Okay, folks!
Preliminary alarm bells. Get yer butts out of your seat, because it’s time for word of mouth.
Greg Rucka, author of the Atticus Kodiak series of novels (as well as many and varied other words of worth), releases his new book tomorrow. Booya with the cover:
It promises to be potentially the last Kodiak novel, and if you’ve been following him as I have, this is like losing a friend, in that creepy way that you think you know fictional characters when they’re expertly rendered.
If you don’t get your butt out there and try this book out (provided you weren’t going to anyway), you are on this board:
That’s right, punk. You’re on notice.
And if you haven’t bought it by the end of the week, you go on the dead to me board. That’s right. Right under the cast of Friends. Dante could not provide a worse hell than a room filled with Chandler, Rachel, and Judas Iscariot.
And your life will be a little worse off, too, because you won’t have as much of the awesome your tank can take in. Provided it can handle that much awesome in the first place, which I doubt. It may take two sittings to read the book so you don’t die of heart failure or a tragic case of no more socks. And yet you will be inclined to do so anyway. Tread carefully. Make sure you have paddles nearby.
But seriously, folks. Tomorrow. Do it. You want proof I am not insane?
Billy Mays here, for Neal Bailey. Not having copies of Female Force get you down? You tried stealing it from the lady collecting it for resale value, only to have her upside your head with her cane?
Just click it… and purchase it. That’s right. Just click, and purchase. Why, in four easy steps, all of your female political problems will be solved, except the debate about the toilet seat (pause for good natured canned laughter)!
And, as an added bonus, you’ll learn where to find Neal’s older work, and what he’s been up to! That’s right! All this, AND a floor show.
But act now! You won’t be able to find this shit once the fucker is dead of author-pox!
…
In all seriousness, though, I spent some time on the page because I 1) Found a place where you can get the books online, finally, and 2) Because all you good folks who wanted to pay me for postage don’t need the extra cost of a middleman, barring desire for a signed copy. If you still want a signed one, let me know. It might have to be second printing, but at least now there’s a place you can buy copies!
I am going to take a week or so, bone up on some research for editing, write a few comics, and let it sit. I am fully three weeks ahead of my proposed frantic schedule.
Amazing what a little sensible normalcy will do for a guy, huh? Bills paid. Work for hire. I knew there was a healthy me in there somewhere. Now I’m shaking his hand and making deals. Good.
The sun in Portland is a hotter sun than on Hilltop. I must kill it. But for now, I have earned a little break. I’m gonna take a friend’s advice and watch a little Shakespeare, because I don’t have a good, firm, novel is done tradition yet, and it’s time to try some out.
I just wrote 8,429 words. Nineteen pages, single spaced, plus three chapter title pages.
One more day, and my novel is finished. Rough draft is gonna clock in at 56-60 thousand words with a set final goal of 80,000. This is fine. I have been skeleton framing it, which is something I do consciously, with little description, setting, place. The main ideas, the character positions, it’s all set. Now I can add in the flavor, the theme, the symbolism, and a few scenes, and flesh it out.
Usually I agree with Stephen King, who suggests you should lose 5-10 percent a draft. But then, I used to write in the Stephen King style, whereby I let the characters rumble about and determine their own conclusion, going in many directions that weren’t essential to the plot. The nature of this piece, with its pretty complicated plot, requires beats, and I’m okay with that. Character showed through, that’s for damned sure. But the story now is mostly beats with flavor. Now I have to correct, reword, add a few more tics. But I am utterly confident in this product in a way I’ve never experienced, which is strange, given that I’ve been writing it for six weeks, and I took a two week break.
Today I wrote more on a novel than I ever have. My fingers hurt. I’m not a goddamned T-1000 machine, I’m that new hot chick terminator. Now, to avoid magnets…
Didn’t get much done Friday… just said fuck it. And I’ve earned it. 35,000 in two weeks? Good times.
