I’m half way through the rough draft of a new book with the working title “Wilty Zeebo and Jackson Toad: Space Hobos” …
and I decided to share a bit with you about the process involved. For starters, it’s a brand new sci-fi series, but readers of my previous series will know the characters’ backstories and readers who are new to my books with this series will not. So how do I handle that? I want to avoid spoilers whenever possible so that they find the previous series enjoyable. This is tricky, and I think in some ways impossible. The characters have certain predetermined abilities and lives that cannot be ignored. Of course, it’s my hope that readers will figure out the timeline in which I wrote my books because I drop Easter eggs from many of my previous books in subsequent books, so it makes sense to go through them in order. But on the other hand, readers may be coming to the characters deserve an introduction, so, while I normally don’t believe in Introductions that break the fourth wall before a novel, I do believe in breaking the rules from time to time, and here’s how I’m planning to introduce these characters to the reader before the thing gets rolling:Jackson Toad.Jackson Toad Stetson is a minor character from “The Stetson Jeff Adventures,” a six-book series I wrote with my friend Justin Fike. We’ve always used the catchall phrase “action-adventure-comedy” to describe the Stetson Jeff books genre, but they are our attempt at a contribution to a genre I’d call The Great American Tall Tale, which is not a genre according to Amazon, so we were at a loss when it came time to categorize the work for publication, like when the Smithsonian tries to find a place for the skeleton of a skunk amongst the bones of the ancient behemoth lizards. Stetson Jeff ought to be judged against revered characters such as Paul Bunyan, John Henry, George Washington, Johnny Appleseed, Betsy Ross and anybody else who ever appeared in an educational film strip, those characters who never really did the things that my elementary school teachers said they did: chop down cherry trees faster than a chainsaw and refuse to lie about it, invent apple pies and railroads, even design the American flag, and so on. No, sir! They did much more than all that for this great nation! Stetson Jeff, written in the first person, utilizes a great deal of embellishment, so you know it has to be true even if it isn’t factually accurate, which sets the tone for how Jackson Toad got his name, a point which I have been working toward steadily for an entire paragraph now.
Jackson Toad first appeared in a short story called “A Very Stetson Christmas,” which Justin and I wrote to bridge the gap between the first trilogy and the fourth book (not knowing at the time that there would ultimately be six.) In this story, Jeff Stetson tells the reader about his nephew and explains that his name was “supposed to be Jackson Road because he was conceptualized perhaps slightly out of wedlock by a month or so in the bed of a Chevy S-10 on the dirt road that did not have a name but was headed in the direction of Jackson, Mississippi, if you kept on going right through a couple other states, but you couldn’t because the bridge was out before you got to the next town, and then anyway the nurse misspelled his name when she typed it in the birth certificate because the T is right next to the R.” I assure you, dear reader, that the above is not a spoiler. Stetson Jeff stories are famous for Jeff’s humorous, rambling asides, which is pretty much the only thing in the Stetson Jeff books, aside from the bits where he gets kicked in the head and the places where plot jerks forward like the second-hand of a fake Rolex. Still, Jackson Toad does play a role in the final chapters of the last Stetson Jeff Adventure, Denouement in Dallas, and if I said any more about that, this Orientation would become a spoiler for the other series.
After the Stetson Jeff Adventures were completed, I wrote seven short stories involving Stetson Jeff characters and paranormal occurrences, jammed them into a volume called Close Encounters of The Stetson Kind and published it before I had a chance to second guess myself about the quality of the short stories, and in retrospect (or “in retrograde,” as Stetson Jeff would say) I wasn’t going to second guess myself anyway, because I don’t do that, which is why I keep publishing books all the time instead of wallowing about in the fear that it isn’t ever going to be good enough. As my editor Michael Lee says, “You just don’t give a shit, do you?”
He meant that as a good thing. At least that’s how I took it. Far too often in this life, giving a shit stops people from doing shit. Heroes in Tall Tales don’t give a shit, they eat stacks of flapjacks as big as a butte, so why should I care? They’re pretty good, as you’ll see for yourself, because I decided to share one of the short stories from Close Encounters of the Stetson Kind called “No Quarry for Old Stetsons” with you. For the sake of this book I will call it the “Prologue” because it was intended to bridge the gap between the Stetson Jeff Adventures and the ensuing fusion experience. It’s an hors d’oeuvre or a palate cleanser. It’s the final word from Stetson Jeff, it is his version of “Hiyo Silver, Awayyyy.” It’s all we have to explain how Jackson Toad went from east Texas to wandering the stars.
