It’s heavy down here,

at least according to the Cowboy Junkies. Life is heavy, despite our constantly trying to make light of it. We can buy the shiny toys, repeat the snappy slogans, pass around cute fuzzy memes, and still some suburban Midwest girl will step off a bus in Manhattan and be welcomed by a guy with bad intentions. She may well end up hooked on meth or heroin, selling herself for the profit of another. Some guy in a suit will rent her for an hour then go home to his wife and kids and watch a sitcom. The next day at the office he’ll espouse family values and conservatism. Then he’ll formulate a plan to fuck the workers below him out of a portion of their wages and glow with pride while his supervisor pats him on the back for being a Great American. On the evening commute to Connecticut he’ll inch past a car wreck with bodies scattered across two lanes of I-95, probably caused by the driver texting on the smartphone lying shattered amid a glittering spray of safety glass. He’ll roll his eyes and tap a finger on the steering wheel like the rest of the impatient, inconvenienced people around him. An hour after craning his neck for a macabre glimpse the dead will have ceased to exist as things once human in his mind, if they ever did.

And this guy? He’s one of the halfway decent. In that same span of time, in that same metropolitan area, hundreds of children will have been abused and molested, millions of dollars will have been stolen or misappropriated, armies of homeless men and women will have been viewed with pity or loathing, or ignored altogether, dozens of women will have been raped and battered, and scores of animals will have been mistreated, sometimes for entertainment.

And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

All the while, people will drive and ride and walk around with fake smiles on their faces and false platitudes on their lips. They’ll lie and say things like, “Fine,” or “Good,” when someone asks how they are without really caring one way or the other. It’s just what you say. And most of the rest of their day and indeed their lives follow that same pattern.

A few will smile in genuine delight at the warmth of sunshine on their faces, or the clean smell of recently fallen rain, or the wise and baffled expression on an infant’s face. These little beacons of light in a drab and darkening world send ripples outward into the crowds around them, and for a brief moment the emotions they emit touch others and are shared, and sometimes, hours or even days later, one of the touched will recall that moment without consciously remembering it, and reach out in some way to touch another, whether with just a smile or with physical aid or an act of kindness, and all the anger and frustration and resentment brewing in the cauldron of teeming humanity will lose some of its force for a time.

And that’s heavier still, because the smallest glimpse of hope outweighs the longest stare into the dark. Every sliver of rising sun peeking over the horizon offers a shot at redemption, a new start. It burns the darkness away into the cracks and crevices. But the tallest and broadest of things and men cast the longest and widest shadows, always, and even at its highest and brightest, the light cannot penetrate there. The darkness crouches, waiting, and we always reach into it with one hand even as we reach for the light with the other, because we’re made of both, and are called to both.

That’s why I write the kind of stories I do. All good fiction peers at this paradox and tries to peel away layers to see what’s underneath. It peeks at the horror and joy of it all. But crime fiction tears those layers away violently, and stares unflinching at the heart thus exposed, in a way that cannot be denied or written off as fanciful. It’s bald truth masquerading as fiction. Only the names have been changed.

And that’s how it should be.

Yeah, it’s heavy, and down here includes everything under the sun, from the poshest penthouse to the dimmest subbasement. The high and the low alike are subject to the gravity of things, no matter how they might cry out in denial, or more accurately, because they do.



SR

They want to slap a brand on you,

because people have this need to know what to expect. Apparently the sense of adventure and willingness to take risks that started things rolling in this country fell by the wayside somewhere in the 1950s. It’s why McDonalds is such a smash hit. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap, it’s familiar crap. Who wants to eat red beans and rice with alligator sausage or Grenouilles a la Provencal or Arros con Pollo when you can have a Big Mac that looks like a fat guy sat on it and fries that smell great while they’re cooking but deteriorate to the consistency of greasy cardboard ten milliseconds after they’re pulled from the fryer?

It’s a no-brainer. And that’s the problem. The non-thinking, fast & easy trend is turning the world into a no-souler.

So you’d think people who read books for entertainment (and hopefully more) would buck that like crazy. But according to the publishers and editors and agents, it ain’t so. They want you in a readily identifiable box for easy marketing and mass consumption. That’s right, folks. We’re fucking Coneheads. Rejects from the planet Remulak. Mass quantities is where we’re at. Big steaming piles are in, take a look at the parking lot of the Old Country Buffet on any night you can manage to pull your head out of the tube.

I don’t want to be branded. Cattle are branded. It’s a stamp of ownership, and I ain’t fucking livestock. You want a box, hit the drive-thru.

