Matt Phillips's Blog, page 3

Nothing But Good News Here

Hi—

Second episode of the Roughneck Dispatch podcast is live and writhing. This one is with noir-ish weirdo and all-around badass, Jo Perry. You’ll like Jo’s books if you like stellar writing, complex procedurals, and characters that scratch curiously at your soul.

The best book written about the pandemic lockdown? Jo Perry’s Pure.

Have a listen to Jo and her complex ideas about storytelling, writerly sight, and a bad mofo who used to be around named Warren Zevon. Speaking of which, you can vote to get Warren into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Exercise your right to rock, man…

Two more things:

My psycho-noir novella, The Man with the Remade Face, will be serialized this summer on the Shotgun Honey website. They’ve got a cool model they’re trying out with myself and mystery writer Albert Tucher. Can’ wait! Plus they’re publishing a bunch of other books that look killer.

I wrote and directed and acted in a short horror film—Customer Service Representative—that will premiere at the International Mobile Film Festival in San Diego (late April). Super-stoked to get an extremely low budget film into a festival. Here’s to getting a few more acceptances…Sure hope my sound mix is acceptable! Time to up my game and shoot with a real camera…

Alright…GO VOTE FOR WARREN…

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Roughneck Dispatch: Jo Perry

On this episode, crime writer Jo Perry talks about poetry as fuel for fiction, the complex nature of seeing as a storyteller, and what a bad mofo Warren Zevon was…Rock ‘n’ roll, baby. Have a listen and buy a book: https://www.authorjoperry.com/

Music by Road Side Brake.

Podcast is live.

Howdy, All:

The first episode of the Roughneck Dispatch podcast is available here and various other places you find your podcasts (Stitcher, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts). This week’s guest is crime writer Curtis Ippolito. We talk about his debut novel, Burying the Newspaper Man, the late and great Hunter S. Thompson, writing longhand (in cursive?), police ride-alongs, and the shape of story.

Thanks for reading Roughneck Dispatch! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The podcast is a personal diary format in which I’ll have discussions with other writers, filmmakers, artists, photographers, and storytellers all sorts. Interested in joining me for a chat? Leave a comment below and I’ll get in touch!

If you can, download the podcast and have a listen to Curtis and myself.

In other news, I charged through The English. This series is well-acted and just pulpy enough to be different. Fantastic visual imagery and some kind of dreadful heart to it—Emily Blunt gives a damn good performance. Direction and writing are top notch.

My reading habits—right now—are split between Javier Marías’ novel The Infatuations and Karel Capek’s Believe in People. Hard to get through one when I’m reading both, but Capek is as funny as he is brilliant. Leaning toward finishing that one. How can I not with gems like this…

Culturally, it’s better not to keep escaping from your own emptiness, but make sure that you fill it with something worth having. - Karel Capek

Oh, here’s a good one: Somebody tried to have ChatGPT write a Nick Cave song. Cave’s response is the essence of brilliance and artistry. Check it out at Red Hand Files. Like Cave says…

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. - Nick Cave

Speaking of suffering…Not many people write songs like John R. Miller.

If you don’t know what ChatGPT is—don’t read this article because it WILL piss you off. Trust me. I’m sure ChatGPT will stop writing when it finds out the pay is so damn low—ha! Okay—that’s all for now. When I have publishing news, I’ll give it.

For now, it’s head to the grindstone. Or fist to the heavy bag.

Got some business cards printed. Gotta prepare for these conferences—if these cards don’t beg for professional respect…

Until next time…

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Roughneck Dispatch: Curtis Ippolito

On this episode, crime writer Curtis Ippolito talks about his debut crime novel, writing longhand in cursive (huh?), his work as a reporter, police ride-alongs, and the shape of story. Have a listen and buy a book: https://curtisippolito.com/

Music by Road Side Brake.

Sound effect of"Pencil, Writing, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk)

Roughneck Dispatch Trailer

Brief promo for Roughneck Dispatch.

Music by Road Side Brake.

The Good Noir News

You’ve been wondering why I’m so quiet? I was waiting for the right time to share this news—new book contract is signed, sealed, and delivered. Which means…

The crime lovers over at Run Amok Crime have seen fit to acquire my latest crime novel, A Good Rush of Blood. If you’re a crime fiction fan, you likely know Run Amok from their Jacked crime fiction anthology edited by Vern Smith. If you haven’t picked up that book, you should. They’re also known for a number of widely-acclaimed literary novels. My book will come out this November on their crime imprint, and I’m super-stoked to work with their editorial team to bring this story to the reading masses. More than that, I’m incredibly thankful to have people who know their stuff believe in this book. It’s a novel that—I think—is pulpy in all the right places, but downright mesmerizing at its core.

A Good Rush of Blood is a novel about a lot of things, but mostly the book is about a mother’s wrongful conviction and her estranged daughter’s calling to explore the dark shadows shared between guilt and innocence. Largely set in my place of birth, Palm Springs, California, the novel is both an ode to Palm Springs’ pulp-inspired past and a celebration of what the city is today. I hope I’ve done it justice.

To that end, if you’re based in Palm Springs, or know people there, get in touch as I’m looking for help with planning a book release event. I’ll also need some people to talk up the book and invite me to myriad social gatherings—kind of a writer-at-large tour, you dig? Reply to this email if you’ve got ideas or connections.

This means you!

What else? Maybe you need some suggestions? I’ve been digging Tim Heidecker’s album High School. Also a fan of a new blues/soul release by an unknown called Pastor Champion. Check out his only album, I Just Want to Be a Good Man. We burned through the tv miniseries, Welcome to Chippendales over the holiday—makes for a fun ride, albeit drenched in blood. I also devoured two re-releases of pulp writer Jack Lynn’s novels from Grizzly Press. These are pulps unabashedly fantastical—Tokey Wedge, private cop, always gets the girl—but it’s a thrill to see what kind of fun writers could have while making a living, you know, way back when. I also read Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich and, man, there is no better attempt at documenting such tragedy. The book will knock you flat. And maybe that’s all? I celebrated the book news by picking up a bottle of La Gritoña and loved it. Don’t judge, people…it was a splurge for me. Okay, I’l leave you to it. Give me word, if you’ve got any.

I leave you with the brilliance of Jim Harrison…

Read his poem Mother Night—it’s damn good for you.

“…the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government…”

- Jim Harrison

On the Record.

It’s odd—this digitization of the human intellect. Here I am writing on a platform that, for all I know, may vanish at the savage whim of some freewheeling computer engineer, his/her ego fractured by the soul-stealing grind at the crux of our binary 1-0 world. This is all fake, you know? Conjured to entertain us—a projection.

My point, friends, is that what’s real is what has always been real. Ink on paper. The dusty smell of a used book. Cruel laughter in the halls of some suburban junior high school. Sweat and blood under a ditch digger’s fingernails. Throttle music burning through your spine as you shift into second, third, fourth. The scent of pines. A glint of a smile across the produce section of a third-rate supermarket. Waiting for a city bus. The inconvenience of a jury summons from a southern state you vacated years prior. Washing the dishes and ripping a wine cork in half.

