Fall's Favorite Reads

 Headstone, Ken Bruen. Wasn’t sure if I liked it through the middle, as the torments Taylor has to go through can be a bit much. By the end I was all in. Of course, it’s Bruen, so the writing was excellent throughout and got me over the rough spots.

Writing the Private Eye Novel, Robert J. Randisi, editor. Essays from more than twenty heavyweights circa early 90s, this is still a wealth of information for anyone interested in writing private detective fiction. Lawrence Block, Loren Estleman, Ed Gorman, Sue Grafton, Parnell Hall, and a dozen others join Randisi in exploring every facet of writing a PI novel, which often applies to writing fiction in general. I bought this after Bob died, as I wanted something of his on my bookshelf and this seemed a logical choice. It turned out to be far more educational and inspirational than I expected.

Lines and Shadows, Joseph Wambaugh. Non-fiction examination of a special team of San Diego police tasked with keeping predators from robbing, raping, and killing people sneaking across the border in the late 1970s, and how things eventually got out of hand. Focuses on more than the police work to shine a light on a too often forgotten aspect of the immigration problem: these are human beings deserving of at least a minimum amount of consideration and safety. The salient takeaway for me is how Wambaugh describes the US-Mexico border as an imaginary line separating two economies. Highest recommendation.

Floodgate, Johnny Shaw. I do loves me some Johnny Shaw. This is a departure from the Jimmy Veeder fiascos and Big Maria, and I was a little dubious at first. Not that it wasn’t good, just not what I expected. I got over that when I saw how compelling the story was and Shaw’s natural irreverence took over. Reads a little like a mash-up of James Ellroy and Carl Hiaasen; Shane Black could make the movie.

The Big Book of the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett; edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. It’s 733 small print double-column pages of every Continental Op story ever published, and one that wasn’t. (“Three Dimes.”) Contains the serialized version of “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” which became Red Harvest, as well as the original stories that make up The Dain Curse. The Beloved Spouse™ gave this to me as a Christmas gift in 2022 and I read the stories as palate cleansers between novels. It’s wonderful to see how Hammett’s writing improved as time went on and the stories became more complex and refined. I particularly enjoyed reading the opening lines of “Fly Paper.” (It was a wandering daughter job.)

The Capitalism of Publishing

 

The public is not typically aware that bookselling is essentially a consignment business. (Not all authors are aware of this, either, though they should be.)

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. Bear in mind there are others that handle much of the logistics, but what’s here is the core process.

·       The publisher issues a catalog of what books are available to bookstores this quarter.

·       The bookstore orders the books it wants.

·       Customers buy those books from the store.

o   If they buy more than the store ordered, the store orders more.

o   If they buy fewer than the store ordered, the bookseller may return the unsold copies at the publisher’s expense.

·       Booksellers build the ability to return books into their business plans.

·       Publishers go along because they have to.

There are four major publishing houses that operate like this. Don’t be confused by the number of “publishers” that have their names on the spines of books. Those names are generally what are called “Imprints,” and a single house may own multiple imprints. For example, the Hachette Book Group owns Grand Central Publishing; Basic Books Group; Hachette Audio; Little, Brown, and Company; Little Brown Books for Young Readers; Orbit; Running Press Group; and Workman Publishing. Each of these has imprints of their own. If you buy a book published by any of these, the publishing company that runs the show is Hachette. The others in the Big Four are no different.

Since the big publishers can afford to accept returns and pay for display space dedicated to their books, theirs are what you see in your local bookstore. Since the local bookseller depends on this financial support to stay open, they do not as a habit stock books that

·       are put out by publishers that cannot afford to accept returns or pay for display space.

·       are self-published.

Rest assured, if you go into your local bookstore and ask for a specific title by an author not connected to any of the Big Four, your bookseller will order it for you. This is much appreciated, but it also means no one – literally no one – will find such a book by browsing the shelves, nor will it ever appear as a staff recommendation.

Where does this leave the small press or self-published author?

Shit out of luck.

Though it may sound like it, I’m not complaining. I accept this is how things work. I returned to self-publishing because I chose not to swim in the publishing business’s version of the Seine River during the Olympics. I have made my peace with it.

I’m writing here to encourage others to look clear-eyed at their prospects. Examine why you write. What do you want to get out of it? Money? How much? Fame? How much?

Or will the respect of those you would like to think of as your peers be sufficient? The joy you get from crafting something that, while imperfect, came out about how you wanted? The satisfaction of putting together a story others will enjoy reading, no matter how many – or how few – actually read it?

