Endless Threadren: Author RK Byers

“I watched Jalen Brunson's dad cook Master P” + Vampire Odyssey, an indie lit hit

Friday night’s humbling of Mike Tyson is halfway why you’ve been served the print version of my talk with Atlanta author RK Byers on this evening. The other half? You ought to be crediting novelist Dimitry Léger, who—like Byers—belonged to my beloved turn-of-the-millennium conversation clique, The Threadren. Last week, I learned that Léger sold the follow-up to his lauded debut God Loves Haiti. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish Death of the Soccer God in Spring of 2026. This news took me way back.

Now it’s your turn to go.

The names Mike Tyson and Dimitry Léger yank me to a time in hip hop, sports, and media culture that was overloaded with possibilities. Tyson was the edgiest nexus of pro athletics and a musical vibe that remained counter-cultural. Magazine writing jobs were still a vital media component and, briefly, a career path for young storytellers like us. Léger was near the beachhead of a rare, Black magazine writers clique.

In uncertain times, nostalgia offers great comfort.

Fortunately, RK Byers offers an outrageous and well-reviewed new literary creation to go with the soothing recollections. As you’ll read, what began on the page as “a tribute to some of the writers that I've contacted, read, fell in love with” while trading their books became a knowing and irreverent confection. RK Byers probably loves words and thinks more about the ways reading works than you do.

In today’s Sojourn Conversation, the Nyack, New York native discusses contributing to The Source Sports right when athletes and hip-hop were first openly comingling. Byers also gobsmacks me with his 90s reporting on “The Gay Rapper,” a quaint insider obsession for one months-long window.

But it’s the Threadren stuff that has my heart. Beyond Léger and fellow previous podcast guest Alexandra Marshall, we had great talents and challenging minds: Artists, book and magazine editors, an elite gaming influencer, and little ol’ scribes like me and Byers. Only Marshall was not Black, and our effortless gender diversity was a strength.

Rich and I go on for a while here, so I won’t dally with the set up. Enjoy our look at a communication phenomenon that has outlasted Mike Tyson and keeps touching the world in new ways each year. We talked in the tail end of October, when I still had my day gig of putting on playground activities for elementary school students.

Donnell Alexander: Do you prefer RK in the world?

RK Byers: As a writer, yeah, I do like RK It's one of the ways I can distinguish where people know me from. If you call me RK, you know me as a writer. If you call me Rich, you know me from the street. You just called me Rich, so I know we know each other.

DA: It's funny you say from the street. I want to get to your writer stuff in a little bit. Actually, this question does talk to your writing, but in a different form:

I bet you don't remember where where we first met.

RB: The first time? Was it at a club or something?

Vampire Odyssey author RK Byers

DA: No, no. (Laughs) It's such an obscure thing, man, but I thought about it this morning… Master P, that's the hint I'm going to give you.

RB: Wait... was it there, at that game?

DA: He was trying to break into the NBA. He was allegedly trying to break into the NBA, and it was something like Providence, Rhode Island, or Hartford, Connecticut, someplace like that.

RB: Was it that CBA game?

DA: It was not an NBA game. It was like NBL or something like that.

RB: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God, you were there too? You know, I've always wanted to write a story called “I Saw Jalen Brunson's Dad Cook Master P.” Remember, Rick Brunson was on the court and he was... killing Master P—in his pocket, scoring at will. Rick Brunson was a passable 12th man, a legitimate NBA guard, not a great guard. But the disparity between his ability and Master P was gross and shocking. And the fact that this dude really considered himself an NBA-worthy talent, it was an offense to our basketball sensibilities.

DA: That was such an obscure thing, but I'm glad I went there, because it was something that could only happen in that period of time. You remember J. Cole tried to do that—I think he went to Africa. Got cooked real bad, you know? But Master P, I don't think he thought he was NBA caliber. He was definitely building his brand.

RK: Because I had written a story about him, I think he was actually deluded enough to believe.

You know what it is, though? The man was an exceptional leader. He was able to rally people and get them all on the same agenda, and sometimes you can think that translates. Like: If I can get a bunch of people from different backgrounds to come together under the No Limit umbrella and act in accordance to my vision, I could do that with anything.