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Most of us—the tech-savvy among us—flip-flop from one publishing platform to another, one social media site to another. It’s as if we’re searching for the real and final place of record; it isn’t Twitter and it isn’t Medium. It doesn’t appear to be The Times or The Post. Ah, that trusty old Internet Wayback Machine—there’s the place of record! Or, maybe not. Maybe not. You see, when the power goes out…All of it is gone. Except those cold hard books on your shelves, warmed in the gloam by the frantic grasp of your still very human hands.

In the spirit of continuing the record, I am (re)publishing an interview with elusive noir writer and filmmaker Pablo D’Stair. I conducted this interview with Pablo a little over two years ago and, I can tell you, his books are still immorally undiscovered, under-appreciated, and—to my fierce loathing—under-purchased by American readers.

If you don’t care about noir or the mystique of victimhood or studies in narrative patience, or the writer as auteur, or the swing of a live band on paper, or the ‘strange whisperings of blood,’ well, this interview isn’t for you. But maybe…I don’t know…challenge yourself to hear from Pablo. And you should damn sure buy his books.

Care not for my ramblings? Satisfy yourself by watching Let the Right One In or exploring the Arne Svenson cache of mugshots from the 1800s or…That’s all I have.

Here, in all its effusive glory, is my interview with noir legend Pablo D’Stair conducted in the summer of 2020.

You can find his books here.

My first introduction to your work was Man Standing Behind . To me, the book is a study in narrative patience, but the prose contains an urgency that evokes in the reader a kind of paranoia to race through the story. I’m curious how long the book took you to write. What is your general writing process for a novella? How do you create such an organic feel for the plot?

Man Standing Behind has become such a peculiarly storied novella of mine, really — sometimes I don’t know what to make of the various (and varied!) response and interest in it (despite, of course, just being chuffed and full of myself).

As to your question, I suppose it is most important to note it was the final of four thematically connected novella I wrote in short order for a project cumulatively titled “they say the owl was a baker’s daughter”: four existential noir. None of the novella share characters or anything like that, but rather are permutations of the same set of elements, filtered through and teasing out variations of certain moralistic and (obviously) existential conundrum until an overall “idea” has been come at from all sides. All four were written “as a whole” and with the collected set in mind (these were, in order Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate; i poisoned you; twelve ELEVEN thirteen; and Man Standing Behind).

While all of the books were very to the point, internal point-of -narrative -view, and “state proposition and explore” in their setup, by the time it gets round to Man Standing we have the most stripped down, succinct, and “theoretical” of the victim/victimizer scenarios. Meat and potatoes, a book like the pistol Jesse James would use, you know?

Meat and potatoes, a book like the pistol Jesse James would use, you know?

In a lot of ways, it was the easiest because of this — the rules of engagement (incident and exploration) are immediate, absolute, and irrevocable and very little by way of setup needs be gotten into. This is a bit of trick, of course, when in conjunction with the other novella — in those it might “take awhile to get the idea who is cat and who is mouse” or however one wants to say it (“who We (reader) are to more directly identify with as Us and who as The Other”) — but in Man Standing, due to the scenario and the voice, it seems rather clear — cut from the jump who is Good (Us) and Bad (Other). As the book proceeds though, in (I hope) myriad bracing and disquieting ways, our gut association becomes quite damning and the very notion of who we respect and why goes topsy-turvy.

As to how long — well, not very long. None of the four novella (nor much of my noir work) really ever took more than 2–4 weeks to be finished. I think Man Standing was a clean two weeks from conception to finalized book. I doubt it would have been written (any of the novella, actually) if things had come up in life to not allow for this compressed composition (I already had work and a newborn to be tending to — hahaha — so my writing at that time needed to find its way between any available crack even more than usual — I was also penning Trevor English and some other projects all in the same few month period).

But Man Standing — any noir — needs to have a real immediacy to me. I can’t “step away and come back.” No. The voice would be kaput and the voice is everything. Too much thinking in advance kills it — it has to be written like it hasn’t already happened or it doesn’t get the cadence it requires, something would go wonky. Especially something so on the skin, in the head, something so cut throat and blunt.

Like anything I write (be it noir, literary, satire, etc) I write entirely linearly — first word to last word, no jumping about, no real prep or outline to speak of beyond, “I have this idea, here’s the voice, it’s gonna X Y and Z … GO!” (worst comes of worse? I lose the thread and, well, that’s what having other ideas is for, right? hahaha) I have a notion and know how to feel it out (like music) and was a smoker at the time so would use cigarette breaks to do the planning, intricacy, make sure I knew where I was at in the piece at any given time and so knew what and when to have happen next.

Man Standing (as with the other three in the set) are such linear, “real time” stories it was kinda a cinch. And it has such an imperative track that it was blissful to not even have to be tempted to deviate — coming only through the aperture of the one character, it was more like cataloguing what happened and how it influenced his next thought rather than lacing in too much to give a “bigger picture” to the events. There is no bigger picture. This is worm’s -eye-view noir. This is the depiction of the trauma with none of the processing (that is for the reader to sort through, if they please, later).

This is worm’s -eye-view noir. This is the depiction of the trauma with none of the processing…

This notion of immediacy is interesting to me — I’m reminded of reading narrative theory from Seymour Chatman. He implies that narration resides on a spectrum…The reader/audience at one end, the ‘author’ at the other and, somewhere between on the spectrum, the ‘narrator/narration.’ That is to say that a ‘narrator’ can invoke various degrees of closeness to either author/reader. But is altogether separate (and apart even from first, third — person, etc.). How close do you — as a writer — feel to your readers? How close are you to your characters? In what ways does this closeness (or not) influence the impact of an artwork (okay, literature piece) on broader society?

I have to come at this question in an odd assortment of ways, so must beg an indulgence (we’ll see if I eventually land on an answer to the actual question — I suppose I’m notorious for not! Hahaha):

To me, it’s always been a heartache that literature is not believed to have (or even *allowed* to have, in the minds of many readers) a Live aspect to it. Quite the opposite! Music, theater, even painting, sculpture are allowed to have a Live aspect (for simplicity we’ll stick with music — there is the Live and the Studio version of a particular song) — while other things which are certainly Art cannot have such a trait (for the easiest example, let’s pick Architecture — one sees it is Art, yes, but would not much want some structure just “built on the fly” even a little bit — “measure twice, cut once” as it were, quite literally!).

Writing/Literature, it always felt to me (in the eyes of audience) got lumped in with Architecture. “The author should draft and then redraft and then smooth down and then model and then dismantle and rework and then reconsider and then blueprint and have someone read it and think about what they said” and on and on — the belief being that, like how a building would be made more aesthetic AND structurally sound/safe/ purpose — serving, a story (or novel or what have you) would somehow get *better/more to its aim* the more it was schematized, poured over, reverse engineered etc.

What does this lead to?