There is no right answer; there are wrong ones. By “wrong,” I mean, if you’re getting into it to make money and you don’t, whose fault is that? Is the system rigged against you? Sure it is, if only because there are more people who want to make money as writers than the industry can support. The lottery’s rigged against you, too, and you don’t bitch about that. (You have one chance in 292,201,338 to win the Power Ball jackpot.)

Telling stories for money is a privilege, not a right. It’s on you to come to accommodation with the industry. If you can’t, don’t bitch; quit. Not being a writer is the default state of humanity; there’s no shame in it. Those who make even a serious attempt are outliers.

“But I can no more not write than I can not breathe!”

Then save your breath and stop whining. No one is owed a living in their preferred profession. No one knows that better than I do. How I came to know it is a topic for another day.

Grammar and Spelling

 A conversation erupted on Facebook a few weeks ago about the importance of proper grammar and spelling. Opinions were all over the place. Some people were rigid for proper grammar and precise spelling. Others believed that, so long as the reader understood what you meant, anything goes.

I was busy at the time and unable to participate, though I have thoughts. (Surprise, surprise.) Here you go.

Regarding grammar, the entire field has become a refuge for pedants who would use strict interpretations as a crutch and demand everyone else do so. That’s bullshit.

I recently read Bill Bryson’s delightful history of the English language, The Mother Tongue; now I periodically dip into its companion Made in America, which shows how the language changed on this side of the sheugh. There are large chunks of “proper” grammar that come from a book by an English minister who appointed himself the Royal High Arbiter of English Grammar and pretty much decided what grammar should be. There were no definitive guides at the time – which makes sense, as there was no universally agree-on grammar either – people adopted his “rules” wholesale and we’re still hamstrung by them.

The purpose of grammar and punctuation is to make the writing clear to the reader, not to follow arbitrary rules. Placing the rules ahead of the purpose often serves to obfuscate the meaning, and that is something up with which I shall not put. (Thank you, Winston Churchill.) Last year I read Basil H. Liddell-Hart’s renowned history of the Second World War. It has a wealth of information, but the precise English public school grammar makes some sentences almost impossible to navigate; I sometimes forgot how a sentence began by the time it completed its Byzantine meandering to the end. You must give the reader a fighting chance to discern your meaning (Thank you Strunk & White), but grammar should always be the servant, not the master.

Spelling is different. Bad spelling forces the reader to divine the meaning of each cluster of letters. This not only slows things down, it violates Strunk and White’s “fighting chance” rule. Even the excuse, “This is how it should be spelled” is faulty, as readers from different parts of the country may perceive even a purely phonetic spelling differently.

Few people hand write things for others to read anymore. Keyboards and voice recognition reign. This means spell check is almost always available. If you can’t take the time to send your message through at least a rudimentary spell check, why would I think you spent any more time than that thinking about it, so why should I read it? (very brief social media and text responses are obviously not included, though you should still show some consideration for the poor bugger on the receiving end.)

Here’s the thing with grammar, spelling, and life in general: be sensitive of the intended audience. If you want them to read what you sent, make it easy for them. Think how you’d feel if someone forced you to trudge through turgid grammar and misspelled words in hope of figuring what they want to tell you and use your judgment accordingly.

Happy Anniversary to The Beloved Spouse™

 Today we celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of The Beloved Spousal Equivalent’s promotion to Beloved Spouse.

Notice how I did not say anything about it being ‘fifteen years ago today?”

That’s because it wasn’t. The actual anniversary was this past Wednesday, November 27.

Why the discrepancy?

In those days my parental units used to visit us over the Thanksgiving holiday. They’d arrive Wednesday afternoon and leave early Sunday morning so Dad could be home for the Steelers game. (He was old old school and didn’t believe in watching recorded games, no matter how much of his remaining time on earth would be saved by skipping commercials.)

The Sole Heir was still local then, a freshman at the University of Maryland in College park. She was home in Olney for the holiday weekend.

TBS and I had decided to get married but wanted something in our own…idiom. We arranged for a celebrant to come to the house on Black Friday afternoon, as Mom and Dad would be there and we could easily arrange a pretext to get TSH to the house.

Oh, yeah. We didn’t tell anyone except for the celebrant we were doing this. No one.

We were watching hockey – the Penguins would go on to lose to the Islanders 3 – 2 – with TSH and her then boyfriend now husband wondering what it was we’d hurried them over there for.

