So I just had an idea for a blog post and thought, I could
write that one in fifteen minutes, and that's about how much time I ever have
nowadays, because dealing with a group of
accurately-said-to-be-difficult gifted and talented 9th and 10th graders
is turning out to be a wee bit time consuming, and I'm in the middle-to-last
stages of finishing a new mainstream YA novel, which I hasten to say is only as
much like Madman Underground as any two books by me are like each other. (Longtime fans just laughed, and thanks for
the support, guys!)
Riffing rather than writing a footnote, the reason I
hastened to say that bit about the current YA mainstream not being a sequel to Madman Underground is that when a sometimes-reclusive writer makes a
too-brief announcement, out in the blogosphere it tends to go like this:
Fred Ferd Dref, author of Space Duck (in personal blog or fan newsletter): I'm working on a
new science fiction novel, and I'm getting close to done.
Over at PerfectlyReasonableFans.com, there follows:
Perfectly Reasonable Fan: Dref is writing a new novel! Gee, I hope it's a sequel to Space Duck, because I loved Space Duck!
Another perfectly reasonable fan: I'm not sure whether it was just that I was in the mood for Space Duck when I read it, or if it was
that great cover it had by Duncan Deceased, my favorite sf artist ever. I wish
he was still around!
(Snip, now, an enormous number of people talking about the
Dref and Deceased oeuvres, with a bit of politics and some silly puns and
occasional harmless pretensions and even more occasional genuine insights).
Then over at ModeratelyGoofyGeeks.bloginabox.org, we get:
ModeratelyGoofyFan1: Dref is working on sequel to Space Duck! I hope he doesn't screw it
up because apparently it will have a posthumous cover by Duncan Deceased, and
Deceased deserves better than that!
MGF2: You're crazy! Duncan Deceased should have been shot
for that cover he put on Space Duck! He totally drove people away from the finest
novel since Les Miserables!
MGF3: I loved Les Mis.
MGF4: Your a dumshit nobody was talking about les mis we were
talking about how Dref shot Duncan Deceased and stole his best cover for this
stupid sequel to stupid Space Duck. And anyway you should say Les Miserables because the book is Les Miserables and when you call the book by the nickname of the musical it sounds all pretentious and theatre-person snob arrogant --
MGFn: And you're the kind of shithead that hated Space Duck, doesn't get that Duncan Deceased totally had it coming, and pronounces it all fake French like LAY MIZZER OBBLES!
You can all probably construct the chain of messages across
many more blogs until somewhere out there in the LoudmouthCreepBlog, there's a
proclamation that Space Duck contains
a confession to the brutal murder of Duncan Deceased, and the sequel will be
about how Dref feels sorry for himself because he's a socialist dick that voted for Obama and sucks up to women and that the next work will be titled I'm So Miserable and the publisher will
bring it out anyway because big publishers only publish books by writers they
have already published and it's just not fair.
Also at IAmTooAnInsiderSoThere, there will be a pre-review of I'm So Miserable declaring it to be a
major advance far, far beyond Space Duck,
and in fact the best novel of all time, which will show those jerky right wing military sf fans who
just want to read trash, so there.
And there went my fifteen minutes. So, as it turned out, it was all riff. Maybe I'll write that first idea I had sometime later. Back to the YA book.
No, it's not a sequel to Space
Duck.