He probably thought he could have been a quarterback too. And he did play guard at University of Houston for like a season or so. He probably had himself also convinced that, “If I had devoted as much time and energy towards playing basketball, I would have been as successful as a basketball player as I was…” Naw, bro, there's some people that eat, breathe, and die that game. And that's all they know. And that was their only option.

Those guys are always going to cook you.

DA: That was the era where athletes really thought they could cross over. We had bad albums from Shaq and Chris Webber and people like that. And they thought—

RB: Oh man, why'd you remind me…

DA: Why do you think that era ended? And there's less of that now than there used to be?

RB: One of the great conversations my daughter and I had when I was taking a job at Delaware State was about what I thought was the last true lyric in hip hop, Chuck D's, “Impeach the president pulling out my ray gun, zap the next one, I could be a shogun.” The reason I always said that was hip hop's last lyric was, it was the last time—or one of the demonstrative times—that hip hop spoke about politics.

You know, the powers that be said, We got to get these people navel gazing. We can't have them thinking they can take political power and take political clout and be able to mobilize people through music. So let's take the music. Let's make it all obscene graphic violence and N-words and all this other stuff and just have it go in that direction. Then we'll repackage it as the truth.

I think that the 90s was probably the last era where the tug of war was still happening between real MCs from the 80s that we remember and the new crop that was being ushered in. Because it was wide open and there was still that thing going on, everybody thought they could get a hand in and make some kind of statement, as far as hip hop was concerned.

It had finally—in the nineties—also become something that was undeniably an aesthetic and you couldn't say it was a fad and it was certainly going to be here. Like, by the 90s it’s been been around for 11 years. It's not going anywhere, it's grounded. But I think now sports have become such a factory and such an industry that you could kind of [have] to go all in without thinking “if I don't make it,” except… except what's that kid Dave East? “If I don't make it, I'll fall back and be a rapper”—nah, you probably devote all your energies to your craft as an athlete now.

Probably. And if you're a rapper, you probably don't bother with sports. There's more specialization now. And I don't think hip-hop will accept these interlopers like it used to, because I don't think that the people that are in hip-hop control it anymore. Look at the Black-owned labels from hip-hop in the 80s versus now. Who? The last major label head in hip-hop that we had is buying thousands of bottles of baby oil and facing federal indictment charges. [Laughs] So, what we knew of as hip-hop has been completely dismantled, repackaged—re-given to us—told, This is your truth, this is your historical truth.

I saw somebody on Twitter saying something along the lines of, “Hip-hop is not Black owned and controlled and it's never been black owned and controlled.” And I was like, That's how Jesus became White, you know? Anyone who knows anything about hip hop remembers that Sylvia Robinson was the first person to record a specific rap [record] when she recorded “Rapper's Delight.” And she was of course a Black woman… but you know—

DA: She was the first executive to rip off Black people in hip hop, right?

RB: Hey, it doesn't change your color, you know? The bottom line is, You get these people that spin these narratives and they get, thousands following another.

Another good example: I saw a young lady—Black young lady, too—talking about, [how] she was mad that someone had suggested that Black people couldn't laugh publicly. And this young lady was saying, this young lady had to be in her early 20s: “That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard of. Can you imagine Black people couldn't laugh publicly?”

And I'd read a Ralph Ellison book of short essays. I had never known about laughing barrels. I'd never heard of that… And I was like, She's young and she has a following and she'll purport that the notion that Black people couldn't laugh publicly is absurd, (that) Black people could always laugh publicly. But there's a documented history of Black people having to stick their heads in a barrel to avoid the possibility of embarrassing White people who thought they may be laughing at them.

So, because of this person presenting her position on history, which she clearly doesn't know about, she can reconfigure and reconstruct history to fit her own narrative. And the same thing was done with hip hop.

---

The Legend of Black Mexico is my most ambitious storytelling effort since publishing that memoir in my early 30s. You can keep track of how the work is going through periodic updates.

---

DA: Well, listen, I want to slow you down a little bit because I want to introduce you. We're just launching into all this stuff. I was bringing up that game in Hartford, Connecticut because I met you and I also met former Source editor [Chris] Wilder.

