A Little Reminder

I’m well aware my decision to forsake traditional publishing puts a glass ceiling over any writing career I might have, and I’m good with it. I’m even better after what happened today.

I want to state up front this is not a diatribe about agents. Agents have it tough now. The foundations of their business are set in quicksand and they’re getting squeezed on one side by publishers who want more out of authors all the time and on the other side by authors who think a book contract will buy them a villa in Capri. The agent I’m about to discuss is highly respected by everyone I know, including me. We’ve met, shared a couple of drinks in a small group, and my writing has always received a fair hearing. This rejection was complimentary, written with tact, and I have no quibble with the assessment.

It did, however, take the agent seven months to get around to it.

To me, that says more on the state of publishing than it does about this agent, and I’m too old for this bullshit. I’m fifty-five, and life is too short to live on gossamer-thin hopes that take the better part of a year to spin out. I don’t burn like I did as a young musician. I enjoy my quiet time more than I used to, and I’ve paid enough life dues that I don’t feel the need to wait indefinitely for someone to tell me to jump so I can ask how high.

I understand my path is not the way to fame and fortune; I’m not recommending it to others who may have different goals than I.

On the other hand, I’ve never missed a deadline, and I doubt I will.

The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide

Finding books on how to write is easy. Lay in the parking lot outside any building housing an MFA program and sooner or later one will fall on you. Actually publishing a book, or even placing more than one short story in a respected publication such as the Pennysaver is optional. Many of these books dispense such valuable information as, “show, don’t tell,” or “grammar is good.”

In much shorter supply are books about how to be a writer. What to look for in a school, what’s involved in selling a book or story, and what will be asked of you once a contract has been accepted. How to keep ends together. Even whether you should become a writer in the first place. John McNally’s The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide is a welcome addition to this niche.

McNally’s credentials are substantial: three novels, two collections of short stories, the editor of six anthologies. His fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, and he is currently an associate professor at Wake Forest University. (Full disclosure: McNally was a visiting writer at George Washington University in 2001-2002, where I was fortunate to be accepted into his workshop.)

TCWSG is broken into six parts, each consisting of several sections: The Decision to Become a Writer, Education and the Writer, Getting Published, Publicity, Employment for Writers, and The Writer’s Life. These are bookended with a brief introduction (The Writer’s Wonderland—Or: A Warning) and the notes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and index such a book requires. The layout is logical, progressing through the stages of a writer’s life as they as most likely to be encountered.

The book works as well as it does because McNally has scuffed around as much as a archetypal writer should. He never starved in a garret, though he did freeze in a trailer, where he was almost overcome by the fumes of its kerosene heater. (A plan to work Alaskan crab boats before Most Dangerous Catch made it cool was narrowly averted.) Anyone who hopes to earn a living from writing will have few life events that aren’t at least analogous to something McNally has done.

The other element to the book’s success is McNally’s writing. If easy reading truly is hard writing, then John McNally busts his ass. Conversational without becoming colloquial, TCWSG is as much fun to read as his fiction. There are no sections to be trudged through. Even what may seem at first glance to be the lair of dryness may be spiced up with an anecdote or a well-designed phrase. McNally is expert at Elmore Leonard’s credo to leave out the parts people skip, often by finding a way to make them worth reading.

Yes, I’m in the tank for him. He convinced me I had some talent, and has been encouraging throughout our relationship. Still, the only book I’ve read about the writing life that comes close to TCWSG is John Scalzi’s delightful You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop. (Stephen King’s On Writing begins with a long and informative biographical section, but it’s much of it is a purging of his demons, and, hopefully, of little practical use to other writers, except as a cautionary tale.) The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide is thought provoking and fun, which is the best way to learn anything.

A Writer's Life

Once again, The Onion knows more about what we do than most of us are willing to admit.

Crashed

I’ve been a devotee of Timothy Hallinan’s work since I was asked to review A Nail Through the Heart, the first of his Poke Rafferty series. The Rafferty books started strong and got better, capped (so far) by last year’s The Queen of Patpong. Knowing how much effort Hallinan puts into the Rafferty books, and the emotional fatigue that must have been induced in writing Queen, it was no surprise when he opted for something lighter for his next project.

