By Paul Kupperberg

I was listening to a writer being interviewed on NPR the other day and the interviewer asked Stock Question #27: “So out of all your books, which is your favorite?” The write responded with Stock Answer #27: “All my books are like my children. How do you pick a favorite?”

Yeah. Sure. Look, every writer knows when they’ve screwed the pooch and written something that just doesn’t stack up against the rest of what they’ve done, or just flat out sucks. If you’re a believer in Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud.”) than 90% of what every writer writes has to be crud (unless you’ve revised it as I have to make it Sturgeon’s Law–Now Improved With Face Saving Rationalization!: “90% of everything by everybody except me is crud.”). But even if you don’t accept the Law, I can understand using Stock Answer #27 instead of responding truthfully; why open yourself up to the follow-up question, “So which one of your books, etc. do you think isn’t so good?” Which can also be asked as, “Which of your books shouldn’t readers waste their money on?”

(See, this is why I only had the one kid.)

But to the question at hand: I do have some books, stories, comic books, whatever that I’ve written that I like more than others. I can’t really think of many things I’ve worked on that I outright hate, even if I wasn’t happy with it at the time I finished it (oh wait…I almost forgot The Adventures of Goggleman, an instructional comic I wrote in 1992 for the Power Tool Institute. I kid you not. “Always wear your safety goggles and always read, understand, and follow the owner’s manual!”). Usually, with the softening effect of a little time and emotional distance between the actual work and taking another look, I find it’s really not as bad as I thought. Maybe not my best but I usually put it down with an, at worst, mildly satisfied, “Well, maybe that didn’t suck as much as I thought.” (Usually, although there’ll be a few epic fails, like the one I discussed here, in an earlier blog post.)

Conversely, there are projects that I’ve pushed away from after typing “the end” and said, “Okay, this almost doesn’t suck!” (That’s understatement, so as not to jinx anything or, as my people say, put the kina horah, or evil eye, on it.)

One such project was The Same Old Story (available, I’m obliged to remind you, right here from Crazy 8 Press). It was one of those times when, once I got going, everything just seemed to come together and roll merrily along to a wonderfully (to me) satisfying conclusion.

Another of my babies to which I can point with some pride is Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury, a humor book I wrote for Kensington Publishing in 2008. It’s written as an instruction manual for a Jewish-based martial arts but is, in reality, a repository of Jewish jokes, Yiddish humor, and silly plays on religious traditions. It’s no longer in print, but if you want to learn such moves as the Davening Headbutt, the Payess of Fury, the Deadly Punch in the Kishkes, and how to use the throwing star of David, it’s still available for the Kindle here.

The third of my babies was, if you’ll pardon the disturbing comparison, stillborn. In 2004, I signed with Byron Preiss’ iBooks to write a trilogy of Justice Society of America novels. Book One, JSA: Ragnarok was finished in July 2005, just weeks after Byron’s early, tragic death in a traffic accident. Others tried to keep iBooks going, but they weren’t able to hold the company together and were forced to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on February 22, 2006…the very week Ragnarok was supposed to go to the printer. I have a PDF of the uncorrected proof, and, within the last year or so, have been in touch with the publishing concern that acquired iBooks’ assets (Ragnarok included) about getting the book to market. However, the new company and DC haven’t been able to come to terms (DC owns the rights to the JSA; the other publisher owns the rights to the manuscript, meaning neither can publish the book without the cooperation of the other) so it’s unlikely Ragnarok will ever make it to print. (You can, however, check out a few excerpts I’ve posted to my website, here, here, here, and here.)

I really do love all my “children,” but as it is with the people we love in our lives, there are some I definitely like better than others. But don’t tell that to Goggleman. There’s really no reason to hurt his feelings.

A rule of advice to authors is to kill your darlings. You might love a line or a character or a scene but if it does not help the overall work, it should ruthlessly be excised without looking back. But, authors are infrequently asked about which of your darlings would you save. Who is your favorite? Most authors will tell you it’s like asking which of your children you love most. You love them all the same, you tell people.

