I gather from some of the comments I have received on social media that a good number of my followers think I post too much on Twitter about the material I am researching for my new book rather than my usual diet of UFOs and pyramids. In pre-pandemic times, I imagine I would have bounced ideas off people in real life, but I don't have that luxury as often today. Now, I grant you that it is very different content, and sometimes more explicit, but I do not control history. If people see a significant difference between writing about James Dean's much duller than you would imagine sex life and George Adamski allegedly paying blond teenage boys for sex while telling people they were Venusians visiting his hotel with cosmic secrets, I can only shrug and wonder. But, good news! I have finished more than ten of my book's twelve chapters, and there is not much left. Then I will have nothing to talk about!

I have now sent my agent the final revision to my book proposal for my book about James Dean, flying saucers, and midcentury panics. My agent seems confident that publishers will be interested, and it is out of my hands now. I imagine this is the point when I urge Apollo and the Muses to intervene. “Happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his lips. Hail, children of Zeus! Give honor to my song!”

My first and most influential book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, was published fifteen years ago this week. In the crush of work on my two new books, I nearly neglected to mark this important anniversary. When I published the book back in 2005, I received heavy criticism both from those interested in H. P. Lovecraft and those interested in space aliens. Both groups felt I had done a disservice to them by explaining how the modern ancient astronaut theory grew out of the influence of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos on the authors of one of the hypothesis's key texts, Morning of the Magicians. But now, after all this time, this conclusion is so widely accepted that some who discuss it no longer credit it to me, for it has passed into the realm of fact. It is an honor, I suppose.

The Cult of Alien Gods is not perfect, nor is it the book I would write today. I was only twenty-three when I wrote the book, twenty-four when it was published. Despite selling thousands of copies, I have never seen a dime of profit from that book. (I earned some initial royalties which did not cover the costs incurred writing the book, and since then the magic of accounting has kept the book perpetually shy of the threshold for receiving a check.) Nevertheless, it both made my reputation and locked me into a niche from which I only now have a chance to grow beyond.

I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. For the realm of the mind and for the historical record, it is good that I wrote the book. Without it, I would never have discovered so many secrets about history and culture. But I do wonder if I had held off whether I might have been able to grow my career in a more mainstream direction. I can remember how proud I was of having a published book when I applied for jobs in publishing back in 2005, 2006, and 2007, only to have editors turn up their noses. They published literature, you see, and I wrote about déclassé aliens. They couldn't have me on their staff lest I corrupt their Olympian literary taste. Yeah, but you can Google my name and see how many people have built on what I've done. No one knows who any of those editors are.

My recent book The Mound Builder Myth is now available in audio book format, narrated by Charles Henderson Norman. The audio edition runs eleven hours and eight minutes. The publisher did not share the audio version with me, so I have only heard the brief sample available through Audible.com. Not being an aficionado of audio books, I cannot say whether this is typical of the narration of others. I would have preferred a more emotional reading with a greater range of vocal intonation, to match the dramatic rhythm with which I wrote. But that is just me.

In other news, I completed my review of the edited manuscript of Legends of the Pyramids and returned it to the publisher for typesetting. I also wrote a new overview for my James Dean/flying saucer book proposal and am waiting for my agent's office to finish their review to see if I hit the mark for a more personal and passionate case for the book. I hope to hear back on final changes this weekend.

I will not be posting this week unless something important happens because I am currently swamped under an astonishing pile of book work. The copyedited manuscript for Legends of the Pyramids needs corrections, markups, and review, and the notes for improvements to my book proposal for my James Dean / flying saucer nonfiction novel are going to be coming in tonight. Fortunately, my prose for Legends of the Pyramids is pretty clean, so there are relatively few thorny issues to address. However, it's still a massive amount of work to fit into the ten days allotted. (By contrast, the copyeditor got three months.) The new editor overseeing the project is less enamored of my occasional humorous forays into low language than the previous and, according to the document tracking, had a back-and-forth with the copyeditor about which adjectives were acceptable for describing the quality of the Egyptian god Min's tumescence.  It is all quite silly, especially when the ancient Greeks were a heck of a lot cruder. Anyway, I am buried under book work and apparently will be for at least a week. I am not sure how this year turned into my most productive literary year ever--three nonfiction books in some stage of the path to publication in one calendar year, and a novel sitting in storage--but I can't keep this pace up forever. I'm tired!

I am pleased to announce that my new nonfiction novel exploring midcentury moral panics through flying saucers and the life of movie star James Dean has been picked up by a New York literary agent, who will be representing it to publishers. My agent also represents an Oprah Book Club selection and several award winners. In the coming weeks, we will be working together to sharpen the book proposal for submission to some of the larger publishing houses. Of course, this means that I actually have to stick the landing on this one and bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. Up until now, that was a theoretical concern.

As I’ve been working on my book, I’ve noticed that the theme has slowly drifted away from my original plan. My outline had such a nice, rigid structure with a tripartite division among the three moral panics that originated in 1947, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and the UFO scare, with discussion of how these panics resulted from defining groups of outsiders against a conformist mainstream culture. But as I wrote, the separation between the parts started to break down, in large measure because the social aspects of all three moral panics rather quickly subordinated themselves to a broader concern about redefining masculinity after the crisis of the war years. Hence, the Red Scare devolved into panic over gays, gay panic plunged into disputes over effeminacy and weakness, and from the very first day of the UFO flap, everyone measured witnesses’ credibility by their masculinity. The very first flying saucer articles even talked about Kenneth Arnold’s high school football salad days and how muscular and tall he was, as though masculinity equaled credibility.

I’ve been making great progress on my new book, and I’ve nearly hit 40,000 words. The bigger challenge is trying to interest anyone in it. It’s rather rude, really, that literary agents can’t be bothered with even a pro-forma rejection but instead expect me to wait out response windows for silence to speak for them. But on the plus side, I’ve had an opportunity to explore some areas of historical research I hadn’t had the opportunity to look into before. Honestly, it was a little weird.