Update on Reaction to Political Comedy "SPILL"

I wrote SPILL in a state of major creative doubt. My fiction wasn't having any traction with agents or publishers. I thought the stuff was pretty good, but I could be self-delusional. I had always been reluctant to share my fiction with friends because if they said they liked it, could I believe them? If they didn't like it, could they tell me? Seemed unfair to put a friend in that position.

So, I pursued an idea for a comedy, a form I had never tried. A bar friend was working as a small package contract delivery person and he came into the bar and related how that day he had delivered the head of a dog to the vet school for rabies testing. That image stuck in my head and so I started with that scene. Dang thing wrote itself in three months. Nothing had taken such a short time. I thought if I wrote something that made people laugh, then you couldn't deny the writing was successful.

SPILL was released Sept. 11 by the small press Curiosity Quills. Here is a comment that came from a former co-worker, a wonderful writer and excellent editor:

"Hi Randy - "I just finished reading SPILL in one sitting - once I started, I couldn't put it down. The more I read, the funnier it was, until I was laughing so hard my husband could hear me from the other end of the house."

And here is the first review placed on Amazon: "Randy Attwood's done it again with SPILL -- a knife-edge ride on a political snowball thundering downhill at high speed. It's the story of a decent-enough guy scraping his living together who finally reaches the breaking point over the ever-escalating price of fuel. His pockets are so regularly plundered by Big Oil, that in a flash of clarity, he devises a way to get back at them and make some money along the way. His allies are the unlikeliest "think tank" you could imagine. Sarcasm drips from these pages in wide, viscous streams. Like all of Mr. Attwood's other political writing, you're laughing out loud at the moment you begin to understand he's making a point here. Spill is a must-read for anyone who has had it with the lobby-spin that is running out lives and the self-righteous pols who reap its rewards. If we're not laughing, we're crying, so we might as well laugh. And think." -- Richard Sutton

Curiosity Quills helped me do a giveaway of a copy of SPILL through Goodreads. Go there if you want to enter.