Three o’clock. The doorbell rings.

 Our celebrant, Heather, is at the door dressed in medieval garb. “Would anyone here like to get married?”

I turn to TBS. “Don’t we have that box of wedding stuff somewhere?” She says yes, tells me where it is – I already knew, this was theater – and everyone else wondered what exactly the hell was going on.

The wedding box contained, among miscellaneous festive appurtenances:

·       Tee shirts labeled husband, wife, mother, father, daughter. (We didn’t know Zack was coming, though he was more than welcome.)

·       Two small notebooks containing our “scripts;” the celebrant had her own scroll, for reasons that will become apparent later..

·       Heads on sticks of my brother, sister-in-law, two nieces, their dog, and two close friends who lived nearby and we knew would have come had we even hinted at this.

We then went through a real and legally binding ceremony while everyone else looked on with various shades of amusement, disbelief, or irritation. (It took Mom a while to figure out what was going on. She was still pretty sharp in those days, but no longer all that imaginative.)

I’ll not go through the entire brief, but not very solemn, ceremony here. Suffice to say it began thus, in script form:

HEATHER

 

Dearly beloved,

 

I know this was unexpected, so I will be brief.

 

(Allow scroll to fall open. It’s about four feet long.)

 

We are gathered here today on this not quite so solemn as some might have it occasion because when one heart exhibits migratory behavior toward another, it’s a force of nature, and not a question of where it grips it. Corky and Dana have married before. The marriages fell over and sank into the swamp. They tried again. Those marriages burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. So here they are, having learned from experience and lived as married in all but name (nudge, nudge, say no more) to build the strongest marriage in all the kingdom.

 

[References to Monty Python deliberate and numerous.]

Five minutes later we were married.

“This is all very nice,” you are asking, “but what does any of it have to do with not observing the actual date of the wedding?”

Good question. Actually, a great question. (What’s the difference between a good question and a great question? A great question is one I know the answer to.)

We were both still gainfully employed. We knew we’d always be off during the four-day weekend. November 27 might not always be convenient for an anniversary celebration.

The day after Thanksgiving would.

So here we are, celebrating our anniversary on the agreed-upon day, two days late by the calendar. Our prescience has been proven solid, as today finds us in Florida, where The Sole Heir, her husband, the baby, TSH’s mother, and Zack’s parents have all convened for the holiday. There are no better ways to celebrate important life events than with as many of the people who mean the most to you as can be assembled. That is exactly what we are doing.

Of course, the anniversary would still be a joy had it been just the two of us. The Pens play at Boston this evening – it’s later in the day than fifteen years ago, but the in-laws live in Massachusetts, so a friendly rivalry may be in order – even if we had nothing else scheduled. (Assuming the game is on in Florida.)

Every day is a bit of an anniversary with The Beloved Spouse™. We both do little things, intentional and otherwise, that remind us of why we chose to formalize a bond we’d already shared for five years. We are growing old together, not for better or for worse, but for better, as we are both well-equipped and willing to help the other through whatever vicissitudes old age visits upon us.

I wish I was as smart every day as the day I said:

DANA

 

I, Dana, take you, Corky, as my lawfully wedded wife, in this ceremony crafted to our own particular—uh—uh—

 

CORKY

 

Idiom

 

DANA

 

Idiom, to share in my great tracts of land in a very real, and legally binding sense. I promise never to make you live in a self-perpetuating autocracy, but in a an anarco-syndicalist commune. We shall take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. Soft dirt shall not tempt me, even when I find unidentified and previously unannounced vegetables in my dinner, and I shall not say “Ni!” to you unless strenuously provoked.

 

Happy anniversary to The Beloved Spouse™. Never was a title more richly deserved.

Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger is Available Today

 

Today is the climax of the relentless crescendo of hyperbole surrounding the release of my first Western, Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walte Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger. Some may consider my use of “hyperbole” to itself be hyperbolic. Based on my standards of marketing, I do not.

Dead Shot was as much fun as I’ve had writing a book. The research was fun. Finding a voice I liked was fun. Even the first draft, which I usually consider to be the literary equivalent of searching excrement for intestinal parasites, was fun. Reading it to The Beloved Spouse™ was a lot of fun, especially when I saw her reaction, which was as encouraging as any I have received from her on a book, and she’s endured listened to them all.

In short, I enjoyed the entire process.