Learned that Michelle sold 45 thousand copies. Forty five thousand. That’s more than Trinity is selling. That baffles my mind.
I tried to go for my first camping trip, but the snow was three feet high. We hiked into a campground and decided to try and trust Hunter again. He’s been coming in the off leash park when we call him.
He didn’t come.
After ten frantic minutes, Kristen finally found him. The echoes confused him, and the snow made him ignore us, but he eventually came back, only because he was extraordinarily cold and uncomfortable. I have learned the lesson that an animal is still an animal, and discovers no real loyalty over time save to its base instincts. Which is fine. But I thought I’d lost a third dog. Sigh.
I have come a long way as a person, though, because I didn’t strike the animal. I was very proud of that. I used to, based upon example, smack the dog (my other dogs) when it misbehaved in my younger years. I feel more healthy in that respect.
I’ve been walking a lot more lately, which has been ridiculously fun, though I’ve put on a few pounds with the writing. I’m gonna work on that soon. Steady walks, bike rides.
I’ve been asked to do another comic book, a two parter, and I’ve started to research that. I’ll put up the wordtracker as soon as I’m sure that’s a go and have the okay.
Michelle comes out on the twenty-ninth.
I did the Portland con, which was good in ways. I got to meet Steve Rolston, and I’ve liked his work for quite a while. I also met Lars Brown. Good guys.
I signed my first fiction comic book. R.A.N. was a non-fiction tale. The Vincent Price book is pretty cool. There were two pages added in by the editors (a kind of Crypt-Keeper bookend), but my story came across pretty well, I thought. Now that it’s out there, I can delightfully point out my Cthulhu monsters and let people know their names in the script are Syd and Nancy. And that the inspiration for the skinny dude was David Byrne. I’m making it a Vincent Price theme. In this one, David Byrne, in the next, Phil Ochs.
The sun is out… I can afford an air conditioning unit. What else could a guy want?
BTW, if anybody wants a copy of the books, I am fairly low on comps (we’re waiting on a print run because of demand, so I have yet to receive more than a few), but to share with you guys, anyone who’s interested and is cool with paying postage or popping over, shoot me an email. I have a few spare Hillary Clintons, and a few Vincent Price issues. Some are already promised, but I’m playing it by ear.
Another bite for you. An encounter with a drug dealer. The heavy who is his muscle is called Scope. The other guy is Grade A. The rationale is that his cocaine and crack is Grade A, the best stuff on Earth. Cue Hal:
“Why Scope? Is he good with a rifle?”
Grade A laughs. “No, fool. Nigga drinks Scope. He crazy.”
“I tend to prefer the Listerine when I’m short on Colt, myself.”
“True. True.”
Not relevant to the post at hand, just fucking funny.
I wrote something a long while back about a guy on a park bench who looked like he’d been through ten different shit rains. I walked up to him and said, “It’s okay, bud. It’ll be all right. It’ll get better.” And he just grunts at me and turns away.
The end of the poem was, “Well, fuck him then. On to the next chump. We do what we can.”
And that’s the broader point. We do what we can, and that’s never enough, and it never will be enough. But we try. We try in our own ways, even if it’s not as efficient as it can be. I didn’t cheer that guy up. Maybe he was inconsolable. Maybe he was a shit. Maybe I looked like the guy who killed his cat. I dunno.
I got to thinkinking last night about what my moral obligation to write is, and what, and how. I was talking with a friend last night about what ole Hunter means to me as an entity. Why I revere him. I figured, examining it, because he’s a clown. Same with Bukowski. I don’t like either for beating their girlfriends or getting drunk and passing out in the pool. I like Buk because he lived a shit life, and yet still found the poetry in it, and I like Hunter because he survived a Bush. Only it was a Nixon. Same shit, different day. Only his snake had a bit more bite.
