This email was sent by the JL website. The webmaster/moderator wants you to see:
Comment by Rolf
Well, I know you have sold at least 9 books to me. Been on a bit of a slavery jag in the last couple of years. As a small-time author myself (most S/F), I know the markets are changing. What I think you might find a market for, and what would be very useful to me as a teacher, is if you wrote the script for a graphic novel. [1]
Dark, spare, somewhere between Batman and Manga, with brutal realism. Take everything you know about the kidnapping and white indenture/slave trade to the new world and write a fictionalized account that takes an average kidnapped 8-YO from Aberdeen or London, gets held for a month (poor parents can't buy him out), give a bit of background of the enclosure and vagrancy laws, shipped over losing a quarter of the half-freight kids who are just dumped over the side, the starvation, the beating, malnutrition, the fact that most did not make it to the end of the first year, etc. add some footnoted items for numbers and sources at the end. [2]
Aim it at typical MS/HS students. [3]
The female indentures getting raped to extend their service. [4]
Make it clear they were all white. Etc. [5]
Keep the script spare (setting, action, dialog, repeat). [6]
I think it could get crowd-funded to the art, then sales after that are gravy. [7]
I know I would want several for any history classroom I'm ever in. [8]
Might make a good way to wrap up the colonial white slavery series. [9]
Just a thought. If you have no interest or time, but would be willing to edit / proof, I might be talked into writing it myself. [10]
In the mean time, hope you are doing well in the new year.
Respond on the website
OR
Respond by personal email
…
Rolph, I am flattered that you like my writing, being a writer yourself.
Oh, I don't read site comments and this was sent to me once by my editor and by the web master in the form above.
I have footnoted your ideas above, the answers below.
-1. I did not go to school and never learned English composition before dropping out of Trinity High School on my 16th birthday. It took me reading about 5,000 books from 1973 to 2020 to pick up a writing method that some people find pleasing. I don't have the eyes or the 47 years to do that with scripts. I'm like musician that can't read music. I do not know how to write, I just do it, and do it as an echo of those dead white men whose books I read. I once read The Script, by Wells Root, and became convinced that I lack the ability to write a movie script, and also the interest in that medium. I suppose I am whatever measure of writer I am based on reading many books. I have watched fewer movies that almost every other modern person and have only read a handful of comics and do not like that medium. I actually have a hard time getting through a comic and absorbing the information—they grate on me in confusion. Perhaps this has something to do with my unique mental retardation.
-2. I have done one Plantation America novel, Sold, which is not in print yet but can be read on the patreon site. It is specifically based on the execution of Thomas Hellier in 1678 near a Plantaion called Hard Labour in Virginia. Hellier was such a shitbag that I inserted a typical half-freight waif to develop reader empathy.
-3. I have no idea what would appeal to children and youth today but do know that their parents would form a media mob to erase me for trying to shop The Greatest Lie Ever Sold to their kids. I do not possess that kind of courage.
-4. The hard thing about writing this for children or youths, is the fact that although female freight were raped, for every girl that was knocked up by a negro buck so her master would get fresh-born slave for life, a thousand [no exaggeration here] white boys were raped by white men. Man-on-boy white rape is the very foundation of this nation, and, well, trying to popularize the truth about it could get me erased pretty quick. For this reason I can't write about an average 8-year-old, because they all got sodomized. I inserted a washed up boxer into Sold, to protect the kid, just so I would not have to write a first person account of a boy getting ass raped.
-5. How exactly are we supposed to shop slavery to Americans if we do not have Scottish negroes getting marched down to Aberdeen by American slave catchers?
-6. I have no idea how to write a script and would have to read thousands of comics to start internalizing the structure. My dislike of comics and condition of my eyes prevents this in any case.
-7. The idea of crowd funding leaves me stale. I don't get it. I couldn't imagine me waiting to complete a book while the money rolls in over a year or so, when I could write it in a weekend. I would lose interest in the project as soon as I began begging for money. That's just how my mind works for writing. The other thing is, I assume, that to write a comic, I'd have to communicate with a comic book artist? I'd rather fight Mike Tyson over a can of dog food.
-8. I am beginning to gather that you are involved in teaching. If you are, kiss your job and your pension goodbye if you are found with a white slavery comic.
-9. I plan on writing Bound, the sequel to Sold, this year. After that I would like to use runaway adds to write a series of short stories, titled Free, one each about the various vagabonds I discovered in those brief indictments by their masters. I am already sick to death of the subject, and knew I would be years ago. That is why I set up the patreon account to focus only on Plantation America, to tie my income to an obligation to continue mining the mass child grave of “Colonial” America. That is the only reason I am still doing this, because patreon provides half of my annual income. I just want to write novels and only write history when I can't help it. If the patreon account got nuked tomorrow, I would not write another word on the subject and just turn my back on it. I actually hope I die before I finish the history books—it is such drudgery. So, I do intend to do more fiction on the subject, in part to save my eyes from ploughing through these photo pdfs from the Library of Congress. Despite my graphomania, Lynn actually has to remind me to write this shit so I get paid.
-10. I don't even try to talk fighters into fighting. I am a terrible proof reader and worse editor. If you would like to do a graphic novel based on Sold [which I have sent you the draft of] I'd be thrilled. But it would be all your headache—I'd want nothing to do with it as a project and ask only a credit mentioning Sold. Looking at a comic layout hurts my brain. But, if you wrote a script [which I would not know how to edit] I could give it a read if you sent it in 16 point Lucida Sans and would probably catch 40% of the typos.
Rolph, thanks so much for your interest. I would be interested in ready some of your science fiction if I could get it in really big sans type. I began Plantation America by accident, researching Seven Moons Deep, a science fiction, and am continuing to use that material for background for my new fantasy series Elder Earth, which begins with Sorcerer, which will post on Saturdays on this site from early April to early August. I hope you have a good year as well.
