Welcome to the first blog post related to The Never Hero Trilogy. I found I wanted a place to give people a sense of what this series of novels is about, as well as describe my adventures in writing it, that was longer than a synopsis or a tweet.
The idea for this series started to take hold in my mind roughly 4-5 years ago. It was birthed out of a simple question:”What the hell is wrong with the men of my generation?” Originally, I had some ideas about how to answer that question, I found an overabundance of time to ponder it while I was stuck on a treadmill at the gym over the last few years. As I wanted to approach the book from an entertainment stand point — read as not non-fiction — I started developing a story line about a young man named Jonathan Tibbs that would act as a conduit for my various theses on the matter.
I’ll tell you right now, most of that went out the window. As I started to focus more and more on the necessary elements of the story from a science-fiction action-adventure standpoint, I became far more interested in the entertainment value then I did any underlying messages. In other words, I decided to tell an exciting story instead of preach. Now that being said, the story doesn’t lose the message that spawned it entirely. Those people out there who really like to over-analyse what an author is writing will still be able to pull that message out, but I muted it as to not beat it into the head of the reader.
I attempted to start the novel 3 years ago but quit writing after about 60 pages. Why? truth be told I was still too immature to tell the story. Every word that came out on the page was a joke, a crude joke usually, and the main character was so jaded about life that I feared I was taking a good story idea and flushing it down the toilet by making the reader trudge through a swamp of overly dirty humor and depressing thoughts. Obviously, I never fully let it go though, as I was convinced I at least had one “new” idea that I had not seen in movies or books thus far. That being said there are truck loads of science fiction out there, so I am likely fooling myself thinking anything my little mind can come up with is original.
The Never Hero in its current incarnation is still funny, but with more wit and less crudeness. The story takes itself seriously. Originally I attempted to leave out swearing and overly adult topics in order to gain a larger reading demographic. I eventually decided that this was hurting the novel, as I soon found that the emotion core of a lot of situations is lost when a character is always trying to respond to life as thought it were PG-13. In other words, I am hoping that though I might lose younger readers because their parents find the material to adult, the novel itself will gain a feel of realism.