Of course, those same publishers and editors and agents will tell me I’m making a mistake by adopting this attitude. Well, I’m not adopting anything. It’s not an attitude, it’s just me. So that’s what you can expect when you read something I’ve written. Pick any label you like. You can even try to apply it. But don’t get all upset when I peel it off.

Still, I’m driven to write about certain themes. My characters tend to be outside the norm, black sheep, if you will. I do fit a genre, but it’s a damn broad one. Crime. You probably guessed that if you’ve read these pages at all. Not the same old formulaic cop books though, I tend to walk the thin line between what’s lawful and what’s right, because they’re not always one and the same. And not caper books about criminals pulling off a heist either. These days I write stories about flawed people in bad situations that have to make hard choices to survive. My settings tend to be rural, because I’m a country boy at heart. I was born in the city and lived there until age fifteen, when I moved to the Arizona high country. There, I lived ten miles from the nearest pavement, and then it was another ten to the nearest town. I found magic, and it shaped the man I became. Tracking mountain lions hoping to catch a glimpse of one, hunting rabbits on a crisp January morning, or sitting on the edge of a caprock mesa with a pair of owls perched in the top of a lightning-killed ponderosa looking you in the eye will do that.

Western Montana shaped me too, as did years of roaming all over Canada, far from the U.S. border. Alaska poured a profound silence into my cracks that dwells to this day.

Now, after a nine-year fiasco in a small Wisconsin city where the prevailing mentality felt way too Mall of America for my taste, Victoria and I are back in the country, in her home range, the southern Missouri Ozarks. We’re only four miles from town, but town is a general store that doesn’t accept credit cards, a rural fire department, a tiny community center and library, and a riverside restaurant. Not even a post office. That’s twelve miles in the other direction. Next door are millions of acres of ridges and hollows and woods, creeks and springs, oak and hickory and pine, deer and black bear, and a cougar or two, and coyotes that sing you to sleep at night.

What the hell does any of this have to do with crime? That’s easy. There are humans too. And people are people. Go do an online search, and you’ll discover the area has a rep for meth and racism and whatever else. Some of it is true. But it’s a big area, and what applies to Franklin County or the country around Springfield doesn’t necessarily apply elsewhere, at least not to the same extent. But regardless, you don’t go driving up on folks at night out here, banging on their doors. The same was true in the White Mountains of Arizona and Catron County New Mexico and Montana's Blackfoot Valley. There’s trouble everywhere, because people are trouble, and you can’t get away from them.

That’s what drives all good fiction; people and trouble.

Some folks I trust and admire have said I fit a subgenre called country noir. I’m not certain that’s true. Noir tends to slant toward the hopelessness of things, regardless of setting, and while my stuff is plenty dark and gritty enough to be rough on your gears, I can never exclude hope, or hold it out of reach of my characters. That’s not my place. Hope is an essential ingredient in us all, so it seems to me that to withhold it is to be disingenuous. Shit, the act of creating is for me an act of hope, even faith. So noir might not be quite accurate in its strictly defined form.

But the masses demand that easy to read label, so it’s as agreeable and acceptable as I’m likely to get and still satisfy the marketers. Still don’t really like it though. I’m with Bill Hicks when it comes to those fuckers. But it is what it is. I’m in good company, and more than one of my heroes defies the branding iron by wielding it himself. Writers like Joe Lansdale and James Lee Burke and Tom Piccirilli, to name but a few, those guys brand you with their stories, and I’ll always strive to do the same.

I write from the heart, and that makes me wide open to you, the reader. You’re getting a glimpse inside me. It’s part of the joy of storytelling; making a human connection with people I’ll likely never meet, across miles and years alike. I invite that, which is why there is no comfort zone or taboo subject or PC bullshit in my stories. I want you to see, hear, and feel it like it is. Fair warning though, that means I’m not after providing you with some happy escape. You bang on my door after the sun has slipped behind the tree line, you’ll find yourself looking down the bore of a shotgun.

If the bears and lions don’t get you first.

SR

I'm switching gears here, because so far I've just been grinding them.

I wanted to offer readers a glimpse of what I write, and why, as well as who I am. I believe I've done so. With that in mind, I'm not going to give away any more stories here. That's something I'll save till later, for promotional purposes. From now on I intend to use this blog as a way to connect with readers through discourse, and I invite you, dear reader, to speak up. If you agree with what I have to say, tell me and others why. If you think I'm full of shit, say so.

Now that's out of the way...

This essay began life as a comment in reply to a post titled, "Self Publishing as Amway," on agent Chip McGregor's blog. Self-publishing is a hot topic right now, lots of confusion and assumptions, and even some obfuscation going around. It's also something I'm studying, along with the entire business end of writing, a topic Chip and Amanda are very knowledgeable about. So if you're interested in that sort of thing, and want to keep up with what's happening in the publishing world today, check out Chip's blog. There's a link to it at the bottom of this page, in the Cool Sites and Favorite Authors section.

