PP#1: Chaos in the Windy City
I'm...going to have to rethink that title abbreviation.
Hey, I’m Jack McGuigan. I wrote Dog Walker (I and II) and Agents of Paradox, a comic book. At some point in the last six months, you signed up for my mailing list. Or maybe you didn’t? If not, here’s a button!
What is “The Primate Post”?
“Gorilla House” is the imprint I publish books under, so…that, but a newsletter. I also made a couple movies about evil monkey pod people in high school? Primates were my brand long before spooky dogs. I would imagine you don’t really care what I name things, but I should explain this once in case it comes up later. Anyway!
Here’s where I’m at: I quit Facebook because it makes me sad, and I stare at Twitter for several hours a day because it makes me a different type of sad that I can’t seem to get enough of. Social media killed all the other websites and then became a mild torture device, like that chair in Wisconsin Dells that gives you little electric shocks through your hands. So now what? Where can I say book things? If I write a book and I don’t tell anybody, how will people know to read it? If only there were some sort of free publishing platform that was suddenly home to a lot of great writers…
(And now, also, me.)
What’s gonna be on here?
Man, I don’t know yet. I’ve written half of one of these so far.
Are you writing more books?
I am! I’m currently deep in the pre-production outlining process on two different novels. This is the part where I sit around making stuff up, i.e. The Best Part of Writing. I don’t actually start with prose until I’ve got the basics of every scene worked out. I’m not a seat-of-your-pants guy. I need to know where it’s going, or else it feels like I’m bullshitting everybody? These things cost money, the least I can do is try to make it good.
Book #1 is Dog Walker III, which is coming together surprisingly quickly, probably because I already wrote two of those. Book two is a new thing, a longer, weirder thing that I’ll call The Reimagining. That one is…harder to get out, but I kind of want to write it more. There’s new characters and a whole made-up setting and entire books full of research involved. I had to draw a MAP. Can you imagine?
I should know by the next newsletter (February) which one is actually going to be 2020’s novel, and you’ll be the first to know on here.
Here’s a free book!
-_-_-_ Deal of the Month _-_-_-
DOG WALKER (for Kindle) is FREE from now until Friday 1/10!
Jack’s Recs
Black Hammer v. 4: Age of Doom Part 2 just came out in trade. Terrific end to a great series. Black Hammer is the story of 6-7 very specific Marvel/DC superhero analogues, who get trapped in a mysterious farm town for like a decade, figuring out where they are, how they got there and how to get out. It’s got a very David Lynch/Twin Peaks vibe, he said, having only ever seen Lynch’s Dune movie. I’ve been recommending these to everyone I talk to for a while now, and it’s nice to be able to point them at a completed thing. That’s rare with comics.
The Irishman is going to be on a lot of lists, and I watched it weeks after everybody else, but when trying to come up with a movie that really stuck with me in the last month, this is the one that keeps popping in my head. It’s like a regular gangster movie, except it keeps going for an hour after the natural endpoint, and you get to see how this story actually ends. How it always ends.
John Hodgman’s Medallion Status (I listened to the audiobook) is a constantly funny and surprisingly moving story about becoming famous and then slowly becoming less famous. I laughed out loud while walking the dog, and a neighbor saw me and turned away, so thanks John, now somebody thinks I’m a whackjob.
In the future, I’ll answer reader questions down here, so if you have anything you wanna know, email me at gorillahousebooks@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter.
Your friend in time,
Jack