Beginning to End - Dark Factory: Agent, Christopher Schelling
Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s wholly original “immersive” novel that combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events, to create a story that unfolds on the page, online, and in the reader's creative mind.
A near-future dance club, Dark Factory is three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club’s wild card floor manager and Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing their own vision of true reality. Rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience.
Meerkat Press released Dark Factory on May 22, and will follow up with Dark Park, in 2023. For our next Beginning to End*, Spine follows the project through author, agent, publicity, and design.
*And since the project hasn’t actually “ended” (thus the asterisk) we’ll finish with a creative collaborator bringing a version of Dark Park to virtual reality in 2023.
Next up: Publisher: Publicity & Marketing, Tricia Reeks.
Though I’ve known Kathe Koja for over thirty years, and I’ve been her agent for over twenty of them, she still surprises me with every project. (In truth, she surprises me with every email but let’s focus on her books.) Her earliest work was rightly published as horror fiction, and a half dozen of her titles in the early 2000s were clearly YA, but most of her amazing novels form genres unto themselves, illuminating liminal spaces and the strangely familiar people who occupy them.
Seeing artists’ works in progress is one of the joys of being an agent. Kathe’s emerges more fully formed than many, with a strong and singular vision that doesn’t waver through revisions. Sometimes that means she’ll be 20,000 or 25,000 words into a book and the path it’s going to take is not one she wants to walk—not so much a false start as a swift end. There’s a Dropbox folder I keep called “Koja Scraps” (I mean that in the kind way, if there is one) that contains these beguiling beginnings.
She had been writing something with a nightclub setting that focused on a couple of young women, but knowing what was in store for them, she relegated it to the Scraps folder by saying, “I can’t do this to those girls.” Understood. Koja’s worlds are not safe places, it’s just that her characters don’t always know that. But the concept of a club novel stayed with me, so it was exciting to hear that she’d come up with something brand new in which the club itself is a main character.
I’m very plot-oriented and my editorial style shows it. I’m always asking for more—more dialogue, more events, more characters. (Actually, that last one is untrue. I ask for fewer characters because I believe readers should be rewarded/punished by the emotional wringer of surprise deaths.) Whereas Kathe is a maximalist with her ideas, she’s more economical with her prose, preferring to keep important things in the shadows. Readers should have to look for them, and when they find them, they shouldn’t be able to look away. She finds the delicate balance every time I try to push too far.
Tricia Reeks at Meerkat Press is as much of an explorer as Kathe is. Having published a new story collection and a reprint of Kathe’s first novel, Tricia was ready for Dark Factory—and were we ever ready for her! She didn’t just embrace the concept of an immersive novel set around a power struggle at a retro-futurist nightclub, she inhabited it. Her ideas for print and digital editions, for websites and events, for real and virtual tours, went far beyond anything a major publisher would do. Matchmaking authors and publishers is a major part of my job, and Kathe and Tricia are a singular match.
Learn more about Christoper Schelling’s agency, Selectric Artists, here.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.