The truth is we don’t love our written works with equal fervor. Recently, I addressed Time Station Berlin, a work I wish I had a chance to redo.  I’ve written books with zero editorial direction and while good, could have been better. Even with good editorial input I know I could have written a few better but circumstances interfered.  I’ve written books as a favor to the editor so it was a job. I wrote a book on desserts, easily the most boring book I’ve written, because no one else offered me work at the time. So no, I don’t love them all differently.

I’ve written some pieces to take on the personal challenge, as I did when I tackled The Nature of Energy. Not being a science guy, I figured if I could make sense out of it for myself, I can convey that to middle schoolers. A huge baseball fan, I wrote the biography of Wilt Chamberlain just so the editor could see what I can do and be in her mind when a baseball opportunity rolled around leading to the Lou Gehrig assignment.

Out of personal pride, I loved working on The Essential Batman Encyclopedia which may be a bit of esoteric for some but a labor of love and something I remain incredibly proud of. Similarly, I dove into the research with deep interest and feel out of all the young adult work I have done to date, the Bataan Death March was the best of the bunch.

But, do I have an all-time favorite?

Well, you always remember your first. In this case, it was my first solo novel, Star Trek: TNG – The Romulan Stratagem. Having cut my fiction teeth on collaborations, the time had finally come to write something on my own. I relished the notion that we had not really seen Jean-Luc Picard lose a conflict with an opposing race. From that simple concept, I spun a story that brought in the then-underused Romulans and even the emotionally charged figure of Sela. It worked out pretty well and I note over at Goodreads that it remains one of my best reviewed works, which I think still holds up.

And maybe the next one I write will bump that off the pedestal.

As the newest member of the Crazy 8 Press team, the first I heard of this Crimson Keep dealie was at the group breakfast we held at last summer’s Shore Leave in Maryland. I learned that it was the setting for “Demon Circle,” a short story co-written by the pre-me Crazy 8 writers at 2011’s Shore Leave as part of a fundraising effort for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The idea in 2013 was to create an anthology of Crimson Keep stories to be available at Shore Leave 2014 in celebration of the imprint’s third anniversary.

The ever-efficient Bob Greenberger made sure that we were all provided with a copy of the short story and a mini-bible of its characters and situations, set the deadlines to assure a Labor Day weekend pub date, and off we went to the races.

The thing I took away from “Demon Circle” was the humor. The set-up involves a group of students apprenticed to the magical Master of the Crimson Keep, a castle rumored to have one thousand rooms and one hundred staircases…more or less. The Keep changes, whether by whim or necessity, no one is quite sure, and the apprentices themselves range from braggarts to incompetents to straitlaced, dedicated warriors. Stories could be about any one or all of the above. I went with a solo story about Belid, the wise guy braggart.

Those who know me won’t be surprised by the selection of Belid for my story. Like me, Belid is a terrible student, a dedicated procrastinator, and an unrepentant wiseass, all of which offered me the opportunity to do one of my favorite things: write funny. I don’t mean comedy writing per se, but rather writing with a light touch that lets the reader in on the absurdity of the situation without any outright mockery. Kind of like Douglas Adams, just sans stepping outside of the story to provide observationally wry commentary. It’s the approach I use to write my Leo Persky, Weekly World News reporter of the weird stories for R. Allen Leider’s Hellfire Lounge anthologies (three stories and counting, in volumes 2-4, published by Bold Venture Press) and it’s a wonderfully refreshing break from the more serious voice I usually take in prose.

So, what happens when Belid attempts to evade an upcoming test for which he isn’t prepared by deliberately getting himself lost in the ever-shifting corridors of the Crimson Keep? In this case, he finds himself locked out of the castle and trapped in an enclosed courtyard between “The Wee Folk at the End of the Hall” and their jailers, the bird-like Shadowings. But even while avoiding class, the young apprentice winds up learning a valuable lesson, to wit: No good deed goes unpunished. The trick thereafter is living long enough to apply this hard learned lesson to life.

Tales of the Crimson Keep may have been my first exposure to the world of the Master and his apprentices, but here’s hoping it’s not my last. Like Belid, I’ve still got a lot to learn about this magical and ever-changing place.

Tales of the Crimson Keep will be available in print and digital editions on August 1.