The Waste Book One

Dear Reader,

A word from the author...

Readers hate this story. And if you are one of those critics driven to warn others, you might as well copy and paste any of the following:

"How many false starts does this book have?"

"Tons of grammar mistakes and incomplete sentences."

"Is English even his natural language?"

I am saying, if you're a persnickety nag, you will loathe my writing. And you will miss everything I have to tell, because, who else can speak for me? The same question applies to the writing and the proofreading, editing, artwork. I'm responsible for every bit.

I persist regardless the persecution! Here I am, and I insist The Waste is an epic story. Well, antiepic; deviant of conventions. It's tragically adventurous. What is here is a novice's effort to create a story on the scale of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Stephen King's The Stand. But my tale is different. There is no good versus evil. Everyone here is an irredeemable sinner. There is only evil in this desert world called the Shur. God is gone, and that has left an opening for demons and alien gods to fill that void.

That supernatural struggle is reflected in the religion and the very same absent god of two theocratic combatants. A demon plays these factions against each other. That is probably where readers complained about encountering false starts in my story – you are meant to follow a demon and not any tangible character through the books. I meant the original titles – Pazuzu Book One published by Llumina Press and my self-published Pazuzu Trilogy – to reflect my intention.

The Waste is actually in its third revision. I self-published the thick volumes twice under my pseudonym, Mr. Binger. The Waste is a two volume edition of what I wanted the book published by Llumina Press to be. The out-of-print Pazuzu Book One, though, only told half the story, and people weren't buying it. That brought an end to hiring a professional proofreader. All we have got is a Libreoffice spell-checker. I hope readers have seen through the multiple revisions and incarnations of the story, I do correct typos as I go.

The Waste is always the uncensored pinnacle of the story. Whereas, a single novel would easily tell the tale, I always imagined two volumes. Just like the New Testament, there are two parts – a resurrection and an apocalypse. The trilogy split the story into three suggestively titled books – Manifestation, Emergence and the meaningless Abeyance – but that did undermine the whole idea to revise Christianity. The Waste, Book One and Book Two, is what readers should have got. This is Book One of The Waste. Herein, readers witness the Antichrist manifest in the dystopia of a godless desert.. -- Matthew Sawyer