[Editor’s Note: It is generally accepted to be bad practice to use a loved one as a sounding board when judging the merit of a work in progress. This is not the case with TBS. She is not bashful about pointing out weaknesses or things that don’t make sense to her. While I don’t always take her suggestions, I always consider them, often discuss them, sometimes at length. Even if I don’t incorporate a suggestion, I have come to trust her opinion enough to know that, if she pointed something out, I need to make a change, even if it’s not the one she’d like.]

I shared a draft with J.D. Rhoades, author of the Jack Keller series (among others) as well as a highly acclaimed Western of his own, The Killing Look. Here’s what he had to say about Dead Shot:

"A fascinating, picaresque journey through a tumultuous post-Civil-War American West. Walter tells his tale with scrupulous honesty and wry wit as he encounters legends and makes a few of his own. Fans of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man are going to love this one. Highly recommended. "

I’m as happy with how Dead Shot turned out as I’ve been with anything I’ve written. What’s on the page captures when I had in my head as well or better as any previous work, whether novel, short story, or flash fiction. It’s even made me reconsider bringing out the Western I abandoned a few years ago, though that won’t be anytime soon, as I have ideas I want to work on stacked up like jets over LaGuardia Airport in bad weather.

One last excerpt before I leave you to your holiday preparations.

Knowing about marshals’ ability to collect rewards, you may wonder what I found attractive about bounty hunting. It was simple. As a bounty hunter I was not constrained by having to serve routine warrants, transport prisoners, or stand guard over a jail or courtroom. I was also not required to pay to bury anyone I might have to kill. So long as I turned in the wanted party, I was paid, often on the spot.

Bounty hunting was lonely work. You rarely took partners unless going after a gang, and then you kept one eye on your pards for fear one of them might decide to increase the size of his share by cutting down the number of shares. I typically stayed away from the big money bounties, or those marked “Dead or Alive.” I made a decent living picking up some of the lesser outlaws, as they were not as likely to shoot it out, especially with a man who had my reputation with a gun.

Dead Shot is available for free download through my website in MOBI, EPUB, and PDF formats by visiting https://danakingauthor.com/. 

Dead Shot Available in One Week

 My first Western, Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger becomes available next Friday, November 22. This date was chosen as a courtesy to my dozens of readers, as I know the holidays are a busy time and you might like to get this order off your plate before Thanksgiving makes life hectic. (Canadian readers should ignore the Thanksgiving part. Yours has come and gone. I hope you had a good one.)

Over the past weeks I’ve posted about how and why I wrote Dead Shot,. Today I thought I’d talk a little about why Westerns matter at all, since the core of the book, Walt’s time on the range, took place 120 – 150 years ago.

Western stories – in particular Western movies – have shaped American culture and politics since their advent. The image of the lone cowboy riding into town to right injustice has become so iconic a lot of people in this country – too many, frankly – think that’s how things were and, even worse, should be today. To them, everyone should not only have the right to carry a gun, but should carry one. They believe that’s what it takes to be safe in a world far less dangerous than they would have you believe.

The people who lived on the frontier, where guns were often a necessity, would have liked nothing better than to see fewer of them. Rifles and shotguns were critical for subsistence hunting in a land where the closest meat market might be two days’ ride with no guarantee the meat purchased wasn’t already half spoiled.

Guns were also needed for personal protection. The frontier was a place where a farmer’s wife could watch him disappear over the horizon for a simple run into town for supplies with no assurance she’d ever see him again, no way to check on him, and no way to notify anyone if he didn’t return. Pa would be wise to arm himself on the way to and from town, even if he left the gun in the wagon while he was there.

Why would he leave the gun in the wagon? Because a lot of towns, maybe even most of them, eventually had ordinances that prohibited carrying firearms inside the town limits. People checked their guns the same way we check our coats now. The folks in those towns were painfully aware of the misery caused by every swinging dick in town coming heeled.

That element isn’t very romantic, though, so it’s often overlooked, especially in what I call the good haircut Westerns of the 30s through most of the 60s. You know what I mean: men came into town after three weeks on the range with their hair cut and combed, with maybe a day’s growth of beard. That right there should have been a tip-off that the image about to be conveyed would be inaccurate, no matter how compelling the story.

(I make two exceptions to the above rule: Shane and the original The Magnificent Seven. The grooming in both is still pretty good, but the depictions of the lives lived are also unvarnished.)

The turning point came with The Wild Bunch; Westerns would never be the same after Sam Peckinpaugh’s masterpiece. Clint Eastwood then became virtual curator of the genre with a series of classics, including The Outlaw Josie Wales, High Plains Drifter,  and his Western tour-de-force, Unforgiven.

