brendan halpin

I’m sure you can absorb this from other disciplines, but here’s an important lesson I got from studying literature, in particular poetry: the part that doesn’t make sense is what makes it make sense.

Now, for those who don’t know me, I’ve been an English/Writing teacher in some form or another for most of the last 30 years. Just gotta establish those bona fides because I know teachers won’t listen to anyone who’s not a teacher. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing! I went to enough “professional development” meetings led by consultants who had never set foot in a classroom to be extremely skeptical of non-teacher takes on teaching.)

Okay, let’s start with a quiz. Which one of these is an error?

I’ve got a cold, which means isolation and streaming stuff on Shudder. I’m a big fan of Dario Argento, so I decided to catch the new documentary about him.

We all know how much corporate control of the internet sucks. And how much corporate control of art sucks. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to support DIY artists.

I still love paper books, but I also love ebooks. I love a trip to the library to browse and check out books, but also if I finish a book at 9 at night, it’s cool to be able to borrow the next one from my couch. And, of course, having an e-reader opens up a whole new world of reading. A lot of books (such as my 2002-2012 output) are pretty much only available to read as ebooks. And a lot of people (again, like me—pay what you want!) are putting out new work in electronic form because ebooks allow you to put your work out in the world with far less expense and trouble than traditional publishing. Yes, of course there’s a lot of crap out there, but that’s true of paper books as well.

But a lot of people tell me they don’t want to get locked into getting books from Bezos, especially since ebooks you buy from Amazon are essentially licensed rather than owned. (Remember when they sucked all the copies of 1984 out of people’s Kindles? A little on-the-nose, if you ask me, but it actually happened.)

Fortunately, you can get an ereader that’s not locked in to any particular bookseller, which essentially means buying an android tablet with an e-ink screen.

I’m really proud of this mystery I wrote, and I’d love for more people to read it. So, below, please find the first chapter for your consideration! If you like it, you can get the rest of the book (pay what you want!) here.

So the liberal arts are under attack from people who think the sole purpose of higher education is vocational training and from fascists. I’d like to talk about the second group because they’re more sinister, but also because if you’re a person of good will in the first group, you should be really clear on who you’re in bed with.

Fascists, and American Christofascists in particular, hate the liberal arts not because they’re not practical or because of tenure or antisemitism or even left-wing indoctrination. They hate the liberal arts because they don’t want people to think for themselves; they want them to do what they’re told.

Maps! Secret rooms! Forbidden knowledge! Libraries! This book checked a lot of boxes for me, and it’s definitely a fun, engaging read. Most of the big reveals were telegraphed pretty early on, so I can’t say anything that happened was terribly surprising, but still, I enjoyed the ride.

But of course I have some quibbles. Read on only if you’ve read the book—there are major spoilers ahead.

I never heard back on my Arkham High pitch. Did they not like the fact that the chapters were inexplicably named after Carpenters songs? Was the drug dealer as protagonist a little much for them? Did they find it too derivative of Boaz Yakin’s 1994 movie Fresh? (This one would have been pretty fair, and if you haven’t seen Fresh, I highly recommend it.) I’ll never know!

I thought I’d take one more crack at this. I decided to pitch a pretty obscure character, figuring I’d have way less competition for a Zatanna book than with something involving one of DC’s Big 3.

Back in 2016, I got a call from the person who was my literary agent at the time. They told me that their agency had been contacted by DC comics because they were in search of YA authors for a line of YA graphic novels. They wanted a big-name kidlit author that the agency represented (I won’t name names, but Don’t Let the Penguin Drive the Bus would have been a good DC Comics property for this person to write.).

But that author wasn’t interested, so my agent asked if I’d like to pitch a project. I went to New York during Comic Con and met with a DC editor and had a great conversation. I pitched a Superman story. She liked my idea, so I wrote up the pitch and had my agent send it off.

Apparently some editors loved my pitch and other hated it. The haters won out, so I got to work on another one. I used a bunch of the ideas I’d pitched to DC in my high school noir I SEE RED, which is forthcoming from…me. But said editor had also informed me that someone in the company came up with a Gotham-based idea called Arkham High. So I pressed Kaitlynne from Shelter in Place into service and wrote a pitch for it. It follows below!