Well! The surface parts of the building can be allowed a virtuosity — the façade can be an artwork (much like on a concert hall there can be details to the walls or what have you, the immediately visual portions) but those are *little to do with* what the architect actually *did.* Those respects are, however, what the “audience” (the public) will *judge* the structure on. Hell, a squat little apartment block could have a virtuosic plumbing system — oh, a journeyman could have redefined the game as it came to how they rigged electrical conduits or whatever (I obviously know nothing about architecture, I beg pardon) but no one is gonna look at a generic block of flats and say “What a triumph!”

…oh, a journeyman could have redefined the game as it came to how they rigged electrical conduits or whatever (I obviously know nothing about architecture, I beg pardon) but no one is gonna look at a generic block of flats and say “What a triumph!”

Where am I going with this? Somewhere, I promise.

Now — with music what is interesting is the Live/Studio break allows for two easy camps and ways of showing appreciation. Namely “I prefer the studio version” and “There is nothing like seeing it Live!” And, of course, one can have BOTH opinions, at the same time, and no one thinks odd of it.

Does the band/performer “hit every note right” “get every lyric” “perform a seamless thing” down in the pub? In no sense! But they do something the album can never do. And the band members, well, without fail (almost) would rather play live on stage than just play their album over the PA! And to most fans of a given band/performer a bootleg tape of a different version of a song or a certain live show or something is the grand prize as far as “what the band can really do!”

A writer/author is the live band.

Writing the book isn’t the same as tinkering with the song to get it ready to play, it is being on the concert stage, in the pub, right there in the immediate moment. The honest, rough hewn, cannot be redone or replicated verve of the performer — in — person isn’t just in “the first draft” (or whatever) of the novel, to be discarded as rehearsal artifact — it has to exist in the final, bound version. And that does not mean “make the final sound like a live performance by tinkering for days in studio” it means, more or less … well … record the fucking live version and use the studio to shape just a tad — but the final all has to be of a single take.

How to do this? Well, differs artist — to — artist, of course. But to me, the shortest way to immediacy for both audience and artist is to play by the same rules — no matter the “voice” of the book, the rendition of the voice has to be vulnerable, conversational.

So: I write linearly. That is my principia number one. Every novel, story, anything I have ever written (even if some forethought or note jots at an overall structure are scribbled someplace) has always been written “from the first word to the last.” Once something is down, it stays down. It is the actual and cannot be altered. It can be copyedited, typos can be touched up, little things like that — to a reasonable and very specifically pre — decided degree, individual to each work — but for the most part the order of events, sentences, ideas, cannot be changed. And to make it all the more vital — to get close to the Author as Live Performer — each sequence, sentence, paragraph, what have you, needs to go down “in real time” — as though the written word is the voice of a raconteur — “rules of writing” are mingled with “manners of speech” — ways something could be “said” that fly in the face of the “way things would need to be written to express the full of what was said” start bleeding into each other, forming a voice not exactly *spoken* but certainly not *written.*

A book will never be better or more vital than the feeling of first having the idea and haphazardly explaining it to a mate — but that is the feeling the book should have. “I want this forty thousand page novel to sound and feel exactly like the three hundred words idea I spit out to my pal — that sensation to exist in every aspect of every page.”

A book will never be better or more vital than the feeling of first having the idea and haphazardly explaining it to a mate — but that is the feeling the book should have.

So, one has to get and stay in that head. You need to feel the eyes of the audience leaning over your shoulder, watching you type (like that Monty Python sketch about Thomas Hardy writing Return of the Native). There needs to be in one’s mind while one writes a sensation of immediate reaction, judgement, just like one speaking to a room, flirting with a potential lover, has that high wire suspense — the room/individual listener is felt out, the style tweaked to fit the atmosphere, the mood, the eyes of the listener.

I always say “Every reaction that can be had to a piece of art will be had — and infinite times over” so there is little sense in “tidying up for one person in particular. You don’t want to alter yourself to fit the desire of the person you’re flirting with, you want the person you’re flirting with to be brought over to exactly how you flirt, so to speak.

An author cannot be bothered with thinking to defend against specific judgement the way an architect *absolutely has to* think about a fucking building not collapsing. No — instead the author has to risk like the live band inserting a tone of voice, a new lyric, an improvisation, a hip swivel, live on stage, in person, there and then, risk of belly flopping in front of people who already adore them, losing all that was built.

To keep a piece of writing immediate for author and audience, the author needs to write like they are improvising but not be — and at the same time be improvising in a way that comes across as though they aren’t.

To keep a piece of writing immediate for author and audience, the author needs to write like they are improvising but not be — and at the same time be improvising in a way that comes across as though they aren’t.

(take even this correspondence interview: I answer in real time: read the question, spit out response, go once through to clean up some punctuation — as close to “we’re sitting here talking” as possible. As I read through the one time I allow myself to, sure I see things I could add “if I were writing an essay” other points to make, things I maybe feel I slightly muddied or even mis — expressed — but I don’t change them — because them being there is magic of an answer — what makes them an answer is they never will be — don’t change what you said just say something new later)

To challenge you in some way: I’m thinking now of this letter to Norman Court . Trevor English is presented with an ‘opportunity,’ we might say. BUT, his larger grift evolves through a series of decisions. How to leverage the letter? What to do with the letter? What to do with the letter (and its copies) once you’ve done what you’ve done with it? Point is, the story largely evolves as a series of key decisions. I contrast this with, say, a traditional craft approach: Inciting incident — this happens — that happens — another thing happens and so on. Instead, we experience the decisions about what will happen as not only plot points, but also as climaxes in and of themselves. If, as you say, “A writer/author is the live band,” how do/did you (Pablo) experience the decisions of Trevor English to hurt/harm/con other characters? I’m reminded now of one of my favorite stories from Borges, “Borges and I.” He writes, “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.” What does the writer’s experience mean? What can it mean? Does his/her experience matter in the context of the ‘reader’s’ experience?

Before tucking into the meat of your question/s, I feel I must (rather amusedly) point out how a little … how to say? Pet peeve? Observation? Pebble in my shoe? — of mine has been in how I’ve noticed that while ‘auteur’ of course *means* ‘author’ there has become (in my share of experience) a rather cultish (or at least zealous and obstinate) insistence in ‘circles literary’ that an author be anything *but* an ‘auteur!’

More and more I’ve felt an encroaching insistence (and the requisite, accompanying dread) that the composing of a novel is, of necessity, to be a joint/group effort. The “author” exists as a capacity, an entity serving one function (to keep with our motif let’s say the “author is the front man”) but is, when the situation is examined in wide angle, little more than the “idea man” or the “spark” of some onerous collaboration between at — least — multiple if not dozens of parties. So much so that an author saying “No, I merely wrote what I wanted, the way I wanted” is seen as a simp, at best, a preening pariah at worst! Hahaha…

And while, maybe a decade past, this was a view which seemed to come not directly from authors, but from readers, from commentators, from “the industry” or what have you, I have (with quickening apprehension) seen it become a principia espoused directly from authors, themselves, in conversation with each other more often than not. “Your novel isn’t finished until it has been ‘beta read’ and you see how people react and then how they re — react to what you’ve tempered and rejiggered based on learned (I would say ramshackle and piecemeal, no matter how much respect one might have for the people giving comment/suggestion) response.”

