20th Anniversary of Johnny Red
My first novel was published twenty years ago in 2005.
Johnny Red | Word Riot Press | 268 pages | 2005
Synopsis: Johnny Red is an epic and tragicomic love story, a modern picaresque novel about the adventures of Johnny and Ruth as they are imprisoned, survive their imprisonment, escape to the open road, make their way across America, and try to make something of their lives. Oh, and Johnny is a Rock Red rooster; Ruth, a Leghorn hen.
Yes, my first novel was an action romcom about chickens.
If you read my earlier entry about the publication of my first collection of short stories, The Leap, then you will recognize this novel as the novel I wrote before I wrote the stories collected in The Leap.
In the late Nineties, I was married with two kids, and I had a job that was not full-time. It was like three-quarter time. I worked for a vendor in the auto industry. I traveled throughout the Midwest, interviewed union workers and corporate managers, wrote articles, took photographs on factory floors, and designed magazines and commemorative books. Because it was not a full-time job, I had time at home to write fiction.
So I gave myself a deadline. I would write a novel before I turned thirty. I gave myself this deadline sometime around the year 1998. I would turn thirty in September of 1999. So I had at most two years.
I sat at my desk in my finished basement office in Troy, Michigan. I daydreamed the world of my story. I took notes, I scribbled, I researched. Upstairs, our nanny cared for our two kids during the day, so I was under pressure to make the most of my time. And I did it. I wrote a novel before I turned thirty.
I was inspired by old writers: Cervantes and his Don Quixote, Rabelais and his Gargantua and Pantagruel, Joyce and his Ulysses. I let my imagination run wild, but I also drew on the tightly argumentative prose style I’d learned in law school. I liked lists and puns, meta-narratives and bad jokes. I put everything into the stew of the novel.
An agent told me it was too much. I had to cut out the extraneous bits. I had a storyline about human beings interwoven with the main storyline about the romantic chickens.
In one night, I cut the manuscript almost in half. It was easy. I just cut out everything except the main storyline. I got rid of the storyline with the people. I got rid of the puns and the jokes and the meta-commentary, which included fake reviews of the novel itself. Boom. The book was two-hundred pages instead of over three-hundred pages.
But I was also told I needed an audience, and to get that audience, I had to write and publish short stories.
So that led me to writing the stories, parodies, and satires that were published in ezines and print journals and were eventually collected into the book The Leap. That book came out in 2000. I kept sending stories to ezines while I edited my novel.
Finally, an editor came to my rescue.
Jackie Corley of Word Riot Press agreed to publish my novel, Johnny Red.
I was using InDesign at my day job, to lay out magazines and books for the auto industry, so I was able to use the software to design the cover and typeset the manuscript for my novel. An artist, Opal Downer, provided chapter artwork, and I paid an illustrator, Kim Battista, to sketch roosters and hens to help the reader visualize the story of the novel. Her illustrations were so good that I created a gallery for them at the start of the novel.
And so Word Riot Press published Johnny Red in 2005.
We promoted it the best we could, mainly online. It received good reviews in several newspapers and magazines. I did a handful of interviews. I emailed friends and family. I had hats and other promo goodies made.
I kept promoting it while I continued to create new products, like the Dead Bug Funeral Kit, and publish and promote new story collections, like The Human Case (2002), We Were Ugly So We Made Beautiful Things (2003), Terminally Curious (2005), Twisted Fun (2006), American Home Life (2007), and Love Me Alone (2011).
I still have grand feelings about this first novel. I’m still grateful that Jackie Corley of Word Riot Press took a chance on this book. And I’m still proud of how it turned out. It’s a timeless comic epic, lovingly typeset in Emigre’s Tribute font, with flourishes and artwork, and decked out with phenomenal illustrations by Kim Battista.
I still have a few copies in a box somewhere. Maybe they’ll be of interest to someone when I publish my next novel, one that breaks through in the market somehow. Then Johnny Red will be the novel that started it all!
Cock-a-doodle-do.
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