Nice work getting the Weird Luck trilogy into the world again. How was the process for you?

Thank you! This project has frankly been quite a long-ass journey. The City of the Watcher story started to coalesce in 1999. I wrote numerous drafts of the first two books, Weird Luck in the City of the Watcher and Time Traveling Blues in the City of the Watcher, between 2001 and 2004. Got an agent, shopped the manuscripts around for a while, no dice. Frustrated with fiction, and living in Los Angeles at the time, I decided to shove the books in a drawer and study the craft of screenwriting for a while. I did that for half a dozen years, enjoying it immensely but frankly not getting good at it.

By 2011 I had left L.A., and a friend happened to suggest that I look into self-publishing. I was skeptical. It was still common at the time to view self-publishing as less legit, but that wasn’t my reason; I just didn’t feel lit up about my books in their current form. They were fine for the Andrew of ten years earlier, but I had grown as a writer (and theorist of social change). I couldn’t ignore the fact that if I’d undertaken such a project from scratch, it might look very different — so, another round of revisions could be a real slog. Honestly, I also didn’t want to be on the hook to finish the trilogy, especially knowing the third book should probably be as big as the first two combined.

That idea of self-publishing gestated a bit, though. What turned the corner was actually the decision to try an experiment in rejecting my particular form of perfectionism. Motivated more by pursuit of personal growth than by the books themselves, I decided to just put them out there as-is. Heck, better to have them in the world than not. I founded Argawarga Press, sold some paperbacks of the first two City of the Watcher books, wrote and published Wallflower Assassin, and finally in 2015 published Cannibal-King, the third Watcher book.

Then I joined Autonomous Press, bringing in Argawarga Press under the AutPress umbrella as an imprint focused on genre fiction. Faced with the (minor) process of doing a bit of rebranding and administrative stuff, I realized that I had misgivings about that past exercise in anti-perfectionism. That was fine as a personal experiment, but didn’t necessarily feel like bringing my best work to my comrades at Autonomous Press. I had access to better editorial feedback, I had always heard that Samuel R. Delany shamelessly reworked his books between printings, it seemed only right to revise mine at least a little bit before republishing them in second editions.

I had no idea how much revision was actually going to be warranted. I hadn’t read the books in years. I dreaded the idea of slogging through the revisions, and procrastinated for years before even looking at the first editions of my books. When I finally did so, though, I realized something surprising. Sure, I could see plenty of things I could do improve the structure and execution of each book, but I actually really liked them. Each book just had a couple of unsatisfying bits of dialogue or description that had haunted me, leaving me with the feeling that surely plenty of the rest of the book was just as flawed. But they weren’t. There were just a few little things that I didn’t like, and I pruned them easily.

I still find it easy to imagine executing this story very differently, but that’s just the nature of growth at a craft. And regardless, these books are so dense with beautiful moments and cool ideas that they’re a goddamn delight.

When it comes to readers just encountering the Weird Luck universe (and characters), what would you like them to know?

Enjoy the ride, and don’t worry about making sense of it. There’s a lot going on, always with lots behind the scenes or under the surface, and the full picture is never just spelled out clearly and simply. But whatever’s happening at the moment is typically a blast, if you’re up for the ride.

So, dig the moment, whether it’s action, intrigue, horror, farce, or slapstick. The bigger picture is ultimately best experienced as a mosaic of these countless scenes, vignettes, short chapters, and set pieces, each offering glimpses from the vantage of different characters from countless worlds. This multiplicity of perspectives will coalesce into coherent threads of plot and subplot.

And repeat readings are abundantly rewarded. The Weird Luck tales are thick with easter eggs.

How does your trilogy relate to the Weird Luck webcomic that comes about through collaboration with Mike Bennewitz and Nick Walker?

Chronologically, it’s a direct prequel, and there are some ways in which the characters and events of the trilogy strongly influence the background of the webcomic. However, only one member of the main cast of the webcomic appears in the trilogy: Max who has a little screen time in Cannibal-King and a very disproportionate impact on the story. He also plays a crucial role in my other book, Wallflower Assassin. (Is that him on the cover?!)

Stay tuned, though, there are some really fun bits of direct crossover from the trilogy coming up in the webcomic….

What goals do you have for your readers, as they learn from your characters and attempt to bring those lessons into daily life?

The idea that inspired me to write the trilogy was to create a cautionary fable about the pitfalls of pursuing revolution without a good model of social change, good strategy, and personal integrity. I tried doing that in a way that entertained the reader with action, farce, horror, and heartbreak.

I also poured in a hodgepodge of details inspired by life, relationships, interests, and experiences of all sorts, hopefully giving the reader a rich variety of things they might draw insight or inspiration from, to help them do good and enjoy life.

And looking ahead, what’s next for you?

Nick Walker and I are co-editing an academic anthology, The Neurodiversity Paradigm in Clinical Psychology and Counseling, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Then I’m editing the next book from J.S. Allen, Give Me to the River, for Argarwaga Press. I’ll be contributing a chapter to Nick’s anthology Neuroqueer Theory & Practice, forthcoming from NeuroQueer Books. And I’m going to do my best to edit How I’m Jewish by my late friend Jeremy Gross (z’’l), a combination of memoir and socioculturalpolitical analysis that he drafted half of before passing away suddenly last year.

I also have ambitions to put out an illustrated single-volume omnibus of the City of the Watcher trilogy. I’ve already got about 50 black & white interior illustrations, including 30 by the incredible Tim Molloy. But I think the book really needs at least 100 illustrations to really fulfill its promise, maybe more. So we’ll see how that unfolds. I aim to do a bunch of them myself.

Most of all, though, I’m really eager to get back to writing new fiction. I’m currently working on an urban fantasy story about an occult detective trying to expose a corrupt DA: “Akaz Maxo Sees the Egregores.” Stay tuned.