My forthcoming novella, Life is What Happens Between Advertisements, is scheduled to be released Q4 2017. The voices tell me it’ll likely be published late October, early November.
Life had a somewhat mundane inception. I was sitting in a hotel room in Idaho, absentmindedly flipping through the television channels. Every channel had a commercial playing. I started to think about how saturated our daily lives are with advertising, marketing, and brand names. Whether it’s the neon signs lining the highways or the manufacturer name stamped on a urinal cake, everywhere we look we are being sold someone’s product, overtly and subliminally.
I then recalled being dragged to a talkie at the moving picture show that I had no interest in seeing. To make throwing ninety minutes of my life away somewhat palatable, I made a game of counting how many different brands were embedded into the film as a method of integrated marketing. I stopped keeping track around one hundred.
I reached the conclusion that our existence is so inundated with advertisements that the moments of one’s life can be measured not just by days, months, and years, or by significant historical or personal events, but by the length of time between when one advertisement ends and the next one begins, however brief.
Life takes this premise and underlays it beneath a dystopian near-future metropolis of mega corporations, militarized government agencies, and secret societies.
So, what’s next? I’m working on a collection of short stories, some previously published (links on the Bibliography page) and some new. I also have another long-term creative project, but I’ll reveal the details of that at another time.
Stay weird,
-BA
