A Rough Introduction

To a new book I'm working on

That’s a sample of the books I intend to read, cover to cover with yellow highlighter in hand, over the next nine months. Not seen are all the books I’ve already highlighted to absolute shit and taken copious notes on. Some of the books you see I’ve already read a while back, but I haven’t yet studied them for the purposes of writing my next book.

And then, approximately nine months from now, in an orgiastic fury of writing, I hope to have the draft of a new book completed prior to Christmas of 2024. That’s the plan, anyway. It might not work out that way. I’ve been hustling this career for fifteen years straight and am tired of killing myself. My only motivation to finish this book in a timely manner and not in a George R.R. Martin manner is you, dear reader. I don’t want you to have to wait too long. But I won’t rush it, either, as the intention is for it to be my magnum opus. Or, at least, my first magnum opus. More opuses to come afterward, I hope. But opuses take time, and I want this first one to be a gooder.

The working title is Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots: A History of Humanity.

Last night I gave a reading at Owl’s Nest Books. We had a full house, and rather than read from a book that everyone was there to buy, I read some new stuff. I read a new “on this day in history” story about the history of the phone book (why won’t they die?), and I read the rough draft of the beginning scene of this new book, which I shall refer to as GSRB for short.

Before I get to that, I signed a bunch of books at Owl’s Nest and we sold a chunk but they still have signed stock. It is the only place to buy signed copies of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. They have excellent customer service and will deliver anywhere in the world. Depending on how far away you are, if you order RFN you can probably get them in time for Christmas. This is the link.

Anyway, I read this to the crowd last night and they seemed to like it. As a reminder, it’s rough, and after all the research and planning it’s entirely possible the final GSRB intro won’t look anything like this, but at present, this is where my brain is at. Enjoy.

Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots: A History of Humanity

Human history began when Adam, who was bored and lonely in that garden, said, “Ima take this rib outta my own body and fuck it.”

            Wait. No. That’s the bullshit version. Let’s try this again.

Human history … just … ugh.

            There is no grand narrative to our history, no plan, no great arc, no destiny. Our path is a bunch of shit that happened, and it’s anyone’s guess what comes next. We’ve brought ourselves to the brink via constructing thousands of fission-explodey toys and strapping them to intercontinental boomsticks to point at each other and say, “I fuckin’ dare ya!” If you knew how many times we’ve been a testicle hair away from making the planet go kerblooie and shrouding Earth in a blanket of invisible cancer air, well, you might just say fuck it, cash advance all your credit cards to the max, and make tracks for Vegas.

            It could still happen. There are myriad scenarios that could take us from “I can’t wait for the next season of The Bachelorette” to “Ow shit my face is melting.”

            Here for a good time, not a long time.

            But, perhaps, there is reason to hope. While there is no discernible pattern, no deterministic prophecies or a generational cycle that repeat every eighty years, there are indications that we are learning to suck less.

            There are those who believe humanity was once kinder and gentler, and that our decline was all cereal’s fault. Fucking Weetabix screwing over humanity for eons to come. But before our species went hard on agriculture which led to creating hierarchies, building armies, and establishing empires, many imagine that once upon a Stone Age time, life was all hunting, gathering, rainbows, and newly domesticated puppy hugs. And they may quote famed anthropologist Margaret Mead to tell of a magical mythical era when we were truly civilized.

            It’s a convincing tale. Imagine a time, approximately 15,000 years ago. You are part of a small and nomadic tribe that wanders the land in search of game because you’re sick of eating nothing but roots and berries. Things are relatively equal, as life is about subsistence. We all live, or we all die. Communism doesn’t work at the national level, as we’ve proven time and again via things like Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Great Leap toward sixty million people starving to death, but in your wee tribe, life was largely communal.

            Alas, one day you trip over a discarded mammoth tusk and break your fucking leg. Not just your leg, but your femur. You are fucked with a capital Firetruck.

            But wait! The tribe cares about you. They look after you, do your chores, feed you, drag you around until your leg heals. I mean, modern medicine is not yet a thing so there aren’t any opioids for you to get addicted to, and you’ll likely walk with a limp the rest of your life and therefore get downgraded from hunter duties to gathering, but you live a few more years until some malaria mosquito bites you or you shit yourself to death via dysentery or you exsanguinate while endeavoring to squeeze an oversized hominid head out of your body via an orifice of insufficient capacity to accomplish such a biological feat. Or maybe some saber-toothed murder beast turns you into a snack. The point is, the fractured femur didn’t do you in because your fellow bipeds took care of your worthless injured ass until you got better. You die at a later date, becoming Paleolithic worm food. Millenia pass, then some anthropologist finds your bones and says, “That’s interesting.”

            And then a student asks Margaret Mead when civilization began, and you become the star of the show.

            Margaret tells your tale, explaining about finding your remains and the evidence of the healed femur. To a rapt audience she details how other members of the tribe, rather than saying well shit this person is fucked sucks to them, they took on additional hardships to ensure that you lived. “Helping someone through difficulty is where civilization starts,” Mead tells the student.

            Awwwww!

            What a sweet story. Too bad it’s bullshit. Never fucking happened.

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And that is what I have thus far. If you want to follow the journey, paid subscribers are going to get to see each chapter as it’s written, plus read all my angst-filled posts about the research and writing process, so maybe gimme money by clicking this button here:

And don’t forget about ordering signed copies from Owl’s Nest. They have the very last of the cool bookmarks but they have more signed copies than bookmarks so if you want to make sure you get one included you better order asa-motherfuckin’-p. This is what they look like, and there probably won’t be any more:

And of course if you just want to buy a copy of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down not signed by me it’s in bookstores or you can find links at JamesFell.com/books.