Announcing God of the Desert's 5 Imprints and Their Substacks
Announcing God of the Desert's 5 Imprints and Their Substacks
We're publishing a wide variety of books across genres and styles. Here's my manifesto justifying and explaining this path.
It took me some time to pinpoint the root of the writing principle which has guided my career - my life, really - and in turn which I am now institutionalizing in this publishing company.
I decided to be a writer in third grade. All this began with a little handwritten short story - "The Mystic Waterfall," that I still have in my files - about a little boy running away, having adventures, and gaining new magical powers in each land he visits by passing through the mystic waterfall.
I believe that this story and my general output in childhood fiction writing for the following four years reflected that general ethos. A young person or outsider individual is granted unique powers and then finds and develops new ones. Just one superpower wasn't enough. We needed to get one after another.
At the time, the X-Men cartoon had debuted, and the collecting of X-Men and other comic cards had become a fad. This became one of my first deep passions, beginning in 1992. But it wasn't the stories or the art that grabbed me: it was the characters and ways in which they were joined together on various configurations of teams. I saw the importance of having characters with multiple powers - who knew when one challenge in an adventure could call on a particular hero's skills?
When my friends and I played at recess, we seized on this superpower fantasy, each day picking a new character out of the guidebook I had ordered from the school Scholastic book program. I soon realized that the best "power" to have was magic - being a wizard meant you could wave the magic wand and have whatever power you wanted
.
Early on in digging deeper into this comic fantasy world, I began to pick up on the different kinds of stories that could be told here - that there were adventures, magical fantasies, science fiction in outer space, horror tales with monsters, and also human drama that, even as a child, I could pick up on and appreciate. Even an 8-year-old can get the emotional melodrama of both Wolverine and Cyclops being in love with Jean Grey and her struggle to choose between them.
So early on, as I began to write fiction, the idea of telling different kinds of stories seemed natural and compelling. In other media I took in at the time, the variety of genres and my interest in creating in all of them arose. I could see the difference between space ships flying in outer space and men with swords fighting wizards. And I wanted to do both.
As childhood turned into teen years, one obsession passed into another and one form of writing and storytelling emerged after another. The essay. The personal website. The religious polemic. The newspaper op-ed. The journalistic article. Poetry! The in-depth research paper. The book review. The movie review. The novel. The screenplay. The blog post. The investigative journalistic expose. The tweet. The confidential opposition research compilation. The celebrity interview. The podcast. The 10-second social media video. And now the surreal AI-generated image created from absurdist prompts.
And so it goes - and so I evolved from an 8-year-old, writing fantasy stories, to the writer-editor-journalist-researcher-activist-publisher I am today.
The writing principle is simple: you must learn as many mediums of writing and genres of fiction as you can. You should aspire to gain knowledge of all stages of the writing process from reading/researching through composition through the various types of editing to the production process to the distribution and the selling of books.
As I became an older teenager and a college student, these principles further imprinted themselves as film became the obsession. I looked at notable "auteur" directors known for distinct styles, themes, and reliable high quality. I came to see that the best would work across genres - they'd do a crime thriller, then a comedy, then a period piece, then a musical, then a documentary, then a terrifying horror film, then a serious, Oscar-aiming highbrow drama, then a filmed concert performance, then something bizarre and experimental.
P.T. Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and great foreign and classic filmmakers Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut - working across genres is the way.
This passion for film has come to strongly shape how we've developed this book publishing company. One of the conceits that I've had for some time with GOTD is that we're going to think of what we're doing more in the context and mentality of acting as a movie studio rather than as a book publishing company.
This will manifest in a number of ways - and I'll discuss this in an upcoming podcast series to be announced soon - but one way is in the further application of this multi-genre, multi-medium principle.
I've just read Chris Yogerst's wonderful new history book The Warner Brothers, a biography of the filmmaking family. There are so many lessons from it that I'll be exploring and dissecting, and then applying to what we do here.
One of those seemingly obvious ideas that we now take for granted is the way studios put out films of so many different genres. What were the various categories that customers expected and demanded? Where were the opportunities to create media that could reach different people and satisfy their different needs? Some nights, we're in the mood for an exciting crime thriller. Other nights, it's time for a goofy laugh.
At GOTD we are embracing this approach through dividing our book offerings and Substack content into 5 different imprints. Part of why we're doing this is our understanding that readers interested in one form of content are going to be bored with or even repulsed by others.