EB: For the first time?

DA: Yeah.

EB: Oh wow.

DA: And that was the era. It was a Source Sports thing. I don't feel like that was celebrated enough or even recognized.

EB: It wasn’t

DA: Can we talk about The Source, your relationship and how you got into writing?

EB: The Source is like a secondary thing for me because I'd always considered myself somewhat of a snob. And when Vibe launched, I thought for a fact I'd work there and write for the vibe because they seem to be prestigious and they had Quincy Jones.

I didn't know the ownership of The Source, and I looked at it as like a gutter rap magazine that was beneath me and I had contempt for it—I'll be a Vibe guy. I'll wear a cardigan. [Laughs] I'll be that kind of a guy. You know, R&B and I don't want to do this hip hop thing. But I did know Chris Wilder; I cut his hair once when we were at Howard.

I had written a book, I've written a book called Uptown Heads, and I couldn't get it published. I finished it when I was living in Atlanta. and I couldn't get it published. I moved back to New York, which is where I'm from, from Nyack, small town in Rockland County and shopped it around. Certain people liked it, certain people didn't. I had an ex-girlfriend from Howard that was in London. She had become a lawyer, and she was doing international law. And she sent me a brochure from this company called The Express that was doing publishing. I sent, like, a couple chapters from my first book there, and they liked it. They decided to publish it.

So I had a book. Okay, great. It's 1995, I'm 27 years old. Yeah, 27 years old with my first book published. Thinking like I guess everybody thinks when they write their first book: This is all I need to do. I'm about to become a multimillionaire, a celebrated personality. You know.

DA: It’s like you were there.

DA: Yeah, this is who I am from now on. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to move another muscle. People are going to dump the money on me and the women are going to come and it's going to be champagne and nonstop laughter from now on out. This is my life from now on out.

Needless to say, it didn't go exactly that way or even similar to that. But I did after a while realize that I would have to be a little bit more aggressive with the book and make sure people read it, on my own behalf—as opposed to just waiting for people to read it.

Because how could you avoid Uptown Heads by RK Byers? This is something that needs to be in your life. Like your life is lacking without Uptown Heads. You're the one that's deficient if you haven't embarked upon this… journalistic—not even this literary journey—that'll take you from the ends of the earth and mold you and remake you by this 27-year-old kid who has no idea what he's talking about.

So anyway, I start hanging out with just this circle of different writers, just, you know, vicariously. One of them introduced me to a writer from The Source, Tracii McGregor. I had to humble myself, because by this point, I'm thinking, I just want to write. It doesn't even have to be necessarily literature anymore. It could just be writing for writing.

DA: Let me stop and ask, Was she executive editor of The Source at that point? Was she just one of the editors?

RB: She was an editor. She was just an editor.

DA: I knew Tracy from L.A. because she was an editor at Urb magazine out here, before she got hired by The Source.

RB: Get out. Now you're giving me some insight. How long ago was that?

DA: You know what it was? I moved from San Francisco to LA at the end of 94, and I went to an Aceyalone show. I think it might have been Special Ed. I'm not sure. It's weird because I know I saw Acey there. But... I was on the guest list, and I told her who I was. She was working the door, and she said, “I know who you are.” And if you say that to me, you got me. Tracii and I had a lot of fun way back before I moved to New York. One of the great connections.

But I want to talk about you and The Source. I mean, it doesn't sound like you had a desire. You weren't someone who grew up wanting to write for The Source.

RB: No, not at all.

DA: Just that connection with Tracii got you in there?

RB: I started sending stuff that I wrote to different magazines and different newspapers. I was trying to give her ideas for stories and also trying to feel her out for what she might be into. This was at the time when there was rumors. Now, can you imagine this? Donnell, this is going to date us. And thankfully, we're contemporaries in this respect, so it's not something I have to explain.

Sometimes when I'm talking to my daughter, I have to set the context. But there were rumors in 1998, and no one would believe this now. It's so far-fetched and fantastic. But there were rumors that there was a gay rapper.

And like, Can you imagine a gay rapper? Oh, my God.

So...

DA: There was an article.

RB: Do you know who wrote that article?

DA: I do. [Laughter] Do you want to say the name?

