publishers were encouraging when I shopped the book around, but not enough to buy it. Their reaction to a teen novel with an eco “message” was, “Ewww.”
They also said it doesn’t fit the teen template, whatever that is. I hope they’re right. When I was growing up back in the Pleistocene, there was no teen literature ghetto. There was the kids section in my branch library, and then everything else. The genre of “YA” had not been coined yet.
So I just wrote a book, probably rated PG-13. While the boy and girl protagonists are sixteen years old, I hope the story of their struggle will appeal to all ages. The time paradoxes are the kind of thing my friends and I argued about back in our own teen years.
In any event, I’ve become a “hybrid,” the new word for authors who publish both independently and with established publishers. This wasn’t my first choice, but I wasn’t going to put The Murder of Adam and Eve in a drawer, either.
It’s too good a yarn.
So I commissioned a cover and a conversion of my manuscript into the proper files, and just published it as an e-book and trade paperback. This turned out to be more time-consuming and frustrating than I expected, so it’s been a challenging learning curve.
I also tried to keep the price as reasonable as I could to encourage readers, especially teens, to risk a read: $4.99 for the e-book, $13.99 list for paper. One reality I uncovered is that the print-on-demand technology used for self-published books keeps paperback costs surprisingly high, and best-seller competition drives prices distressingly low.
For those who dip into the book and are wondering, Goat Island, Fort Whitman, Anacortes, and La Conner are all real places near where I live.
My teens also follow a route not too different from one my wife and I made with Thomson Safaris in Tanzania. I’ve fictionalized, but I walked some of what Nick and Ellie walked.
And Adam and Eve? The back of the book gives some of the science background to this story.
I hope you’ll give it a try, write a review, and tell your friends. It turns out that writing is only the first step! Now I have to get the word out.
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Thanks for the heads-up! I just purchased it for my Nook. If it’s as good as the rest of your novels, which I’m sure it is, I’ll write a review for the Skagit Valley Herald.
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