Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kevin Bowersox. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Kevin, thanks for joining us today. Was there an experience or lesson you learned at a previous job that’s benefited your career afterwards?

Having worked for several corporations I learned that the idea that the private sector does things more efficiently than the government is a flat-out lie. Size is the problem in both cases. Small to medium organizations perform better than government, but large corporations are every bit as inefficient as any govt. bureau. They just add people at the top sucking up money.

More importantly, I learned from them that working for a large corporation is a fertile source of absurdity and nonsense useful for writing comedy. But god, what a price to pay!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have written a trilogy of comedy science fiction novels: Tales of the Incorrigible: Flummox or Bust!, Tales of the Incorrigible: The Ouroboros of Oon, and Tales of the Incorrigible: A Song of Wood and Meat.

I’m currently starting my first horror novel. All my other horror writing has been unpublished short stories.

I also write poetry, but I don’t sell that. I love poetry, but it has always baffled me how some people can make a living as a poet. I joke about it in a short conversation in A Song of Wood and Meat where I briefly tell the story of a poet that lives off the proceeds from a single haiku. The haiku is titled “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination.”

I do love the crafting of words and emotions that one does when writing poetry. It really lets you crack words open and let their nectar spill out. I carry that over into my other writing as well. Less so in Flummox or Bust! than the other two, but I am definitely playing with language through all of them. For example, I have always been amused by the term disintegration ray. So much going on in that one word “disintegration”. I take it further. In my universe I have “matter declumpinizationizers.”

As basing that word on “clump” suggests, I’m also very fond of a technique called “bathos.” I know it sounds like a clean-obsessed Musketeer, but it is actually the mixing of “high” and “low” themes in the same work. I feel that if you close yourself off to either you are missing half of life. Also, they tickle something in my brain when they bump up against each other.

My Tales of the Incorrigible series of novels was my attempt to do for Sci-Fi what Terry Pratchett did for fantasy. To take the form and have fun with it while sneaking a message in there. My goal is first to be funny, second to be engaging/thrilling, third to be enlightening.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

My view on NFTs will be clear to any readers of A Song of Wood and Meat. My satire of the trend is the Fully Unique Certificate. This is a digital product offered by a company named Posr. I think these two sentences sum it up:
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The growth of Posr showed everyone that there existed a class of people for whom consumption itself is the product. FUCs allowed consumption that was not only instant, but conspicuous on a galaxy-wide scale.
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NFTs are like that. They offer only two types of value. 1) Being able to tell people that you had disposable income to spend. 2) the possibility that there is someone who wants to be able to say that same thing but by spending more.

Like crypto, they are a great advance in trading in that they finally managed to take a commodity bubble and remove those bothersome commodities!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Writers talk about “plotters” and “pantsers” concerning how a person writes. Plotters lay out the plot first and then write. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants.

I pantsed my first novel. I let the theme grow naturally. Once I knew what it was all about I did re-writing and editing to bring it all into line.

I plotted my second novel. I had to. For one thing, the book involves a complex conspiracy and hidden codes, so I had to create that all ahead of writing. For another it was my “write naked” phase, so I had no pants.

My third book, I started out plotting. I had it all laid out in quite a bit of detail. Then I started writing and it just never “clicked.” The book was turning out to be a snore. So I scrapped it, bought some trousers, and went back to pantsing.

I think that the themes I am concerned with are so ingrained in me that I don’t have to set out to show them. I just set the characters loose and the theme will naturally evolve the same way the action does.

Contact Info:

• Other: Bluesky: @oonian.com

  The Fediverse: [email protected]

  Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09G6V18JK?binding=kindle_edition&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin

  Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/series/tales-of-the-incorrigible

  Payhip: https://payhip.com/CatRabbit/collection/tales-of-the-incorrigible

Image Credits

The QA team examining a copy of Flummox or Bust! are Mr. Twix and Ms. Peach.

All covers were designed by Tristan Bowersox (aka TB McQueen https://cargocollective.com/tbmcqueen)