RB: RK Byers!

DA: What?

Yeah, in The Source!

RB: Which one are you thinking about?

DA: I was thinking of one that was published anonymously.

RB: Oh, no, I know what you're talking about. That was that an article?

DA: An as told to, right?

RB: I thought that was a blind item. Because I'd heard of that too.

DA: Okay, but please go on.

RB: “Undercover” would be a terrible word, but feeling Tracy out, I knew that would be something she was interested in. So, I was like, Why don't I go out in search of the gay rapper?

DA: It sounds crazy in retrospect, doesn't it?

RB: Dude, nowadays the first rapper you find is a gay rapper. In that era, there were already known to be certain gay hip hop nights at different clubs. So I went and started asking questions and there's some names dropped and stuff. What I was interested in—because, traditionally and historically hip hop was so homophobic and it was unforgiving and they still used words that they don't use now—a lot of the current rappers that are longtime stalwarts of hip hop, had different positions on sexuality. We've all had to adapt and change course. But back then, man… you got called a certain word, you got mocked for effeminacy— that was still popular.

I would have been the last person to think that gay people as a culture partied to hip hop. So I was shocked that this was going on. I'm like, really? And not only like “hip pop”—some of the poppier hip hop—but some of the grittier hip hop. I'd spent two nights in different clubs and talked to people, talked to people, talked to people. I think it was called “The Other Side of the Game” and Tracii published it.

Yeah, that was mine. That was RK Byers.

I had seen Chris on the PATH train, going probably to Newark to go to Philly or something like that. And I’d said to him, This is what I'm really like, oh, I just want to write. I want to write anywhere. I want to write anywhere.

He was at The Source or leaving The Source or going to Sony, and I was like, Hey, man, I want to write for The Source again. He says, Yeah, send me your resume. Completely dismissive. In retrospect, I don't mind because I'm sure he got that all the time. But after I wrote that piece for Tracy, I think he realized I was serious. So, he decided to try me out with a story he'd had in mind for a while called Ballplayers’ Boys

Now, remembering again the time, this was after 1996, when Allen Iverson was notorious not only for his basketball skills, but for having a posse of these deranged criminals that hung out near him and sycophants and people that sponged off of him and lived off of his wealth and accomplishments.

That became a thing, and then people realized more than one person—more than Allen Iverson—have friends and associates that live near them. So Chris had the idea to write a story about some of the—I don't want to say hangers on—but some of the friends of superstar celebrity athletes that live with the celebrity or in close proximity. He had me do Marcus Camby, Chris Webber, and Terrell Owens.

So, okay, cool. In the middle of all that, he's like, I'm starting this thing. I've come back to The Source to start this thing called The Source Sports. It's going to be pretty much the marriage of hip hop and sports.

We'd already had a guy. Iverson was kind of the current personification of that. But if we're fair, we already had a guy and he was on the first Source Sports cover, that embodied that idea probably better than anybody ever would again. And that was Mike Tyson.

Mike Tyson was the first hip hop champion, with the swagger, the fact that he's from Brooklyn, the fact that he played rap while he was training. All the other—even boxing guy—were R&B guys. Like Jordan is an R&B guy to his core. Like all the other athletes up until that point were, you know, R&B guys. But Tyson came in: Hip-hop aesthetic, hip-hop mentality. He was the first hip-hop athlete. Iverson took the mantle, in my opinion, and then it just became the way to go.

So if I'm going to launch a criticism, maybe not a criticism, but if I'm going to make a statement as to why The Source Sports went, the way of the dodo, it's because it kind of became synonymous, hip hop and sports—

DA: Right.

RB: I mean, you know we'd reached the saturation point—the tipping point—when Jeremy Shockey was talking about runnin’ hoes. I was like, okay. Now, yeah, now it's just, you know, if you're a young athlete, you are hip hop.

DA: This is the thing: The Source Sports didn't last, but all those people you mentioned: Wilder. Tracii McGregor. Yourself. You get, I don't want to say the foundation, but some of the core members of The Threadren. That's the main reason—aside from it being Halloween and you having a project I think is great for Halloween—I wanted to talk to you, to talk about the Threadren.