It’s as though nowadays authors’ teeth chatter and fop sweat forms at the idea of putting their actual voice out there, their actual ideas — individual authors hulk restrictions on themselves to not fully express but rather to “become talented at executing what other people might like to read” (or, to voice this a bit nearer to how I personally feel, better to say “what other people would write if they were the writers they wished they were”).

It’s as though nowadays authors’ teeth chatter and fop sweat forms at the idea of putting their actual voice out there, their actual ideas…

But … anyway … hahaha — perhaps that is neither here nor there, in the long run. To each their own and money makes the mare to go and words to those effects and all …

As to your question about Trevor — how I went about achieving the feeling I wanted, how I experienced his decisions: first of all, I agree with you that this is the precise kink of the novella/s and, in many ways, the central tenet to the majority of my work ‘genre’ or ‘literary’ — not to come up with a series of events and to manipulate them to be as titillating as possible or (worse still) to arrange the events themselves as ‘thematically meaningful’ based on arrangement or sequence, but instead to trace the genesis of an idea, from sensation to execution, similar to Knut Hamsun’s desire to ‘track the strange whisperings of the blood.’ Because, really: I feel more suspense and intrigue can be built up by wondering, so to speak, if one could, themselves, stop a runaway train — of — thought rather than halt the runaway train. Because it is in the minutia and the particulars of the moments — within — a — moments, the thoughtscapes where the passion of our actual existence dwells, that one can fuse with a character, understand and (however perversely) root for or at least go along with them — not because one agrees or disagrees, not because the character ‘represents some ideology’ or anything like that, but through the pure inertia of knowing what it feels like to think, knowing the sensations of urgency of a thought which has taken rein, straining toward fruition.

Then? It doesn’t matter the stakes — low stakes become high, the struggle becomes so precise as to transmute into abstract and, from there, to being understood by all comers.

In specific, though: Trevor was originated to be “made up as I went along.” The first novella was conceived to be a freewheeling serial — I zapped down the opening sequence, top of my head, and sent it to the author Nigel Bird, asking if he would post it on his site — attached to it was an invitation: if folks like what they read, they could offer me a spot on their site and I’d send them the next bit. Thing was: I absolutely would only write another bit if requested and would not “pre — think’ the tale in any truly specific manner. After all, I was, meantime, working on several other projects!

As it turned out, the “twenty — two sections” I had arbitrarily claimed the full story would be comprised of had to be written rather quickly, seeing as more than twenty — two offers to host poured in, straight away.

It became drastically important to me with Trevor that I not write a novel/novella, exactly, but rather that I compose a series of ‘songs’ as though the tracks on an album — treating each, while part of a whole, not as a ‘build to next cliffhanger’ but to, as much as possible, eschew ‘cliffhangeriness’ altogether. Each ‘exploration’ though in the midst of a sequence needed to be taken as standalone and worthy of being, in a way, as much a beginning as the first installment (and it dawned on me I had decided there would be five novella which would need be self — contained though absolutely component to a single Novel, in large). If it struck me an entire section would be Trevor on a train getting shyly drunk, I would have to make that ‘song’ be perfect and gripping as that, as though ‘What if the thing started here — wouldn’t that be great if this was the first we met Trevor?” (much like with an album, each song should have the feeling ‘it would be amazing if this was the first one someone heard on the radio even though I’d never start the album with it!”). The gig was to forever explore Trevor in that context, trusting the ‘sequence of songs’ would give the overall effect I was after rather than ‘crafting everything for plot effect’ (aka ‘this would all fall apart if read/listened to out of order’). And, of course, I wanted to keep the momentum I desired of having, somehow, what goes on in the scant 1200 words allowed of each section inform an unraveling narrative.

My other driving principle, especially in noir, was then added to the mix — that being ‘always try to write one’s self into a corner’ — the ‘next idea should rightly end the story and leave nowhere precisely to go’ — and, imperative to say, no unintelligent decision or sudden, hitherto unknown aspect can just be tossed in to ‘get things churning again’. So that’s what I started with: a ‘plot’ hellbent on, much like life, piddling out every 1000 words! What to do? All that’s left to truly explore the character and, moreso, the very mechanism of what makes anyone do anything.

The special trick with Trevor, then, was to (as with all characters, in a way) write him as Pablo. Top — to — toe, though dressed specific to story, what drove him had to be what drove me — even if he takes a path I would stay myself from, it is a path I know I would consider and, thus considered, the exploration is genuine. That takes some strutting and it takes some humility and it takes an honesty — ‘I’m interesting’ ‘I’m witty’ ‘I’m put upon’ is the easy part … ‘I’m amoral’, ‘I’m out of my element often’ ‘I solicit and therefore deserve my misfortunes’ is the sterner barrel to look down.

Trevor was an artiste written as a petty thief and I am a petty thief pawned off as an artiste — this is undeniable, no matter that those who know me well would brush off the stickier parts of me as folly and exaggerate the more tidy bits as who — I — really — am.

And this maybe is the best place to fuse to your second set of questions — that is: what does the writer’s experience mean, can it mean anything, does it affect in any tangible way the ‘reader’s’ experience…

My gut answer is to say flatly ‘No — it means nothing, it affect the reader in no way.’

But by this, I mean it affects in — no — precise — way the ethereal notion of “the reader” (ALL READERS) because it disavows them as necessary. A novel should be written as exploration, like a map jotted by a cartographer as they go along, and should be true only to the traveled experience of the one jotting, no matter if someone can come along and point out how the topography is incorrect or incongruous or what have you (the map of the moment will never match the map corrected by research and retread).

…the map of the moment will never match the map corrected by research and retread…

I have a thing I keep in mind always: “every reaction which can be had to a work will be had” and add into the bargain that “if infinite experiencers of the work are imagined, it means, in the end, every reaction which can be had will be had, infinite times over” — so who could give a toss what one or the other might be?

But: moving past my gut, I think the author’s experience of the writing has pronounced affect on the reader because if “done right” what a reader should be reading is the Experience — the breathing, writhing, ups — and — downs of the very physicality of contriving and rendering a self — informed exploration.

‘Do they like the plot?’ I’d hope so, but that’s just a personal quirk. If I had choice between them remembering the way some reaction felt, precisely (even if it was boredom or derision, so long as it is *precise* boredom or derision!) to recall the pace of their pulse, the weight of their clothing, the exactness of the moment and sensation of reading something or, instead, to have them always recall the story or details of some intrigue contained in it, well I’d choose the former, always.

‘Ideally, doesn’t one want the two mixed?’ I sometimes find myself questioning. And I tend to think “Naw — ideally one just doesn’t want to give a fuck and only is writing something to get on with writing something else, so who cares!?’

Hahaha — but with less cheek, maybe I can answer the following way: there is a special synthesis which should go on in performing the act of a novel much like performing the song on stage — and it should always be informed by the notion and experience of one’s self as audience. I listen to Dylan, I know I don’t hear Dylan how Dylan hears Dylan, I hear Dylan how I hear Dylan — my experience will be richly nuanced, poured over, informed by a history and by trivia and what have you and, in effect, the more I feel a song, the more it seems to touch on my life, get in my blood, the more absolutely certain I can be I am far far far from the experiences that birthed the piece — I become closer to the song by departing from its origin and I depart from its origin by, in a way, attempting to get nearer.

