Years ago I put together a collection of horror and sci-fi short stories I’d written around 2010 – 2012. This was shortly before I took a stab at my first novel Pareidolia, and served as a literary canary in a coal mine; I had next to no idea what the creative writing process was like.
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In 2017 I self-published my first stab at a novel, a highish-concept science fiction thriller named Pareidolia. You can read the premise here, and the table of contents can be found here.
I had also published a single deleted chapter when the book came out, but today I added four more. Click here to read these never before seen chapters, as well as other fun bonus material.
I stupidly forgot to link each chapter to the next, so you always had to go back to the TOC to keep reading. No more. Now there are go-to-next-chapter links at the bottom of each chapter post.
Enjoy!
I just finished reading Infinite Jest for the third time, and this time I took notes. It helped. Keeping the dozen-plus storylines straight in the mist of the rhetorical glitter bombs Wallace throws in your face borders on the Herculean, which I get is on purpose, but I noticed (and more importantly retained) what felt like a good quarter of the story that I missed the last two times around.
I read the first several miniature chapters of George Saunder’s Lincoln In The Bardo with some misgivings. I knew and loved Saunders from Tenth of December and was accustomed to his style, but the overbearing nature of epistolary literature has always rubbed me the wrong way. And this was a whole novel of that? Very hard to grab onto, yet the reviews glowed and gushed. So I pushed on.
I considered myself a science fiction writer all the way through my first novel, Pareidolia. With portals, time travel, impossible rooms, and recovered alien artifacts, there’s no way it could be anything else.
I figured I ought to have a glancing familiarity with my genre, so I assigned myself a long reading list, starting with Frankenstein and ending with the hottest new sci-fi novel of the moment. It didn’t go well.
I started reading Robert Bolaño’s formidable novel 2666 last month, and I’m sure it’ll take me another month to get through it. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which sometimes makes long novels a pain in the ass to get through. But not this novel. I’m savoring every minute of it.
So you’ve read every word of my self-published sci-fi novel Pareidolia, and you just can’t bring yourself to admit that the journey is over.
Never you fear! Below are some sweet Pareidolia bonus features to keep the freaky vibes flowing.
DELETED CHAPTER: BALERO’S JOURNAL
DELETED CHAPTER: SETI STUDENT GROUP
DELETED CHAPTER: ZEKE IN PORTLAND
DELETED CHAPTER: HOLCOMB’S INTERVIEW
Enjoy this deleted chapter from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
Taking place just before the final version of the book begins, this deleted chapter finds Zeke fumbling his way towards Kenneth Holcomb’s secretive inner circle by way of a college SETI student group. (SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a real thing.) The connections Zeke makes in this group eventually lead him to attend an out-of-town astrophysics conference where he befriends some members of Holcomb’s inner circle who agree to take him in as one of their own. Some of these characters are mentioned by name in the book’s current opening chapter, at the “birthday party”.
Continue readingEnjoy this deleted chapter from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
This is an excerpt from Balero’s journal that had for quite a long time served as the book’s opener (it was one of the very first sections I wrote). It was later moved to near the end of the book in the form of a physical journal entry that Marcus stumbles upon while holed up at Willow’s extravagant condo around the time Balero demonstrates his newfound powers to Zeke by forcing Leah’s father to materialize from the past and then vanish again.
The 2nd and 3rd sections of this intro (“urge loop” is an anagram of prologue — I was quite obsessed with anagrams while writing this book) serve as background pieces to get the reader comfortable with the world they are about to enter.
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Jason Herrboldt 