If you had to explain it to people, what would you say that email thread was?

RB: I don't remember why you did it, but it had something to do with LeBron. You got us all together. We all knew you and you routed us all together… in protest of something?

DA: Yeah, you know, it's funny. [Now] I remember that quote unquote protest. I didn't like his games, his high school games being on TV. But The Threadren, it didn't exist before that?

RB: No, that was you, bro.

DA: Wow, man. I've done too much.

RB: Who did you give credit to for that? That was yours. We all knew you.

DA: Well, how did it grow then? Remind me, you remember these things better than me, apparently.

RB: Everybody knew somebody that they felt that should be included, Like, everybody knew somebody who could add something that was probably missing: a perspective, just a thought. It's like specialization. Let's say we got a good singer and a good guitar player, we need a drummer, and you bring in a bunch of drummers and you're like, okay, they're all good. Let's just go heavy percussion. Yeah, you know what? We're kind of drowning out the guitar now. So let's get another guitar. You know what? Now we've got so much sound, we need more vocals. Let's get some background.

So, it became that sort of thing, in perpetuation, I know even though we got this kind of thought: this guy adds a little something extra, this girl brings something else in and it just kept snowballing.

DA: Well, it was such a high-quality group. I mean, personality, intellect and all that. Who do you remember best from that?

RB: It was me, you, Wilder, Dimitri, Alex.

DA: Alex Marshall, yeah.

RB: Tabanitha McDaniel was in it. I don’t remember whether she brought in Naima [Brown] or vice . Ngai Croal joined eventually.

DA: Did you know him at all?

RB: I never knew him before then.

DA: Okay what about John Simons?

RB: John too! Of course, John. I met John before, but I got to know him a lot

better in his and his ideas.

DA: I don't want to say equal parts men and women. I'm blanking on some names now. I know there's [Aliya King], who’s is a very big book person at Disney. I feel so bad for blanking on these names.

We talked a lot about sports, but it wasn't just about sports. When you talk about building a band, I think of one of the reasons it worked, it wasn't just a bunch of dudes talking about those things.

RB: Oh, no, of course.

DA: Politics became part of it.

RB: What part of California are you in, man?

DA: Let's just say I'm in suburban Los Angeles.

RB: Nice.

DA: Where are you?

RB: I'm in McDonough, Georgia. That's about 20 minutes south of Atlanta.

DA: How long have you been down there?

RB: About two, well, coming up on three years in November.

Where were you before Atlanta?

RB: The Bronx.

DA: The last place I was in in New York was the Bronx, and it had changed so much from the Bronx, I recognized.

EB: I think the Bronx is everybody's exit plan because Ngai, before he moved to Charlotte, was in the Bronx. Newsweek hired him as the first video game journalist.

I wrote a thing for John Simons, about equity in the cannabis industry when he was editing Time. And we just couldn't get it published for the life of me. I ended up taking it back on my own and going through USC, because when you talked about weed—even two or three years ago—the legitimization of it was tough. There's a real stigma to it. I ended up going through USC's School of Health Journalism and eventually I got the California newspaper publishers' long-form story of the year.

RB: Really?

DA: I tried to get it into Time and it just wasn't time for Time. It's a trip. Yeah, you had to go through a lot of hoops. And I think John is a really good editor, but he was not the person to usher that thing through.

I never really got to the point of what I was trying to say, which is that he was more conservative than a lot of us. [But] we had him in the mix. You know, whenever Wilder's politics about… I don't want to say “feminism”… But when they had conversations about child support, for example, it was not one-sided and people learned things. You had an environment where women learn things that maybe they couldn't hear about child support.

And he couldn't go wild—er—with it. You had to have a measured, reasonable conversation. I thought it was remarkable because a lot of times you get that many different perspectives in the room it gets combustible, you know? I think we had combustible moments, but nobody ever left for hurt feelings that I remember.

RB: I remember, because of the thread, we all got together to go see Bringing Down the House, the Queen Latifah movie. Were you still around for that?

DA: No, I was the only one in L.A.

RB: Okay. I want to say people were saying she was Sambo-ing or Sambo-ing was involved. And I was like, “Well, let's give it a chance” or something like that.

