Hello again friends, I hope you are all doing well this week. I apologize for falling behind on blog posts recently as I have been busy all damn month – but this one will be worth the wait I assure you all. As of writing this, next week on May 4th I will be releasing my masterpiece of poetical fiction entitled, “The Konpeitō Masquerade”, containing 80 poems worth of a story woven together. The book itself is about the length of a novella, and the story within is definitely unique and one I am very proud to present to all of you willing to get a copy when it drops.
Now, in order to understand this book, I need you to understand the overall setting. No defined timeline exists within the book, but it takes place sometime in the undefined future at a point when a cataclysmic event has all but wiped life off the face of the Earth. All that remains is the remnants of civilizations bygone and the vague outlines of societal structures that once existed before it all came crashing down. Roving bands of bandits (can be implied by the lack of formal society in the book), local warlords consolidate power for themselves over rivals (implicitly expressed within the book since Huxley himself is a warlord), and the poor are sequestered into slums and away from what is seen as the rich areas of the world.
I wanted to create a post-apocalyptic world unique in its approach in that instead of encompassing this whole destroyed and decaying world into a single book or even twenty, I wanted to micromanage the imagery and instead put a 2x lens up to a single story within this world. Instead of creating a “man-saves-world-from-domination” archetype story, I instead wanted to hyper-focus on issues that an audience reading could relate to without explicitly getting out of the vibe due to it. My goal in creating the world as vague as possible (while vividly describing it when I did go into detail) was to create the impression that there is so much more mystery and stuff we don’t know about this new world. Many post-apocalyptic stories go to great lengths to overtell the same tired trope, and the story often suffers as a result (think The Walking Dead, A Quiet Place, and even any season of Stranger Things beyond season 3). I am often critical of stories because most stories today are so cliché and predictable that it takes a lot of the magic out of it for me.
I am also a big fan of unconventional themes in stories. Take the video game Grand Theft Auto V for example: The story is composed of 69 main missions split up between 3 main protagonists. Usually, the GTA franchise would follow a simple formula – 1. Single player game with one protagonist, 2. Tons of side activities, 3. 100+ missions usually, 4. A compelling and engaging story rivaling or superseding that of many blockbuster films.
Take the movie Heat for another example. The makers of Grand Theft Auto V openly have said what an influence that film was for their game, and for the heists in particular. If say, a story is usually composed of 100 pages (aka missions), and there is a single main character to follow, usually the story can be fleshed out much better and more nuance can be inserted into it. Take that same story and whittle it down to 69 pages (aka missions) and add 3 full main characters to explore, and you can soon see how a story, even one as great as GTA V, can suffer under the weight of trying to outshine itself.
Even the video game, Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 both could be grouped into some of the best storylines ever created for artistic mediums. I mean, when a group of outlaws storms a Southern-style plantation and wipes out a matriarch’s many Civil War veteran children, when that same group of outlaws feeds an 1800s mob boss to an alligator for kidnapping one of their kids, when the virtual outlaws can feel more alive than ones portrayed in real-life by actors, then it is hard not to place the blame squarely on the writing of the story as a key cause of this.
I enjoy a good story just as much as the next guy, but the story has to be unpredictable or at least good enough for me to look past any cliches it emanates. So, that is why this story I wrote, “The Konpeitō Masquerade”, is one for the ages. I am a huge fan of mob flicks, crime drama, horror films, and other types of genre-bending art styles/pieces, and I often imbue my favorite parts of my favorite genres into my new books. This one is NO exception!
It takes a lover of good stories to be able to continuously write good stories and improve. I usually never write prose or anything besides poetry, so this book was one where I allowed my improvement to shine through naturally rather than attempting to force it. Overall, I am super excited about sharing this with all of you.
Also gonna be dropping some exclusive, rare merch to support the release of this gem, so tune in to @bigsalpoetry on Instagram for near-daily updates and more content than can be found on Wix! As always, thank you for reading and be on the lookout for my next blog post!
Comments