I realize that I don’t really identify with or want to pursue the larger-than-life author. I like to clown myself, but I don’t think it’s so that people will buy my stuff, because that’s proven to be an absolute fail in that regard (and is outside of youtube for most folks, and as we know, youtube is not an author fount any more than Random House produces Tourette’s Guy.)
I realized that the only thing of Hunter’s I expressly regard with love (and it’s enough) is Fear and Loathing, because the writing is taut, but looks sloppy. With Bukowski, it’s the same thing. I realized that it’s stuff my dad, who never reads, could pick up and chuckle, and yet it’s stuff that I can look into and find a deeper meaning.
But I want to tell stories. And I am having more fun telling stories. And I have meaning in my stories, even so.
I backed away from message boards because I believed (I believed with a passion) that I could change people with rhetoric and help them see reason. Why? Because I grew up seeing it happen. In high school, rarely, but on occasion, you see some numb shithead learn that their preconceived notions about a given thing are wrong, and sometimes, despite social ostracism, they revise.
I realize in adulthood this is far more rare, and that Hunter Thompson wasn’t popular because he changed a lot of heads, but more because he found a lot of people with the same head and no outlet for expressing it (before he took his own head, thus ending his potential of worth in that regard).
In other words, and to put a fine point on it, that’s why I’m trying to do less political rambling and less message board posts and less rants and raves and more fiction. And the more I think about it, the more it seems smart to me. I miss Hunter, but jinkees, what he could have done if he had taken Fear and Loathing and written many more books of fine prose beyond The Rum Diary. He got caught up in his malice and the journalism.
And Bukowski, had he taken the seed of truth from Women and abandoned his dysfunction and told a hell and back story, he could have been beyond something, I don’t know what. But he was too attached to being a clown. So was Hunter. They got laid for it.
But I won’t be a clown.
I am a writer of truth, by god, and I will focus my laser, not turn it on the audience.
Continuing my tradition of random non-sequitor looks into my new novel (5,000 more words now, do you kennit, as a man once said):
The title of chapter eight is OMEGA COCK!
And the great thing? Makes total sense in context.
This is Omega Supreme, a Transformer from several years ago. I imagine he is in possession of an Omega Cock. Sadly, the toy was lacking in this respect. Something about a toy for children.
I was reading a little bit this morning, Simple Art of Murder again, and a little bit of a look into “Murder/Kill Your Darlings.” The idea being, if something stands out to you as good writing, or a piece of good writing, you should kill it, beacuse it’s probably pretentious shit.
Sometimes, this is very true. But sometimes, it’s remarkably naive. Because I love this entire fucking book so far, more than anything I’ve ever created. Seriously. And there’s no high-minded thought to it, though there is a moral lesson. It’s just a fucking GREAT STORY. Something in my blood’s been crying out for it.
And yet, if I removed my precious darling Omega Cock, I know the work would suffer for it. How’s that for a Freudian insight into the writing process? BWA HA HA HA! TAKE THAT, AUTOBOTS!
I depart to fuck off for the whole weekend, having reached 32,205 from 8,900. I’m no math major, but that’s 23,000 words in a week. What am I, those Left Behind guys? Good god.
I want to share a chapter with you guys, but I daren’t. Not until it’s finished. I will share a story point I particularly enjoyed.
Confronted with a condom filled with hard rum and used semen (not his), our hero realizes he’s not an alcoholic, because he doesn’t take a swig from it despite REALLY needing a drink. And then he blanches, because he realizes that for his plot to work, he has to blow up the condom.
If that doesn’t brighten your day, what will!?
Another character trait: He drinks beer like there’s no tomorrow, but he HATES hard liquor like Indiana hates snakes.
And one more tiny bit: There’s a guy named Billy Hamm’s, because, according to Hal, he was being a douchenozzle, so when he passed out when they were twelve, he covered his head with a Hamm’s box, and when he woke up, he ran into a wall. Ever since then, Billy Hamm’s.
And later on… Hamm’s actually… ah, fuck. You just gotta read it. I give away too much.