Or no, I think I'd seen it. And I was like, it's not that bad. And they were like, Oh my God, it's deplorable. Hattie McDaniel would die on a cross and just all kind of just extreme positions on it. And I'm like, She's an actress, she's got to play roles.

I was like, I don't know. Sometimes, sometimes a movie is just a movie. Sometimes the thing is just a thing.

DA: The word that comes to mind about our conversations, they were sophisticated. But they were like a conversation that came from The Source community in a lot of ways.

RB: Sure.

DA: And that was just reaffirming because I didn't see that in the culture. I love that we've gone this far and not specifically mentioned Puff Daddy, But the time when we were really connecting is when that transition was being finalized. Meaningless sort of music—not [yet] shopping culture music, but hip-hop wasn't a political signifier anymore. Puffy's biggest crime was helping to usher in that. He's got so many crimes under his belt, [but] my personal bias is being against that.

Can I tell you the thing that incited me to ask you to come on here? I'm dealing with these kids at school. I'm having a hard time getting them into books, but I will always try to get them into storytelling. And because it's October, we have to have Halloween themed stuff. And I started explaining [to] these 10, 11 year olds, the Frankenstein universe. And when I did that, I took the broadest parameters .

When I dealt with Dracula, there's this, there's this movie on Netflix called The Count—El Conde. It takes Augusto Pinochet and imagines him as a vampire through the ages. It's a beautiful, incredibly violent black-and-white film. But I included that in a picture of Pinochet and the cover of this film, and the kids—the boys, for whatever reason—became obsessed with Pinochet. They were drawing Augusto Pinochet, but on the [body] of a werewolf.

RB: Oh, Lord. You're touching all my bases now.

DA: I thought, man, this is the time to have you on because you have a project. You put out a book. I want to spend the rest of our time talking about it and the process by which you did it.

RB: Yes, Vampire Odyssey. The subtitle—and if you were to click on Amazon, Vampire Odyssey by RK Byer—the subtitle is “The Blue Blood of the Elizabethan Upper Crust.” I never say the whole title because it's too much of a mouthful. I just call it Vampire Odyssey's on the cover. If you open it, you see, in much smaller print: “Or, The Blue Blood of the Elizabethan Upper Crust.”

It didn't start out as Vampire Odyssey. I had been book trading. This last project I wrote under a different name. I traded with a lot of different writers and I kind of established a community of writers. All indies.

I read Ghetto Celebrity and I loved it. I can't imagine that had you had to push at yourself. It's extremely difficult to get people to read. They see it as a chore. It's like people have lost the joy in reading, the joy in silent reflection. If it's not a TikTok video, it takes too much effort.

One of the greatest joys of reading, I always thought, is the fact that you can stop where you are and just consider. You don't have to keep following the narrative. Like with anything else, something can happen that can shock your senses, but you still have to follow it because it's visual. It's a moving art. Even if it's music, you may say, Oh, run that back or whatever when you hear it, but you still don't want to lose the thread of what's going through your mind as it was being processed. But with reading, you can come to a point and be like, Hold it before you continue. And there's no other medium that does that.

I'm thinking, the people I've traded books with, I've traded books to get people to read the last book I published under a different name. I read a bunch of their books and I thought, I want to write a tribute to some of the writers that I've contacted, read, fell in love with, that I now know because of trading books. They were open to the suggestion of trading books.

So, I'm going to write a book called The Indies. I mocked up this cover and I got, like, this picture of this black dude in the middle—with a goatee or whatever—and a bunch of other people, ostensibly writers surrounding him. I'm writing it and it's coming out and I'm like, This is so niche. Like, this is only for the people I've traded with. This is just not interesting. This is, you know, singing for the choir. This is not anything that's gonna grab attention.

I said to myself, what I need to do is, I need to have my main character—who was still kind of unformed—I need to have him trade for a book like I would have. So I'm thinking, Gee, what could he trade for? I need an interesting book. And so I take an edible and it comes to me: You'll trade for the worst book ever written. Inconceivably bad, spectacularly bad, gross, offensive, overly violent, overly sexual, and outrageously cartoonish.

