Last month, I blogged about trigger warnings and my choice not to provide them, for fear of scaring off readers who might become fans of my work if they give it a try. I’ll now be a total hypocrite by providing this trigger warning about my “pre-apocalyptic” sci-fi comedy Offlining, which was officially published on June 23:

If you’re easily offended by strong language, violence, or sex, or if you don’t find anything humorous or at least ironic about religious zealotry, then please steer clear of this one. On the other hand, if you like to laugh at life’s absurdities—and if you find much of it absurd—then you’ll discover plenty to hoot, chuckle, snort, and guffaw at in this book.

The premise of Offlining is simple: 20-year-old Jerusalem (Jeru) Pix, a video gamer who virtually lives in the virtual worlds he loves, is sent on a real-life heroic quest. He soon discovers that offlining—giving up the online world for reality, where the graphics aren’t great, nobody can fly, and everything hurts—is gritty and downright deadly. Worse, there are no do-overs, save points, or bathroom breaks. Along the way, Jeru will switch bodies twice, battle homicidal robot vacuum cleaners and an evangelical suicide cult dubbed the PentaHostiles, and, maybe scariest of all, fall in love.

Why did I write this book? It was an antidote to the serious—some would say melodramatic—novels I’d written previously. Even though every book I write has a happy ending, I often put my characters through hell on the way to that promise of a better tomorrow. Hardscrabble Road and Return to Hardscrabble Road tell you in the title that these are going to be arduous journeys, but all my books cover a lot of rough ground before the positive payoff. In Aftermath, Janet Wright’s sense of humor keeps the amateur-sleuth murder mystery from becoming too grim, but even that novel takes some dark turns before exiting into the proverbial sunshine.

While Offlining isn’t a cakewalk for Jeru—he must endure a lot of pain and suffering too—the tone remains light, with lots of fake product placements featuring silly taglines (e.g., CelluGone: “Kiss your butt goodbye”™). It’s a tale told with tongue firmly in cheek. That will be a challenge for the audiobook narrator!

My original intention was to write it to amuse myself, but I sent it to some agents and acquisitions editors on a lark and received very positive feedback, such as “George’s prose is just delightfully packed full of wit. Reminded me a lot of reading Lock In by John Scalzi, but funnier.” Though nobody wanted to represent or publish it because they feared causing riots in the streets, they loved it, nonetheless.

Eventually, a tough ol’ agent with nothing left to prove did choose to represent Offlining, but she couldn’t find a brave enough publisher either, so I decided to self-publish it. Critique partners I showed portions of it to over the years always laughed in all the right spots, so I figured others might enjoy it too. To give myself a little bit of cover, I published it as “GJ Weinstein” so at least it won’t be comingled online with my other books. Worst case, I figure I’ve helped enough people now that some will forgive me if they’re appalled by this book, while others will do the polite Southern thing and pretend it never happened.

I can’t stop you from buying it—I can only warn you that it’s meant to be absurd, satirical, and funny. It’s best to go in expecting to be offended, but hopefully you’ll be surprised at how much you find humorously ridiculous. Maybe it will make your own offlining adventures a little easier to take.