There is a vast mystery and, to me, a certain romantic sadness in this, so far as artist to audience (even audience — of — artists to audience — of — artists) as thus: while I am composing a piece, the more voluptuous I am with myself in rendering whatever my impulses reveal of me, conscious and unconscious, the more pure an experience I express, the more apart from me, specifically, the reaction will be from an audience, and the more heartfelt and personalized that reaction, the more distant still.

If I have elicited a notable reaction in someone, they have, in essence, experienced the soul of what I experienced while writing that which they reacted to — yet they possess absolutely no way of accessing where I was coming from. And this is good, I think. An author should want to create distance by doing everything they can to obtain intimacy.

Humorously enough, this is what I have always felt was the treacherous ground of the interview (I’ve done a bit of it myself) — it might be a dangerous thing for an author to understand the motivations of audience, audience to glean the engine of author. Anecdotes, ideas, methods; reactions, queries, explorations. We can annihilate ourselves with our trivia.

I just finished Helen Topaz, Henry Dollar and, in looking back at your books, I’m beginning to spin more and more on victimhood, victimization, et al. Without giving anything away to potential readers, I have noticed a toying with these roles in your work. One begins to wonder who the real victim is in each story. What at first seems clear becomes more and more muddled, as if the very notions of cruelty (in both the victim’s and victimizer’s senses of the word) are a collective mirage somehow…Let’s not “annihilate ourselves” here, but can you talk about your ideas of victimization/being victimized? How do these ideas/words/concepts fit into your notion of noir? Can being a ‘victim’ be empowering?

You use language very close to how I think of things, actually. Victim/Victimizer is never *precisely* how I go about terming, but the labels serve well enough (or as well as any) and so I will express some thoughts through that lens.

I look at the collective encounter of the characters — at — tension — with — each — other as something of an Electron Cloud Model. There is a fog. A vital haze. These characters are two (or how many ever) charged particles we know are moving in intricate, energy generating, gravity maintaining ways not around each other but in a kind of concert around some defining nucleus. So: there is an absolute artificiality to our eyes (the observers) ever holding one character in isolation, pausing it for a moment, being able to regard it individuated rather than as part of the diffuse resonance and weight of the cloud and whatever is at its core. As with the Uncertainty Principle, when we as readers consider (for whatever reason, be it ‘where we are in the story up to a certain point’ or else through the aperture of our own life experiences, predilections, fantasies, prejudices) a character and seek to give the character identity (this is like saying an electron is There as opposed to There or There) or to even label specific characteristics of the character, as individual, it is only natural to, when we take another sample of that character anywhere else in a novel’s trajectory, to come away with an altogether other impression.

BUT! It is very important to me not to confuse this with saying the character “changes” over “the course” of a story. Nobody changes. Linearity is false and, sadly, novels do a disservice of giving the impression that things actually happen this — to — this — to — this is a one — way causal linking.

No — we don’t change. Which is not to say “we are one thing and stay one thing” but instead is to vigorously reinforce the Heraclitus-ian notion of Flux. It is a mistake to take one impression and linearly compare it to another (“the character “starts as” and “ends as” after “going through” etc etc) Why a mistake? Because we have no idea if it a pressure Toward or Away, a desire Forward or Back, which is possessing the actions of the character. The one thing life teaches anybody who pays attention is that what’s going on today has next to nothing to do with today! Today is an agitator — it may very well be that events (or impressions of events) long past are the current which informs what we do now or next; and it just as well might be the (perhaps phantasmal) concoctions of hoped for futures, desired events which to our psyche are equally as real as memories (which are never accurate) which drive us. Flux is all of the oscillations of a single moment, in a single moment, nothing ever leaving the moment just cataloguing the moment’s contents — so the very notion of change is mooted.

In noir pieces, especially, I like to use this kind of “freewheeling philosophical bunk science” of mine, as outlined above, to allow the truest portrayal of “encounter” I can. Of course of course of course there are many many many things which inform each work I write — but at the core is: to never “define exactly a character” but to full sails plumb and delve and excavate “how many ways I can precisely define a character” with no written — about — moment of them seeming foggy or imprecise even while the overall work when reflected on generates exactly that: fog, imprecision.

In less ethereal ways of saying it: sure, we are all Victim and Victimizer. But it’s not just a duality I am interested in, because that can become just as much stacked — deck poppycock as saying one character is Good and another Bad “for reasons.”

With Trevor, the secret is this: I side with him. I side with him because I like him (and I am him) and for zero other reason. I empathize with everyone else I write, with their nuance, their ideas, their fumblings, their tricks and traps and desires — Hell, man, I even think the worst of them are Better and More Right than Trevor … but I side with Trevor. I infatuate with him. I spoil him with my attentions as author and it is impossible this does not unconsciously make its way into the prose and enforce the effect I want the reader to explore.

…the secret is this: I side with him. I side with him because I like him (and I am him) and for zero other reason…

No person is defined by what happens to them. This is the other thing. No one is. We are affected. Sometime irrevocably. Sometimes without knowing. But it is never external event which defines a person. And so this is where a true danger comes from (at least in so far as Trevor being fucked). Assuming the mantle of Victim, it means one is allowing that a third — party event has the driving wheel, has defined them. People do that. And when they do, they become volatile. Dangerous. Because their fluxion is starting to solidify — or, at least, they are starting to actively believe it can, to fight for the wheel to stop. Pressure is starting to build. An inchoate instability creeping through to the entire molecule’s construct. The cloud starts thinking it isn’t a cloud but a bunch of particles which can be stopped and observed and known individually — and, well, that just is not so! And Victimizer? No one (at least in my writing or experience) ever defines themselves as such — not at all! It is either victim or third — party who assign this — the very notion of Victimizer a further disintegration of the stability of a world (the victim needs it to prove their individual, self — contained existence against another fixed point).

The tension in the Trevor books (and in many of my books) if I had to give an over simplistic way of naming how I write noir, is in our trepidation, as observers, that EVERYTHING is going to fall apart — and often because of NOTHING.

…EVERYTHING is going to fall apart — and often because of NOTHING…

While it’s noir and so I play fast and loose with relative Right and Wrongs, a reader, I think, can inherently feel the initial Stability of the world of a given novel which is unhinged (in Trevor’s world especially) when “someone starts looking too hard” “thinking too precisely” insisting on assigning a non — fluxing morality to the obviously self — constructed haze which is human experience.

The people Trevor encounters, in one way or another, all do this. Trevor? He never does. He’s incapable of anything but bliss, flux, being. And in that, his pre — assumed “villainy,” the more time it is reflected on in relief of any other character (let alone in the situations he causes or stumbles into) the more it becomes, for readers, only naturally to shift our focus to the Other, to the Not Trevor and to see them (perhaps perversely) as agitators, aberrant. Because Trevor doesn’t change, everyone else (to us reading) have no choice but to do all the changing — and we have no purpose in reading but to start seeing them in all the multifold ways they exist and to… well…blame them. Blame them for not understanding the complexity of their own nature. We hate them for wanting to be them — singular rather than the them — plural they are.

