The Birth of our Book

Our book, Tales of the Dim Knight is now available in paperback on Amazon or through the Kindle, as well other ebook readers.  There are excerpts to read at all sites, so you can see if the book is for your before you buy.

Ever since, I was eight, I was writing stories and books. Now, the first one has gone into print. It’s in print, but how did it get published?

I began writing Tales of the Dim Knight in 2004, and have worked with it off and on for years. I grew up with superheroes, particularly on television whether it was old Superman Cartoons on VHS, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Batman: The Animated Series, or the Flash.

I had the idea to write a superhero parody novel, where we’d poke a little fun at the superhero genre, and even play with some of its improbabilities that are accepted. For example, the favorite superhero tactic of rescuing a purse-snatching victim, returning the purse to the victim, and leaving the would be purse-snatchers tied up without explanation presents some serious practical problems, and can make for a funny situation when our hero calls the police and is told to untie the villains, as they’re no evidence to proceed on. And then there’s that eternal question of how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles get television signals in the sewer.

For our hero, I created the character Dave Johnson. Dave is a superherofanatic with an extensive collection of comic books and all manner of memorabilia. He carries an X-men lunch box to work and wears spider-man around the house. He works in an FBI warehouse that was kind of inspired by the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The warehouse is full of secret stuff, and its through something brought into the warehouse that Dave’s dreams came true and he gets superpowers, and proceeds to try and live out the superhero stereotype. We let the story go and when I ran out of supehero conventions to parody, I brought the novel to a close.

Over the years, I shared the book with quite a few people and usually got pretty encouraging feedback. However, trying to publish a superhero parody novel is quite a challenge. Particularly with a Christian theme. Most books with Christian themes are either Historicals, romances, or the like.

I did take the fanboy elements of Dave, amped them up several times and created the character of Sci-Fi fanatic Kirk Picard Skywalker and he was the hero in “Your Average Ordinary Aliens” which was released in an anthology in 2007. But the main book languished, while we worked on other projects and would have continued to do so if not for one person.

 One of the people, I shared the book with was a young New Zealander by the name of Grace Bridges, who was working in Germany as a translator for a police department. She laughed quite a bit as she read it, so much show she had some German policeman wondering what she was laughing at.

After she left Europe and did a grand tour of the United States (which included a trip to Boise), she started Splashdown Books and solicited the manuscript. The project was agreed to with Andrea and I as co-authors.

I could go into the exact nature of the co-authoring, but that’s another blog post in itself. But the book simply would not be the same without Andrea’s dedication and hard work.

This Summer the book went through its final revisions. When we sent the book to the publisher, it was 63,000 words long. The book that’s now published is 96,000 words long. This was a long, detailed, painstaking, often maddening process, but the end result is a better book than we started with.

The big improvements came in filling in a few gaps, and sharpening the humor in a couple places. We also worked pretty hard to deepen the family element of the story. One thing that does make Dave different from the vast majority of superheroes is that he’s married with children, but the portrayals of the marriage in the first drafts were kind of shallow, particularly as the state of the Johnson marriage is a subplot that grows in prominence as the book goes along.

Dave had a Peter Pan syndrome. His wife, Naomi is very pushy and treats her husband like a little boy. The two big questions we had to deal with are, “What attracted these two to each other in the first place? And why should we care whether they stay married or not?”

We had to be very careful in adding more scenes about the marriage. Because, too many of the wrong type of scenes could ruin the book. However, we found a way to show a few more scenes that helped us care about the character without making the book too heavy, and actually added humor to the book.

And I really pushed hard and we all worked together to get this book out in time for Christmas. It’s been long and bumpy road, but we’ve made it. Thank God, we’ve made it.

Read more at Adam’s Blog