by David O’Boyle
Origins of the Transient Visitors Short Stories Series
Years ago. I was walking on a beach on Fire Island in the winter in Long Island, New York. Nobody was reading my first novel, Mooncalfs that I put out right before going to law school. For the most part, I also knew that the quality of the book was not why people weren’t reading it. Let me be clear before continuing. I am not saying that the book is good and that it simply didn’t have readership. In my view, the book is average. What I am saying is that Mooncalfs did not attract readers to begin with, and so the assessment of whether it is good or bad is irrelevant.
The reason for this was pretty simple. Reading a novel is time-consuming. Reading a bad novel, even if you are trying to doing it out of pity for your self-published friend or family member (hi there!), can be torture. So it is a lot to ask people to do in order to get a taste of whether there is anything good there to peak (pique?) their interest. Therefore, without sophisticated marketing techniques or a publishing behemoth behind you, it’s quite the task.
I failed at that task.
The Transient Visitors Series is a Response to Lack of Mooncalfs’ Commercial Success (feel free to buy Mooncalfs to change that!)
In part, Transient Visitors is a response to what I saw as the failure of Mooncalfs. I believe- and still do- that while you cannot convince most folks to read your novel. They will give you a pity few paragraph read if you look desperate enough. So in a way these very short stories are fiction elevator pitches. If the reader liked them, maybe they would read others. Maybe someday, in fact, they would contemplate reading something larger (and more expensive to sell, YAY!). Or maybe they would read all of these short stories together, in bulk, amounting to the equivalent of a novel-reading experience when said and done. The goal of making 365 of them and putting them in monthly installments is the product of what I thought was savvy marketing. The problem is that I am not done with all 365. So I can’t really market it that way…yet. Or maybe ever, since there is a long way to go. So maybe that marketing isn’t that saavy. LOL. Calling the series Transient Visitors: A Collection of Very Tiny Tales, hanging on the double entendre of the word Transient with the length of these stories and the characters that go in and out of tales, combined with the play on words of tiny tales instead of tall tales is pretty clever though. Good luck convinving me otherwise.
There is another part to why I wrote and continue to write Transient Visitors. That part also is a response to Mooncalfs. The adage is that good writers write what they know. That seems pretty true based on my experience. Part of the reason why I didn’t include a lot of the literary fun stuff in Mooncalfs is because I didn’t feel like I would be writing enough of what I know, and would therefore come across as derivative and boring and inauthentic.
Putting the Two Main Ideas Behind Transient Visitors Together
That created a Catch-22 of sorts. I wanted to write about aliens and space and war and the universe and historical events and monsters and devils and angels and future technology. Yet I didn’t know enough about them to put them into novels. And also, quite frankly, I didn’t necessarily like many things enough to be wedded to them for an entire novel-writing experience. I solved the Catch-22 by deciding that I would write about everything, but I would write in such limited doses that I didn’t get bored and maybe the reader didn’t get bored because I knew at least enough of what I was talking about for a page or so rather than for a whole book.
That’s how we got here.
Got here, in the present sense of the phrase, means done with book 1, which effectively means January, which effectively means that month 1 had 31 stories published in it. The forthcoming Month 2, which effectively means February, will have 29 stories published in it. March will have 31 as well, and so on and so forth, you get the point. I have all 365 drafted in one way or the other. But I take forever to edit, so the goal is to make this one of my life’s works.
If I do not finish it before leaving this world, I will be sure to arrange a better writer to finish it off. My intention is to befriend one of those great writers out there that is too whatever to sit down and show their talent, and guilt them in to doing it on my behalf. Sort of like what Qui-Gon Jinn did to Obi-Wan Kenobi in regard to training Anakin to become a jedi.
Then again, I am no jedi. More importantly, I hopefully have more than a few decades left until you are granted that reprieve as one of my readers to get someone else to finish this off. Until then, feel free to order the book, digital if possible to save the trees. If you don’t want to pay for the book, I eventually publish the stories on my website here. So feel free to wait. Another thing you could do is shoot me an amusing brief email to dobsuniverse@davidoboyles.com. More than likely I have a copy of one of these bad boys laying around gathering dust that I can send over. I don’t have a big enough to get rid of all of them.
Additional Background on the Series
The above commentary sums up the soulfoul resopnse for Transient Visitors. The back-book summary of book 1 sums up the marketing translation Enjoy! A quick fix of fiction. Something to read at breakfast when you finish the back of the cereal box. Novels never fit that mold. Neither do magazine-length short stories. That's why I wrote Transient Visitors: Month 1 of 12, a Collection of 31 Very Tiny Tales. In addition to complimenting your soggy second layer of Cheerios, this book will send you into space, underground, and through the tapestry of time in between. Along the way, anticipate encounters. Fellows will emerge that seem strange... they probably are. Other fellows will emerge that seem fine...they probably aren't. My advice is this: Avoid aliens and intergalactic criminals, especially the moody ones. Before boarding a train, confirm its destination. Dine with sasquatches, but don't be their dinner. And finally, watch your spouse, your in-laws and your employees. Everyone, and everything is up to something.