And that’s it…Pablo D’Stair—the classic interview.

Internet Wayback Machine…can you hear me calling?

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Here is My Story Story

2008, California

I was working at The Cheesecake Factory—hustling pumpernickel for corporate bean counters. A life of waiting for metro busses and serving ranch sauce to mushroom people. Screenplays on the hard drive and poems in disrepair. No way out…except up? Down? Sideways? Any direction besides back to the soda fountain.

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I decided to volunteer at an international film festival in town.

Purpose: Meet filmmakers who will produce aforementioned short film scripts.

Result: A sustained volunteer gig in the festival programming office. Also met my wife, but that’s another story that deserves the ‘novel’ treatment, if you take my meaning. That volunteer gig led to a paid position in the festival programming office and, most important, a mandate to watch as many short and feature film submissions as possible to ‘score’ them for the higher-level programming team.

This sounds glorious. I assure you—it is not glorious. When you watch 500 short films or 100 feature films in the span of two months, you start to become what I call a discerning viewer. Known in some storytelling circles as a complete asshole.

This description is not wrong. But….But:

You also develop—if you pay attention—a keen detection for authentic storytelling. I had the privilege of ‘sniffing’ out films that I thought were great and ‘pitching’ them to programmers or the festival director. This means, in essence, I had the opportunity to have my tastes and preferences ‘workshopped’ in a professional setting where there were high stakes in failure. It’s a real bitch when the audience watches a film you programmed and their response is…Why are we still here?

Some of the films I programmed or pushed up the chain include Everything We Loved, Medal of Honor, Medeas, Lucky Country, and various shorts like Dónde Está Kim Basinger.

But this process—watch, assess, reject or recommend, and receive feedback—served as my formal (and not so formal) education in storytelling. Take note: I am not saying I learned to write here…Writing is a craft developed over years and years of practice—someone may write beautiful sentences, but that doesn’t mean they can write a story worth a hill of garbanzo beans.

Storytelling—independent of writing—is a craft unto itself.

These two things are connected, but they have distinctions.

I learned a helluva a lot from the people I worked with…And I learned a helluva lot from the failures I watched. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. The festival where I worked was founded and run by a titan in the independent film scene—he passed away a couple years back, but he gave me one thing I’ll never forget and which guides me as a storyteller to this day. I’m going to give it to you…Are you ready?

Below is the ONE BIG THING THAT MATTERS FOR STORYTELLING and a few other things that might matter too. Take this into cocktail parties. Drag it into boardrooms. Use it for your songs and poems and stories and books. Use it for your jokes. Put it on a t-shirt. Hell, I don’t care—It’s December (almost), and I am passing a gift that was given to me onto you. So, here it is…

ONE BIG THING THAT MATTERS FOR STORYTELLING

Tell the unfamiliar story in the familiar way.

Tell the familiar story in the unfamiliar way.

That’s it. Simple.

Some Other Things that Matter for Storytelling

You pick up a book or watch an opening scene or hear the first few bars—ask yourself this question: Am I in good hands? Hint: That answer should be yes. Make sure your audience knows they are in good hands.

Is the storyteller—the director, the writer, or the songwriter or whoever—making decisions, and are they the right decisions? Are you making decisions in your storytelling? Are they the right ones? No decisions = No drama.

Try to understand whether the wonder of a story—to the extent there is wonder—is sleight-of-hand or true illusion1. There is a difference, and neither are wrong. But the storyteller has to know which they are practicing or they are cheating the story and therefore the audience. Do not stand for manipulation in story, and don’t manipulate your audience. Call it like you see it: That’s the old child-in-peril trick.

Ask yourself if the story is candy or wine? Again, neither is wrong, but storytellers need to know whether they’re serving candy, wine, or something in between2.

Continuity can’t hold a candle to character3. Focus on characters—worry about continuity when you actually con some sucker into publishing or producing your work.

Storytelling is a practice of the spirit. It comes from your heart—not your head. Don’t get it twisted or you’ll end up paying ghostwriters to follow outlines generated by some jackass computer algorithm. You’ll have plenty of dough, but you’ll be a fraud.

And last, but never least…

The story starts with you, but it ends with the audience. They’re the final judge.

Sayonara, suits and suckers. Buy a book, why don’t you? Or at least tell me why you won’t. I’m off to tinker with words…

1

There are illusionists (Houdini) and there are wizards (Gandalf)—it’s all magic, but the methods diverge. Know the difference. Sometimes, a storyteller can be both…Like when Christopher Nolan directed The Prestige or when Eduardo Galeano wrote The Book of Embraces.

2

Run All Night with Liam Neeson is candy. Scorsese’s The Departed is something in between. Wine? You tell me.

3

You know, like Chandler did it in The Long Goodbye.

Dear Independent Booksellers

Less than forty-eight hours ago I read a gushing op-ed in the ‘paper of record’ which championed university presses as the saviors of American literature. This piece of floppy drivel put me on serious edge—my insides are still burning with the acid tinge of indigestion summoned by such faulty logic and general disconnect from artistic reality. The central thesis in this rudderless boat of prose seemed to be that Amazon is EVIL and we should all buy books from university presses or breezily wander (with our decaf mochas) into the progressive bookstores housed on the campuses of elite American universities. But that’s not all. This thesis engorges the tweed-sleeved punks who run these presses. And those punks—whether they’ve read Foucault and Marx and Barthes and Judith Butler or not—still serve the uber-punks in university administrations. If not, the money dries up.

Like Dylan said, You Gotta Serve Somebody.

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Should we expect the same institutions who rip off students by the billions in a continued FedLoan cash grab (the biggest grift in American history, by the way), to ‘keep American literature alive?’ We may as well piss into a stiff north wind.

Let me be clear: I don’t take issue with the notion (however true or untrue) that university presses publish important work. I myself worked on a book about the photographer Paul Kwilecki published by The University of North Carolina Press. But I doubt you find that book on the shelves of any independent bookstore outside a twenty-mile radius of Durham, North Carolina. Hell, maybe it’s in stock somewhere at a niche bookstore in NYC, but I wouldn’t bet a paycheck on it. Notice the link above is an Amazon link, you fuckers. I can have a new copy of this book on my doorstep within 24 hours. And it will be pristine and cost me less than it would at any store.

Still, why the edgy-acid-indigestion?

Because this piece doesn’t call out the real conniving bastards among us (yeah, I said it). You people. The booksellers. If I walk into my local independent bookstore, I won’t find many books from independent or university presses adequately featured. If I see ‘em at all, they’ll be buried beneath bestsellers by the regular suspects…celebrities and politicians. Independent books are lost little souls vanquished to the ninth ring of publishing hell—the bottom shelf. That’s something I will bet a paycheck on.