Anyway, I think there are some harsh realities about writing and publishing that a lot of folks don't want to face. Many have been covered in Chip's article and the ensuing discussion. I would ad that writers need to stop bitching about how tough it is to get in these days. It always was, and you can't really blame the publishers for being narrow--my choice of words over the much-bandied "picky" I keep hearing in this context--in their choices of titles to publish. Self publishing has sort of enabled this by absorbing the midlist. But in the end it's the readers who are driving it. The bean-counters running the bottom line mentality at the big houses are just selling what people are buying.

E.L. James, as Chip Opines, writes like an eighth-grader? I agree. Thing is, apparently millions of people read like eighth-graders. Sort of scary, really. So "picky" doesn't fit, in my opinion. We-want-to-publish-only-best-sellers is closer to the mark, and unfortunately, a lot of best-sellers are crap. But look at any interstate business loop through Main Street America, note the mile-long chain of neon stabbing the night sky, vying for your attention and your dollar, see the $60,000 SUVs lined up at the drive-thru. Visibility and ease trump quality in a ton of cases, across the board.

 I give you "Bose is best."

No, Bose sounds like tin and cardboard, but Paul Harvey says otherwise, and he has the ear of millions, and they repeat what he tells them, whether they've heard Bose--or anything else--or not. So we need to look at ourselves and the mentality we've adopted as a society, not point fingers at the publishers and cast them in the role of Big Corporate Bad Guys. They're only selling what we're buying. Consumer is as Consumer does, and if you invest in that identity as a human being, you have to live with the results, and if you don't, you still have to live with the results, because those of us who disagree aren't doing much to change things.

As a writer, I'm studying this issue for all I'm worth these days. In the past, I was of the opinion that most self-published work was crap, and was reducing the overall body of work out there by diluting both its content and value, and still am to some degree. But I've revised to ad that this is only the case with writers who aren't investing in either the craft, or the business end of the job, just throwing first drafts out there and hoping to sell. Which is most of them, apparently.

Ain't never going to work. But they heard it will on the internet.

Bose is best.

Part of me rebels at the idea of standing on a virtual corner with a flashy sign in my hands hawking my goods, but that's the only thing that gets anyone's attention in a crowded marketplace. I and my stories are commodities, plain and simple, and I'm still learning the art of promotion as I hone the art and craft of writing. Hell, I still hate writing pitches and synopsis, although I think I'm getting the hang of it. Finally. But regardless of where I am with that, lots of folks are going to bypass my driveway and pull into the fast and easy drive-thru, because that's what they want, and it gets more air-time than me, has a bigger budget to grab their limited attention and time.

Fifty Shades of Flash and Grab is where we are, and all we can do is keep writing and bust our asses doing our best to be heard, studying the market and formulating a strategy that fits us and our stories. Like Chip says, it's on us to get it done, no one else.

My biggest disappointment is seeing knock-offs selling like hotcakes for a few years, and then what? After the public gets tired of the flave du jour? The author keeps jumping on trends or disappears? Has become disposable? Seems so, given the number of Twilight, Hunger Games, and Harry Potter clones out there. Best of luck with the log-term thing, I guess. Investing in an author and building their career and audience and down-the-road profitability over a number of books is a thing of the past. Welcome to the next-quarterly-report field of view.

It is what it is, and it's still evolving. You can't think about all that while you're writing, at least I can't, and don't.

My biggest hope in all this, strangely enough, is T.V. (I call cable and HBO and Showtime T.V.) Still a lot of garbage out there, but there's some really good shows too, and they're popular, which tells me that not everybody wants fast food stories, but real meat, real drama and not melodrama, substance and not air. Having said that, and being a music lover, the parallels between what the recording industry went through over the last decade and a half and what the publishing industry is going through now haven't escaped me, nor has the fact that I haven't bought a new album put out by a major label in a long, long time. Just about all of my favorite artists who've hit the scene in the last twenty years record on indie labels, or just create their own and put it on their website for sale and download.

Food for thought.

Now, if I could just convince some of those artists to offer FLAC and high-res downloads in addition to the MP3 garbage. ;)

P.S. If you follow this blog, you know that I change the background image every time I post, to something apropos. For this post I wanted a night shot of that Main Street America strip I mentioned above. Couldn't find one. A couple of day shots, and they lacked the oomph I was looking for. Apparently suburban commercial bliss isn't something photographers want to capture. I wonder what that says about it?

In any case, I chose to leave the background black for this one. Like a good sound system, a black background makes the message leap forward all the more. Or so I hope.



SR