Junior Bender is a burglar. Not some cheap smash-and-grab asshole, Junior works mainly on commission, stealing specific things on demand for pre-set prices. When stealing a Paul Klee painting from the home of a notorious gangster goes south on him, Junior finds himself engaged with two organized crime operations, a crooked cop, and the pornography industry.

The Rafferty books always had laughs in them, no matter how serious the content. Hallinan has a good ear and light touch with his humor, and an appreciation of how characters have the capacity for it—even if unintentional—during the toughest moments. Crashed is intended to be more of a humorous read, as the story breezes along with more odd circumstances and quirky characters than can be found in any of the Rafferty books.

That’s doesn’t mean it’s fluff. The core subject matter is life and death, and Junior has a harder interior than may first appear. Thistle Downing is a cautionary character, and the issues surrounding Junior, his ex-wife, and their daughter are real enough to fit far more standard occupations than professional thief. The ending isn’t sure until it’s over.  Still, the subtext is lighter, the smiles more frequent, and the cast more inclined to banter than in the Rafferty books.

What hasn’t changed is the quality of the writing. Hallinan  writes scenes as memorable as anyone working today, and his descriptions are Chandler-esque at times, without sounded dated or derivative.

It’s easy to see why Hallinan would need a departure from Poke Rafferty’s increasingly dark adventures. Crashed is just what could be hoped for, something different that still has the basic elements that make Hallinan  worth reading in the first place.

(By the way, if you haven’t read The Queen of Patpong, you really ought to get busy.)

Wild Bill Saddles Up

I just sent the manuscript file for Wild Bill in to eBook Architects to have it formatted for Kindle and other electronic formats. Once it comes back, then I guess I’m committed to getting it out there, hopefully this summer.

Stay tuned.

Developing Genius

Interesting post over at Pitchers and Poets yesterday. (Any baseball fan interested in more than the same old bullshit would do well to check P&P out regularly.) Eric Nusbaum took sabremetrician and writer Bill James to task over an article James wrote for Slate Magazine, lamenting how we as a nation don’t invest the same effort to develop writers as we do to find baseball players.

Nusbaum’s right; James’s article is “interesting but extremely flawed.” I’ll not rehash each writer’s points here; they speak more eloquently for themselves than I could. I will attempt to add a couple of argument stones to Nusbaum’s side of the scale.

Before I begin, note that I have been a Bill James devotee since I first saw a Baseball Abstract in 1982. Aside from being the father of modern baseball statistical analysis, he’s a wonderful and entertaining writer, with a keen intelligence not limited to baseball. Several of my life attitudes have been adopted from things Bill James wrote, and I’m better off because of it. (Example: he once took “baseball men” to task for dwelling on what a player couldn’t do, instead of capitalizing on what he did well. Good advice when dealing with anybody.)

James drops the ball uncharacteristically in several ways in this article. Nusbaum catches most; I have a couple more. Wondering why Topeka can produce a major league player every so often, but never a Shakespeare, even though it’s about the size of Shakespeare’s London, misses the point completely. If using Shakespeare (or Dickens) as an example, the comparison isn’t with producing a utility infielder, or even a player who held down a regular position for several years. The comparison there is with Willie Mays or Ted Williams. Few cities of any size have produced players of their accomplishment. If Topeka has, please point him out.

James also errs in his locations. Shakespeare wasn’t from London; he was born and grew up in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Dickens moved to London when he was three, but another James example, Graham Greene, grew up in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. They moved to London when they were already developing as writers. The analogy to Topeka would better be served to cite players who played minor league ball in Topeka, of which I’ll bet there are several well known names.

My arguments here are a hodge-podge, in part because so were James’s. So it goes. I suspect editorial and time constraints may have prevented his normal level of research. His point is still well taken: we don’t produce writers in anything like the quantities we crank out ballplayers.

Well, duh.