So in addition to the nonfiction offerings you’ve come to know at this Substack, here are the four types of media that we're going to be putting out in books, Substacks, podcasts, and - soon - merchandise.
Please subscribe if any of these sound of particular interest to you. Each of these Substacks will be home to a new series I’ll be starting soon, and we'll also list the subjects our authors will focus on exploring.
We have created this Substack and Imprint for the promotion of our authors
, , and . We will publish books in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, and thriller. We also plan to publish non-fiction titles exploring these genres and popular culture more broadly.At the Heroes Substack you will be able to read articles, essays, and blog posts on these subjects. We're going to discuss and debate what makes books and stories in these genres successful. We're going to talk about how to write them. We're going to feature excerpts from our upcoming titles. We'll talk about our favorite TV, movies, popular music, and video games. (Want classical music and jazz? Head over to the Oasis, our next new Substack, for that.)
We have a number of titles from our group of authors here already, so we are not yet in any rush to find new authors to join the group. However, if all this sounds like a good fit for you and you want to work with us, please reach out. Here's what we're looking to acquire.
Many of our newer readers are likely unaware of this, but GOTD emerged out of the failure of a conservative fiction publishing company. These four Heroes authors and I come from conservative political spaces, each with differing areas of emphasis and styles. Alec is a pro-life activist. Fred comes from a counter-left conservative style, very informed by the various opposing ideologies. Oren and I became friends while working together at a hawkish, counter-Islamist think tank. And Mike and I both share roots and nostalgia in the Tea Party movement and enthusiasm for the Constitution.
So, as a result - and as a patten you will see throughout these imprints - we are very traditional in what we want to publish in this fictional, genre-oriented space. We like the conventional, 3-act, rising climax, hero's-journey narrative. Think The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, “Star Wars,” Star Trek, “Battlestar Galactica,” Dune, the superhero worlds of Marvel and DC Comics. My biggest fantasy influence isn't a book or movie but the computer game “Heroes of Might and Magic 3,” which I'll write some about here.
That doesn't mean we're entirely opposed to more experimental, avant-garde work, though. I'll be writing about and exploring the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson, Douglas Rushkoff, and especially Alan Moore. We're cautious about very eccentric, postmodern experiments - because most experiments don't work - but sometimes authors can pull off something innovative and effective by bending the rules. So we're open to that.
We have created this imprint and Substack to promote the work of our authors
, , , and . Just as Heroes of the Desert embraces the established traditions of genre fiction, Oasis of the Desert offers the refreshment provided by the traditions of literary fiction. Each of these first four authors to the imprint embodies a literary form which I cherish. Barb is our historical fiction author, Howard is our literary satire author, Jon is our poet. David embodies this multi-medium ethos which I have been arguing for today. He dazzles on the literary novel, novella, and poetry - and, of course, in memoir (which will release June 25 in ebook and then arrive on Sept. 10 in paperback.)Again, here our four authors come from varying conservative traditions which in turn inform an enthusiasm for the literary forms and conventions of the past, which I share. Thus it is at this Substack that we will explore more serious art, culture, music, history, and literature in an unapologetically "high-brow" fashion. I plan for my initial writings here to explore the writings of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Wolfe.
We'll announce soon what the other authors will be exploring here, as well as at these other new publications.
This imprint and Substack has been created to promote the work of authors
, Bill Walsh, and . This imprint is dedicated to mystery, supernatural thriller, horror, crime, and detective stories.As in our two previous imprints, we also embrace traditional, classic forms here. In preparation for the novels which I intend to write in these genres - which I want to set out here in the Morongo Basin in San Bernardino County, where we have lived since 2022 - I will be reading and studying the writings of Raymond Chandler. Within this genre, I am most drawn to the hardboiled detective tradition, and I regard it as a foundation if I am to write further on these mystery and crime themes. I will supplement this with also studying these books’ cinematic follower, film noir.
Sally, in contrast, is currently writing in the Shirley Jackson tradition and focusing on the spooky, twist-ending short story.
Finally Goddess of the Desert is
’s editorial domain, which will feature memoirs and novels written by women, with a special focus on exploring female characters and themes. We have chosen to shift the fictional "Our Dog Jasmine Talks to Us and Writes Blog Posts" series over there.Thank you, everyone, for your continued support and encouragement. This is only the first of many announcements for new books and new series coming in the next few weeks. We’ve made a lot of progress with our books and are very excited to share with you what we’ve created together.