I also don’t believe in Prologues, but now that we’ve done half of a thinly-disguised Introduction, I’m waist deep in useless front matter and rule-breaking shit-not-giving, I might as well keep going.
Now, having Jackson Toad appear in outer space from his origins in a sequel to a Texas-style tall tale isn’t really fusion yet, not until we add a character from another series. Enter stage left …
Wilty Zeebo.
Unlike Jackson Toad, whose origin story as told by Stetson Jeff contains a bit too much information about where and when his parents had intimate relations, Wilty Zeebo just appeared in The Satchel Pong Chronicles, specifically book two, Satchel Pong and the Search for Emil Ennis, at the beginning of chapter 28. He appears out of thin air.
I was writing along one day and decided that Antoinette Xho needed an apprentice, so I gave her one and named him Wilty Zeebo. At first he’s a dunce. He doesn’t know how to write, nor what wattage or a generator are. He’s such a dunce he doesn’t even know what a dunce is. He is as blank a slate as can be. If you ever want to see an example of a time when an author has spent zero time thinking about a back story for a new character, Wilty Zeebo would be exhibit A. I dumped him into the story like a pile of wet clay and breathed life into him, whoosh. I do not remember doing it this way, but the evidence is in the negative space all around his character development, and I certainly don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. (To be fair to myself, there are some comments in the story about how various people are just joining up with Satchel Pong’s little clan out of nowhere, and so Wilty is just one of those that I gave a name.) Regardless of his complete ignorance of anything related to constructing or using a wireless (radio) set, Antoinette takes him under her wing. As to his provenance, the story only notes that “She remembered the day he walked into camp. He was alone and starving, to be sure, but even so, he looked as though he were just out for a stroll. Like he knew dinner would come to him as long as he kept his spirits up. She knew he had promise.”
That’s his entire back story. We never learn anything about his parents, land of origin, nor how he survived on his own as a young child in the wilderness before he found Satchel Pong and the rest of them. Wilty himself didn’t have much recall on events prior to his arrival, he is ignorant of his own history.
As for Wilty having “promise,” I myself had no idea how much promise he would show when I casually dropped him into the story. Almost anything I could say about Wilty’s role in the last three and a half books of the series would be a spoiler, so I’ll leave you with that. As it turned out, Wilty had so much promise that here he is getting a spin-off fusion series of his own, five years after Emil Ennis was published. You will notice that Wilty will make many references to things on his home planet which those who’ve read Pong will recognize, but it works just as well in this novel to not recognize them and instead to experience them as Wilty being weird and coming from a weird planet. Which he does.
While Jackson Toad comes from the tall-tale series set on planet Earth, Wilty comes from a series that’s part steampunk, part fantasy, part sci-fi, set in a world of my own creation, although it is quite unlike almost anything from any of those three genres on their own. Because Wilty has appeared in three and a half books, he now has a weird and rich back story.
But we must never forget that Wilty Zeebo appears out of thin air. In another world, he might have been both a priest and a king after the order of Melchizedek. By the time we’re done with him, he might be more like Cotton-Eye Joe: we will not know where he came from nor where he did go, and if it hadn’t been for Wilty Zeebo, some of you might have been married long time ago, although I don’t think you should blame him for that. If you sit around and read books and don’t get out and meet interesting people, that’s a possible consequence. The obvious solution is to join a book club. I digress. I feel that there’s both an innocence and a mystique to this character I trust you’ll enjoy. Satchel Pong’s story ended but I never felt that I was done with Wilty, and I hoped he’d get along with Jackson Toad.
I hope at this point you’re excited about the fusion project. Let’s be real, I hope you’re excited enough to go get the first book in the Stetson Jeff Adventures (Beatdown in Bangkok) and the first one in the Satchel Pong Chronicles (Satchel Pong and the Great Migration) and give them a try. Check out my bookstore page (www.adamgfleming.com/bookstore) and if you’d like a free listen to the first Stetson Jeff book on audiobook, send me an email at agf@adamgfleming.com and I’ll send you a code to listen free!
Adam G. Fleming 