I can almost guarantee what we all see on prominent bookshelves at independent bookstores are the ‘bestsellers’ as dictated by the Big 5. Take this month’s list of IndieBound bestsellers at independent bookstores: Surprise! The same books I see at the good old Barnes & Noble or…wait for it…aimed at me via Evil-Amazon’s purchase predictive algorithms. There is nothing like buying Bono’s memoir, Matthew Perry’s ‘struggle’ story, or the new Cormac McCarthy from an ‘independent’ bookstore to prove you are doing your small part to keep American literature alive.

Better than the smell of napalm in the morning, I imagine.

You, independent booksellers, offer readers and writers no solutions to this epic clusterfuck—instead, you play into Amazon’s Evil Hands by trying to sell the same books I can have dropped on my doorstep within 24 hours and for less money. Why in Satan’s name would I choose to narrowly survive traffic and play bloodsport for parking to buy this same book from you? Because I have a moral obligation to support your small business? What have you done for American literature and American writers lately? Jack shit—that’s what.

Take one personal example:

In spring of 2020 I was slated to moderate a panel at a major crime fiction conference. It so happened that my panel featured a conference guest of honor (point being, I’m not a nobody necessarily). At most crime fiction conferences, writers published by independent presses (not the Big 5) can consign books with the official conference bookseller who is—always—an independent bookseller. Word came down that, this time, our heroic bookseller would charge writers $20 to consign their books. Rest assured, all writers who were speaking at or moderating a panel would have their books pre-ordered by said bookseller and those books would be available for purchase at the conference. First, it would be almost impossible for the second part of this claim to happen. It is highly unlikely that a bookseller would scour the panel offerings and make certain to order books from each writer present (note that it would also be financially foolish to do this because one would accrue immovable, excess inventory).

I called bullshit on this immediately and sent the following correspondence to the bookseller:

“I'm both a panelist and a moderator at [conference] and I debated whether to send this email. But I think I should at least make a few points for you to consider. Charging a consignment fee, in my opinion, is pretty lame—at larger conferences (like Bouchercon) I've never been charged a consignment fee, let alone $20.00. Which, by the way, is a significant portion of what most writers would make if they sold half the allowed inventory. And you'd still get your cut from the sales, right? I guess I could take heart in the fact that you say you'll order my book(s) because I'm moderating, but I can't depend on that—can I? Plus, I'd like to offer readers a few titles. I am concerned that charging a consignment fee is, well, predatory-seeming. What exactly does the $20.00 pay for? We have to bring the books and take them away, right? Are we paying for you to process the paperwork and put the book(s) on the table? Or, is the fee meant to cover the fee you pay for selling books at the conference? In theory, wouldn't the sales you make cover that?”

The response—which pretty much boils down to ‘go fuck yourself’—came as thus:

“Consignment agreements by their nature engender additional work for booksellers—each interaction effectively creates a new vendor whose inventory must be processed through our point of sale system and accounting system outside the relationships already established with publishers or wholesalers. This additional work is historically disproportionate to the amount of bookseller earnings from consignment sales, with the bookseller's percentage set at the lowest trade standard, and is without any additional financial incentive to the bookseller like earning coop dollars, all of which are important factors in a very low-margin retail operation. Thank you for your understanding. You are always welcome to contact the other [conference] booksellers and ask if they have consignment terms available.”

These aren’t lies, as Elwood Blues says, they’re just bullshit. Impressive argumentative acrobatics, to be sure, but without merit. The simple fact is these bastards were trying to scam independent writers, and for a twenty-spot. Enough dough to convince a Marriott bartender to muddle a mojito, for fuck’s sake! I, like many of my colleagues, was forced to peddle trade paperbacks from the dark shadows of a thrift store trench coat like some kind of…side-alley street salesman. This is a role I know well, but not one I aim to perform at a conference wherein I have already been fucked sideways for a few hundred dollars to simply participate. And, no, these cheap scumbags did not—to my knowledge—order my books as stated in their own official policy.

Take one public example:

In October of 2020, another teeth-grating, soul-smudging piece of half-ass journalism was published by the ‘paper of record.’ Your Local Bookstore Wants You to Know That It’s Struggling is a classic small business sob story—complete with whiny booksellers and quaint revelations of moronic business principals. You booksellers fully admitted, and it’s on the record, that you needed to peddle large numbers of Barack Obama’s memoir to survive.

Because, you know, free speech and equality and self-expression for all?

To wit:

“There’s a Hail Mary here where the holiday season could really change things,” said Ms. Hill. “To have a book like that [Barack Obama’s] come out right at this critical time, it could make a huge difference.”

And the stunning narrative continues:

Many store owners are afraid the printers won’t be able to keep up with demand, or that publishers won’t prioritize indies if supply gets tight, so they’re placing large orders up front for some of the biggest books of the season, like a new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi. (Mr. Obama’s book has required other adjustments: At 768 pages, it will weigh 2.5 pounds, said Matt Keliher at Subtext Books in St. Paul, Minn., so the store had to raise shipping fees or else it would lose money on every sale.) Because the demand has been so enormous, Mr. Obama’s publisher Penguin Random House will be sending orders out in batches for stores across the country, from little indies to the big boxes.

And then the big-time reveal:

“If we could sell 1,000 copies between November 17 and the New Year, that’s going to make a huge difference in us being viable, so we need those books,” said Gayle Shanks, an owner of Changing Hands Bookstore, which has locations in Phoenix and Tempe, Ariz. “We’re really trying to get the message out, to help customers understand that not just for bookstores but local retailers and local restaurants, if they want them to be there when the pandemic over, they have to support those businesses now.”

So what we’re saying here is that you—independent booksellers—are still trying to compete, in fact your business is weighted to such competition, against the company that cannibalized and co-opted distribution (of everything from consumer products to cultural objects like books and music)? This appears to be the central value proposition: We have the same books Amazon does. Buy from us because we also sell cute little bookmarks and those magnetic poetry sets?

As a reader, this is like driving to Kentucky for a bottle of bourbon when, in fact, I can buy that same bottle for less money at Total Wine or BevMo.

I have a word for doing something like that—I call it dumb.

Now, take one indie press-specific example:

There are a number of supposedly ‘independent’ bookstores* here in the San Diego region. Of those I’ve approached about carrying my books, only one, Bay Books at the San Diego International Airport and in Coronado, agreed to order any of my books from the distributor (the airport location, to their credit, has made good on this promise). The main reasons for not ordering my books (or carrying them on consignment)—according to book buyers and clerks—is that ‘we don’t carry local writers’ books’ or ‘we don’t carry books that aren’t returnable.’ Let’s stop here while I explain something: First, not carrying books by local writers is so obviously dumb I shouldn’t have to explain it. So much for ‘Buy Local,’ right? Second, most independent books are not ‘returnable’ because independent presses use print-on-demand technology—this technology lowers overhead and permits them to publish a diverse offering of voices/writers/stories. Why is this the case? Using print-on-demand technology—which has been scaled by, you guessed it, Evil Amazon—makes it possible not to invest in a print run for a book. Readers order the book from Amazon or direct from the publisher, and Amazon prints the book and send it to us, the readers. This simple method—again, scaled by Evil Amazon—has done more to empower diverse writers and storytellers than any university press or independent bookstore can lay claim to—that’s a certifiable damn fact. There are dozens of independent presses that will verify this for anybody who disagrees. My own UK publisher drop-shipped me books from Amazon last month after I ordered a few copies of my own titles direct from them. Let me say that more plainly: It was more efficient and cost-effective for my own publisher to have Amazon print and ship me my very own books. But all this is beside the point…It doesn’t matter if the books are non-returnable when and if you—as an independent bookseller—plan to sell the fucking books to readers. That’s right, whether or not a book is returnable has nothing to do with its quality and value as a cultural fucking object. You could, if you really cared about American literature, give it the old college try and sell some fucking independent books to a supposedly ‘loyal’ customer base. Or do your customers not trust you to make recommendations?