There were others. Off the top of my head Young Guns, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Appaloosa, Open Range and especially Monte Walsh worked overtime to dispel the image built up over the previous forty years. On television, Lonesome Dove stands alone. Some were better than others. None glamorized the West, though they often displayed the heroism required to survive on the frontier.

Walt Ferguson’s story includes many scenes based on actual events. Action scenes that might lead one to believe this is just another shoot-em-up. I hope that’s not the general takeaway. I wrote the book to be entertaining, but I also wanted to show that Walt’s exploits were only necessary because the frontier was such a dangerous place.

One last excerpt from the book sums up Wat’s feelings toward his time on the frontier. The “current economic situation” he refers to is the Great Depression.

The frontier is gone now and will never return. That is as it should be, and while I miss it, I do not yearn for its renaissance. The world can never remain too constant or it will become stagnant, and a stagnant pool cannot sustain life except maybe mosquitoes and Lord knows we need no more of them.

What I do not speak much of, and why I am not sorry the frontier is gone forever, are the hardships. As bad as things are during the current economic situation, people who were not there have no idea of the depredations and suffering endured by those who made the trip west when the prairie had never felt a plow blade and was run by Indians. Even without the Indians it was a dangerous and unforgiving place where starvation and disease were constant threats. A relatively minor injury, easily treated by a doctor today, could prevent a man from working and cast his family into ruin.

My heart went out to the homesteaders who broke their backs and buried their children in small family plots. They had no thoughts of riches, only of a better life than the one they left. Maybe to give their children a leg up. They linger across the prairie in unmarked graves covered with stone to keep the scavengers away. The men like me who wore guns get all the attention nowadays but those unnamed millions deserve the credit. I could never have done what any of them did.

Important (For Me) Announcement

 The recent election had a side effect I’ll bet not too many of you saw coming:

Jeff Bezos can kiss my ass.

For those unaware – primarily low information Trump voters, I imagine – Bezos is the founder and owner of amazon.com and one of the two richest people in the world. (The other is Elon Musk, which should give you an idea what kind of high-quality individuals we’re talking about.)

Bezos also owns the Washington Post newspaper. Two weeks before the election, he decided the Post would not endorse a candidate for president. In a remarkably self-serving opinion piece, Bezos defended his action by stating he was returning the Post to the policy it observed until 1976. He argued it would imbue the paper with an aura of objectivity.

This is bullshit. Prima facie evidence to follow.

Bezos also owns Blue Origin, the company chosen by NASA to build the rockets that will return the United States to the moon. He is paranoid Trump will cancel the contract and give it to Dancing Elon (anagram: LONE SKUM), thus costing Bezos billions of dollars.

Let me rephrase: it will prevent Bezos from collecting billions of dollars.

Well, then, he can’t have any more of mine.

The Beloved Spouse™ and I are finding other sources for products we subscribe to on Amazon; we will not renew our Prime subscription. You can’t cancel those, so we’re locked in until August 2025. In the interim we will only use the services Prime provides for no additional charge, such as Free on Prime programming and the occasional sporting event. We will use Amazon as a shopping and information source for products we’ll buy elsewhere, even if it costs us more.

The reader in me has a more personal interest. The Kindle app of my iPad is more accommodating to my vision issues than most books; I’ll need to find another e-reader app and place to shop. (Suggestions welcome in the comments.)

My inner writer has a deeper dilemma.

I have long set aside my misgivings about Amazon, especially relative to physical bookstores, because brick-and-mortar stores don’t stock my books and are damn near impossible to book events into anymore. Bezos’s craven suck-up to Trump has severed that bond and I am removing from Amazon all the books under my control.

Where will I sell them? Nowhere. Anyone who wants one will be able to download it for free from my web site. Please stand by while the logistics are worked out. I hope to have physical copies through a POD source to sell at conferences, but that is also a work in progress.

I’ll still post notices here when books are available, as well as occasional reminders for the entire oeuvre. The books won’t be any harder to get to than they are now. You’ll just go to a different web site and it won’t cost you any money. If people are interested, I’ll see about working out a way print copies can be ordered from me directly, but that’s down the road and only if people ask for the service.

I hope this doesn’t inconvenience my dozens of readers; I’ll do all I can to see that it does not. The first book to go up will be next Friday’s release of Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger. Once we get those logistics worked out, I expect to have everything moved over sometime in December.