Not going to list them all for you and give you titles and chapter and page numbers. Just a few hints. I know, bait and switch, right? But switch to what? How about a brand new alphabetic bestiary just for you, the readers? Let’s do it. (Starting time is 9:59 am EDT.)
A is for the Audience, which might include you but not primarily. We want to be discovered when they start digging through the rubble to start rebuilding it all.
B is for Bibles. Four of them at last count. Only three at Amazon though. But in existence.
C is for comedy, cartoons, and comics. I’ve done quite a lot of these by now. They’re fun. And deadly in earnest.
D is for Dactylic Hexameter. The flip side of anapestic. The hardwired rhythm of epics. Why the ascendancy of iambs has killed nobility and meaning in literature.
E is for entertainment. I write because I find it so entertaining to turn my own mind inside out to see what’s in there.
F is for fiction, which we all think we know when we see it, or from the label at the bookstore anyway. The challenge is finding where fiction begins and where it ends. A chancy business with me.
G is for glossaries. Let’s see (using my fingers now), I’ve done 1, 2, 3, 4 of them, at least. Plus two or more gazetteers and a bunch of maps, a gang of alphabetic Who’s Who lists, an alphabetic Bible book that contains a kind of Bible glossary and a numeric/date listing. I’ve also done a dictionary and a book jacket describing a dictionary, the only one we need these days.
H is for Harry, the romantic tragic hero who still rules all my writing from Rio.
I is for I and what you and I make of it through the story we live and the line(s) we draw through that story. It can be a straight short segment if you like. It can be a complex shape with more facets and sides and dimensions than even the string theory cosmologists can draw. I’m entitled to have that opinion. So are you.
J is for the Jews, the indispensable pivot point of all recorded human history. Attempts to deny, evade, defeat, or destroy this pivot point are the most direct route to hellish narcissism yet devised. What Chosen really means.
K is for the Ka. Like gravity it’s a necessary aspect of physics, whether you can see, understand, or believe it or not.
L is for Lorenz transformations. Unless it’s for the Labyrinth of Daedalus. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve designed more labyrinths than bestiaries. But there’s overlap there. As there usually is. Plenty of beasts in my labyrinths.
M is for Millennials and their so far unrealized Mission to pull the greatest Lazarus act ever by rising from the dead against all odds and rediscovering life.
N is for nihilism, the empty end of every empty soul. It’s a void that’s always hungry but never capable of being filled or sated. It kills what it consumes and seeks absence from being with every voracious bite. Everything here is the sworn enemy of this metaphysical black hole.
O is for Ontogeny, which Philogeny is recapitulated by. Discovered this watching a puppy organize a human household with one lick and one wag. Just such a puppy created the species of domestic dog.
P is for punk. If you didn’t know that, you wouldn’t be here. Of course many aren’t here. You can think of us as the dead tree righting itself in the forest when there’s no non-tree there to see it.
Qis for questions, which are the beginning point of every piece of writing from poetry to porn ads. What questions are you asking for your audience and what answer(s) are you offering to them?
R is for referring, the act of identifying, mapping, or plotting a relationship which enlarges both the referrer and the referred to.
S is for serendipity and synchronicity, which I combine via mutual reference to serendicity, which is how Johnny Dodge is created a shatterer of worlds in the seemingly doomed flight from one dead-end world to another.
T is for the Tarot. Buy one. The Arthur Waite deck. The drawings are cool and all the doorways are open.
U is for the Undernet in ST99. Now there’s a hint for you.
V is for Vade Mecum, what Eugene Field and Doctor Dream have in common, their own incarnation of the Zerone.
W is for wheels within wheels within wheels. In short, absolutely everything here.
X is for all kinds of exciting meanings, known and unknown. It is the fullback of symbolism in the letter team making up the alphabets of both language and mathematics. Always a signal to pay attention.
Y is for you. The stories embedded in my work exist only as you choose a path or even many discrepant paths through them.
Z is for Zerone, the infinite space between zero and one that contains absolutely everything in existence with no exceptions. The universal punk writer symbol is a Zerone. And so are you. How you define “one” is the definition of your soul.