What if I show up to sing the songs, write the poems, spin the yarns and rhyme the rhymes? What if I told you I’m ready?
What if a thousand story songs welled up in my throat unbidden? What if it’s time they were told?
Can I hold them back when they want to burst forth? And why would I want to hold back? Is it possible finally their time has come, and my time while we’re at it?
What if I show up ready to run the race? Do I have proper shoes and the right attitude? Will I even know what I’m doing? And what if I don’t, is it all that bad? The whole point is whether I’m willing.
So it seems to be more complicated than, “OK, I’m going to sit down and write something now,” because your brain goes, “I don’t know what to write,” and you say, “write anything except nothing,” and the next thing you know, you’ve doodled the word “SOMETHING” in big block letters with googly eyes and duck faces all around it and maybe a little shading around the edges of the letters, and then you write about the weather, how it’s cloudy out and you sure wish the sun would shine and that it would cool off or warm up (depending on what time of year it is), and you keep on moving your fingers to spill words onto the page, sometimes for pages and pages of incoherent nothingness, and what do you know all of a sudden you’re in the Arctic searching for a lost shipwreck, and just as you’re giving up hope the sun comes out from behind a cloud and there’s the wreck just where you expected it to be, but suddenly the villain is standing in your way aiming to snatch your victory away, or maybe you’re a young child racing across a field of wildflowers with not a care in the world except to get your mom’s batch of cookies over to the neighbors, when all of a sudden you realize the neighbor won’t know if you’re bringing a dozen cookies or 10 and they sure smell good.
But if you don’t move your fingers and you don’t write nonsense until it starts to make sense and tell a story, well then, I hope you have a nice day even though you didn’t write anything. I’m just here to tell you that nothing is nothing and nonsense is something, and something is better than nothing almost every time. And if you’re hoping that maybe this is the time that nothing is better than something (I did say almost), well, yes, and maybe this is the time you win a million bucks in the lottery, too.
I don’t know how these thoughts come to me. It occurs to me that if I had been able to follow through on my original idea for superhero Myke Phoenix, then Myke Phoenix Magazine #445 would have come out this month.
Why it came to me is fairly simple — I saw that Amazing Spider-Man #1,000 is due at the comic book stores later this month, and that got me thinking about what an amazing milestone that is.
I have always been a fan of Lester Dent, the pulp writer who produced most of the 182 Doc Savage novels that were published from 1933 to 1949 in a magazine that was monthly for most of its run. In the late 1980s I imagined a monthly magazine that would feature a superhero of my own creation.
Myke Phoenix was/is the alter ego of Paul Phillips, a radio reporter who gains the ability to inhabit the body of a super-powered ancient hero named Mychus. Myke became the protector of Astor City, a medium-sized city somewhere in the Midwest.
Because I had a day job, I didn’t think I could pump out a 50,000-word novel every month, but 10,000 words felt doable, and I figured that since comic books had displaced pulp magazines in the marketplace, maybe I could manage a pulp that takes about as long to read as the average comic book, to accommodate modern attention spans.
Starting around January 1990, I finished four episodes and a short story, and I conceived a fifth story, “The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur,” which would reveal and introduce the arch-villain Deinonychus who had been behind much of the mayhem that had plagued Astor City in the first four stories. But in those days there was no way to self-publish books or magazines without expending a great deal of money, and so I let logistics scuttle the project before that fifth adventure, and I tucked it all away until I would have the money or the world changed, whichever came first.
I still didn’t have the money in 2008, but the world changed. Print-on-demand services and the Kindle allowed me to publish The Adventures of Myke Phoenix for basically zero upfront cash, and the idea of a monthly feature tickled the back of my mind again.
It stayed back there until 2013, when I finally wrote a new Myke Phoenix story, “Song of the Serial Kisser.” Not long afterward I came up with “Firespiders,” which is now known as “Spiders of Fire” for reasons I forget. And then my brain finally shifted to a place where my original concept might kick in.
I wrote down 10 more story titles for what would be a 12-story arc, and in 2014 I wrote and published Myke Phoenix ebooks once a month from February through November, including by the way The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur. “I can do this,” I realized, and I was having a grand old time until I failed to come up with a clear idea of where to take the series after that 12th episode. I did create a paperback edition of all 12 new novelettes called Year of the Dinosaur, so named because Deinonychus was again the central villain.
When the corporation eliminated my day job in late 2016, I started publishing the novelettes in short books, most of them 64 pages, and developed the first 12 before I was offered a new newspaper job, so that plan stalled before I could begin actively marketing it.
Three more years went by, and by 2019 I figured I was done with Myke, so with a bit of rewriting, I collected all 16 novelettes and two short stories into a 732-page behemoth titled Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, which is still available on print-on-demand to this day.
I think about Myke from time to time — I’ve even tinkered with the idea of a novel or two, so that I don’t turn “The Complete Novelettes” into false advertising. Will he ever return? I can’t say — not because I’m being coy, I just don’t know where the muse is taking me these days.
Part of me is disappointed I was only able to maintain a monthly schedule for 10 months. Part of me is proud to have maintained a monthly schedule for 10 months. Those are the conflicting ways of looking at the idea of Myke Phoenix Magazine #445.