Even when I was writing The Indies, I was making fun of the fact that people only wrote like five stories: They wrote vampire stories. In all the books I traded for, there were vampires. There were undead. Zombies. And I used Frankenstein. There were werewolf stories. There were damsel in distress stories and there were hood stories. I read a lot of hood books.

So I said, I'll get the ultimate vampire, the ultimate undead guy. I'll use the very first werewolf and I'll get the ultimate damsel in distress and… I'll put them in the hood and have them have to make their way back to Dracula's Transylvania homeland. Yeah, that's what I'll do.

I'm glad I'm getting an opportunity to tell this story. There was still a working-through process because this guy at first was too much. The guy who writes the Elizabethan—the blue blood of the Elizabethan upper crust—he was still a very thinly-disguised me. So as the Vampire Odyssey story comes to me—and it comes whole cloth —except the end, I saw the whole picture and I said, This will be hilarious. I'll have a great time. This will be fun writing this terrible book.

I started noticing, Well, why would I be offended by that book? Because I would actually think this book was funny. I need to create a different character who's reading this book. He's traded for this book and he's reading this book and he finds it mortifying. He's outrageously offended by it. So I had to go back through, create this character Landsford Uppington Smythe. I don't even envision him.

One of the things I'm very careful about, all… all of these characters are White people. I don't play with that. I don't re-envision them as Black. Dracula's White. Frankenstein's White, for the most part. Lycaon the werewolf is White. Snow White's White.

I envision Landsford Uppington Smythe, even though I don't say it, as a White guy, because the guy who writes the vampire story is a guy named Durrell Sherman. All he is throughout the book—he never speaks, he writes one review—but all he is is a guy doing *this* as his Facebook profile. Landsford trades with him and starts reading his book.

Now I'm heavily implying, because of the language I have him using, that Durrell Sherman is Black, but I don't ever explicitly say it. It's in Atlanta, they're trying to get out of Atlanta and, you know, go back to Transylvania. They have to make all these adventures and murder and sex of different calibers and variety.

There's all this stuff happening. I make in the end Landsford Uppington Smythe—the blue blood of the Elizabethan upper crust guy—kind of villainous, but he is ultimately the hero of the story. One of the attributes I could not ascribe unto him is racism. He never specifically mentions race. So he never says Durrell Sherman's Black. He never says, “I'm White.” It's just implied. I imply it with his lineage. He's making fantastic claims of his own because he really thinks that he's deluded enough to believe that he's of English royalty. And you could get into why he's deluded: His parents came over on the Mayflower. He's related to all the great personages throughout history. And he's reading this terrible vampire book, also giving his opinion on that as the story goes along.

But, of course, the vampire story is so outrageous that it's the one that gets the most attention, gets the most mentioned and gets the most talked about.

DA: How are you promoting it? I mean, it's on Kindle. I know that you got hard copies. How do you get it out as an indie author?

RB: I've continued to trade and I've joined different forums. I've done various promotions. Some urban writer gave me a great idea for what I use as my catchphrase now. I was scrolling through, looking for prospective trades and I read this urban writer saying she had just released a book and she had said something along the lines of, Uh-huh, that's right. My readers are going to show up for me.

And I was thinking, “You obnoxious snob.” How dare you take that kind of attitude?You're lucky to have a reader… But it made me want to read the book. And I was like, you know what? As opposed to taking the more traditional route of saying, Come on out and support me… Some of you guys are my friends… Hook a brother up… Look out for me.. Buy my book… I'm going to make it seem like you're not in the know. You're behind. You're slow. You're stupid. You're not with the cool kids, if you're not reading my book—If you haven't read my book, there's something wrong with you. I don't need you to read it, you need to correct yourself for having not read it.

Out of that was born, if you're not reading Vampire Odyssey, what are you doing?

And that became my catchphrase. That's how I tagged everything of every video. This has helped move it to any review I've ever gotten, whether it be on Goodreads or Amazon, I've reviewed the reviews. Even the bad ones, you know, because it supports my point: These people are reading Vampire Odyssey.

I've gotten more reads on this than probably anything else I've self-published.

DA: It's worthy of Madison Avenue, that tag.

RB: Oh, yeah, it's copyrighted, too. I had to.