We never will. No one ever will, no matter how hard we might try. First, there’s no return on investment for writers. Scout the right ballplayer and you stand to make millions of dollars. The number of writers who can make a publisher comparatively rich can be counted on your digits. Baseball teams own the rights to their players’ work for six years after the reach the show; writers can change publishers with their underwear if they choose. No publisher is going to invest the money and effort to develop a writer who might give him one book, then leave.

Another key element is that baseball players—any athletes—are easier to spot. Watch twelve-year-old kids walk down the street. You can tell with some certainly which are the better athletes. Put a bat in their hands and it gets even easier. Choosing talent at the highest level is hard, but weeding out the chaff at the beginning of the pipeline is relatively easy.

Now take those same twelve-year-olds and tell me which one can write. What does a writer look like? How does he act? You can’t even tell by how he speaks. (People like to make fun of athletes, but I’ve heard some entertainingly inarticulate writers.) You just can’t tell with writers until you read what they’ve written, and even then you ought to read quite a bit before you predict someone to be a guaranteed success.
Comparing writers to athletes is a pointless exercise, not unlike saying Topeka has a population similar to Port St. Lucie FL, so why don’t they have spring training in Kansas, too? That’s comparing sunflowers and oranges.

The truth is, we have about as many writers—and ballplayers—as we need, or there would be more of them. Lord knows I’m not an ardent capitalist, but if we as a people wanted more writers, there would be more. We’d buy enough books for more of them to make a living at it. We don’t. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, good or bad.  It is what is is, and inventing convoluted comparisons to show how we are lacking because we don’t create more of them is like complaining about the uneven distribution of sunlight throughout the year. I don’t like it, either, but it’s  not changing anytime soon, and we may not like it when it does.

City of Lost Girls

No slave to the madding crowd, I. The fact that I waited six months after release to buy a book does not prevent me from waiting another six months to read it. Everyone waits their turn, no matter how much I revere their writing, or I might only read a small handful of writers.

Declan Hughes, for example.

Ed Loy is back resurrecting a friendship with a acclaimed Irish movie director he fell in with back in his Los Angeles sojourn. Ed’s job in those days was to clean up Jack Donovan’s romantic messes. That was also the cause of the falling out. Time heals most wounds, and Ed’s well along the path of understanding himself enough to forgive others, so he takes Jack’s case again, this time to determine the source of some threatening letters. When two young extra go missing from the set, Ed sees the connection no one else wants to, that three extras disappeared from the set of another Donovan film, never to be seen again.

Hughes sets himself a task with each novel. In All the Dead Voices he went back in time to show how the crimes of that book had origins in The Troubles. Here the new aspect is the introduction of first person narration from the killer’s perspective. He’s better at it than most, but the serial killer justifying himself to himself has been done so many times it’s become almost self-parody. Only the caliber of Hughes’s writing saves it from cliché, though it’s still the least strong aspect of the book.

Hughes has mastered the art of keeping a series fresh by allowing the characters to grow in non-stereotypical ways. Ed’s drinking is substantially reduced, though he’s not succumbed to the banality that accompanies the tortures of the dry drunk. His relationship with a woman is more strained by her fear that he will become too suburban than by his demons.

Tommy Owens becomes a more reliable friend all the time, accepting more responsibility and pulling it off better—though not without difficulties—with each book. Among the best sidekicks in any current series, Tommy’s value to Ed and to Hughes’s books is the equal of what is expected of Crais’s Joe Pike or John Connolly’s Louis, though Tommy is never as predictable as either.

Often compared to Chandler and Macdonald, Hughes is, to me, Ireland’s James Lee Burke. No one else can get away with the florid, unabashedly beautiful use of the language in describing actions that are far removed from any beauty, and still manage to keep the beauty in the description alone, attributing none to the act. No need to resort to odd spellings and apostrophes; the accents are right there on the page for anyone who reads with his ear as well as his eyes, and anyone who knowingly chooses to read Hughes with his eyes only is a fool.

One of the nice things about reading books a year after their release is that the next installment is that much closer. Lucky me.