As a reader, what I buy to read is a helluva lot more important than where or how I buy it. Ideas and expression and creativity matter more than your pithy little beef with Amazon. They always have and they always will.

Now, let’s assume for a short paragraph here that university presses are ‘keeping American literature alive.’ How many of you independent booksellers are religiously ordering from university presses and finding optimal placement for these books? Perhaps a good many of you (I hope for this, but seriously doubt it), but how many of these books are you returning? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Fifty percent? More? Good thing university presses do print runs and those books are ‘returnable.’ Last I heard, Barack Obama’s memoir sold more copies than Eula Biss’s most popular book…especially in your retail locations, those supposed undervalued bastions of free speech and expression. These are questions you should ask yourselves.

Of course, even if you do privilege university press-published books at your points-of-sale, you still obscure a wealth of American literature being created by worthy writers and published by independent presses who don’t have the funding to do print runs. Here’s the tired old rub: Hundreds of amazing books are published each year that the American public does not have access to except through Ever-Evil-Amazon. Or through individual web-based storefronts which—as evidenced in my second example above—sometimes have to resort to using Amazon for distribution and printing.

Here’s an idea: Establish some relationships with independent presses and writers whose work you feel—you know—is keeping American literature alive and work with them to get their books to readers. You can do that work—of course, it takes confidence and vision and competence…all qualities rarely present and, if present, mostly in insufficient quantities.

I know that my opinions here will be assaulted by shrewd social media opportunists who will predictably accuse me of ‘not being a real writer’ or ‘not understanding how retail works’ in the modern age. Or they will say I’m ‘just bitter my books aren’t in a physical store.’ Perhaps they’re right: I don’t have a shiny Big 5 contract for any book(s) and I don’t have a neck-tied agent schmoozing at cocktail parties, looking for half-assed ways to make money off my admittedly middling talent. I don’t have a business manager or a movie deal. All I have—all I’ve ever had—is the word and the page. I’ve come to realize, however slowly, that the word and the page are all I need.

You can call me a hack if you want, but the word and the page are mine.

You know who’s keeping American literature alive? It’s some poor schmuck or schmuckette slaving away at crafting a doomed poem in a rented room inside an unheated apartment in a building halfway between hell and skid row.

That’s where American literature is alive and well. You won’t find it in the halls of academia or on the shelves of independent bookstores where loyal customers weep over the souls of dead hummingbirds. American literature is and has always been a stiff kick in the nuts, a razor-blade down a cheek, a hard nipple, a pinched ass, a mean drunk sleeping it off in a wet gutter. I can be more graphic, but you get the point.

Yesterday, I wrote this exchange in my current work-in-progress, a stiff hard-on of a novella called The Transfused Man:

“I’m clear-headed. My brain function is fine. I know the year, the month, the day of the fucking week. I know—”

“Do you remember me giving you a blow job in the Holiday Inn hot tub, Willis? Do you remember the fucking blow job!”

He did not remember the blow job. He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. They made a right hand turn onto Marigold and he watched the facade of unfamiliar storefronts run past him like melted film.

“If you can’t remember that blow job…I guaran-fucking-tee you have a concussion. Those doctors can kiss my sweet white ass.”

If this brief exchange doesn’t prove I am the second coming of F. Scott Fitzgerald, you can’t read English, babe. And I feel sorry for you.

Until next time…

*I am purposely excluding Verbatim Books from this anecdote because—while they do consign and I consistently sell books at Verbatim—they are a used bookstore and neither order nor carry any ‘new’ inventory. They are a part of the solution to the problems I outline above.

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Who is eating who?

Sad to say, my day job has been eating ME. Or maybe sucking me dry, if you care for a ‘festive’ image. I am not the type of writer who bitches and complains about time and motivation—fact is, Roughneck Dispatch hasn’t been a priority. But still…here we are and here I am again. Back at it. Or giving it a shot.

Last we talked, For Money and the Luck, my latest pulp novel, was picked up by Fahrenheit 13 Press and slated for release this year. I’m still not sure on a publication timeline, but you’ll be the first to know (well, after I know). That’s still a go…In other news, a horror-noir novella I wrote is likely to be picked up by another indie press. Just waiting on confirmation and the good old contract. As soon as I confirm that, I’ll supply the details. So, there are some coals in the fire.

A smoldering flame, as some might say.

I’ve been finding inspiration and artistic drive in some of the regular places, and some not-so-regular places. Showtime’s series Let the Right One In is four episodes deep and it has me by the heart strings. A vampire series that has you by the heart strings? Yep. You might want to check it out. The great Nashville country singer Gabe Lee has a new album out and it’s stellar. He is either John Prine reincarnated or I’ll eat my shorts. Damn good songwriter. More music: I am ashamed to tell you that I ‘discovered’ Southside Johnny and the Jukes a few weeks ago…I am sure the classic rock and Springsteen fans among you are laughing at me, but I am digging the band’s ‘80s attempt at mainstream success—it’s an album called In the Heat. For those who don’t know, Southside Johnny was the technical advisor for the Eddie and The Cruisers films. Following that line of thought..Is Tom Berenger’s performance in Eddie and The Cruisers a masterpiece? Sure, why not—remember this classic scene?

If you’re still in the mood for horror after Halloween, check out the Polish horror film Hellhole. Say what you want about Netflix, but giving this film wide, accessible distribution is straight ballsy. Loved it, but this flic is not for wimps.

I’m reading another Tom Ripley book by Patricia Highsmith. She’s as masterful a suspense writer as god has ever created. Don’t believe me? Read Ripley Under Water. The Goodreads rating of four stars is a prime example of reviews being total bullshit. Nobody did it better before Highsmith, and nobody has done it better since. I also had the good fortune to read Jim Nesbit’s masterful noir Lethal Injection. I saw some indie writers talking about this one on twitter and decided to pick it up. The fact that this novel has 14 reviews on Amazon is a testament to how we are horrible curators of our own stories…We buy what corporate America wants to sell us, all the way down to the books we read. Nesbit is what would happen if Cormac McCarthy and Jim Thompson were somehow combined into a mutant noir writer. If I write a book this good, I’ll die a hero in my own eyes. I take it Jim has passed away, but I say here he was a damn fine writer. Try something new, why don’t you?

Okay—that’s it.

Talk soon, people.